i stayed in this house with "oomy" ("my mother," as i was told to call her), who was quite old, with bad teeth and rough-skinned hands. unfortunately i have no pictures of her because she is shy. she has 7 daughters and 1 son. all of them, except the youngest daughters, are married with kids of their own, but they all live in al-rajiff too. they are always at the house, especially on the weekends, cooking and cleaning and tending to the animals. oh yeah, my family had like 13 goats and 8 chickens, approximately. but we ate 4 of the goats (i'll get to that story in a second).
the first night i was there, my youngest host sister (23-year old maliha) got engaged to my friend natatlie (who was also staying in al-rajiff)'s host brother!! that meant one thing: mansaf. mansaf is the national dish of jordan, and it consists of either goat or lamb meat, rice with leben (tart, milky yogurt), parsley and almonds. it's delicious. it's cooked over a fire in huge cauldrons basically. so that afternoon we (by we i mean definitely not me, but the men in the family and all the male neighbors) slaughtered 4 of our goats. i thought it would phase me more because i was a vegetarian for 3 years. but it really didn't. they slit the throats and out poured a waterfall of blood, which the young children had fun running around dodging. my host sister burned something called baqhour to mask the smell of the blood. unfortunately (or fortunately, depending), i don't have any digital photos of the slaughter to show you, dear readers. i took them on my film camera. some cvs photo guy is in for a fun surprise!
so the next night we had a "small party" (oh, just about 100 people) at our crib. all the women were inside in the sitting room, and the men were outside under a makeshift tent. natalie and my other SIT friend staying in al-rajiff, anna, were able to come. the three of us were required to wear hijabs and dish-dashes (a long, shapeless dress covering your entire body), which was pretty fun, except my host sister sprayed my hijab with like 800 spritzes of perfume. we sat and chatted as my host sister came around with a bucket of water so we could wash our right hands, and then with a pot of turkish coffee and two cups, which 50 women shared (which is, undoubtedly, why i'm now ill). then the mansaf came in several GIGANTIC plates, and we ate on the floor with our right hands, occasionally using bread to pick up the goat and rice. yum yum yum. here are some pictures. natalie and anna are the ones who are obviously not arab. natalie looks like a badia bride.
it was a great evening, except there was no dancing, because it was still the mourning period for my host dad who recently passed away.
in case i didn't mention, al-rajiff is located at the top of a huge valley that looks like it was carved out by giant eagle talons (lord of the rings?). the mountains also sort of looked like the bumps on dave lanegran's booze nose. my host brother-in-law, abu adl (which means father of adl; people here often take the names of their firs-born sons) led me around the valley, which he grew up in. he said he used to walk all the way up the mountain from the bottom of the valley to go to school... barefoot. he would leave at 4 in the morning, with only a breakfast of a palm-ful of sugar to sustain him. oh, also, abu adl used to live in bahrain and work as a bodyguard for the al-khalifa royal family. no biggie.
he showed me old bedouin winter homes, which you'd barely be able to find if it weren't for the tiny chimney poking out the top. inside was just a bed and a few necessities, and the resident had scratched a greeting and his name on the wall with a soft rock.
he also showed me traditional water collection methods of the bedouins, which i of course flipped for. here is abu adl and his daughter miriam, walking up the steps to a catchment pool for rain runoff:
then we gathered some brush and made shay marameeya (tea with sage) on a cliff overlooking the valley and lay out in the sun. i died a little bit of happiness, especially when abu adl said that i was a bedouin because of how much i love tea. but apparently i am not a bedouin because i pick up after myself. bedouins here just litter. everywhere!! when i picked up the cans of juice that abu adl and his daughters left behind, he said: "BADIA. NOT CALIFORNIA." but i took them back home anyway.
i did more stuff, but i'm too tired to write about it now, sorry. maybe later. except it is worth telling that it took a really long time to get back from the badia because the bus driver had us over to his house for tea. this is typical. i love this country.
i have two arabic midterms sunday so i have to study up. thursday i will be leaving for oman, where i'll be for a week. again, no biggie. tomorrow i'm going to ajloun to visit some castles. jordan is the best. sorry minnesota, but i'm going to try to get an internship here for the summer, or maybe in israel (codename "disneyland" so we can talk about it in public places without drawing death stares).
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