Monday, November 26, 2012

Tearing Down My Walls




This weekend was great.  I spent too much money and was finally able to see through my own emotions.  When I first came to Jordan, I was very lonely.  Although during the first 2 weeks I was surrounded by a Jordanian family, I didn’t know them and we had a hard time communicating.  I cried a lot during the first two weeks.  But then I was determined to make friends and to adjust to my surroundings.  As those who have fallowed my blog know, things moved so quickly and I was constantly adjusting to situations and doing what I had to do to get by. 

This weekend as I went shopping, I found some presents to send back home and I realized that in order for my presents to get home in time for Christmas, I need to send them this week.  So I bought these presents and started to plan on how I could send them.  Once I got home, I organized everything and then it finally struck me that I wouldn’t be going home for Christmas.  It started to bring everything into reality.  I sat there and realized that for the first Christmas in my life, I wouldn’t be with my family.  I wouldn’t get to go home.  Rojeh, my boyfriend, walked in and saw the tears in my eyes and tried to comfort me.  We had already planned to have Christmas between the two of us and he even brought me a Christmas tree but I know it won’t be the same as seeing all the people that I’ve known and loved my whole life.

Afterwards we went to our neighbor’s/friend’s house and I just wanted to watch TV as Rojeh and our friend talked, but then our friend started to talk about me.  He said that I was very strong.  I came all the way from a different country, over 12 hours away by plane, with no friends and no family.  Whenever you leave a country to go to another, like I did and like he did when he moved to the US twenty years ago, you have to start all over.  You leave everything and have to start working up from the bottom.  He said that he expects to see me on the TV someday working for the embassy or something.  He told Rojeh that he was all that I had.  That Rojeh is everything for me here.  I didn’t want to hear it because it is true.  Every time I go home to my apartment, I feel trapped by my daily handicaps from being a foreign girl in the Middle East that doesn’t speak Arabic.  I know that to leave home alone will be another struggle to explain what I want and what I need.  Sometimes it feels easier to just stay home.

I think after having to struggle for so long, you just get numb to everything and you do what is necessary in order to get by and to try to get ahead.  I feel like I’ve been here for two months and I have been a spectator in both of them.  I watch the people and I do what I need to survive.  I make friends just to quench the ache of loneliness.  Much of my life here has been internal filled with prayer and inward thoughts.  So often Rojeh ask me why I’m quiet and what I’m thinking about and I just rely “To much.”  I think about politics, public opinion, tradition, human conditions, money, and also my future, but I did very little living.  I’ve made very little real connections with people and I only have one person who I feel like I can be completely honest with here.  Most of the foreigners here are focused knowing that their time here will soon be over, but I think it’s different for me because I know that I will be here in the future. 

Before I came here, I was afraid that the Middle East wouldn’t be everything that I wanted to it to be.  Once I got here I wasn’t dissatisfied.  To me it was just different people in a different part of the world.  In the end, we are all people.  The more I learn and observe, I have felt my passion for this part of the world and dreams to help improve life here grow.  My goals for my own life have only become stronger and I know that my life will never be satisfied if I don’t make a difference here.  There is so much need around me—I have to make a difference.  With that in mind, I know that I can’t just be a numb foreigner here just as a tourist being a spectator, but eventually I will have to start accepting part of my identity as being connected to the people here.  I need to learn how to be comfortable here and how to just live life here.  I know that part of that will come once I become stronger in the language, but overall, I need to start actually making a life here because I know I will be returning. 

At least for the first month that I was here, I had dreams night after night where I was back at home and I would wake up and have to remember where I was.  It was always in shock when I remembered that I was in Jordan.  I think that is part of what made it so hard to be here in the beginning.  Now I have dreams about parts of my life that I miss, like silly enough, my cat.  I know eventually I will be able to create something solid once I finish my undergraduates’ degree and start working, but it makes things hard.  When I was home I didn’t want anything to be solid because I know I would be leaving, now that I’m here I just think about how I can’t get to solid here because I’ll be leaving.

 We went to the Rabad Castle in Ajloin (northern Jordan) this past weekend and we got there just in time for them to close.  Thanks to true Arab arguing, we were able to get in for free and we were convinced that I’m a Jordanian.  As I was looking over the mountainsides off the top of the castle, I felt like I was not only looking at the countryside, but at a nation, a people, and a cause.  Afterwards we then went into town to wait for someone else to need a ride to Amman and we just drove around the town and I got to see the people.  Of course, people in a city and in a village are completely different, but they strengthened my passion.  I guess we all need those moments that drive us forward.  That one was just one more of mine.




Saturday, November 3, 2012

الثقافة Culture

Malaysian girl touring the Roman Ruins
I went to a job interview last month and once I finished I went to the corner restaurant for lunch before I had to go to work.  As I set and waited for whatever it was that I had ordered without knowing, I watched as students walked home from school.  There were so many girls who were dressed in a hunter green, white, and beige uniform.  They were all just chattering with their girlfriends and regardless of their matching hijabs, all their personalities came through clearly.  There were shy girls and outspoken girls, fun girls and scared girls.  Their personalities reminded me of home and how all of my friend and I acted back in school.  But as I thought about my history and their current situation, I thought about how these girls have no idea of a world beyond their own.  All they have ever know are wrapped women and a lack of interaction with boys, and all we knew was that everyone was allowed to be our friend, including the boys if we ever gave the gross boys a chance, and that our hair should be fixed neatly in a ponytail everyday.

I went to class that day and vented at my class of young men.  Honestly, only one boy in the class could understand me, but I still wanted my thoughts to be heard.  He is planning to go to Malaysia to study Telecommunications or something like that.  Another in the classes is planning to go to Australia to study nursing, and the last wants to just stay in Jordan and get married soon.  The last one got the most rant from me but I told them all that we need to experience other cultures so that we can grow as people.

Adam Awwami-  Saudi in USA
Studying other cultures isn't just about learning how to manage others to make profit.  If that were the case, then yes, why would the majority every consider learning about others?  We need to learn about other cultures because it teaches us how to be a better person.  Ever culture has something to teach us.  As Adam Awwami says, "We take the best of both cultures."  We can take the good of both and grow from them, then leave the bad behind.  The more we learn and experience the better we will become.  Some of the wisest people in the world are the most cultured.



International Fulbrights at a Native American performance
So often I get frustrated at my own community for not acknowledging a world beyond their own, but it's not just Americans who do that.  People all over the world choose to stay where they are most comfortable and simply stare at and judge other cultures.  I feel like at some point we decide to stop learning and to stop growing.  We decided that where we are is where we should always be, and that there is no need for any change.  I protest this type of thinking.  We as humans should always be growing and evolving for the better.  The world has so much to teach us and it is yelling out at us everyday as we turn on the news.  The world as a whole has so much growth to make and through cultural exchange I believe it will grow.

This is why I study culture and religion.  This is why I think that we need know other cultures beyond our own.  
Learning about other cultures will help us grow as a person and as a community.

Small Business

I'm certified to teach English so just as much as my housing situation has been unstable, so has my job situation.  Shortly after I got here I applied for a job at a center that teaches English and I got the job.  I get paid 300 JD a month and they told me that I would work any time between 2 and 8pm--depending on classes.  After I accepted the job, they gave me 22.5 hours of teaching.  I was shocked by how much I was expected to teach.  Slowly as the weeks went by, I got more and more classes.  Now I'm up to teaching 4.5 hours a day, 6 days a week.  Frankly, it's ridiculous.  That's in-class teaching time, not including pre-class preparation time.  Basically since I started working, I haven't had the time that I need to study Arabic.  I'm still doing fine in the class, but I have a test on tomorrow and I have to teach 4.5 hours today.  Usually after I teach all three of my classes, I'm so exhausted that I don't want to do anything but sleep.  I pray that God gives me the grace to be alert and awake tonight to do well in my studies.
Very unflattering picture of me, but it's me in the classroom.

I have looked at several other teaching opportunities and they all tell me the same-they're taking advantage of me.  24 hours a week for a full time teacher is even too much.  It's too hard to keep track of everything.  I teach 8 individual classes.  One interview that I had said that she was sorry that I had that horrible experience, but instantly after she said it, I told her that even though it's completely exhausting, it has exposed a side of culture to me that I would have never seen if I didn't take the job.

The professional situation here in Jordan is so different from American.  In American, a full time job is only 8-5, 5 days a week.  We have workers' laws that prevent abuse of workers, but here there are no such laws.  People work all the time.  They work for money (which on average is only 300JD a month [~$450] and they work to have something to do.  The professional situation is so less organized.  I was called one day and had my interview the next day.  Then I had to decide if I wanted the job at the interview.  When jobs are posted, they don't tell you everything until the time of the interview, then it forces you to be instant in your choices not allowing any time to think or pray about anything.  The girl who was interviewing me told me that she promised herself that she would never work for a non-American again after her similar experience.  Although my reaction to the situation is different then hers, I completely understand.  This is the time where we would say, "Welcome to Jordan."  It's an experience that wasn't very positive, but honestly has taught me so much about small business in Jordan.  It has also given me knowledge about the different English test that I can now teach anywhere.