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Published: October 12th 2007
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I’m sitting at an Internet café in Wadi Musa while
Dr. Phil plays on the overhead TV. The good doctor has an electric guitar slung over his shoulder, looking about as comfortable as the Pope rolling a condom over a cucumber. “Music plays an important part in helping our kids develop,” he says earnestly. “That’s why we need to make sure we keep funding music programs in our schools.” There are mothers in smart pant suits nodding in the audience; a couple of wispy pre-teens brush the hair from their eyes, the salutary effects of suburban adolescence flush in their rosy cheeks. Leading into the commercial break, Brian McKnight bangs out a tune at the piano, the white housewives in the crowd doing their best to make soulful little moves with their heads.
I can’t entirely tell what to make of all this. If you spend enough time in the developing world, you really get the feeling that Americans have way too much time on our hands. We worry about our sons’ emotional maturity; we’re afraid our daughters are too fat or too thin; we write angry letters to the editor because there are pesticides in the cauliflower or
mercury in the tuna or plutonium in the air conditioning. What appetites we have, what luxurious troubles! Years from now, when historians look back at this American century, I hope they’ll judge us with a bit of patience, a touch of sympathy, and a world of good humor.
It’s no wonder the word “America” sounds about as natural in these parts as “fellatio.” At the end of the day, your average housewife in Wadi Musa - the goats bleating outside the kitchen window, the electricity on the blink all afternoon, the hot water taking twenty minutes to swish its way through the pipes - can relate to the audience on
Dr. Phil to about the same degree she can relate to the cast of
Girls Gone Wild. But isn’t this what makes the idea of American life so appealing? I suspect people aren’t drawn to Hollywood sex or the bling of the latest Jay-Z video so much as the utter banality of a show like
Dr. Phil. This is what the world aspires to: a life where the kids are fed, the bills are paid, and you can go about the business of self-actualization and fulfillment, tending to your feelings or your son’s creative spirit like the parsley plants in the backyard garden.
It all feels like such sweet self-indulgence from here. I walk with Baker and his brothers up the hill, a weary half-hour trudge to their home overlooking the valley. They’ve invited me to spend the night, their mother plumping the pillows and pulling extra blankets from a spare room. She has the squat frame and broad, square shoulders of an All-Pro fullback, her compact body suggesting a low tolerance for excess. She blows like a domestic whirlwind from room to room, scolding Ismael for some unpardonable offense, then smiling sweetly and pulling him close with her muscular arms.
We lie on the cushions and sip cups of sweet tea, talking about life in America. The guys sigh about the daily hardships in Wadi Musa, the high cost of having a girlfriend, the impossibility of starting a family. Their mother brings in a massive tray heaped high with grilled chicken and potatoes, a feast she spreads out on the floor over a sheet of plastic. We reach across each other to scoop up the hummus with our bread. We tear the chicken with our fingers and dig into a pile of French fries. Ahmed brings in a pipe and stokes some embers over the
nargileh. There are quiet burps of contentment around the room. Baker rubs his eyes sleepily and pads to the room next door, the cousins waving goodbye and wishing me well on my travels.
The rest of us huddle close to the gas heater. Ismael spreads out a deck of cards on the carpeting to show me some tricks. He prompts me to pick a card, to show it to Hamzeh and then replace it in the deck. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he keeps saying, a throw-away phrase in his small English arsenal that sounds oddly reassuring. When a trick goes awry he wrinkles his face and tries to figure out where he went wrong. When he pulls my card out with a nifty sleight of hand, his eyes light up with a suggestion that something rare and wondrous has just unfolded, though he’s quick to explain the finer points so that I might awe my own audience some day.
Hamzeh brings over a bag of peanuts and cashews and sits Indian-style in front of me. He wants to tell me about the Koran, though for all his earnestness, it almost sounds like he’s pitching me on a new line of vinyl siding. “A lot of what scientists know today was written about hundreds of years ago in the Koran,” he says. “And with a garden hose, you can wipe the dirt away in a snap!” He peppers me with questions about my own tepid faith, a mild sadness coloring his eyes. I remember what Terry, a writer friend, told me about living with a Muslim family in Fes. Each night the daughter would talk to her about Islam, or tell her about a dream where the Prophet Mohammed came to Terry in a rose-filled garden. As an American - and a cynical New Yorker at that - I tend to bristle at any talk of religion that isn’t abstract and analytical: discussing faith as if it were an
objet d’art propped up on the mantelpiece, a tribal relic Aunt Phyllis brought home from Papua New Guinea. But what Terry learned, and what I can see in Hamzeh’s hopeful smile, is that it’s here a high form of flattery. For someone whose faith is a powerful, life-giving force, what could be a greater show of friendship than an attempt to pull someone back from the abyss of non-belief?
Hamzeh makes an earnest pitch, but the light in his eyes is dwindling. Friends we might be, but sadly, never brothers. The next afternoon he shares a cab with me to Ma’an, where I catch the bus to Amman. He shakes my hand warmly and squeezes my shoulder, offering a can of apple juice for the three-hour ride. We sit on the bus, idling for close to two hours in the parking lot, before the engine sputters to life. I haven’t eaten since early morning and go rummaging through my bag for a snack, but all I dig up are a couple of lemon lozenges and an old bag of peanuts.
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Marwan Asmar
non-member comment
Customized tourism
The story is very nice, showing that with a little dare international tourists can explore the basic human side of Jordan at no extra cost and get an insight into the everyday culture. Unfortunately not many tourists are prepared to do that and wounder into the unknown so to speak and make friends with families and people whom they have never met before. The concept of volunturism might be a way into this as it opens the mind. Many local travel companies in Jordan like Petra Tours in Amman do create customized trips and allow the visitor to go on a visit of a life time but people have to be interested and willing to have especially customized tours and trips were quite often the other side of Jordanian life is seen.