By (This article was originally published in Jordan’s Living Well magazine)
I came, I saw, and oh my God, Jordan is changing fast. Good or bad depends from where you’re looking.
Personally, I’m not going to ride the wave of positive dreaming to the tune of merry singalongs. That’s not my job. If you want to feel good, go have a joint, or read the editorials of the oldest twin Arabic dailies. Or do both at the same time, if you want to begin to believe the latter. I describe things as I see them and call them by their names. Cup half full or half empty is not my business as long as what’s in it is drinkable – and available to all.
So apart from being blessed with the best weather in the world (that’s almost as flattering as you’re likely to squeeze out of me), I will not rewrite one of my pathetic schooldays composition pieces and paint a childish rosy picture. Back then, they used to ask us in English exams to write what we did in the summer vacation, and almost all submitted pieces across the Kingdom went like this: “I went to Aqaba. Aqaba was nice. It was sunny. The sun is good. We played in the sand because the sand is nice. The sea was also nice… etc.”. You know the ones I’m talking about.
I kept telling these blissful stories every year. Then, when a government genius decided to reintroduce the mandatory ninth grade Matriculation exams (Matrek, in Arabic), I was seated for the finals in Rashid Tlei’ school, and on my same double seated wooden desk was an older Tawjihi student from a government school, also sitting for his English test. When he saw that I finished early, he asked me to help him out with the essay part, requiring usually no more than a couple of double spaced paragraphs. Uninvited, he passed me his paper and beseeched me to write the whole thing for him. To my disbelief, I warned him that it was impossible because if we get caught, we’ll both be in deep shit, and that in any case, our different handwritings would give us away. But he persisted, so I urged him to do as the question says and just describe what he did in the holiday, and he’ll be fine.
“But I didn’t do anything in the holiday”, his worried answer came, oblivious to whether the government monitor could hear his desperate pleas in the small classroom. I whispered to him to write what he did the previous year. Again, nothing, and neither the year before nor as far as he could remember. With the situation getting more absurd – and risky – I instantly learned to talk without moving my lips and advised him to do as I did and make it up; just say that he went to Aqaba and that it was an orgasmically mind-blowing journey, and get it over with.
“But you don’t understand” he retorted, “that’s why I need your help, I’ve never been to Aqaba, I haven’t the faintest idea what to say”. The poor guy has probably never left Amman all his life.
Leaving aside his own wretchedness, what a tragic education system that we had. This student spent a lifetime being told to memorize that the causes for the collapse of the Ottoman empire are three very short sentences with a specific order, and that, just like a recipe for omelet, he cannot even change their sequence. When he was suddenly required to think independently, he couldn’t dream up an imaginary trip to save his life.
So yes, there’s tons of cash pouring into the country today, but the concentration on the development of western Amman in contrast with the rest of the country is out of all reasonable proportions, to say the least. The twain are centuries apart you could hardly believe you’re in the same country. But Jordan is bigger than the few neighborhoods of its capital city, and those left on the margins, like this poor student, deserve to share in the fruits of the current rush. Otherwise, what is the point of rain if clouds continue to park over the same saturated spot to the exclusion of the rest of the parched lands? It might as well never rain.
On another front, while observing the Jordanian landscape so dear to my heart, I noticed a bizarre Jordanian fascination with the highway. Yes, I’m talking about the autostrad, the autoroute, the autobahn. All over the world, when a main freeway is built, the value of land around it dramatically drops because of noise and pollution. But not in Jordan. For some odd reason, a farmhouse on the airport road is an expensive luxury, the closer to the actual asphalt carriageway the better. Not only that, but national universities, supposed to be the breathing outlets of intellectual activity, are scattered right on its sides like gas stations are in developed countries, in this case breathing only carbon monoxide. There is just no explanation for our peculiar attachment to be near the core of the busy traffic routes. If Frank Sinatra did it his way, I guess we’re doing it on the highway.
While I will never understand our obsession with staying in proximity to cars zooming by at dangerous speeds and inhaling their poisonous exhaust fumes, the road phenomenon that I find most disturbing and downright ugly is the inexplicable choice of picnic spot on the very sides of the airport and Dead Sea roads. This has nothing to do with financial capability and everything to do with absolute laziness and lack of imagination on the part of the campers. These people have already gone through the effort of going far out from where they live, but couldn’t be bothered to veer off from the main highway to set up base for their families’ day in the sun.
This is outrageous. Jordan is one of the best suited terrains for outdoor picnics I can think of, with endless charming destinations, yet these barbecue buffs only enjoy their bloody kebabs if their children are playing literally within one meter from speeding cars. Has Jordan run out of countryside so that we have to show the world that our outings take place nowhere else but on the hard shoulder of the main highways?
Perhaps Ammar Khammash’s prolific writings on the different sites of our beautiful lands ought to be translated and distributed free by the Ministry of Tourism, or even added to school curriculums by the Ministry of Education, so maybe one day we can eliminate this hideous and extremely hazardous habit. Let me say here that the editorial policy of some Jordanian magazines is to stay away from political issues, and I totally respect that. As a matter of fact, I detest politics per se and don’t really like to talk or write about it. I actually even believe that to aspire to have a career that essentially involves controlling other people’s lives and destinies is such a manifestly suspect aspiration for a normal human being that such a person needs to prove to me first that they are genuinely interested in the service part of this career and not in its power aspect in order for me to trust them. Which is extremely rare these days, if not almost impossible. I will even go further to admit that my favorite line in the Godfather III is the almost inaudible sentence at the end of the scene in the courtyard of Don Tomassino in Sicily when Michael gets up to leave and mumbles in Italian: “Politics and crime. They’re the same thing”. So I will continue to discuss my observations of the Jordanian landscape away from that despicable domain, the inherently immoral world of politics. Having said that, a friend invited me to his farm at the Rumman mountains near Jerash, and I enthusiastically obliged. This was on the last day of the World Economic Forum conference in the Dead Sea in May 2004, so it was a good escape north of the congestion caused by the delegations crowding Amman. But on the way down from Suweileh, I just could not turn a blind eye to the miserable squalor on my right hand that is the Beqa’a refugee camp. I just could not pretend that it was not there, no matter how hard I tried.
Wait a minute. I said I will not be dragged into talking politics. Exactly, and I am not. I am writing purely as a human being. You see, I just came down from a city plastered with posters “committed to improving the state of the world”. So indeed, do leave politics aside. I want to begin by improving the state of my own backyard. For, in all honesty, I cease to belong to the human species if I continued on my journey to Rumman without feeling an ounce of compassion for the people crammed in this shameful blot on humanity, or without at least crying out for my countrymen and women to seek to improve their unlivable lives once and for all. We can end this prolonged tragedy in Jordan. All it takes is for more people to slow down their cars and peer at the camp on their way to Jerash, or at the other similar ones scattered around the country. It doesn’t have to be this way.
font face=”Times New Roman” size=”3″>Right of return or no return, settlement in Jordan or no settlement, that would be politics. Leave me out of that. The way I see it, the new Jordan should have no place for such forgotten dumps, for such bleeding wounds in the heart of the country. Human beings should not be made to live like that, no matter what politics dictate, and I will betray my essence as a fellow human if I ignored the less fortunate and destitute residents of my country because of some dire political predicament. We all have the right to living well, don’t we, and this is why we are between these pages, aren’t we?
I did not continue the story with the exam. So was I eventually convinced to cheat, you must be wondering? All I will say is that the Tawjihi student next to me and the many like him were the ones who were cheated out of a decent life by a system determined to quash them. I had no qualms about helping him and the others beat this system if I could. We all can and should – in more legitimate ways, I hope – because this country belongs to all of us. I truly believe that it does.
I wonder where he is right now. Does he look up at the giant posters in Amman and feel that his country has given him what should prompt him to give back to her? Did he eventually pass his English test? Has he seen Aqaba yet?
Oh, the Rumman trip was nice. The sun was nice. The mountains were also nice. Seriously.
