Even though it fucking itched like crazy with the heat, I had to suck it up. Like I said, I didn’t take it seriously at first, until the day Ana and I went to the corner market to get some items for the center. The hot winds picked up and there were warnings of a dust storm approaching.
“Do we need anything else?” Ana asked before we walked out of the small room meant to be an Ammanian convenient store.
I rewrapped the veil over my head with little success and nodded, confirming we have everything on the list. Ana saw me struggling with the veil. “Here, let me help you.”
She adjusted my veil over my ears, then opened the door. I walked quickly, following behind Ana as the rough wind whipped against my face, stronger now than it was when we left the school. It felt gritty, like sandpaper rubbing against my cheeks, so I kept my head down and pulled my veil tighter. As soon as I did, the plastic bag of goods started to slip from my hands.
Holding it tighter in time with holding my veil in place, one of them had to give and it happened to be my veil. Wanting to get back to the school quickly, I ignored its absence and kept the pace with Ana as we passed a group of men sitting along the sidewalk.
The cat-calls were immediate and brazen, having me spinning around fast, ready to give them a piece of my American mind when Ana grabbed my arms and pulled me to her, saying firmly, “Don’t say anything. Just keep walking.”
A few of the whistles got farther away as she pulled me along, but hard foreign words were close on my heels as two of the men hadn’t let up. One of the men I recognized from the neighborhood near the Ba’ashir’s house.
Ana tried to put my veil back my head as she moved alongside of me, but it fell down to my shoulders again.
Suddenly, I felt a tug on my veil, pulling me back. It was the man I recognized. Motherfucker! He was yelling and spitting at me. I stopped walking, my anger pulling at hot tears in my eyes, and yelled at him, “Leave me alone!”
Ana grabbed my arm and tugged me again as I pulled my veil up away from the ground. My confronting them made the spitting and yelling worse as we hurried to the center’s courtyard only a few yards ahead. Ana and I ran the last few feet as the men give way at the entrance, knowing they have met their barrier.
“Are you loca?” Ana barked at me loudly once we were behind the closed doors of the center.
With all of my senses coming back to me now, I realized what a mistake I had made by speaking out to those men like I was ready to start a fight or something.
Hushed, she continued, “We are not in America. We are in a foreign fucking country with customs we have to follow. Some of those people out there do not want us here and you are giving them more reason to attack us with your mouth!”
I nodded the entire time she berated me, knowing I was wrong, but refusing to surrender to this bullshit. “Don’t you think I fucking know,” I hissed at her as we caught our breath in the hallway. “It just blew off and I couldn’t put it back on! I didn’t think it would be a big deal.”
“It isn’t about the damn veil, Ella. Your mouth is going to get you in trouble. You yelled back at those men!”
“What happened?” Tom’s baritone voice caught me off-guard as he walked toward us.
Ana folded her arms over her chest, clamming up and giving me the floor to explain.
Fuck.
The last three weeks posed a challenge for Tom with my line of questioning during integration classes. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to integrate, it was just hard to stomach all of the shit I had to relearn as a woman in this culture. Tom and the staff didn’t hide their frustration with my constant questioning and my slip-ups of foul language.
I speak quickly, “My veil, it fell off my head. There were a few men. They didn’t like me uncovered. We are fine though. Nothing happened.”
“And?” Tom asked, expecting more. “What else happened? What did you say to them?”
He knew me too well to know I tolerated this without speaking up. Ana and I stared at each other and I was fully expecting her to tell him I mouthed off at a man in the streets.
“Nothing. That was all,” Ana said as she looked directly at Tom.
I could see Tom suspects more, but he didn’t push. “There are many people happy we are here to help, but there are some who would rather us leave. We are outsiders. They will find any reason to intimidate you, even if it is a fallen veil, which might I remind you is custom to the Muslim people. We have been over all of this, Ella, and we have been over how to blend into the culture.”
Realizing he is coming off domineering with his reprimand, he spoke more calmly now. “This part of Amman holds tradition sacred when they have little else to hold onto, Ella, and while being progressive, liberal, and somewhat outspoken are commendable traits of women in America, they are not looked upon similarly here. I don’t think I need to remind either of you again. Am I right, Ms. Wallace?”
I nodded, my mouth burning from the unspilled words I wanted to send his way.
“Ms. Diaz?” Tom asked.
“Yes, sir,” Ana responded.
Once he was out of earshot, Ana reached for my fallen veil gently and leaned in close, whispering, “You need to wrap it like this so it won’t slip.”
“Okay.”
As she tucked my veil under my chin and swung the long part over my shoulder, I thought of the reason Mr. Ba’ashir always told his children and I to be very careful. Did he fear I or one of the children might be attacked in retaliation for them giving asylum to the Ahmadi family? While he agreed to let me do this favor for him and Hoda, did he fear for our safety? Did Jasara choose to bring her own children to the center separately from me, so I wouldn’t be targeted if they were? The man that pulled my veil from my shoulders, he was from the same neighborhood as the Ba’ashirs. Could he be watching me? Or is it just my mouth and my non-conforming attitude causing all the trouble?
“There,” Ana said, pulling back to hold the bag of supplies out to me.
I took the bag from her as she added, “If these were the streets of D.C I would have had your back with that asshole, mi hermana. This isn’t our world and while you seem tough, I don’t think you have seen what I have, been where I have been, to take on a son of a bitch like that. What I can tell you is neither of us are tough enough for this world, so don’t go and try to be a hero, all right?”
Her words made it apparent that while I haven’t divulged anything about who I was or where and how I grew up, she has caught on to the fact I haven’t seen the hard world she has experienced and even that world doesn’t compare to this one.
Holding my backpack tighter, I look around me as I wait for Ameena to say goodbye to her brother at the boys’ school he attends. She hugs him then he rushes into the concrete building before we move on to the girls’ school she attends a block away. As soon as we are close to the entrance she turns to me and says, “Bye,” with a small smile hidden behind her very traditional hijab.
“Bye,” I say, waving as she turns and quickly walks into the school.
The center is a few blocks away from Ameena’s and Ghalib’s public schools. The refugees at the center aren’t allowed to attend public schools because they haven’t registered with the Jordanian government, and while Jasara’s family was once registered, when they left the camps, they were on their own, receiving no assistance for her family. I have offered to walk Laila and Rushdi with me to the center, but Jasara refused the offer. Tom had told us many of the refugees refused to register with the United Nations for fear of retaliation from the Syrian government, and with Jasara’s family having been registered she feared retaliation on anyone she comes into association with.
The name of our center, Makan Lil Amal, means “place of hope” in Arabic. It was erected almost three years ago, just a short time before the Ahmadi family found its doors. I sit down at one of the six outdated computers in the concrete room turned technology lab. These are the only computers in the center and are used for email and for accessi
ng resources for instruction. I pull up my email account and an unopened message from Jilly catches my attention. Though, if anyone were to scroll through my inbox, they’d see Allison and Jilly’s names all the way down. I got into the habit of saving all of their messages for the days I really miss home.
“Hey.” Ana walks in and lets her veil fall from her head as she sits down to the computer next to me.
“Hey.”
Typing on the keyboard, she enters her username and password to access her email account. “I can’t wait until the weekend. Hey, a few of the volunteers and I are going to do some touristy stuff on Saturday. Want to go?”
I open the email from Jilly. “Like what?”
We continue to scroll our emails side by side. I don’t see an email from Allison, so I open a new message and send her a quick note.
Hi! Doing great. Settling in finally. The Ba’ashir family is so nice.
So are the Ahmadi’s. Love the girls I teach. Miss you.
“Um, going to Roman Amphitheater I think. Then some restaurant. Hashem. It is supposed to be popular,” she says as she scrolls her own emails.
El,
I need to see Amman! Send pictures soon!
Miss you, Love you.
Jilly
Her emails have become shorter and more playful after the initial heartfelt ones, which has made opening her emails less bittersweet.
“Roman Amphitheater?” I ask Ana.
“Yep. That is what we are thinking.”
I smile as I type quickly.
Jilly,
I will send pics of the Roman Amphitheater in a few days. Everything is going well here. I love my class of girls. Love the family I live with. Miss you. Love you. El
I sign out of my account and glance over at Ana. “What time are we leaving?”
I notice the waiting room to the medical clinic has started to fill as I walk down the hall past the section. The medical staff and volunteers are through Caritas. One of the clinicians I see every day is checking the temperature of an elderly woman. She looks at me just as I’m passing and smiles. I smile back lightly and move on. The next few sets of rooms are where the physicians and nursing staff see the patients. Through the corridor is another section designated for financial assistance and registration with Caritas. The section beyond is for counseling families. Trained staff and volunteers help counsel children and adults experiencing trauma, depression, and other symptoms resulting from their life as refugees. It is also the last section before entering the area WorldTeach has made into a temporary school.
Each room represents grade levels, starting with the youngest, six-year-olds. The rooms in the building have been divided by accordion-like partitions to make room for multiple classes. Like the schools in Amman, boys are separate from girls in the classroom, with one hall being for male teachers and boys and the other for female teachers and girls.
One of the male volunteer teachers exits a room and walks toward me with a cup of coffee in his hand. “Hi, Ella.” David has been with WorldTeach for three years. He has been to Chile and to Morocco, choosing Amman this summer. “Did Ana talk to you about the Roman Amphitheater?”
“Yes, she did.”
He nods and walks on, surely going to get fill his cup with Turkish coffee, the richest fucking coffee I have ever tasted. Don’t get me wrong, it is good, just too strong. One sip and I am buzzing with adrenaline.
While we have a stout number of male teachers through WorldTeach, we also have a few through Caritas who are native Jordanians. Just like the host families, they have lived here their whole lives and want to help the Syrian people displaced due to the war.
I pass through the intersecting corridor leading down a hall, doorways lining each side. This is the girls section of classrooms. Ana and I are separated by a partition in the classroom we share. Her girls are nine and ten-years-old and mine are six through eight. We each have ten girls and I have already claimed mine as “my girls,” when I talk about them. The first day of classes made for a tough audience as I tried to break the ice in broken Arabic. That got a few giggles, but no instruction. For all, this was their first experience in a classroom and a completely new place with some strange American girl trying to speak Arabic. These girls had seen things I could never imagine seeing: the death of their brothers, fathers, or sisters. They had been forced from their homes because of a war they did not start and cannot stop.
In the first two weeks of being with the class, my spirit broke as I read their files, experiencing on paper the traumatic events they endured as they found passage to Jordan, into refugee camps, then into the city of Amman. It was my fault; I asked Tom about each of them. Ana didn’t ask. The girl who taught in the room across from us, Laura, she didn’t ask. They didn’t understand why I wanted to know.
“It makes things more complicated, Ella,” was Laura’s reasoning to avoid hearing her students’ life stories. I couldn’t be expected to teach English and math not knowing what they had experienced.
When I approached Tom about it during lunch, he said it wasn’t standard practice to share certain information, which made me question what he chose not to share with me about the Ahmadi or Ba’ashir family. Had Jasara Ahmadi’s family been through worse than the informational packet I was given stated? Had the Ba’ashir family been condemned for giving refuge to the Ahmadis? I told him it wasn’t standard practice to expect me to teach girls having never set foot in a classroom. Children who had experienced so much trauma in their lives that reading, writing, and math are mundane compared to their existence.
After the third go around with him, he knew I wouldn’t let up, so he introduced me to Samara Hallal, a counselor through Caritas. He told me she could tell me more about my girls. She had a stack of files on her desk and told me she was going to get a cup of coffee and speak with the director of Caritas. She placed her hand on the stack and told me, what I read in that room, stayed in that room. I sat and read their stories, some similar and some more horrific than I had imagined.
Fleeing death with only the clothes on their backs and a bag or two of the belongings they could carry. Running, crying, begging, as they crossed the border from Syria, watching death take those not strong enough to make safe passage; too sick, too old, too frightened of retaliation from Syria. Too painful to look back. At first finding hope in a refugee camp, until it became too crowded, or the abuse too harrowing, or the attempted rapes too terrifying.
These traumas, the damage, had peeled away their dignity, self-respect, and self-awareness, leaving each of them spiritless in some way. Story after story, they leave a camp and find a new one, just for the fucking cycle to start over again, peeling, stripping away layer by layer of life until there is only an outer shell of a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, a little girl who has seen too much in her short life.
After reading in Samara’s office, I walked Ameena and Ghalib back to the Ba’ashirs’ home without speaking. I looked at Hoda and Ismad differently, as saviors to the Ahmadis. While the two families carried on with their night, I ate in silence, then excused myself to my room, where I found solace in crying for the first time since arriving, not for myself in being frightened in a foreign country, but for my girls; Jasara, Ameena, Ghalib, Hoda, Laila, Rushdi, and Ismad. I heard the echo of my father’s voice telling me I didn’t know what I was doing. After, I wiped my tears and swore I would not teach my girls English or math until I got each of them to smile at least once. That was my new rule.
It took me three days to get all of them to smile, but once I did I knew there was hope for them finding their spirits again. While I think about it every day, I haven’t found the courage to ask the Ba’ashirs or the Ahmadis their stories beyond the packet I received on them.
Walking into the classroom, I turn on the lights and set my bag down on the metal chair behind my small metal desk. There are only two desks and chairs in the room; one for Ana and one for me. We are supposed to receive student desks sometime soon; funds fr
om the mystery, silent benefactor who funded my getting here. Tom said we would have them two weeks ago, but still nothing. As I straighten the thin scraps of carpet we are using to cover the concrete floor for the girls to sit more comfortably, I look up in time to see the first of my girls enter into the classroom, Muna Sulaiman. She was the last to smile for me.
“Salaam, Muna.”
“Salaam, Ms. Ella,” she says softly as she holds her notebook to her chest and finds the small scrap of carpet closest to me.
She opened up easily after that day, wanting to hold my hand as we walked to and from lunch, choosing to sit with me in the courtyard while the other girls played, never wanting to leave my side and always being the first in the classroom in the morning, like she is today. Samara said once a child like Muna has latched on to someone, they never want to let go. I could accept that, fully knowing what I know. Her mother and father were murdered the night her older sister and brother fled with her from Syria. They found passage with an aunt and uncle fleeing with their two children. Samara said Muna shared a room with her parents and witnessed the massacre. Her sister and brother hid, but once the intruders had fled, they searched for her and found her buried under the blood-soaked bedding between her mother and father’s bodies.
Muna holds my hand tightly, looking up at me with her big brown eyes as we walk to the cafeteria for lunch. The girls giggle and squirm in line, but straighten up as soon as I look back, only to giggle and squirm once again after I have turned around.
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