Tuesday, January 25, 2011

day in the life

8:27 a.m.: I wake up, and remember I’m in Jordan. It’s the eerie music box song of the petrol truck that does it, making its runs up and down Ridwhan Street, as it does several times every day. The only sound I can compare it to is the ice cream truck—but it’s nothing like the ice cream truck. I’ve gotten used to it enough that I hardly notice it during the day—but for now it’s still new enough to wake me up. I lay awake under orange blankets in my bed, trying to remember what day of the week it is.

8:30 a.m.: My alarm goes off. I get up, groggy, and dress for the gym.

8:45 a.m.: Ziad knocks on my door, calling me to breakfast. In the kitchen, Ruba pours sugary tea in to little glass cups as Aziza, my Jordanian mother, toasts pita over the flame of the gas stove. Rana is wrapped in a blanket on the couch, her face furrowed, moodily flipping through the channels of the TV, and Uncle Ahmed has been to the supermarket and back already, bringing fresh bread for the day.

Breakfast is a spread of hummus, falafel, scrambled eggs, olives, olive oil and zatar, tomatoes and creamy labneh, and we eat with pita forks from pita plates, everyone standing around the table in the sunny kitchen, chattering in Arabic while ripping apart the hot bread with their fingers. We will eat the same thing again for dinner, which won’t be until 9 or 10 that night, coming together before bed the way same we do when we first wake up.


breakfast. Clockwise: pita bread (khubez), ground thyme (zatar), tomatoes (banadoura), cheese (jibneh), olive oil (zeit). Jealous?


9: 15 a.m.: I go outside to catch a taxi to the gym—but Uncle Ahmed always offers to drive me, the way he does every day. He says that Duwar Sebha’a is on his way to somewhere or the other—but I’m pretty sure that he just goes back home after he drops me off. On the way, he points out landmarks to me and I stumble over the foreign words with a clumsy tongue that feels too big for my mouth. When we arrive outside the gym, I say thank you and Ahmed says goodbye.

9:30 a.m.: In the gym, they know my name and say, “marHaba, Anna,” when I come in and “thank you, Anna,” when I leave. I run on a treadmill by a window that looks out over the sloping mountains and wadis of Amman, the houses like stacked boxes up and over the hills, the domed mosques, and the narrow, winding streets. Five times a day the call to prayer echoes over these hills, haunting and unifying and moving, another sound that’s unlike anything I hear at home. In the distance the horizon is sharp and defined where city gives way to desert.

My neighborhood.

11: 30 a.m.: Sometimes I meet Kelly and Rhea at the gym, sometimes not; either way I end up afterwards at the coffee shop on the corner, sitting on the second story with my laptop, sipping tea and watching the traffic go by below. Last Thursday, Kelly, Rhea and I were joined here by a gaggle of teenagers who had just gotten out of school and come to smoke sheesha and drink something that looked suspiciously like a frappuchino.

1:00 p.m.: I am home, and if there isn’t cooking to help with then there are Turkish soap operas, dubbed in Arabic, to be watched.

My favorite is called “Forbidden Love” and I have no idea what it’s about—but there’s a lot of crying and it all seems very sad, as forbidden love usually is. The commitment to soap operas is it seems, quite a cultural phenomenon: all of our families watch them, and when the twelve of us from Earlham see each other later in the day we will compare notes and argue about whether Mohammad made a mistake or not.

Mohanned (left), the lover of Samar (middle) who is married to Anad (right) who is Mohanned's uncle. Drama.

2:00 p.m.: Lunch.

It’s the biggest meal of the day: recently we’ve been having mansaf, the national dish of Jordan. It’s boiled seasoned lamp with hot yogurt sauce on a bed of rice, parsley and nuts. It’s delicious, but incredibly heavy, and I drag myself through it, protesting when Aziza spoons more rice onto my plate before it’s even empty. At Jo Bedu, a t-shirt shop that apparently serves as the hipsters’ headquarters in Jordan, they have a shirt that says in white letters on a black background: I SURVIVED MANSAF. Now I know why. After mansaf, I usually need a nap, but instead I help Aziza do the dishes.

Mansaf. And yes, that is steaming hot yogurt sauce that's being poured over it. We also put more meat on top of the meat that's already there. The lady in the white t-shirt is my host sister, Rana; the lady in black is a family member whose name I embarrassingly enough cannot remember.

3:00 p.m.: At Ziad’s insistence, we watch another installment of the six disc long video of my oldest host sister’s wedding.

Rasha now lives in Venezuela with her husband Hassan and their seven-months-old daughter, Zahura, and if you have any questions about what happened at Rasha’s wedding, I can certainly answer them, because I am an expert. Note to IPO: I should probably get a couple of credits for this.

4:00 p.m.: I leave for Arabic.

The taxi landmark is Mukhtar Mall at Duwar Medina. I am now pretty much fluent in taxicab Arabic, especially turning down marriage proposals or spontaneous vacations to Aqaba with the cabbie, both of which are offered frequently.

My street.

I am in the five-thirty to seven Arabic class with Arielle, Leila, and Rachel—but all the other Earlham kids are in the four to five-thirty session, and I like to get there early in order to hang out at the Science and Technology Club, which we have rented out for classes. This is a good place to hang out because there is always hot tea, snacks, wireless, and, of course, the opportunity to discuss the Turkish soap operas with my fellow Earlhamites. We trade taxi stories and compare how much we were served to eat at lunch until five-thirty, when we go in for our class with Reema.

Reema is probably the best foreign language teacher I’ve ever had, or maybe I just feel that way because we’re doing easy things so far: for example, the alphabet. But Reema is also very stylish and beautiful, wearing outfits with color-coordinated ankle-length skirts, long sleeved cardigans, and patterned silk hijabs in jewel tones that always match her eyeshadow.

We have a good time in class. Leila has a fancy pen that records the lecture as she writes, and it has pros and cons. The pros are that it can upload her notes in her handwriting to her laptop and associate any point in the uploaded written notes with the corresponding point in the recorded lecture, all by magic; the major con is that knowing I’m being recorded puts me under pressure to be even funnier than usual, so I make a lot of bad jokes. Rachel, who is giggly, usually dissolves in to hysterics at any joke that I make, no matter how bad it is, and the result is gratifying but not conducive to the learning environment. Regardless, I am making progress in Arabic, mostly because my two options are a) make progress in Arabic or b) not communicate.

7:00 p.m.: Class lets out, and I hightail it to the Jordan Times, because I’m already late.

At the Times, I work with Rajiv, a design editor. Actually, I was a present from Ica, an editor, to Rajiv, to reward him for doing so much at the Times. The first time I met Ica I was a little terrified—she has tomato-red hair in an assymetrical bob and pointy-toed stilettos, and she looked at me over the top of her glasses the way newspaper editors always do in the movies.

“Well, Anna,” she said, “what am I going to do with you?”

I started rambling, telling her that I had experience with reporting, copy-editing, content-editing, InDesign, photo-editing—

“I know,” she said, interrupting me with a smile. It wasn’t a nice smile. “I’ll give you to Rajiv.”

Which is how I ended up doing proofreading and layout with Rajiv and Shukom in a little cubicle near the back of the office. Rajiv calls me Anna Kournikova and lays out pages at lightening speed while Shukom, complains about “Big Boss” and reads funny things from the Internet out loud.

Working at the Times has been humbling; the first morning I opened the paper and saw that one of the changes I had made the previous night hadn’t gone through, I felt a kind of visceral indignation—all the changes that I made to the Word always went in. This is, of course, because I have gone from the top of the newsroom food chain to the bottom, and am now an insignificant intern who has actually zero influence on what happens to the paper. So it’s humbling, and I’m learning a lot. But it is the most familiar place in Amman; walking in feels like going home. I’ve felt that way since I first walked in to meet Ica and talk about my hours: it’s comfortable and quiet but full of energy and the white noise of pages running off on the printer, smart people, and the smell of ink.

10:00 p.m.: I get to go home.

I’m too tired to really talk to the cab driver. Sometimes I will make up identities for myself, invent a husband and four children at home in Texas or a whirlwind tour of the cosmopolitan Middle East with my boss, an up and coming New York fashion designer. But at night, after work, tired and overwhelmed by trying to speak Arabic I’m usually just Anna, a student from Indiana.

When I get home, the entire family and sometimes some extras are gathered in the living room, all in their pajamas. If I have managed to make it home without needing to call for directions, they cheer for me when I come in the door. I change in to sweatpants and sit down with them in front of the television.

“Anna, are you hungry?” Ziad will ask me. “You want something to eat?”

“No thank you,” I say.

“Okay,” he says, and makes me a sandwich.

11:30 p.m.: I go to bed.

I’m the first one, every night—Ziad will be up until three or four. It’s cold in the house so I snuggle up under the three heavy blankets on my bed, still in my sweatpants and a heavy sweater. I cuddle up with my stuffed Ewok and check my email, Skype with Kaitlin or Rosa or, once a week, call my mom. I turn off the lights and fall asleep as the sound of the petrol truck driving away fades into the distance and Ziad, Eyad, Rana and Ruba chatter in Arabic from the living room.

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