I took a stand today

I took a stand today. Just a little one.

I was in the kitchen squeezing the soapy grey water out of my laundry. An older woman was unlocking occupied rooms and showing them to two girls. I think I've seen the woman before, but I don't know who she is.

"You're in the private room?" She asked.

"Yep."

"I'm going to show it to these girls." She threw another door open. There were scarves on the unmade beds and open books on the floor. Dorm rooms never have desks.

The girls peered into the room. I looked away. I know the girls who live there. "Nope. It's occupied."

"We're going to go see it now."

"No. I live there."

"I'm showing them the dorm."

"They don't need to see my room. I'm not moving."

"No, I'm showing it to them." She puffed her chest out and glared at me. This could go on and on.

"It's not clean."

"Oh." They went and looked at more rooms.

I left my wet clothes in the tub, went back to my room, and locked the door behind me. I left the key in the lock.

This is the first time in three years that I've had any privacy. It's not that I couldn't afford my own room before, just that dorm supervisors would never allow me to have one, regardless of how many rooms there were and how few residents. We were not allowed keys to our own rooms, and subject to search at any time. Anyone could invade my space at any time, and I couldn't stop them. And so I spent two, nearly three years basically a houseplant, not talking to anyone, not writing, barely even thinking. I got myself into a bad situation and couldn't escape, so I withdrew.

I finally managed to pry myself loose and got out. I found this tiny room, and I pay more for it than some of my friends in other towns pay for their apartments, but I don't even care. It used to be the men's washroom - the dorm supervisors say it didn't, but the tiling and the sawed-off plumbing and the fixtures and the painted-over sign on the door and the women's washroom right next to it reveal their lie. I don't care.

Because it's mine, and I will not let anyone invade my space if I can help it. Little power struggles like this are just one more way that dorm supervisors - and older women and people of higher status in general - impress on young women that they have no control over their own situations and no right to refusal. It's a lot like prison.

So when something large and heavy slammed into my locked door, I smiled. The door handle rattled violently, and metal scraped against the keyhole, but my clunky old skeleton key didn't even budge.

I expected the woman to pound on the door and shout at me to open it. I was going to refuse, and throw myself against the door if need be, and probably be evicted.

But she went away silently. I won't win them all, but I won that one.

Walk like a lady

TW: rape, victim blaming.

Our dorm's curfew is eight thirty pm in the summer, but I got permission to go to taraweeh prayers at the masjid across the street during Ramadan. I'm the only one in the building who goes. Taraweeh ends around eleven pm. The dorm supervisor usually calls me at ten thirty to ask why I'm not back yet, but I'm in the masjid and I'm praying so my ringer's turned off. She knows perfectly well where I am and what I'm doing.

Instead of going to taraweeh today, I went to the souq and bought food. Because I had none, and nothing is open until after ishaa, and I'm diabetic. I eat or I die.

It was a Saturday evening during Ramadan, so I waited a long time for buses, and I walked a long ways. Some of the streets in the souq were dead, nothing open, and some were packed wall-to-wall with people and cars. Most of the vendors wanted twice the usual prices. I sat at the mujamma'a for half an hour, waiting for the bus to fill up with passengers and leave.

So it was quarter after eleven when I got home. The dorm supervisor and some of the girls sit on the main floor (the third floor) smoking and talking and watching muselselaat (soap operas) and watching the stairs. Nobody gets by unnoticed.

They stopped me on my way up the stairs, dead tired and loaded down with vegetables, and asked me, with obvious suspicion, how many raka'at I prayed this time. I told the truth. I went to the big masjid in the souq, against the rules and without permission, and prayed the minimum number of raka'at, and then bought food. They berated me for breaking the rules. I don't think that people who don't pray or practice their supposed religion have any business criticising me for doing halaal things.

The dorm supervisor said that she was about to bolt the door, and if I was any later, she would have locked me out.

I believe she would lock me out; it's common practice in dormitories. Any girl who stays out late is obviously bad, and deserves what she gets. And the dorm supervisors know that I don't recognize their authority or abide by their rules. I've got it coming.


Basically, she gave me a choice between death by diabetic coma, and a shallow grave in the desert.


Groups of men hang around in the parking lots outside our building. I've been surrounded and attacked several times in this area, coming home from work in the evening. I fended them off with rocks and blows and shouting. I guess they weren't that determined, and Allah was with me.

I don't carry a knife anymore, and I know it's stupid and I'm putting my own safety at risk, but if I was armed I would stab the next man who touched me. I don't think I would be able to stop. And I don't think I'd be able to live with myself after that.

When I told the dorm supervisor, she said they assaulted me because I was afraid. Right, because fear totally causes gang rape. Other women said it was my own fault for being outside. Or for wearing colour. Or for having pretty eyes. Here's a tip, folks: nothing women do or don't do causes rape. Men raping causes rape. Society blaming the victim and not the attacker perpetuates rape.

I'm conscious of the men eyeing me, and I'm aware that I'm not safe, but I'm not afraid. I hold my head up and walk like someone you do not want to mess with. Women tell me to walk like a lady, slowly with small steps, don't draw attention, don't make men desire you. I don't care. Meekness gets you nothing but abuse in this world. The next man who gropes me will lose a nut, and people can think what they like about it.

Magic Powder

I was lying in bed, with the window shut in an attempt to muffle the sound of hammers and powersaws, and the door open in an attempt to get some airflow.  It was past three am, and it was stuffy and smoggy and probably forty five degrees indoors.  I had to wake up at four thirty to pray, and again at seven at the very latest to get to school by nine.  I was pretty sure I wouldn't get any sleep. 

Perhaps reading something boring would help.  A two-volume explanation of a thousand-line poem about grammar, written twelve hundred years ago might do it, and then I could honestly tell the instructor that I'd read ahead.  I opened my eyes, and watched a dark blob dash across the line of pif-paf in the doorway.  I could hear its barbed legs skittering on the tiles.

Pif-paf is supposed to give "long-lasting protection against cockroaches, ants, bedbugs, fleas, lice, and all forms of crawling insects."  Says so on the can.  Everyone recommends it.  I shake a thick line of the powder across the threshold of my teeny room every night, like a sorceress in a fantasy novel warding the doors to keep evil creatures and spirits out.

The thing with cockroaches is, nothing works on them for very long.  Stores here have a whole aisle devoted to roach sprays and powders and who knows what else, and I've tried all of them, and I'm pretty sure they bother me more than they bother the roaches.

I got up, flipped the light on, put on my flip-flops, and chased the roach out of my room.  They're harder to catch than you'd think. They're damned fast, especially the big ones, they run in a zig-zag pattern which always makes me think of Captain Picard saying "evasive maneouvers!," they can jump and fly, and they run up walls and upside-down along the ceiling just as easily as they run along the floor.  You want to catch them on the ground, in the middle of the floor.  If you corner them, they'll jump at you, or run up the wall.

I stomped the cockroach, several times for good measure, and opened my cupboard to get the can of pif-paf.

There was a cockroach in there too, an even bigger one.  I've seen smaller mice.  I sucked in a breath and quietly said a very bad word.  It panicked and scurried around the cupboard, up the walls and around the ceiling a few times, and then hid behind the jars of dish soap and vinegar and pif-paf.  Clearly the stuff was not all that repellent.  I really didn't want to deal with the roach, so I grabbed the pif-paf, and slammed the cupboard door shut.  Even enormous roaches can squeeze through amazingly small cracks.  It would be able to get out of the cupboard with the door shut.

I dusted a small mountain range of pif-paf across the doorway.  I knew perfectly well that the stuff didn't keep roaches out, but I chose to believe that it did.  Admitting it didn't would be admitting that no matter what I did, creeping skittering things with too many legs that bend in the wrong places come into my room at night while I am sleeping, and there is nothing I can do to keep them out.  And that way madness lies.

So I say bismillah and make lines of useless magic powder and do not look at the door and believe I will be safe, like a little kid going through a precise routine every night as she climbs into bed, because if she gets it exactly right, the monsters can't get her.

I went back to bed and as soon as I closed my eyes, the athan went off, and I got up to pray, and I did not see any cockroaches. 

I didn't go to school that day.  I hadn't gone the day before either.  An instructor complained that I did badly on a test, and I told him that I was running on maybe three hours of sleep and way too much coffee and I was just glad that I had made it in and written the test, khalas it's done lets move on.  But masha'Allah, you're so smart, he said, you should do better than this.  My students are like my children, I want them to do well, why did you get this answer backwards?

Smart, maybe, when I can pay attention, but I'm also neurotic as a pile of lemurs.  Making it through the day without any major mishaps is success in my books, lately.

I woke up at eight and said to hell with it and went back to sleep and had weird dreams and woke up again at noon, and was pissed off because I never sleep that late even when I go to bed at fajr and I'd just slept through half the day and I'd probably be up till fajr again.

I got up to make coffee and get my ass in gear and my dreams were slipping through my fingers and the freakiness dissolving and I opened the cupboard door and the enormous cockroach I'd not wanted to deal with the night before took a running leap right at my face.

I stepped back out of its way, swore quietly, and watched its parabolic arc to the floor.  It had panicked and tried to escape and there was nowhere to go but out of the cupboard and I was in its way.  It wasn't malicious, but still it was a roach and it was in my house and I didn't want it there.

The roach hit the grimy linoleum, flailed its legs and took off running.  Before it ran six inches I brought my flipflop down and crushed it, then stomped it a few more times and watched its legs twitch and crumple like the poles of a collapsed tent.  I always feel bad having to kill roaches.  Allah made them too and they're big enough that they have faces, and intelligent enough that I can empathize with them, but I can't live with them.  I stomp monsters out, wherever I find them, so that I have a chance of sleeping at night.

Every time I go to open a cupboard door now, I panic a little.  I clench my jaw and stand up straight and just open the damn door.  If something jumps out at me I'll crush it into oblivion, but I'm still afraid. 

Afraid of cupboard doors.  What the hell, God?

Figs

It is wonderful to be tall.

I stand on a broken chunk of cement and reach up into the highest branches of a fig sapling sprouting through a crack in the buckled asphalt of the exercise yard.

On the other side of high concrete walls and rusted barbed wire, factories hum and whir and pump black smoke into the sky, obscuring the stars.

Unseen among the rocks and refuse of the wadi, someone pounds out a rhythm on an empty plastic tub.

Indoors, girls shriek and laugh shrilly, clink cutlery on plates, scrape plastic lawn furniture across bare stone floors. Fluorescent lights glow pink through drawn curtains striped by iron bars.

The exercise yard is still and empty; no one sees as my fingers search through rustling leaves in the dark, gently squeezing smooth round fruit, twisting ripe figs free.

Growing unasked for and uncared for, they are small and green and dusty. I eat them without bothering to wash them, standing beside the scrawny tree, and they burst in my mouth, warm and moist and sweet. The air is so thick with dust and pollution that eating a little more grime makes no difference.

I search out more figs and eat until my mouth is tingly and fuzzy, as though I had eaten a honeybee.

Figs bought in the souq in the light of day could never be so sweet.

Christmas Chocolate

A student went around the living room one evening offering everyone something out of a box. Several people accepted a piece, took a bite, and then looking like they’d expected lamb and gotten overcooked mutton fat. I asked the student what was in the box, and she told me that it was special fancy chocolate her brother in Ottawa had sent to their family in Saudi Arabia.

I read “Life Brand Dark Chocolate Cranberry Pistachio Bark,” on the lid and smiled.

“Do you know it?” The student asked me. “It’s supposed to be a very good brand, isn’t it?”

“It’s popular,” I said, trying not to laugh, and accepted a piece. It was strong and bitter and sweet, and the only chocolate I’ve had in a year and a half that tasted like chocolate used to.

Buying half-price drugstore holiday chocolate in the aftermath of Christmas was one of my favourite traditions as an adult in Canada, a bit of sweetness after the long shifts at work, bitter fights, bad behaviour, and drunkenness of a holiday I didn’t believe in and would rather have skipped.

I don’t think I would have had the gall to send it to relatives overseas and tell them it was a Canadian specialty, but in truth it is.

Windstorm

A windstorm comes out of the desert, bending the few scrawny pine trees parallel to the ground and howling around buildings. One whole end of the college is open to the outside, and the wind rushes in and down corridors, rattling windows and sucking at doors. If doors are left open, and people never seem to learn to close them, they will slam them so hard that the handles fall off, sometimes hard enough that the brittle wood shatters. The narrow stone stairwells become blocked for several stories with lemming-like students, every one in turn trying to force the handle-less door open, finally deciding to double back and find a different route to their lecture, and having to shove their way through a mass of other students all going through the same process. 

The wind carries dust and grit from the desert, and pelts it against everything in reach. It drums against the windows, sands the paint off cars, and coats the cabbages and radishes in the farm plot next door with a layer of sandy brown. The wind buffets struggling pedestrians, tearing at their billowing abayas and thobes and scarves. Everyone who doesn’t wear niqab shields their face from the dust with a scarf or a book.

After a few days of howling wind and blowing sand, I wake up in the night to the sound of raindrops tapping on the windows, and rushing water. It is raining hard somewhere, and torrents of muddy water come gushing out of the desert and into the wadi, water turned the colour of chocolate milk by the soil it carries from far away. I listen to the little river behind the school roaring, the wind howling, and the pine branches rustling, and I remember the crashing waves, and the wind in fir trees, and the unearthly silence of falling snow in my former home, far away across oceans and continents, and I fall back asleep.

Rain at Last

Jordan is mostly a very dry place. It doesn't have any major bodies of water to draw from, so it mostly depends on rainfall, which isn't that plentiful in a country that's mostly desert. What about the Jordan River? I've seen it a number of times, and from the hills it's hard to tell that it is a river, there's so little water in it.

Back in November, the Jordanian government called for people to fast for three days and then gather all over the country to pray salaat al-istisqa, the prayer for rain. There were posters everywhere, and a group prayer was held in the paved yard of my college. The rain did come, I don't recall exctly when, but shortly after the prayer. Some people will say that it was going to rain eventually anyways and praying has no effect, but personally I believe that Allah heard our prayers, forgave us, and send the rain.

Rain in the desert after nearly a year of dust and dryness is a miraculous thing to witness. The water has nowhere to go, so streets and many houses flood; the whole town is shut down and classes are cancelled, very much like the effect a few inches of snow has in a certain pathetically and chronically unprepared city in Canada.

Despite the problems it causes, children stand rapt and watch the raindrops fall, and adults rejoice. I was standing under the eaves of the masjid, sheltering from the rain while waiting for it to open, and a woman joined me. She remarked happily about how lovely the weather was, and I thought for a moment that she was joking. In Canada, pouring down rain is ordinary and dreary, but here it's a miracle that only happens a few times a year.



When it finally rains, it really rains. Water comes rushing down out of the higher desert and fills the wadis that were formally used as footpaths, playgrounds, and garbage disposal with torrents of chocolately brown water. It happens very suddenly, and I wonder every year if anyone got caught in the wadi when the water came crashing down.

I'm still around.

Just busy. I'm studying in college, and at the masjid attached to my college, and tutoring English, so I don't get on the internet much. I've been trying to convince the school to stop using Internet Explorer 6, but no dice so far. It's a miracle it even still sort of works.

I've been jumping out of my skin several times every day (and night) when the fire alarm goes off. It's definitely winter now, or what passes for winter here, because the girls are leaving things to cook on the electric heaters, and of course forgetting about them and setting the fire alarms off. It would not be as annoying, if not for the fact that most of the girls in the dorm stay up most of the night, so that's when the majority of the alarms go off, and they won't go and shut them off. Getting woken up and scared out of my wits by the extremely loud bells a few times every night is getting really irritating.

I'm afraid that one day there actually will be a fire (not that it would be that big a deal, since there's not much that could burn), and I'll have rolled over and gone back to sleep, and we'll all suffocate, so I get out of bed and go deal with the alarm, and try to be patient with whoever set it off. My strong fear of fire seems very unreasonable to everyone here; I think it stems from growing up where everything was made of wood or fabric, seeing houses go up in flames like piles of tinder as a child, and having fire safety drilled into me in elementary school. I suppose to a group of very inexperienced girls who have never seen fire, it doesn't seem like anything to get worked up about.

Happy New Year to everyone :)

I've started tutoring a few of the Arab students in my dormitory in English, and discovered that almost none of them knew I could even speak English. I'm one of only two dorm dwellers this semester who isn't Saudi; the other is a Turk who speaks fairly fluent standard Arabic and studies with the Arabs in the regular college programs.

The Saudi girls seem to have just grouped me with all the other pale people with funny accents - Zarqa has a lot of Chechnyans, and quite a few Russians, Bosnians, and other Eastern Europeans. Hardly any of them knew where I was from, and even fewer of them know where Canada is. If they think Canada is one of the little Eastern European countries, it's no wonder they didn't realize I spoke English.

It's true they've never heard me speak English before, there is no one here for me to speak it with, but still, how do you live with someone for a year and not even know which country they are from and what their native language is?

Immigrants in Canada must feel even more invisible and insignificant - one more foreigner with an accent, not really an individual with a past and stories of their own.  But nobody here looks down on me.

Pretending to Be a Teacher

My college offered me a scholarship (yay!) and I asked if there was anything I could do for them in return, since I stay in the dorm for free. We're crammed in six to a room and not treated very well, but still. They said no, but I got back from the souq this afternoon, totally exhausted, and was just about to shower and eat and then lay down for a bit, and my instructor and an Arab student knocked on the door. The student is taking English composition but knows zero English - I don't even know why the school let her take the course, but that's Jordan for you.

So now I'm pretending that I know how to teach English, and the word is spreading, and all sorts of people want me to teach them. Most of them want an hour a day EACH, which seems unrealistic to me, especially since I'm not charging anything. Or maybe that's why they want an hour every day.

I haven't told anybody that I don't actually know English grammar myself. At all. I studied science briefly in Canada, and promptly forgot all the grammar I supposedly learned many many years ago in high school. Trying to explain English grammar in Arabic is not all that easy, especially since English grammar is nothing like Arabic grammar.

I'm going to look for a copy of the college's English textbook tomorrow, study it myself, try to figure out how to explain all this in Arabic, or very simple English, and hope nobody realizes that I have no idea what I'm doing. It's the best plan I can think of. Fake it till you make it, right?

Turkey Again

Wow, it's been a long time since I posted here. My college and its dormitory are closed for two months, so I came to Turkey with the Turkish students. The trip was definitely not boring, but bus trips through Syria never are; we took about five different buses, the first of which was at least eight hours late, most of them were far too small, and one of them wouldn't start and had to be pushed. The Syrian police love hassling people, but we eventually managed to get through the borders. It has gotten harder since the niqab was banned in Syrian schools. The police are always extremely suspicious of me, wearing Arab clothes and carrying a Canadian passport; they think my passport is fake and tell me I'll have to spend days in the police station waiting for permission to travel through Syria.  But they let us all in eventually. As usual, none of us used a bathroom the whole trip, bus station bathrooms are that bad.

We saw two of the Syrian border officers get into a fistfight in the border station as we were crossing into Syria from Jordan in the wee hours of the morning. They had to be separated several times by another border officer; every time he moved away from them they would start punching each other again.  There were many bus loads of travellers lined up in the border station waiting, and they had been waiting for a long time, but the police mostly stood around smoking and ignoring them.  And then the fight happened.  I don't know what was going on.

I spent a week and a half in Ankara, and have been in Istanbul for about a week. I love Istanbul and wish I could spend more time here.

At Least They Aren't Cockroaches

I opened a cupboard in the kitchen a few days ago, and a brown insect about the size of my thumb-nail skittered across the cupboard and dived for cover behind the dishes. There was no way I would eat off the dishes without washing them, but when I went to put the clean dishes on the drying rack, I saw another brown insect scurrying around under the rack. The kitchen has to be emptied out and fumigated at least once a semester, preferably before the little cockroach-like bugs infiltrate the bedrooms, and it was definitely time to fumigate again. If people didn’t leave dirty dishes lying around and let the garbage overflow it wouldn’t be such a problem, but they do. Well, I thought, at least it isn’t actual cockroaches, or more of the two-inch-long flying insect I captured in our room a while ago.

A few days later, I heard women screaming in the hallway for an unusually long time, and went out to see what the problem was. Usually it’s just Najah telling someone that something halaal is haraam, resulting in a shouting match, but not this time. Najah had discovered one of the two-inch-long flying cockroach-like bugs in a box of books, and every girl in the dorm was standing around it screaming. My Indonesian roommate killed it, and hid it behind a fake potted plant so they would calm down.

I almost never feel the ancient instinct to run screaming from insects, but I did when I found a huge cockroach-like bug with inch-long antennae flying around my room a few weeks ago. I told the girls in bad Arabic, with a lot of gestures, how I had opened the windows and left the room, hoping it would leave by itself and I wouldn’t have to deal with it. An hour later, it was still there, and I wanted to go to sleep. There was no way I could sleep with a bug out of a low-budget horror movie flying around the room, so I grabbed the only thing I could find, a water glass, and tried to capture the insect. It crawled down the back of the mini fridge, and I pulled the fridge away from the wall and stalked it with my glass. I finally captured it – but it was longer than the glass was wide, and I partially crushed the insect. I felt kind of bad for it, and quickly scooped it into the glass and disposed of it down the squatter loo.

The girls all had a good laugh at me, except for Najah, who was horrified and wanted to throw out all the water glasses. One of them could contain traces of crushed bug, no matter how well I bleached, washed, and rinsed it, and the bug was not a locust (the only insect that is halaal for Muslims to consume). I suspect she won’t be drinking out of the school water glasses anymore.

After the kitchen was fumigated, I was re-washing dishes, and I saw a little brown bug run across the counter. I think whoever said that cockroaches will be the last creatures on earth after a nuclear holocaust was right, and their little brown cousins will be there with them.

(Edit: actually, they were cockroaches, just younger ones than I'd seen before.  Oops).

Little Flying Brains

It's hamlah season in Jordan. Hamlah are raw, green chickpeas each in their own little pod. I think the name is related to the word for "pregnant." After the hamlat are shelled and roasted in the oven, they're called hemmas.

To eat them, you pinch the top of the pod, and it splits open along the seam.

They look like perfect little brains with wings to me. You can't see much detail in my crappy webcam photos, but hamlah look just like brains.

Mmmmmmm, braaaiiiins. Nom nom nom.

Turkey!

I'm so excited! I am leaving in two days for Turkey with one of my Turkish roommates. There are several reasons for this trip:

1. My roommate asked me if I wanted to go with her to Istanbul for a few weeks.

2. Of course I want to!

3. My visa expired a few weeks ago, so I have to leave the country and come back in anyhow.

4. The tickets are less than two hundred dollars round trip.

Adding together my roommate's small amount of Arabic and my better Arabic but nearly nonexistent Turkish, this should be interesting. We gesture a lot when we talk and carry around dictionaries, but we do manage to say quite a bit.

She told me yesterday that we would get to Syria by bus in the middle of the night, and asked if I was willing to wander around Syria in the dark with her (or something like that, in a combination of Arabic, Turkish, facial expressions, and gestures). Would I be too tired, or in too much pain? I told her, no, it's fine, I'll just load up on coffee and chocolate and more sugar and painkillers, and I'll be okay. It'll be fun!

On the visa front...the official at my college in charge of visas has been telling me tomorrow, tomorrow, insha'Allah for a good month now, and I don't think my visa application has ever left his desk; he wasn't even aware it was in there, until he asked me for something I'd given him weeks ago. He told me yesterday that if I pay a special tax the police will extend my visitor's visa my another three months, but I'm not supposed to be studying on that. I suspect he will just pocket my sixteen dinar 'tax' (about twenty five bucks) and continue to do nothing, but it's worth a try. At least then I would have a visa to show the Syrian police, who are well known for refusing people entry, or dropping them off at the nearest border, whether it's the most convenient or not.

Sometimes I wonder if I worry too much, or not enough.

Visa trouble

Once again, I’m in this country illegally; my visa expired four days ago. This has happened twice before, despite my attempts to avoid it. Bureaucracy in the Middle East is rightfully famous for being labyrinthine and slow.

During one visa-less period, my roommate’s mother was told by her neighbour that the police would come to our building and arrest me, and bring shame upon the whole family. My roommate’s mother was extremely unhappy with me, and I worked for her and lived in the apartment two floors below her, so I was also very paranoid and worried that I would ruin the reputation of the family that had been so kind to me; reputation is everything here, and people talk.

When the time came to go to the police station and find out if the intelligence service had decided to renew my visa, I packed a carryon and got in a cab, fully expecting to be jailed and deported. I checked in at the women’s guard post, went in through the women’s entrance, and waited a long time in line at various windows, so worried and nervous and hot that I thought I would vomit right there in the middle of the police station. I was one of the few women there, and all the others were waiting in chairs while their husbands crowded in front of the windows trying to shove their wives’ passports at the officials. I eventually realized I would just have to be aggressive and push my way through the crowd of men, or I would be there all day. Much to my surprise, the police made no mention of my being in the country illegally for a week and a half, and didn’t ask to see any of my supposedly required documents. They stamped my passport with the new visa, and taxed me two dinar. I asked one of the female police officers, “Is that all? Can I go?” and she confirmed that yes, they were finished. I was so surprised, I walked out through the men’s entrance in a fog, startling a lot of men. Never having known any foreigners, our neighbour had no idea how the visa process worked.

This is the third or fourth time in six months I have had to get a new visa, and I decided that this time I would make sure everything was ready well in advance to avoid being here illegally again. A month before my visa was due to expire, I plunged into a maze of bureaucracy, trundling back and forth to different offices to get the documents I needed. The official at my college was constantly telling me I would have my visa soon – tomorrow, even, but he never did anything with my application. Every time I went to see him, he told me something different and required another document; everyone I talked to told me to go see someone else. A month passed, and I felt like I had been dropped into a Kafka story.

On the day my visa expired, the school finally issued the certificate I needed for a student visa, confirming that I was enrolled with them. I tracked down the person who had it, and gave the certificate to Ustath Abdullah, the school official, who said I would have a visa the next day. Four days later, still no visa.

I was told to go get new passport photos taken, because my Canadian ones weren’t quite right (why did it take a month for him to decide that?). I squeezed onto a public bus and rushed to the souq one hot afternoon after class, and found a studio that would have the photos ready in an hour. I had to walk by a police building near the souq, and the guard fiddling with his gun and staring at me from two feet away as I passed was unsettling.

I submitted my stack of papers and photos just before the school closed for the day. Ustath Abdullah finally confirmed that I had all the paperwork in order, and asked me why I was in such a hurry to renew my (very expired) visa. I told him I was afraid of the police and leaving for Turkey very soon, and both he and the head of the school burst out laughing. The Ustath told me, “there is nothing to be afraid of, you can go anywhere you like and the police will not do anything. We have many students here who do not have visas.” It seems they also have many students walking around without passports either, judging by the bundle in his desk. He wanted to keep my passport again, but I wouldn’t give it to him.

Hopefully, I will have a new visa in a week, but in the meantime I am still nervous. It is illegal to be here without a visa, but it is hard to know which laws will be enforced. Jordanians can go to jail if they are caught without their government ID cards, but as a Canadian I have a certain amount of privilege.

I am going to Turkey in a week and a half, insha’Allah, and the person I am going with (Rukiye) is concerned we will have problems crossing the Syrian and Turkish borders if I’m an illegal alien. Syria is notorious for not letting people in, and I have a ticket for a bus going through it. Insha’Allah, Ustath Abdullah will do his job for once (if I pressure him enough); everyone I have talked to constantly has problems with their visas, because of him.

I’m looking forward to spending a week and a half in Istanbul, insha’Allah. It will be nice to get out of the dorm, and not to be so darned hot all the time. Rukiye speaks Turkish, a little Arabic and no English, and I speak some Arabic and a little Turkish, but somehow we understand each other. This should be interesting.

Is it morning yet?

I woke up at two thirty this morning to some guy playing with the loudspeakers on the masjid minaret. I'm not sure what all he said, but I heard "Helloooooo! Kayf halokum?!" The Arabic equivalent of "Hey, how's it going everybody?" The loudspeakers are loud, they're audible for miles, designed to wake up people who don't want to wake up for prayers at dawn, and directly above our dormitory. He carried on for a while, but I didn't hear any sirens.

Everybody else slept through it; you learn quickly here to sleep through the athan. I tried to sleep, prayed witr, made every du'a I could think of, recited Qur'an, tried to sleep again, had a snack (bread and zatar), oiled my hair, and wrote a lot of emails. I'm still awake, darnit, and I have a tajweed class today. And a very hoarse throat still.

Figiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Spitting Camel.

I can never think of post titles. I don't think we should have to have them.
(Thanks to CrazyNewt for suggesting an awesome, eye-catching title. I have a huge mental block lately.)

As quickly as the Turkish group arrived, they're gone again, after only two weeks. The college is closed for the next several weeks, and there are only three or four other people in the dorm. It is blessedly quiet, for once, and miraculously the internet is also turned on. Good thing, because the college library is also closed, so I can't use the computers there.

I have a week of intensive classes with one other student, and then a weeks' vacation before the next semester, when another Turkish group arrives. Our college is planning an umrah trip to Mecca during the last week of the vacation, but we don't know yet if it will happen. It is very difficult for single women to get into Saudi Arabia.

We went on a lot of bus trips around Jordan while the Turkish students were here. We visited all sorts of neat places - Ahl al Kahf, Petra, Wadi Rum, the Dead Sea, the Roman ruins at Jerash (actually just the gate, the girls wanted to go shopping instead), Ajloun Castle (one of Salahadin's castles), the shrines of three Sahaba and a battle site in Karak, tons of masajid and shrines, and other places that I can't remember right now. I am too tired to write about it now, but I did ride a camel, and almost fell into the Dead Sea (luckily someone caught me, and it isn't very deep around the edges).

I miss the Turkish girls, but I am very tired, and I am glad for the quiet. Alhumdulillah.

Pictures of Our Dorm Room

I tried seven different school computers and finally found one that sort of works and will let me upload pictures. No wonder there are so many, most of them don't work. So, here are a few pics of our dorm room. Yes, it's a mess, but four of us live there and only two of us are tidy. One of my roommates is Turkish, and the other two are ethnic Turks from France. None of them speak English, but luckily I remember enough French to use when I don't know how to say something in Arabic. Except the Turkish woman only knows a little Arabic (the Turkish girls speak Turkish together), so someone usually has to translate from Arabic into Turkish for her.

The room really is not big enough for four people, the table only seats two, and the closets are very small, but it's okay. We have a minifridge, although the school provides two meals a day, which is a good thing because the food is awful and expensive that I can't eat it, it makes me sick.

We are fortunate to have heaters in the rooms, and not to have to worry about the electric or gas bill. My roommates like to keep the room extremely hot and dark, and I like to have fresh air and daylight, but we tend to sleep at opposite times, so that works out okay. They stay up most of the night and sleep in the morning and afternoon, and I get up before dawn and go to bed early. I get rather cranky when people come into the room at all hours of the night and try to talk to me.

Here is one of our electric heaters, complete with roasting sweet potatoes. They are frequently used for heating bread, but people are always forgetting about the bread and setting it on fire.

We are lucky that there are only four of us in the room, most of the rooms have between five and eight or more beds. I don't think the school will be able to cram any more people into our room, which is why we chose it.

I do frequently wish that people would just leave me alone and quit asking me personal questions, it is one of the reasons I get up hours before sunrise. It's the only time I have any privacy.