The woman fruttivendola at the market quizzed me about being a donna sola. Si si, I said firmly and bought ten clementini e prezzemolo I didn’t need. Then I went back to the apartment and worked out how to die.
First, I would post a letter to the children, then send an email to Lyndall and Carmen. Then I would cancel tonight’s dinner with Lyndall’s friends. Then I would put the keys under the doctor’s door and tell him where to find me.
Then the power failed again and I had no internet, so I couldn’t check to see if I had anything strong enough to do the job. Then I took half an old painkiller and stopped weeping. Basta.
When I had first travelled to Damascus in 2006 with the PA, she showed me a small, cheap hotel close to the Old City, near the Umayyad mosque, and where the town’s best rug sellers were. Later, I went alone several times, loving the anonymity, the din and the people.
Here, a foreign woman sitting alone represented a chance for a conversation. I’d sit outside in the morning at one of the cafés in the Old City, with coffee, and a bread roll covered in sesame seeds, and parents would send their child over to me to ask politely if they could practise their English. Other people told me about their work. I once met a woman who told me she was a child psychologist who was trained in Aleppo and was now the first to be working in a school. She introduced me to her brother, who was an engineer working on a bridge-building project in the south, near Homs. I met an old woman at the spice market who showed me how to mix zahtar. She had the spice man grind the ingredients—dried thyme, ground and roasted pistachio and sesame seeds, a pinch of paprika, coriander, cumin, allspice and sumac—for her in a shallow wooden bowl lined with brown paper, sniffing every spice before he mixed them. After she was satisfied, he gave us both a taste, with a saucer of olive oil and a piece of flatbread.
I loved Damascus, with its walled Old City, and its eight gates and the central spine of the Roman Straight Street—the world’s oldest continuously occupied city, since the third millennium BC. Temples, churches and mosques, even a few hammans and madrassas, bakers and butchers, coffee houses, and stalls selling everything from nuts and bolts to fine leather goods and carpets. The Old City of Damascus housed people from all over the region but ghettoes never formed. In houses overhanging the narrow alleys lived Maronites, Copts, Catholics and Greek Orthodox people, right alongside the Jewish, Sunni and Shia Muslim quarters.
Each morning, I’d join the queue at the Umayyad mosque for a ‘foreigner’s ticket’, and a grey abaya to put over my clothes and my headscarf. Built after the Muslim conquest of Damascus in 634, on the site of a Christian basilica dedicated to John the Baptist, the mosque is a holy site for all—Shia and Sunni Muslims and Christians. The mosque has three minarets, a vast colonnaded courtyard open to the sky, and four glowing Mihrab niches in prayer halls. I sometimes sat for hours on the steps in the courtyard, watching family groups in the shade of the colonnades, parents taking it in turns to go into the prayer rooms, children playing quietly, others picnicking.
The space was cool and peaceful. I felt very welcome; invited in, to add my shoes to the pile and to sit. The sounds of commerce from the suq and the narrow maze of streets of the Old City did not penetrate, but once I was outside again, the noise and crowds were deafening.
Eighty kilometres from Damascus, on the north road through the Qalamun mountains in the Nebek region, is Deir Mar Musa, a Syrian monastery originally founded by Abyssinian monks in the sixth century AD, and restored in the 1980s by an Italian Jesuit priest, Father Paolo Dall’Oglio. It is an astonishing place—a self-contained fortress high in the mountains, growing its own food, providing a retreat for Christians and Muslims who worship together in the extensively frescoed chapel. Staying overnight once, on my way back to Jordan, I helped dust books in the library, then sat on the flat rooftop, looking out over the mountains towards Lebanon.
At the start of October 2008, I returned to Amman for a few weeks. This was to write about the work of Ruwwad Al-Tanmeya, a non-profit community development organisation, in the old refugee camp in Jabal Al-Nathif, which had impressed me on an earlier visit. But it was also to check if I would be stopped at the visa counter at Queen Alia airport and sent back to Rome, as I had often seen people being stopped at small airports in Italy and refused visas. I am not black, which might have helped; nor was my name on any list at the visa counter. My passport was stamped. I hailed a cab, and went to the lovely apartment belonging to Teresa, a friend of my Australian friend the PA and of several of the other foreigners who work for the Hashemites. Teresa was pleased when I asked if I could stay in her apartment as a paying guest. She is also the great-niece of Nabokov, which interested me a good deal.
Except for my contact with Teresa, silence had fallen, as though a plug had been pulled. My emails to acquaintances in Amman were unanswered; my phone calls not returned or the line went dead. That I’d chosen to leave seemed to have put me in the category of beyond the pale. My efforts to leave graciously, and with maximum efficiency, so the book I’d been writing for the Prince wouldn’t suffer would, I could now see, be turned around and inside out, until it became about my intransigence, my inability to complete the book I took on, with such high hopes and unreal expectations, more than two years before. But I did complete it. And left it in six neat photocopied piles, and later, as advised by the PA, who said if I were to write about this time, I must not use her name.
I was outside the protection of the Palace. Teresa told me that Sitti Sarvath was furious with me after Nella’s inside story, whatever that might have been. I was shocked, though not surprised. Nella, with only the vaguest notion of what I was doing in Jordan, would have sniffed the wind and flattered Sitti Sarvath. Nella laughed and said she can’t remember when I asked her what she said.
When I’d arrived at Teresa’s, she told me she had been roundly criticised for allowing me to stay, as if she had breached some sort of protocol. She was very angry. How dare someone I haven’t even met tell me who I can have in my own house! Recently widowed after a long marriage to a Jordanian army man, she now needed to speak up for herself, she told me. I felt anxious that Rabeea Al Nasser and Raghda Butros who were expecting me at Ruwwad would also have been got at—but they said nothing about this and were happy for me to interview them about their work.
Staying at Teresa’s was delightful. Her apartment was cool and beautiful, with lovely rugs, cane furniture bedecked with her tapestried cushions in patterns collected from all over the Middle East. She suggested I invite friends to dinner, but I was no longer sure any of them would be happy to hear from me.
I went for a walk that first afternoon, to try to orient myself. No one walked in Amman except poor Egyptians looking for work and Filippina maids exercising small dogs. In this affluent neighbourhood, there were guards in sentry boxes outside the Russian embassy and the houses of the rich.
I was heading in what I thought was a direct line from the street with the red chilli house that ran at a right angle to Mecca Street, just above the Fifth Circle. Each time I came, there seemed to be another circle, more rubble, and more hideous jerry-built office blocks and cheap housing.
There was no traffic in the side street, so I walked down the middle of the road because most of the footpaths were broken, with olive trees growing through the pavement. It was the second day of Eid, so people would be sleeping in the afternoon after the deprivations of Ramadan, before the feasting after dark. I saw only poor men who looked like they’d been dismissed for the day from some small job, of cutting grass or holding a hose. They didn’t look at me as I tried to keep track of where I was. The streets curved and ran out, and headed up hills into blank walls, or took a sudden turn to the end of the precipice above the highway. Piles of rubble from building sites blocked the way and mangy cats searched for food—one limping cat slunk across my path, mean and desperate looking. The dogs were on leads except for those behind the high fences, which all seemed to be German Shepherds or Rottweilers, leaping at t
he wire and barking.
I started to realise walking was a dumb thing to be doing at five o’clock in the afternoon on a cool day when the sun would set soon after six and I didn’t know the way back. But I had to get out for a bit. Teresa was preparing dinner and wouldn’t let me help her. Over a sumptuous meal of iced basil and tomato soup, Turkish lamb and aubergine, and a sorbet of fresh mint, Teresa told me stories about her grand Polish and Russian forebears—Nabokov, especially. And she brought out the family tree, the photographs and press cuttings. We talked about her nieces, and my children in London and Australia, and about cooking.
Teresa had a satellite TV, so could watch everything she wanted: Nigella Lawson on the BBC’s The Food Programme, and political news from all over the world. In Cortona, where the reception was unreliable, I too had been glued to Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and to Rachel Maddow, when I could see them through the static. In Amman, we learned the astonishing news that John McCain had chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate. In the evenings, we watched as the financial crisis spread to Europe and Asia. After Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and Lloyds in London rescued the UK’s largest mortgage lender, there was no knowing where it would end. We sat up late together watching a re-run of Roger Federer beating Andy Murray in the US Open. Teresa was much more knowledgeable than I about tennis and also about economics. We shared our anxieties about our small amounts of capital. The rich will be moving their money, she said; ‘mainstreet’ always suffers.
Each morning, the cab dropped me in Jabal Al-Nathif, a poor suburb close to the centre of Amman and near to the entrance of Ruwwad. I would follow the flash of green paint on a low wall marking where I would turn left into a street of sparkling yellow, green and blue buildings proclaiming themselves a library, a post office, a children’s workshop and a meeting room for tertiary students. Greenery hung over a pink wall, where a bunch of bright-eyed children waited to show me the way. I followed the murals down a long alley to a shady playground and crowded upstairs offices.
Urgent solutions were being sought in Jordan, and elsewhere, to neglected areas made vulnerable to extremism and manipulation. Jabal Al-Nathif was such a place. It began life in 1948 as a temporary camp for Palestinian refugees. Then, after the Six Day War in 1967, when hundreds of thousands more Palestinians were displaced from the West Bank, the camp, and others like it in Jordan, became permanent. Apart from a couple of poorly funded schools, for sixty years there had been no official recognition or new services, not even a police station.
Just a few weeks before my first visit to Amman, in December 2005, the Al-Qaeda suicide bombings of three international hotels killed fifty-seven people, mainly locals. One of them was Mousab Khorma, then deputy director of the Cairo Amman Bank, whose legacy of community activism already ran deep.
Corporate philanthropy—any kind of philanthropy—was new to the Arab world when Aramex, the Jordanian global transportation and logistics company, selected Jabal Al-Nathif as the community they wished to engage with. Raghda Butros, Aramex’s founding director, told me that the people of Jabal Al-Nathif had identified repairing the run-down primary school as their first priority. Materials were donated, labour volunteered; and, crucially, the process was documented and filmed. In February 2006, the film was shown to thirty businesspeople, and some of them joined Aramex in forming a foundation. By the time I first visited Ruwwad, in 2008, it was funded by ten local and regional companies and individuals, with the determination neither to solicit nor accept donor funds, which almost invariably have strings and other people’s agendas attached.
Government agencies had always failed the area—and Ruwwad’s motives were at first queried. But today, where once people struggled to raise children in makeshift housing without services, there is a health centre and a clothing depot, a police station, an employment agency, a nursery, a ceramics workshop, a computer centre—all run by local people to meet what they perceive to be their most urgent needs.
Pivotal to it all is the Mousab Khorma Youth Education & Empowerment Fund, which Ruwwad created in November 2005. In less than ten years, more than 1500 young people have been awarded full or partial tertiary scholarships in a wide range of fields—art history, veterinary studies; many girls do engineering. They choose these fields for themselves, Ruwwad encouraging them to think big. All the scholarship recipients must agree to a fundamental contract—to repay in kind with four hours a week of volunteer work back in their community.
Students choose from Jeeran, the neighbourhood program, where they repair and otherwise improve houses, to help the housebound; or Shababeek, the children’s program, where they share their talents, and pass on some of the skills acquired through study, by mentoring younger children. All volunteer work is to be done with respect for the people being helped. This, too, is fundamental. Volunteers are formally assessed each semester, as a condition of the continuation of their scholarships—a crucial component often lacking in other such programs. So, the young people avoid developing a sense of entitlement and learn the satisfaction of giving back in their own community. Volunteers and staff told me again and again that this circle of interdependence was Ruwwad’s most valuable lesson.
Ruwwad’s genius is that it is home grown. Instead of a one-sizefits-all approach, as with so many aid-based projects, the emphasis is on human interaction, skills exchange and having a minimum of paperwork. Juggling the community’s priorities, and extremely modest budget, depends on the know-how of local people. The volunteer medical program helps families once crippled by drug dependency. Children who had been unable to read now gravitate after school to the sparkling Jabal Al-Nathif library, with its blue tables and full bookshelves, where local women read stories and help the children select books. A volunteer who describes himself as a poet teaches a group of boys the complex spelling game he has invented.
More than 85 per cent of Ruwwad’s staff come from Jabal Al-Nathif and everyone has a story to tell. Rabeea, a librarian and distinguished writer, established the library. Telling children stories and reading to them is the most important work of all, Rabeea said, because it releases their imagination, and helps them deal with their difficulties and often traumatic memories. Libraries are safe places, without hierarchy, that create a spirit of impartiality, she said.
Rabeea told me about an impoverished municipal library with empty shelves she had been trying to help a few years before. One day, the large northern city it was situated in was to be honoured by a visit from Prince Hassan, who had asked to see the library. The day before the visit, the Ministry of Education delivered several truckloads of books, so that the Prince, an intellectual and a reader, would not be embarrassed by what he saw. Rabeea threatened to tell him this, and the library was allowed to keep the books. Now she works to establish outreach children’s library programs, run by volunteers, in villages where the schools often have no books at all.
When I visited again, in October 2008, the room at the top of the stairs was packed as it always is for Dardashaat, the session where the young students share their quandaries and ideas each Saturday morning. The girls sat together. They wore long-sleeved blouses, jeans and trainers, and white scarves covered their hair. The boys, who had made an effort to look cool, stood at the back. They were all from some of the poorest families in Jordan, and were now recipients of Mousab Khorma scholarships. They were Palestinians mainly, but now Iraqis and Syrians displaced by war had moved into Jabal Al-Nathif, as had Egyptian labourers, who queued each morning hoping to get work on Amman’s innumerable construction sites.
Only one boy and girl sat together, rather self-consciously. ‘They would be punished if they did that outside,’ the translator whispered. She told me the girl’s name meant ‘revolution’. The group discussion a few weeks before was about men and women respecting each other and being friends.
Often Dardashaat is about manners: about treating people with dignity, why modesty matters, and how to cope with change. Western values come up in the Saturday se
ssions: which ones are good and which must be resisted; how parents and brothers can be helped to understand that a girl can be both virtuous and out in the world. There was a real sense in the room that day that the girls were strong. Later, one of them told me: ‘All girls know how to be strong and brave. Boys have to be encouraged.’
Ramadan had just ended, and this Saturday morning one of the coordinators asked, What happened to you in the last week that made you think again? First, there were a few minutes’ silence and everyone was encouraged to close their eyes. Then, a young man, a sharp dresser, with slick black hair, pointy shoes and a neck chain, took the floor. He spoke with great feeling and much breast-beating. ‘He has been crossed in love,’ the translator said in my ear. The girl promised to him three years before had left him because his studies were going on too long and she wanted to get married and start a family. A widowed man in his fifties, with money, had approached her father, who agreed that the older man was a better bet.
Everyone listened intently: the girls with downcast eyes, the boys nudging each other and making comments. Then a young woman stood up, went to the front and said firmly that the girl did the wrong thing, and should wait: A young husband with qualifications is worth waiting for.
You are living in a dream, another woman contradicted her. If the girl can marry now, she should. This boy will be two more years studying, then he’ll have to find work in another country, send money back home to support his brothers and sisters, as well as his wife and children. What kind of a life is that?
The boys seemed to think the young man was badly treated, that the girl must be no good and must have done something to encourage the offer. You’re well out of it, they told him. Some of the girls disagreed angrily. The last to speak was a boy in a blue T-shirt who sold roasted corncobs day and night on the streets of Downtown. An orphan, he lived in a hut nearby and a student volunteer was teaching him to read. The translator told me he never missed a session. You must stick to study, the boy told the room, and trust that the right wife will come. Insh’allah. Everyone seemed to agree.
Other People's Houses Page 16