Picture a gregarious Japanese kid greeting you with "Que onda?"

I learned the Egyptian dialect at BYU, and every time I use Egyptian words, people grimace and laugh; and when they repeat the words, you get the sense that they feel like taking a shower afterward.

Most of the farm labor here is Egyptian, and the social dynamic is uncannily familiar—they’re darker-skinned than Jordanians in general, and you see dozens of them waiting for work outside hardware stores. Polite Jordanians will refer to them as “hard-working”, while others allude to a perceived machismo and lasciviousness. There’s even a vaguely analogous national discussion about illegal immigration—though it’s a lot less vitriolic since the racial undercurrent isn’t as strong.

So, although everyone claims to be quite egalitarian, there is something about hearing Egyptian Arabic from a rich white kid that they find hilariously dissonant. I guess it would be like a Japanese kid learning English in South Central LA, and then coming to Salt Lake and calling everybody “ese”. Which, by the way, would probably redefine the fish-out-of-water genre as we know it. I want to see a screenplay on my desk by next week.

In any event, I’m trying to adopt the Badia dialect, which has its own tough-guy connotations in the city; it will be interesting to see how it plays. One of the shop vendors has already deemed it hilarious and given me and my colleagues free strawberry-pineapple slushes, though, so confidence is high.

I am living in a slasher film.

Things weren’t planned as tight as we thought they would be—welcome to Jordan—so for the past couple days, we’ve been essentially camping in what looks like a Saudi aristocrat’s abandoned summer home. And yes, living in an abandoned mansion is exactly as creepy as you’re imagining.

At first glance, it’s magnificent; a three-story, walled villa with olive orchards, rose gardens and ivy creeping up the stone paths and archways. The whole ground floor is full of guest rooms and bathrooms, and a kitchen about as big as our apartment back home. Around the verandah, there’s a special exterior building for receiving guests, with worn, washed-out pictures of the homeowner shaking hands with various members of the Saudi royal family, including the crown prince.

In a village of small homes built out of bare cinderblock, it’s so out of place as to seem surreal—like it just flashed into being out of the ether one day. Possibly as the result of a pact with Satan. As beautiful as it is, though, it clearly hasn’t been lived in for a long time. Picture the nicest house you’ve ever been in, five years after the zombie apocalypse.

There’s no water, no gas, the toilets don’t flush, the front door doesn’t lock, and everything has that musty smell of a tarp that’s been left in the garage for a long time. We spent last night in the tile foyer, washing our clothes in buckets and sponge-bathing in a five-gallon tub of cold water.

The paint is coming off the walls and ceiling in big flaky sheets, and long, spindly-legged spiders have colonized the toilets and the warm, malodorous refrigerator. (I thought spiders were supposed to work alone, but apparently these are Arab spiders—friendly and family-oriented.) There are rat turds underneath and behind everywhere you look, though the culprits have yet to show themselves. It’s a lively little ecosystem, considering the desolation outside.

Adding to the ominous post-apocalyptic vibe is the stuff the owners chose to leave behind: faded pictures on the walls, a couple food items in the pantry (which I assume sustains the zoo that has lived here since they left), and two locked rooms that are still fully furnished, with their personal papers still in the drawers and books on the shelves.

They left weird stuff in the fridge—a ten-pack of rectal suppositories, a tupperware full of tea leaves, and nothing else. I’m told that the homeowner went to high school with Saddam Hussein, and was thus forced to flee to Saudi Arabia when Hussein slaughtered his entire graduating class. Our town sits on the highway to Baghdad, 300km east—who knows, maybe the Ba’athists came looking for him.

My story gets better, though; not only are we living in the haunted mansion all by ourselves, but we moved in during the biggest dust storm the town has seen in years. Visibility is about a hundred meters, and the sun is a perfect white sphere behind a gauzy veil of dust. That makes things a little creepier, sure; but then there’s the 50 mph winds that have slammed against the windows and doors, without interruption, for the last three days. We’re huddled in our little corner of the house, and in the dark, empty rooms all around us, things are going bump in the night.

(Later): Once the storm subsided, we bought cleaning supplies and groceries, and went to work establishing a little human colony in one corner of the house. The front door has been bashed off its hinges—again, nothing suspicious about that—but handily, there are locks on each interior door, each with its own key. So, we just picked the four rooms we needed and locked ourselves in, leaving the rest of the house to the spiders, vermin, vagrants, and vengeful undead that no doubt already live there.

We’re staying at the home of Dr. Faisal, a business administration professor who teaches at four different universities around the Badia. His wife, Umm Munther, is the principal of the primary school where we teach English.

Their son, Munther, is about to finish the thanawiya el-3amma, a year of intense study and memorization unlike anything we have in the States, that establishes one’s educational and career options for the rest of forever. You take just a few classes every week, with the expectation that the rest of the day will be spent at home, drilling and memorizing for two big tests at the end of the year. People who can afford it send their kids to cram schools, hire private tutors, plead, threaten, persuade, cajole, and bribe their kids to get this one thing right, because, for universities and employers, nothing else matters.

It’s a pretty dysfunctional system; I’m told that no matter what you accomplish later in life, if you bomb the thanawiya, you’re going to be essentially unemployable. Munther’s family esteems education very highly, and individual behavior reflects much more strongly on the family here than it does in the States, so it’s a time of high expectations.

Unfortunately, Munther is a young man after my own heart. He studies for maybe an hour a day, and then hangs out with his friends or watches TV. Putting myself in his position, it makes complete sense: he’s been told that his choices are (a) to have fun with his friends, bomb the thanawiya, and die poor and lonely; or (b) buckle down and do nothing else all year to qualify for the opportunity of four more years of rigorous schooling and testing, with the possibility (by no means assured) of a comfortable desk job in Amman when he’s finished.

If those were my options, I don’t think my efforts would be particularly inspired either. From our conversations I can tell that he’s inquisitive and bright; the feeling I get is that he has (sensibly) decided that the game is stupid, so he’s not going to play. I understand his family’s exasperation, trying so desperately to motivate him; but I don’t think they could have motivated me either.

I spoke to Dr. Faisal about the possibility of sending Munther to the LDS Business College to wipe the slate clean, like I did; and I learned something very interesting. Obviously if Munther can get into the Business College, he can go on to any university in the country, and his high school grades will be irrelevant. That means he can easily accomplish whatever he wants to—except work in the Middle East. He could earn a doctorate from a prestigious American school; but if he ever comes back here to work, the first thing any Middle-Eastern employer will check is his score on the thanawiya el-3amma.

You can see the problem: Munther’s situation cannot be all that uncommon. Surely there are thousands like him every year—bright, capable, independent thinkers who reject a no-win scenario here in the Middle East and head for the “land of opportunity”. This would not be so problematic, but when they finally make good, rather than welcoming them home to build their country with the skills they learned in the West, they are told that their youthful indiscretions are unforgivable. Go be a doctor or an engineer or a professor in America, because you’re not welcome here.

I’m not worried about Munther, and neither is Munther. He’ll find a way to succeed. What I am worried about is the country that will lose him forever when he leaves.

"You eat it. Good for man-to-man."

We’re in the Badia now: a vast, empty scrubland and desert north-northeast of Amman. From our hosts’ home in Ad-Dafyanan, we can see Syrian hilltop villages. We are less than ten miles from the killing in Dara’a, but Jordanians pride themselves on being aloof from the chaos and tyranny of their neighbors. Our contact in the region is Shlash Al-Oun, and in demeanor he reminds me of no one so much as my father’s redneck vinyl-siding salesmen, albeit better-dressed and better-educated. His father wears the traditional Bedouin robes and Jordanian checkered keffiyeh, but Shlash wears neatly-ironed slacks and collared shirts, polishes his shoes and gels his hair.

Shlash is the oldest of 18, and his family has all their holdings in common in a single, massive account. The men all go to university, and when they turn 30 they marry and are provided with a car, and a house in the village. It’s an artful mix of tribalism and capitalism—their communal finances create a much larger investment pool, which is one factor in their family’s wealth. As foreign as the arrangement is to me, as we toured his rural demesne I could not help being impressed with the results.

The Al-Oun family has built four deep water wells that feed villages and farms throughout their tribal region, and they’re worth about $1.3 million each. I drank directly from the intake, and it was the clearest, sweetest water I’ve ever tasted. It is a strange thing to splash your face with rainwater that fell 65 million years ago, and hasn’t seen daylight since.

The Al-Ouns grow olives, stonefruit, grapes, malt, melons, and wheat on land that they rotate every seven years; and they keep horses, camels, donkeys, sheep, and goats in their stables. When we walked in, Shlash told us to stand back, made a clipped, guttural call, and two massive Arabian horses burst out of their pens and charged across the yard to their trough. They were the horses of a woman’s weird Freudian fantasies; glossy and panting and muscular. With one more shout from Shlash, they jumped from the trough and stormed back into their pens faster than I’ve ever seen an animal move.

The camels were hilarious and ungainly—especially the week-old calf that Shlash delivered, who hadn’t quite figured out his legs yet—but far more interesting was the dog. Arabs don’t keep dogs; they see them as scavengers and pests, something like they way we think of raccoons or coyotes, and the whole time we were in the stables, this filthy yellow dog skulked in wide circles around us, head down, always watching for some morsel to catch, jumping back at any sudden movement. Strange how even a dog will be exactly what it is expected to be.

Driving along rows of olive trees and grapevines draped on aluminum trellises, we drove past Abu Shlash (Shlash’s father) in his pickup truck. His face was dark and weatherbeaten, almost callused, and he spoke to Shlash out of a tracheotomy tube about the need to harvest the malt before the drought kills it, and to put us with “someone respectable” because we are “from Loren’s side”.

Dinner at Shlash’s home was a gauntlet of cultural obstacles. First, my wife was ushered into the women’s area, and I was briefly introduced to Shlash’s wife and daughter. Loren says this is an honor, and was only possible because I am married—Loren, being single, did not meet Shlash’s wife until several months after the wedding.

Without thinking, I immediately moved in to shake his daughter’s hand. She, apparently trying to be polite, hesitantly reached for mine, before I realized that I was making an ass of myself and quickly withdrew and pressed my hand to my chest. I later mentioned the killing of Osama Bin Laden at dinner, which also went over like a fart in church. Better to get these errors out of the way among understanding people, I suppose.

Dinner was a single silver platter of yellow rice and boiled chicken with a yoghurt broth poured over the top, called menzef, the eating of which is apparently an essential Bedouin experience. It can be eaten with utensils, but I’m told you’re not cool until you’ve eaten menzef by hand. They said they would teach me how to eat it, and I said, “It’s eating with your hands; how hard could it be?” but I quickly discovered that there is definitely a wrong way. There is a rather elaborate ritual of tearing the chicken, playing with the rice in the platter, scooping it into your hand, balling it, and then flicking it into your mouth with your thumb; and for now it appears to be beyond my capacity. I made a tremendous mess.

We ate with the shabaab (the boys), and Loren said it best: “It’s like hanging out with five-year-olds, with no girls to impress and no manners to keep.” They didn’t say much while we ate, which I am told is customary, except to tell me, “hand to mouth, not mouth to hand.” After a long silence, Shlash’s brother (cousin? nephew?) pointed to a plate of long, jagged leaves and said, leering, “You eat it. Good for man-to-man.” Then everyone giggled awkwardly, and Loren said (in Arabic) “Enough, enough. He’s learned enough for one day.”

Now, the reader will understand that I was already pretty uncomfortable. They didn’t have a lot of English, and I didn’t have a lot of Arabic, and there’s nothing more unsettling than being in a strange place, alone, while a bunch of middle-aged dudes talk about you in a language you barely understand; but I’m a man of the world. I can handle it. I was even getting used to the way these repressed, macho cowboys cuddled when they were alone together; but nobody had touched the leaves before me, and I wasn't about to 'learn by doing' as far as "man-to-man" was concerned.

When I refused to let it drop, Loren finally told me that man-to-man refers to “performance”. Ostensibly with women. So, hoping against hope that that was the whole truth, I hesitantly took a bite of one of the leaves; and I am happy to report, dear readers, that I have not suffered from erectile dysfunction even once since then; and, as far as I know, I was not drugged and raped by the Bedouin.

Truthfully, apart from the enjoyment they clearly derived from watching me squirm, everyone we've met has been perfectly hospitable and kind. The language and the culture take constant mental effort to navigate, but we're surrounded by patient people, and they seem to enjoy helping us learn. More on our work and our host family in the next post.

Kevin