I had never expected Amman to be such a windy city. Back home, as I packed my single duffle bag for my seven-week trip, I fretted over how I would balance modest dressing amid the inevitable, unbearable heat. I was headed to Amman to study Modern Standard Arabic (Fus-ha) and colloquial Jordanian dialect (Aamiah) through a program run by the School of International Training (SIT-www.sit.edu/studyabroad). I had chosen the program partly for its Amman based home-stay component; after only a three day orientation, I and the other fifteen American college students on the program would meet the Jordanian family with whom we would live for the remainder of the trip. I was eager for this immersion experience, planning to face each colloquial and cultural difference with my dictionary, notebook, pencil… and smile.
Yet while the other American students on the program came from diverse backgrounds and regions of the country, I am the only practicing Jew, the only member of the group who had visited and lived in Israel, and the only speaker of Arabic’s sister, Semitic language, Hebrew. My upbringing and Jewish education at the Pereleman Jewish Day School and Barrack Hebrew Academy (formerly Akiba) outside of Philadelphia had instilled within me Zionistic values. But following a semester abroad in Israel, almost three years ago now, I became increasingly interested in the politics of the region, and as soon as I arrived at Wesleyan University in Connecticut this past fall, I idealistically clicked the “Add†button under Beginners Arabic.
And so the constant, cooling wind — never mentioned in my classroom Arabic textbook — defied my expectations of Amman from the start. Originally built on seven hills, Amman was called Philadelphia by the Greeks and continuing excavations yield further artifacts from the time of the Romans. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, officially established in 1946, was first inhabited by Circassians and Bedouins. Regional politics in the last fifty years, however, have dramatically changed it’s composition; now consisting of about forty five percent Palestinian and about ten percent Iraqi refugees, this conservative nation with the fourth worst natural water resources has become a region of relative stability amidst the turmoil of its neighbors.
Yet perhaps it is the wind that helps to preserve the city’s surface security. In the streets, Amman is a live with a collage of colors and dresses, from Hijab clad women to those dressed in Western styles. The city bustles with cars and taxis that seem to defy the concept of lanes while Arabic music seeps from the shops and open windows of the city. The hilly terrain is populated with hill after hill of sandy colored brick buildings, reminiscent at times of the houses of Israel, while from almost every point in the city a giant Jordanian flag can be seen, reminding the onlooker that in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the crescent moon and sickle rule. But when the Muezzin calls the people to pray five times a day, the streets do not stop, as in my naivety I had expected, and English words and old American music incessantly fill the airways and shopping malls.
I too have found that Amman is full of such streets with contradicting directions. While a recent poll reported in the June edition of Jordan Business found that 58% of Jordanians have favorable view of President Obama, the same edition noted that 95% of Jordanian Journalists admit to practicing self-censorship, especially in stories regarding military, religious, and tribal issues. Here, the culture and history at times are far too complex for my surface assessments and classroom reading, and expressed in far too quick a dialect to yet properly comprehend with my limited language skills.
Not until my group visited Mount Nebo (Har Nevo) on our third day of orientation, the biblical mountain from where Moses reportedly viewed the unattainable Promised Land, did I feel the true tension between the many directions of Jordan’s wind. Beginning in the 6th Century, ancient Churches were built on the Mount, and in 1934 the area was purchased by Franciscan Fathers. The area has since become a common tourist spot for visitors and a sacred area for the region’s Christians.
On a clear day from the top of the mount, Bethlehem and Jerusalem can be seen in the distance. On a sandy day like the one during which we visited, only the Dead Sea, Tiberius, the West Bank, and the Jordan River are visible, as the view extends into the sandy dunes of the west. On all days, the wind is strong and forceful, carrying dust and sand from between the two neighbor’s precarious borders. As I gazed across the land before me, I tried to imagine what war would look like from the view of the mount; whether Israeli tanks appeared quite as menacing and whether enemy fighters could be distinguished from the sandy earth. I wondered what this sight meant to my Jordanian teachers; whether they felt that this land was rightly theirs, or whether they knew that I cringed when I saw a Jordanian map with the word Palestine written in what is today established as the sovereign state of Israel. I tried not to be consumed by this intrinsic divide as I was pulled from many directions by the wind atop Har Nevo.
