Driven by Curiosity…

My dear friend N. has been talking me into helping her in her drive to collect food for some poor community in Jordan, she thought of a Palestinians refugee camp. The effort of convincing me took more effort than the process of gathering the food… She would talk orphans and I would strike back with DVD and movie nights, she would talk about hunger and I retaliate with catered parties, she finally managed to convince me somehow. I thought her persistence to make something out of my lazy life is very sweet.

In the few weeks we put for ourselves to achieve the goal, we collected 56 sturdy bags (she gathered 55, and I gathered 1!) we arrived to Wihdat refugee camp at around 10 AM, and were met by two volunteers who represent some Islamic social organization. The guys’ hearts skipped a beat when they discovered that we were two young women alone accompanied by our driver! We realized that the driver would spoil our chances of being popular in that environment, but big E who is N. husband insisted that the driver SHALL accompany us.

Wi7dat Wi7dat, and who knows what is Wi7dat!!! People who heard the story told me oh but Wihdat is rich… TRUE Wi7dat camp is as rich as Wadi Abdoun compared to Abdoun. Which actually happens to be one of the poorest areas in West Amman, for those who don’t know. The place that I have seen is HORROR upon HORROR!!! Grim streets, shabby houses that are not more than 8 square meters apiece, roofless tops, and in the very best case tin roofs ( that is why every house I entered had all the pots and pans sitting on the floor collecting the water that came down from the roofs)…No windows whatsoever, no sunshine, no furniture, no bathrooms, no heating system, no water supply… but when I saw tens of children piled on mattresses on cold floors, I was so shocked that it took me an enormous effort not to collapse…. it seemed illogical to bring satisfaction to all those people with 56 silly bag, when each one needed a divine hand to help!!

I was going from house to house shaking hands with young women and old women and tall woman and short woman, fat and thin… the one common factor between all these women is that they lost their husbands who are the source of money and they were left with several hungry kids to feed… obviously none of these women worked. Mainly because this is not an option for many reasons that I would not go into now… honestly I finally managed to understand the concept of DEADLOCK that Professor Khamis tried to push in my head at university time few years back!!! … in Wi7dat camp you don’t have money and you cant do anything about it except wait for some daddy long legs to pass by with a bag of goodies.

We left around 4:00 afternoon, and went home straight to bed. I guess my brain needed to shut down for few hours to be able to deal with the misery that I never imagined looked like this! What is more shocking is that Wi7dat camp is a five star hotel compared to the other poor communities around Jordan.

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I have been to Prime Mega store to find some books to read (I am out of books these days and of titles as a matter of fact, any recomendations are more than welcomed) anyway… as i was looking into their english section three thoughts came to my mind:

1- the books are so DAMN expensive, to buy two books it cost me 18 JDs which is way too much for Jordan. If i take into consideration that one of my acquaintences has been working for the last 10 years as a driver for one of the universities for a sallary of 140 Dinars. This guy has 3 or 4 kids one of them is tawjihi this year… this person can NOT afford food, let alone books for leisure. so how will Jordanians be a well read population?

2- I usually like to look into what Arab women writers do, and to my disappointment, the titles i found were things like the promise, Lost honour, Queen God knows what… basically books that tell the world what a shitty society we are. I understand that these are usually things that happen to the writers and I am happy they are sharing their painful experiences with us, but these are very rare cases and they are by no means representative of our society… what about the millions upon millions of normal women, how come no Arab women are writing about our normalcy? So I would not say what is wrong with these people as Natasha says because they are doing their homework but rather what is wrong with us? So finally i settled for a book by a Jewish Writer called Revenge, that talks about an israeli girl looking to avenge her father who was shot by a palestinian “terrorrist” if they have enough pride to say they are good and we are bad, while we always write about how shitty we are, then maybe that is why they are winning and we stay shitty!

3- The Third thought is of course we have so many books about honour killing, how could we avoid problems like this, when we have these two forces working against each other in the Arab world. First is the extreme conservative,if you go out of the house you are dead attitude, contradicted by the second one which is presented in our video clips and songs(I found something about this in Eman-Aquacool bloggs called
Bravo Arabic Music Channels ) which little girls watch and look up to and think if their parents and siblings watch and enjoy, then this must be what our societyconsiders normal. I mean this is really confusing, isn't it?

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