Well, the Queen Rania interview on Oprah just came to Jordan (for those of you who don’t know, she is the queen of Jordan). All I can say is wow. Sorry for all of those of you who saw that and thought that I was living in a place that is almost just like America. I have a couple of things to say. First of all, there were three women who were featured as “a day in the life of a Jordanian woman”. Couldn’t be farther from my own reality here. I mean, first of all, all three of them were working mothers, living in amman, and speaking fluent English. Not your typical Jordanian woman. I mean, one of the families even ordered dominoes delivery once a week. Amman is a totally different world from most of the rest of Jordan. Amman and aqaba are the only two places you can find fast food. That said, there are tons of places in those two cities: dominoes, kfc, burger king, popeyes, mcdonalds, cinnabon, starbucks, pizza hut… but don’t think that that is normal Jordanian life.
A day in the life of a typical woman in my village goes more like this: wake up to feed the family and send them off, tidy the house and cook a huge lunch, clean up after lunch, rest for a bit (sort of like a siesta, but not quite), maybe go out and visit in the evening with the rest of her family, cook a light dinner and clean up after it. This has tons of tea, coffee and tv interspersed in it, and of course prayer. And often times at night she hangs out in the house alone while her husband visits his friends. A vast oversimplification on my part. But I just feel that the oprah show really missed it when they described “average Jordanian life”. I would say that most women in jordan don’t have significant jobs outside the house, don’t go to the giant supermarket and worry about what American cereal to buy for the kids, don’t get in a big SUV to drive themselves around, and don’t let their daughters wear low cut shirts and backless dresses. Village life is much more conservative than that. The Christians here don’t cover their heads, and they will dress less conservatively. But that is about it.
As for the scarf issue. I want to be very careful about how I say this. Yes, it is a choice. Unlike Saudi it is not dictated by law that a woman must wear a veil. But I have found that there are two extremes in discussing this issue. There are those that say that the scarf is absolutely a choice by the women who wear them. And there are those who say that the scarf represents oppression and is forced upon women. Neither are exactly true. For some women the veil is a choice. For others it is a choice in name only. I mean, I don’t exactly believe that I am the only uncovered girl in my village because every single other woman wants to wear the veil. There are great social, cultural and familial pressures on a lot of girls to wear it. I do know women who used to go without and decided to cover later in life, and yes in those cases it was a personal choice that had to do with faith. However, those cases are mostly in amman. I was speaking to a woman in my village about living in a small town here. and we weren’t specifically talking about headscarfs, but she said that living in a small town is hard because everybody always knows everything that you do. It does apply to the veil. If you are the gossip of the town if you choose not to cover that is a lot of pressure. You are less likely to marry into a good family and less accepted in the village. Talk here can have big consequences.
The veil is a difficult issue to really explain. For example, 50 years ago, the majority of arab women did not cover. Or if not a majority a great deal more than now. So why the change? I don’t necessarily think that it is a sign of an increasingly conservative society so much as a response to increasing cultural influence from the west. The veil is a sign of Islamic culture, and I personally think that the increase in women covering is a rejection of western imperialism and globalization and a sort of clinging to their own culture. But the question then becomes, who is making that decision? It isn’t necessarily always the woman, but in rural villages often the pressure comes from families and patriarchs. The pressure may not even be blatantly stated. How can I put this in a familiar context? Well, I don’t know if I really can. But let me think on it. As a matter of fact, I think this whole blog deserved a little more attention than I have put into it and I am disappointed in what I did come up with. But it is hard for me to write about it in the context of living it. It has become the status quo for me lately. I think that it will be easier for me to tell you all about such things once I have a chance to step out of the local culture here.
So I will step away from that for a bit. It was all sort of a reaction to how disappointed I was by the queens interview and the portrayal of Jordan. It just wasn’t my reality.
Last week something crazy happened. My counterpart and her husband got in a car wreck. However, it wasn’t your run of the mill wreck. Apparently it was set up. They were driving back from a nearby village at night. There was a blockade of rocks set up across the road and they saw it too late and ran into it. And suddenly, there was a large group of men. According to the story, they were thieves and intended to rob them. And they most likely would have had another car not shown up at that moment. I personally hadn’t heard anything like this before. It is kind of the buzz of the town right now. Apparently very out of the ordinary.
So, that is all I have for this week I guess. Maybe next time I will try to spice it up a little.