Ma3 al-Usra (With the Family)

It is now Sunday morning, and since I don't have internet at home, I haven't been able to post since Thursday. I wrote this on Thursday night, after spending my first afternoon and evening with my family--needless to say I was VERY overwhelmed. In order to maintain the proper progression, I'll post this now and then hopefully write another entry later in the day to catch everything up. Enjoy!

2/7/08

To say I am in culture shock right now would be a huge understatement. Whatever adjustments had to be made on a surface level over the past few d ays is no comparison to what I will be adapting to over the next few months. I had said earlier that I seemed to have more arabic training than many of the other students on hte program, but being around my host family for the past few hours has made me wonder how on earth someone who has had less, let alone no Arabic is surviving! My host mother, Maha, is very nice, but really speaks very little English--when it is just the two of us, we usually are able to figure out what the other is saying, but at times, come across a communication barrier. So far we have had either Ra'ed, my host father, or Isabelle, another SIT  student staying with Maha's mother who has had great Arabic traning in Yemen, to help us fill in the gaps. However, as the night wore on, and I became increasingly tired, it was harder and harder to keep with the frenetic pace of her speech--I need to be at full concentration at all times!

More than ever now, I am realizing the true magnitude of the challenge that lies ahead of me, and am somewhat intimidated, but very optimistic. Despite the frustration, I have already begun to see, in the  first day, the benefits of living with a family. Maha and Ra'ed live in a modest apartment building owned by Ra'ed's family in a tourist-free part of Amman--my room is formerly Daoud's, who Maha insists gets scared and refuses to sleep alone, so the room has been unused for a year, despite the mouse and cheese carpet, frog curtains, and Disney pictures that dot the walls. Though Maha insists that Daoud has wanted a sister, I think he is now coming to realize that his days as an only child may be over, and he spent most of the evening running around, screaming, and generally trying to be the center of attention in the most adorable way possible. After unpacking, we ewnt over to Maha's mother's house ,a much bigger apartment that houses Maha's parents, two brothers and two sisters in their late twenties, Maha's uncle, as well as a Sri Lankan maid, Camila. On a sidenote--before being picked up by our families today, our director made a big deal about not interfering with the maids--I remember being told by someone who had done the program before how uncomfortable she felt with the whole situation, that it was very exploitive, etc etc--apparently one former student felt this way to an extreme, somehow smuggled the maid to the airport with him/her to try to get her to the US, and the student is still in ongoing litigation with the family...ridiculous

At Maha's mother's house, I walked into the living room to find Mohammed ogling Arabic pop stars in surprisingly risque outfits on television (though he insists SHakira is his favorite and the only people who don't love her are the blind), while the older  genderation (mother, uncle) sat on the couch, smoking. It's a little disconcerting to be sitting with elderly women in hijab and their younger sons while watching Beyonce and Jay-Z music videos. The entire family is always talking at once, interrupting each other, yelling, on separate cell phone calls etc etc. simultaneously, which makes following conversation, in colloquial arabic, quite a challenge. An impromptu dining room was erected in the living room with the addition of a plastic picnic table, and out came the enormous platter of rice and chicken, salad and yogurt--needless to say my  appetite  doesn't match up to any of these people, and I am always being chastised for not eating enough. The sheer amount of food consumed in this country is insane, and though people often say Middle Eastern food is pretty healthy, the constant fried food, soda, sugar in the tea and coffee (I miss Splenda!) makes me think otherwise.

After much conversation and increasing fatigue, Isabelle and I were taken on an errand which turned out to be one of the most interesting of the day-tomorrow, there is a wedding in the extended family, and both Maha and her sister had ordered new traditional Jordanian outfits from a dressmaker who lived up in the jebels (hills) of Amman. The neighborhood reminded me a little bit of Fiesole near Florence--tons of zigzagging little streets packed with different shops, all open late at night with tons of foot traffic. Traveling as a group of five, we were escorted into the dressmaker's house, took our shoes off and went to sit down in a parlor while the sisters tried on their dresses. Inside, one Palestinian and one Jordanian, were warming their hands over a portable gas stove (a fixture in every household I've seen thus far, regardless of social class), while watching Al-Jazeera. Being a bit more adventurous with her Arabic and more alert than I was, Isabelle started trying to engage the women in a political discussion, and asked her what she thought of the situation in Israel. The women began a rapid-fire response that neither of us could understand, but after much revision, it was simply reduced to the fact that a) she hates the Jews b) there is nothing she can do for her people.

(At this point, I passed out...more to come later)