Abby Keep, front row, fourth from the right, with fellow study abroad students in Jordan 

 

It took 32 hours, but only one day, to get home.

Fifty minutes in a cab from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, four hours from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt, 12 hours from Frankfurt to Las Vegas, and two hours from Las Vegas to Portland, plus delays and layovers. I traveled backward and forward in time.

It was the end of three months studying abroad in Amman, Jordan. As the plane prepared to descend, I felt restless and impatient to see my family and friends, just beyond the gate. At the same time, I couldn’t help but think of the family I’d left behind.

Jordan is a tiny Arab country squeezed among Israel, the West Bank, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq in Western Asia. In a region that seethes with war, Jordan is an oasis of stability.

For me, Jordan was a natural choice. I began studying Arabic as a freshman at the University of Oregon, and I am an international studies major focused on the Middle East. Still, it was a nerve-racking decision. The last time I left the country, my family spent a few days in Canada. I was three years old.

Not long after I made my first deposit, my family and friends barraged me with concerned questions. The most common was “Will they make you wear a scarf thing?” (They did not.) I found their fears well-intentioned but rooted in misunderstanding of the Middle East, Arabs, and Muslims.

I was going. That was it.

I first saw Jordan from above. As the plane descended through a gray-violet haze, I saw miles and miles of golden hills punctuated by twisted, dusty olive trees and scrub brush. To my surprise, I was reminded of Oregon’s high desert. Amman rested on top of these hills like a white bird perched on a branch. The highways, choked with traffic, pulsed like arteries carrying blood from the heart to the body. The plane’s wheels hit the tarmac. My ears popped. As-salamu alaykum, welcome to Jordan.

I identified some of the other students by their college sweatshirts in the visa line. Once we cleared security and collected our bags, we were herded into vans and taken to a hotel for orientation.

Three days later, I met my host family for the first time. They ran late; I was one of the last students to be picked up. Each minute that passed, I felt queasier. What had I been thinking, agreeing to live with strangers for three months?

Finally, they arrived. My host mother herded three little children into the room, one boy and two girls. Their eyes glowed with adoration as they approached me. After a quick introduction, we shoved my suitcase into the trunk and drove off.

No one wore seatbelts. As I would find out, some Uber drivers had even invented a system to outwit the alarms in their newer cars. They cut the seatbelts out, but kept the clip permanently inserted: voila, no more annoying beeping. You were only a little more likely to become a human projectile.

My home family lived in a middle-class neighborhood. The littler of the two girls insisted on dragging my suitcase, which probably weighed twice as much as her, across the threshold to my room. My host mom sat me down and put a cup of mint tea in my hand. The kids crowded around, excited.

“Your face is like a flower,” my little brother said to me. He turned to his sister. “Your face is like a donkey.” She clicked her tongue at him.

At that moment, they were strangers to me. But in three short months, those kids would become like my own brothers and sisters.

After the first few days, I fell into a routine. Each morning, the call to prayer drew me out of sleep. I braided my sisters’ hair and then called an Uber to school. Our school was a 20-minute drive across town, in the upscale neighborhood of Abdoun. Our neighbors, ambassadors and expats, lived in limestone villas guarded by bored soldiers and stray cats. Their gardens overflowed with sweet-smelling flowers; on the balconies, domestic servants hung the washing out to dry. In the morning I studied Arabic on the first floor, and then, in the afternoon, humanitarian relief on the top floor. After school, I spent hours playing with my siblings or studying in cafés in Weibdeh, the artistic heart of Amman.

On Fridays, my extended host family filled up the apartment. Usually at these family gatherings I stayed silent while the family members gossiped. Thankfully, we usually began to eat right after the guests arrived, which meant I could shovel rice into my mouth instead of trying to speak broken Arabic. On Fridays we only ate only one meal, because it was enormous.

Usually I passed unnoticed. But one Friday, my host father’s father, Sedo, turned to me and asked, “Why don’t you speak Arabic?” Before I could respond, he asked a second question: “And why do Americans think Arabs are terrorists?”

Teta, his wife, was displeased. Hospitality is the cornerstone of Arabic culture; being rude to a guest was practically a sin. “Tell him if you thought Arabs were terrorists, you wouldn’t be here!” she counseled me.

Ignoring Teta, Sedo crossed the room to sit by me. His eyebrows furrowed, he told me his family originally came from Jerusalem. They were engineers, petroleum company executives, and diplomats. But their résumés weren’t the most remarkable thing about them.

For a thousand years, Sedo’s family had been entrusted with the key to the holiest site in Christianity: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Many Christians believe the church is the site of both Jesus’ crucifixion and his tomb, and millions visit each year to pay their respects.

Various sects have fought for control over the site for years. In a famous bit of lore, a tiny ladder beneath the second-floor window of the church hasn’t been moved since 1852 because none of the six denominations that jointly control the church can agree on what to do with it. As Muslims, however, Sedo’s family is a neutral party. They keep things running smoothly.

Each morning at 4:00 a.m., Sedo’s cousin unlocks the doors and welcomes pilgrims into the church. Not even the clergymen who work there have a key; they have to wait like everyone else. In a city that bristles with tension, it’s a remarkable story of interfaith cooperation.

 “See?” he said, puffing his chest. “We’re not terrorists. What do you think of that?”

Again, before I could say anything, he smiled and said, “I hear you are going to Jerusalem after school ends. You should find my cousin, because he is your family now too.”

And just like that, I was a member of the family. Soon I would discover that warmth and generosity of Jordanians had almost no limits.

On one school trip, I stood in the ruined streets of Umm Qais, a Roman city, and looked out over the sandy hills. To the west was the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus walked on water. The program director pointed at the hills to the north and said, “That’s Syria.”

Syria. It was surreal. I knew the fighting was hundreds of miles away, but I still felt like I’d plunged into ice water.

“We used to go there on the weekends,” she said. “Not anymore.”

Not since the war broke out in 2011. At the moment, Syria looked peaceful. Silent. There was no sign of the destruction that had ruined hundreds of thousands of lives. Jordan welcomed the refugees with open arms, as they had the Iraqis and Palestinians before them.

Despite dwindling resources and a sluggish economy, Jordanians rarely complained about the influx of refugees. They refused to disrespect their “guests” in such a manner. In total, the tiny country has taken in over 660,000 refugees.

In 2018, the United States resettled 41 Syrian refugees. It was the first of many uncomfortable realizations I had.

I also interned with the preeminent women’s rights group in Jordan, the Sisterhood Is Global Institute (SIGI). The foundation was established in 1998 by Her Excellency Asma Khader, the former minister of culture.

In 2017, SIGI was instrumental in the repeal of Article 308 of the Jordanian constitution, which allowed rapists to escape punishment by marrying their victims. They also provide free legal aid to the domestic violence victims, combat honor killings, educate the public, and build capacity.

It is common stereotype in the West to view Muslim or Arab women as oppressed, subservient, and meek. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The women of SIGI are fearless and determined, and they fight for the advancement of women and girls every day.

While visiting another NGO several weeks earlier, I met a Syrian refugee who proudly told me about a home business she set up selling chocolate to support her family. She sold two kilograms (4.41 pounds) of chocolate for the price of seven dinar—about nine dollars. I was shocked. There was no way she could possibly be making money at that price.

For my internship project, I decided to write a micro-entrepreneur business skills training manual. I hoped that by learning about price-setting, record-keeping, and marketing, the women SIGI assisted would be able to maximize their profits and provide for their families.

A major challenge I had in the project’s design was the fact that many of the women SIGI works with are illiterate. How do you keep records if you can’t read or write? I was able to determine that visuals, analogies, and symbols could overcome this problem. I also avoided the use of technical terms, such as “comparative advantage.” Who knew what that meant, anyway?

The other students and I organized Thanksgiving dinner at the end of November. I offered to make apple pie. I made the dough on their kitchen table. The kids watched in fascination as I worked the frozen butter into the flour with a fork, and then kneaded it smooth. The resulting pie was about a foot in diameter. One of my sisters asked her mother, hopefully, “Kul shay l'asdiqayiha fi jamaya?” I gave her a look, so she knew I’d understood her. Is it all for her university friends? My Arabic was getting better.

We ordered turkeys, stuffing, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, and sweet potato casserole—the works. When I returned home, I gave my siblings the rest of the apple pie, which they liked. My sister tried the pumpkin and immediately spit it out. “That’s disgusting!”

During the last few weeks, we travelled south to tour Jordan’s most iconic landscapes. We swam in the jewel-blue Gulf of Aqaba. We rode in the beds of rickety trucks across the pink dunes of Wadi Rum, screaming as they lurched left and right. We hiked through a basin to see Petra, where Indiana Jones had saved the Holy Grail from Nazis.

I spent my last night in Jordan crying my eyes out. I couldn’t bear knowing how long it would be before I saw my study-abroad friends again. Most of them lived on the East Coast. It broke my heart to leave my Jordanian siblings.

I left Amman on a bus at 6:30 in the morning feeling morose. The bus rumbled across the West Bank, passing makeshift tents and goats, until we arrived at the Israeli border. A girl with a military-grade rifle boarded the bus and asked for our passports. One eye on her gun, I handed mine over. She returned it and left without a word.

From the checkpoint we drove directly to Jerusalem. I dozed off somewhere in between, waking with a jolt to find myself in a busy cosmopolitan center. The bus driver shooed us out onto the streets, and I found myself staring at walls that rose 50 feet in the air. This marked the boundary of the Old City, where my hotel was.

Without much thought, I dragged my suitcases into the Old City, thinking I would easily be able to navigate it. After all, it was less than a half-mile square.

I didn’t take long for me to realize I’d made a mistake. What I didn’t account for were the uneven cobblestones, stairs, and narrow roads bustling with tourists and locals. In other words, I hadn’t counted on the Old City being old. I dragged my two suitcases through as best I could, heart hammering and sweat dripping down my back, past vendors selling bagels or crucifixes.

I passed through an archway into an open courtyard filled with tourists. After a quick glance around, I realized I had accidentally found the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—the same church Sedo’s family had protected for millennia. I felt a strange sort of pride.

I set my bags down on the steps and went to go look for my cousin.

—story and photos by Abby Keep, UO student