Getting e exposed to the taxi experience in the last few weeks reminded me of the agony that led to buying the car in the first place.

On Wednesday, I was running late for the 7iber event that was created around the Tachtical tech film,  was about to start and I had the film with me. I truly needed to be there on time. I had to use a taxi…

The next two paragraphs are truly unimportant. They state the conversation with the taxi driver. So you can simply skip them if you are not in the mood for details.

Destiny sent this strange fellow my way… an old dirty dude, who started a strange conversation with me. He started talking about a woman that he knew… it seemed to me that he was obsessed with her. He was telling me how she uses his services every now and then, and how much she loved and trusted him. He explained her pattern in detail. She visited “her uncle” every now and then with a whisky bottle… she went at 11 and then called the taxi to pick her at 3 or 4 AM. Sometimes, she called him “uncle” and sometimes “cousin”.

One day, she got pregnant with her absent husband who lives in the states, and when her time came to give birth, she was alone. But Mr. Taxi came to the rescue…Sadly the baby died, but Mr. Taxi was too smart… he noticed that baby looked like the man she called her uncle!

Mr. Taxi went on and on piling a detail upon a detail, using bad words and descriptive adjectives… I did not feel safe being in that taxi, but felt less safe asking him to stop. What if I offended him by asking him to stop? What if I implanted an idea by asking to stop?…many what ifs raced through my head. The guy was clearly mentally unstable… and the only option I felt I had then was to humor him and listen to his disgusting tale about his prostitute.

When we stop a taxi, we are, practically, getting in the car with a perfect stranger. Someone we don’t know anything about, we can’t predict his moods, his ethics, his next move. I am not saying that we should know public transportation drivers on a personal level… but in the case of a taxi, it is two people in a car alone.

When in a taxi, no one knows where you are. It is not like you are using the services of a registered company, if you disappear, the people in the office will know where to find you. It is not like you can complain to some sort of an office if this guy did or said something inappropriate… because, usually a taxi is operated by a guy and his brother in law, or in the best case with his cousin…ya3ni, if a taxi driver killed someone for example, they would be the people he would call to hide the body. (To use an extreme scenario example of course).

So all that makes me wonder if taxi drivers are the safest transportations mode, especially for women?
By the way lack of reliable and safe transportation was named as the number one deterrent for women job seekers  in a study that was conducted by a project I managed a few years ago. I expected any reason, but not this one.

Using public transportation is extremely expensive… women who make the minimum wage spend most of their salary on taxis and buses… especially in rural areas and in the suburbs where public transportation does not make it. But things do not stop there;Fathers, husbands and brothers do not feel that it is safe for their women folk to get in cars with perfect strangers. honestly… i don’t blame them… i don’t feel safe myself.

Um Raed, our neighbour at the Jabal. She has a wide range of children (literally). The age range starts from 5 and ends at 25.

Her life is difficult, mostly because her husband is a mean old lazy bum. He could never keep a proper job, and he never quite figured out the meaning of a wife and the responsibility that comes with children. He is one of those who believe that he has rights, but never really fathoms the meaning of responsibilities. Possibly this explains why she has many children… since the husband does not bother with providing for them, he does not mind having them.

I see her on my way to work. I look for her every day, her sense of humour is brilliant and her smile is just very hopeful. Last week, I realized that I had not seen her in a couple of days. I asked Abdullah, the neighbour, about her and he told me she is recovering. “ kheir, inshalla, what is she recovering from?” I asked.

Abdallah, explained that a few days ago, he heard her scream, he thought it was one of the usual, almost daily, episodes with her husband. But soon he realized that the other voice he heard was not her husband, but her eldest son.

Her son does not like the fact that she works as a cleaner. His role model is his lazy father; so needless to say, he has chosen the same path. The son asked her for moneyto buy cigaretts, and when she refused, he started cursing, shouting and offending her. He told her that she is a prostitute; this is what she does at her work as a cleaner. He told her that she is an ugly bitch, and that his father’s biggest mistake was to marry a prostitute; he added that if his father is a man, he should divorce and marry another woman.

Um Raed was shocked. She never expected that one of her sons would ever utter such horrible things. Especially, that the only reason she works is to put food on the table for her family, since her husband and her sons fail to provide. She found herself slapping her son. He became so angry. Next thing she experienced was being dragged by her hair outside the house. Her son started beating her up, brutally, in the middle of the street.

Abdallah, the neighbour found himself jumping and yanking the boy off his mother, then he started beating him up. Abdallah said that his blood boiled, and started beating the boy so strongly, until Um Raed, who was crying humiliated (she was not dressed properly, her hair loose, even though she is mahajabeh) started shouting at Abdallah to leave the boy alone. More people gathered to break them off each other.

Abdallah now was angry. He told her. “ It is my fault, I came to help you !” She answered crying: “But he is my son, I did not want you to kill him”

I talked her, she is ok now. She says that something broke inside her. She knows that her son is imitating his father, and she worries that the other sons will do the same, as they grow.

I am not sure what I could say to such story… it is very sad that this women feels all her sacrifices had not been appreciated. It is very sad that she put all her hopes on her sons, and they turned out to be the way they turned out to be.  It is sad that sometimes, women spoil their sons in the name of love, and they end up paying very very high ” she prices.  “Um Raed asked me not to call her that again.

 she said upset,  ”I am not anyone’ mother from now on” she wants to be called by her maiden name.”My mother respected me, she gave me my name, why would i give it up to these sons of dog.

P.S. I know the picture is not suitable. But i saw it, and i found myself laugh my heart out! as we say in Arabic ” shar il baliya ma yud7ik” Which means the worst disasters make you laugh

“When the girl who was burried alive was asked: for what crime was she killed?” ~Surat Takweer (81:8) and (81:9)

Rania, a young friend came to talk to me a couple of days ago. She wanted to seek my advice.  “ I am embarrassed of M.” She started off her sentence.  “M.” is a common acquaintance. They both study the same major at university.

This innocent sentence turned out to be a BIG can of worms.

She and M. worked on an assignment for the university together last week.  Next day, he sent her a message to check up on her.  She responded to him with a polite but curt message.

She showed me both messages. 

The stars were not aligned that day, her brother decided to toy with her phone and saw the messages… obviously he did not understand the context and did not care to understand.  Rania looked at him in shock when he slapped her the first time.  She did not see the second slap coming, she only felt it. It was all confusing after that.  Her mother and sister interfered in time.  They grabbed him and jerked him off her, while he was shouting that he was going to kill her.

The mother kicked the brother out of the house, which was the best she could do at that point, but turned out to be a bad decision. The boy went to his uncles and sought their help in cleansing the family’s honor. They called M, asked him who he was and threatened to destroy him.  He asked them to come and meet him to sort the misunderstanding out. He gathered his friends and cousins  and waited for her men folk to come… But, FORTUNATELY, they never made it there.

Rania’s father is abroad, and was oblivious to the thunder that was forming in the horizon. Her biggest fear was for her uncles’ to inform the father.    She sat home for the last few days feeling a tingling in her arms and a thousand knots in her stomach. She felt that she might be facing her end very soon.

Last few days, we have been plotting our own plans of action, in case we needed them.  Family protection unit was one option and a friend suggested that she should seek refuge in the house of the Sheikh of his tribe.  Our plans were laid down to the last detail.

Things took a positive course last minute.  The father came back, and sat down with Rania calmly to understand the details of the issue. He understood and told her that he was going to protect her from his son and brothers.

Rania can breathe for the first time in few days… she still worries that her uncles might change her father’s mind.  She said that she has delegated the whole issue to God and is confident God will protect her.

Rania brought to mind a painful memory from the past, another young woman, who faced a similar situation.  Only in her case, her grandfather abused her sexually and the family decided to kill her in order to shut her up. She survived as well, a foreign embassy had to interfere, as she was holding a foreign passport.

Rania asked me a very legitimate question… “who will protect me? “

What ends up happening usually is that she will be put in a prison cell for a few weeks till things calm down, and when the person in charge gets a written approval that they will not kill her, they set her free…. In some cases, she gets killed regardless.

I can’t stop wondering if an innocent message justifies the death of an innocent young woman.

I have just recently moved back to Jordan after living in the US for about 8 years which is enough time to make you go crazy or become so engrossed in the culture that you find it hard to leave again. I would like to think I’m in the middle. I enjoyed my experiences in the US and felt like it was time for me to move on. I have been in Amman for about 2 months now (it seems like a long time!) and have noticed simple differences between life in the US and Jordan.

One of the first things that I have noticed is that people don’t use napkins here…they use fine. I’m not a fan of this practice because I think a napkin in more durable than fine and it honestly just grosses me out. Another thing I have noticed is that taxis honk if they want to get your attention. It makes me feel like I don’t have eyes and I might just need their services if they honk at me, because I can’t see or hear them coming up behind me. Or in-front of me and when they do come by and I look they tend to honk again. It seems like the first honk is “hey, trying to get your attention” second one is “Hey, you know I’m here but I just want to make sure you see me” third honk “hey, I really want to make sure that you did see me and that hand wasn’t paralyzed”. I really don’t understand it.

Women drivers are treated like the plague or if they can do it then they are considered to be courageous. I do realize driving in Jordan is a little different than what I am used to but I don’t understand how it takes someone with a lot of courage to drive period. I can’t tell you how many taxi drivers complain about women drivers! It’s like I’m not a woman. Or maybe they think I am better because I have chosen not to drive and take a taxi. I haven’t ever asked for fear of getting into an accident or something of that sort. I am a woman driver and don’t think I am a horrible driver. Men drive ten times worse than woman do and cause more accidents. I understand why Jordan has the rule about no –cell phones while driving, because your brain is going to focus on the thing that you have done longer and that would be talking and your attention won’t be on the road which is where it should be!

There is another thing that is interesting. When I am out with friends or family and we get the check, they don’t put down 10% of the total down, they put less than 5%. When I asked why, they said it’s the norm. I don’t always think that the wait-staff is very good but I usually give them a decent tip because I would want to get something decent as well. Maybe that is just me but it’s been an interesting point of discussion. They aren’t treated very nicely either. When I am done with a meal I usually try to clean up after myself and my father asked me if I wanted to work at the restaurant. I thought I was being courteous but I guess it’s not the norm.

People place a lot of emphasis on what you have and where you live. If you live in a place like abdoun, swefiah, and khaldi then you are a better person or if you have the latest clothes, car or cell phone. I don’t understand this attitude because I don’t think the person I am is dictated by where I live…but by the person I am.

I am not saying that Jordan is a bad place or that US is better…because I don’t think either. I just notice differences between but I think that is to be expected and you can’t change it sometimes, just learn to live with it.

October 2008

We have finally joint the 70,000 Jordanian families that have foreign live-in domestic workers. Irani, is 23, smart and ambitious. She started her studies in economics at the university, and is here to save enough money to be able to go back to school…. I picked her up when she arrived…

And for a split of a second, I imagined myself going into a new place… where I know nothing at all… I don’t speak the language, and where I am supposed to move in with some completely random family … lets say I can understand why she looked bewildered.

October 2009

Rani is still here; we managed to become friends during this last year. By now I know her life story. She still impresses me with her intellect, intelligence and her subtlety. I also know that her mother is here in Amman, she does not live far away from us… she is a cook at some wealthy household.

Today, Rani told me a very strange thing about her mother… she mentioned that even though she is the cook, her employers made her sign a very strict contract that stipulates she is not allowed to taste or eat any food at home. They give her 5 JDs every week to eat!  FIVE JDs  for the whole week!  While  these fat, ugly pathetic excuses of human beings spend extravagantly on their meals… Rani has mentioned several times before the kind of  meals her mothers cooks, the luxury items her employers export from abroad…Salma spends her entire day cooking! Literally!

Does anyone knows how much cooking this is?!

Salma laughed embarrassed as she explained how she  sometimes desires the food she cooks… but since there are 2 other maids there, one of them works as a spy… she actually can’t eat any food… so she has been feeding on Tuna cans, Endomy Noodles and other crap from the supermarket… she obviously does not want to spend her salary…. understandably, she travelled thousands of miles with her daughter  in order to save enough money so that her 3 kids  (including the daughter) can go to university and don’t have to clean people’s toilets for the rest of their lives!

I know it sounds horrible, but I found myself hoping this family will suffer from high cholesterol and high blood pressure, so that they start eating non-tasty food and desire things they can’t eat… maybe then, they can understand what they have been making this human being go through every single day last year.

Apparently Jordan is so known for our creative abuse methods when it comes to domestic help, that someone went ahead and wrote an article about it on Wikipedia….  Human trafficking in Jordan…

Yup this is how we want Jordan to be known on the world’s map! Fabulous, eh?

I followed Sarkozy’s historic speech addressing the French Parliament this last June,  where he addressed one of the most debated issues in France, the Hijab!

“We cannot accept in our country women imprisoned behind bars, cut off from social life, deprived of identity,” he said. “That is not our idea of maintaining the dignity of women.” to know more about the story, read here.

What was not clear to me was whether France will ban burqas or was Sarkozy just encouraging people in France to feel and express hostility towards women who wear them? I also did not understand how denying women this choice would enhance their dignity?  It is interesting how the west always assumes that women who wear the Burqa do so because they are forced or pressured into it.   I would like to refer here to an Egyptian Anthropologist… Lila Abu Lughod, who researched the hijab extensively and referred to the hijab as a form of  resistance.

In one of her studies, she was talking about how the Americans made it a point to say that one of the reasons they would go into Afghanistan was to save the Afghani women from the Burqa… I guess they were expecting that all women will go in the street and throw the Burqas the moment they saw the Americans…

It, as we all know,… did not happen.

Actually… I really don’t want to talk about the hijab, this was not my intention in this post. What I really found interesting was that Sarkozy… the man who divorced his wife in a sex scandal after cheating on her with a model was talking about women’s dignity with so much confidence… I am not sure how women who wear the hijab are not dignified, but women who get cheated on through sex scandals by their partners are?…. I, as a women find that interesting, i wonder how other women feel about it? also I wonder how Sarkozy can speak about women’s dignity? when he was checking a young woman’s butt in a very indignified way… not too long ago actually. …

Just to add another dimension to this… researches affiliated with the Sorbonne have recently published a report on inequalities in France… The volume  includes extensive statistical information about social and economic inequalities in France… it addressed the gender inequality… Apparently, women in France are clearly discriminated against in the workplace… till today, these dignified French women don’t earn the same salaries as men, even though they hold the same positions…

I guess we should aspire to a world where women have their full rights, but let’s not get too lost in the western idea of rights to a point where we ignore the right to chose, and the right to be different in the process…

He is an A-hole. He does not respect you, leave him!

Now, my opinion has changed dramatically… it has become:

Where is your self confidence?

Elsa on the other hand used to hate it when her partner (ex-husband now…) used to check women out, especially when they were out and she was with him. This was always the base for an argument… she told him repeatedly that it made her feel uncomfortable, she felt it was not respectful of her as a women… his standard answer was a cold “it meant nothing”

Her mother used to tell her that being upset was not about him staring but it was about being insecure in her relationship…. which obviously she was not… and rightly so, since he ended up cheating on her…
Today, when she is with her boyfriend, she truly does not mind if he checks someone out,… which he seldom does, … and when he does, it is done discreetly and respectfully. Actually, it is ironic, that she would point out that a girl is cute…… what would he do in this case? He does nothing…. absolutely nothing… he might mumble something funny and move on.

So I guess her mother’s comment was right after all…. It really is not about who does what… it is about trust… if you trust the person, if you are secure about the person you are with… checking out other people is fine. The point is both men and women look every now and then… it is no big deal, but what is not normal is for people to stare and comment EVERY time some member of the opposite sex walks in a room. Which really was the case with Elsa’s husband, it used to make all of her friends uncomfortable… he would scan any woman’s body rudely…it was disgusting!

Why do men check out women?

I really don’t want to provide excuses for Arab men…they get away with too much as it is…. but let’s look into evolution here. We need to remember that even though we moved from the caves into modern buildings around Jordan… and we started eating cooked mansaf around tables in different Jordanians cities and villages instead of eating raw meet around the fire in the caves, we still share DNA with animals.

We should never forget that the aim of the human race is to spread DNA for the survival of the race! A guy, having to do little work to give birth to a kid, would be more likely to pass on his DNA if he mated with several women… Is this all? Well of course not. There are other reasons as well.. For example the fact that society celebrates men’s behaviours… I mean it is completely ok for a man to look around, but it would be viewed as completely unnatural and maybe a little sick for a woman to do the same…

I would also imagine that it is because the way women react to it… A friend used to let her husband know how cute the waiter is whenever she caught him looking at other women… she would tip these handsome waiters handsomely, and the sting of spending unnecessary money was enough to teach the husband not to look when she is around!

She still tips people handsomely every now and then, after 13 years of marriage!

Can you think of other reasons why men look at other women??

I wonder who would get upset by this video… Michelle Obama or Carla Bruni?

I had a nightmare yesterday… in the dream I sat in my room, knowing that I am home alone… suddenly my door opened and a total stranger poked his head into my room… I almost gave myself a heart attack… I went through the motions and the feelings of this scenario as if it was real…. I woke up in a cold sweat….

I knew the nightmare was related to a conversation I had with the sister the previous night… it was about a guy she thought I should meet… Meeting a guy has been on the agenda of several people lately… I guess people worry that I am not getting any younger.  For some odd reason I absolutely have to meet someone right now, get married on the spot and reproduce immediately (…don’t waste your time… you get married today, you have a baby nine months later… boom…boom…boom… as if this process is in the same category as buying tomatoes).

The problem here is that i don’t seek the same kind of guys i had when i was in my early twenties. At that point I was looking for someone Strong, i felt vulnerable and wanted to be protected. I wanted someone with the standard shit, money, house, car…etc. So that he can provide for me (I still did not know that I can provide for myself… ) And of course intelligence. 

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A few days Later….

I see that I have a wandering keyboard this week… but to return to the original thread, I want to introduce another couple of incidents that took place this week…

“Guess what?! Hala told me first day of Eid  “Fares got engaged to XXXX,” She said…Fares was her cousin’s boyfriend for a long time … we both were surprised at his choice, since both women were so extremely different… while the cousin was smart, ambitious and strong… the fiancée was quiet, unmotivated and dull….

The long conversation we had about why men tend to prefer boring women for marriage was shelved in my head till last day of Eid…. I visited some family members for Eid… They just moved back from Saudi Arabia… I said naively to the lady “you must be happy about being here, you regained your freedom now”.

“On the contrary”, she said… “In Saudi Arabia, I did not have to do anything at all…my husband had to do everything.” She said…

I was appalled! What I heard was “in Saudi Arabia, I could sit on my lazy ass the whole days, and the poor ass I married had to do all the work!”

I found her completely unimpressive… she seemed smart enough when she was first introduced to the family… (five years and three children ago) even though we were a bit uncertain.  I mean the husband is quite an intelligent man… and we did not feel that she was that spectacular… what we failed to realize then, was that he made an intellectual decision to marry beneath him….

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12 November 2008

For years, there’s been a popular conception that men are intimidated by intelligent women in this part of the world… however, intelligent women have a strategy…

They play dumb!

I can’t remember the number of times my grandmother told me to tone it down when I meet someone… or ordered me not to read publicly because it is not appealing… or treated my glasses as a shameless secret… The holly fear is that women who are too strong are less likely to find a man who will love them, let alone marry them.

Honestly I look at my grandmother and she is one of the strongest women on earth. She always knew how to play it down. And well she has been married for more than 60 years now!

Are Jordanian men intimidated by smart, strong women?  

Well…I was browsing when I came across an exhaustive study of people from primary school to middle age has proved that clever men are much more likely to marry than those with lesser intelligence. But for intelligent women, the reverse is true. Their chances of have that beautiful white wedding at Intercontinental Amman are considerably lower than other women who went through university because it was better than staying home!

The study says that one possible cause of this result is that many smarter women are too choosy in wanting higher status men whereas the men are not as choosy about status of females and hence can find a suitable mate from a much larger pool of women.

Another possible explanation (my lovely caveman analogy) men are more driven to seek physical beauty and youth as a result of selective pressures to seek fertile mates. Whereas natural selection favoured a female preference for higher status men as better providers…

“Men have no problem with an independent intelligent woman, but what I have found with women that call themselves that, is they are very judgmental, closed minded to certain things, and love to argue or debate as they call it”

I have been writing this post for a week now. I guess the new Jhumpa Lahiri book Unaccustomed Earth has been keeping me busy…. Not bad at all.. Lahiri knows how to show the human side of her characters…. Also this week i have realized that i am in love with Lebanese singer Marwan Khouri!