writer, photographer

I’m in charge of sifting through the organization’s email account, filtering the requests for olive oil and lodging from the daily dump of spam. Of course I get the usual letters from the widows of African politicians and businessmen, asking that I loan $10,000 so she can access his billions being held in an Ivory Coastal bank. I’m totally baffled by a new spam style I’ve been getting on a daily basis. I get a few lines of literature, followed by advertisements for bargain-priced pharmaceuticals. For example:

“Langdon looked again at the fax an ancient myth confirmed in black and white.
The implications were frightening. He gazed absently through the bay window.
The first hint of dawn was sifting through the birch trees in his backyard,
but the view looked somehow different this morning. As an odd combination of fear and
exhilaration settled over him, Langdon knew he had no choice
The man led Langdon the length of the hangar. They rounded the corner onto the runway.”

And then a big picture ad for Viagra. I’m lost.


I got a photo published! No money from this of course, but some guy came upon my photo site and asked permission to use a picture I took of an olive tree on his website. So my photo is helping out a Danish NGO of some sort. I’m not sure exactly what they do, but from the looks of the website it seems globally responsible. Check it out and notice the byline.

Checkpoint Shuffle

A three-hour language class sounded like hell on slow wheels when I first signed up for my Arabic course at Al Quds University. But a few weeks into the classes now, and the three hours pass surprisingly quickly, helped along by hourly breaks where my two Swedish friends and I stand outside the room and gorge on the free chocolate wafers and Nescafe. Our teacher is Ayman, a bombastic man from Taybeh, the town known for the Taybeh Brewery, which brews “The West Bank’s Finest,” possibly only, beer. He’s openly smitten with two Italian girls in the class, and divides his attention unevenly between the two Italian beauties and the rest of us. I found, however, when I was all cuted up one day, that I was getting called on a lot more in class, so now I play along with Ayman’s style in order to better practice my Arabic. Mondays and Wednesdays I leave work a little early and go home to get my Arabic book, finish my homework and put on eyeliner, and then I head downtown to Hind Husseini College to my slightly sleazy Arabic class. Whatever it takes. No one said it was an easy language to learn.

The system of borders and checkpoints and the Separation Wall has been changing on a weekly basis in the neighborhoods around Jerusalem, and no one is quite sure exactly where things are heading. About two weeks ago on a bus trip back from Ramallah we were stopped at a checkpoint, as usual, and flashed our passports or IDs to the soldier who boarded. On the same bus, same route yesterday, we had to go through Qalandiya chekpoint, as the previously traversable road had been shut down or something. Qalandiya is this prison-like complex which is basically an international border set up by the Israeli government in the middle of Palestinian Territory, controlling and limiting movement within the West Bank and into East Jerusalem.


The bus drops everyone off here.

And then we head through the on-foot checkpoint.

Waiting for the light to turn green. We go through three of these turnstiles.

Back outside, waiting for the bus again.

Crazy Cat Lady

I’ve had this sense that my boss wants me to get a cat. I’m assuming this is just because he’s a cat person and not because he thinks I’m maladjusted here in Jerusalem and that I need a friend. It’s come up a few times in conversation.

Me: That guy who lives in the house behind the hospital? He’s complaining that his house vibrates. I don’t know what to do about this.
Mark: Hey, I hear there’s some kittens up for adoption at the church.

or

Me: Mark? Someone brought their herd of sheep onto the grounds, and they’re storming the eastern olive orchard.
Mark: You know, maybe you should get a cat.


So last night I was on my way back from Arabic classes and got a call from Mark who needed to give me a key before he left for his month-long vacation in the States.
“Yeah, just come by so I can give you this key before I leave,” he said. “There are these kittens--” I heard, before my cell phone cut out. So I got the key and Mark walked over to the road to show me this dumb little kitten who seemed to be living in the rusting shed across the street and kept darting into the road, then scurrying back when cars zoomed by. He was mewing and skittish and hadn’t quite figured out that cars can kill. So for 30 minutes Mark and I tried to corner and catch the little guy. And then his brother came out of the shed across the street, so we tried to get him too. Mark ran to his car to grab a laundry basket that was in there and I held this at the base of the fence that the kittens were darting in and out of while Mark tried goading them into the basket. Finally we got them in there, one hissing, the other trembling at the bottom of this basket. So there I am, holding a basketful of feral kittens, and Mark says “Now when you give them milk, water it down a little bit. And they probably can eat some real food at this point too. See you in a month!” And all the sudden I seem to be a cat owner.

Cats aren’t really my thing, and I have this theory that a lot of women who go abroad by themselves end up going kind of crazy and start collecting animals as a result. I’ve seen it happen and it’s not pretty. There was, of course, Maddie Cat, who belonged to a roommate of mine last year. Maddie Cat is ugly as sin:

but we had a special little bond and she’s one of the few cats I’ve actually liked. So maybe with two attractive cats that look like this:

and like this:

I’ll find that they grow on me.
I got them set up on my porch last night with a bowl of watery milk and a flannel sheet in their basket. The one in the basket, above, has a limp of some sort in his back legs, so he’s stayed on the porch lapping milk, chomping canned tuna, laying in the shade and cuddling in the basket. His brother is the feistier of the two and keeps running away, but I figure if I keep food out consistently he’ll keep coming back. He still hisses at me when I get close.
The guards are already more won over by the little guys than I am, putting out their own bowl of milk and helping me chase after feisty cat as I was trying to force a loving home environment on him last night. The little ingrate.
I figured that the first step in being a legit cat owner is to have photos of your little darlings, so I took the two above this morning. The gardener on the grounds here is a friendly little man who I’ve only communicated with in Arabic. The most complex thing I’ve said to him is “Your garden is very beautiful.” So as I was snapping a picture of feisty cat under a truck this morning, he came over and said in English, which I didn’t know he spoke, “You like pictures of small cats? I have CD with 800 pictures of small cats. I will bring for you.” I’m gonna develop a reputation here.
I’m waiting to see if my ownership sticks before I give names to them. I’m considering naming them after amateur rap artists.

Boys, Girls, and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

Two months in such a small country, and I was ready to cross borders, which I did this weekend when my friend Will and I took a little excursion eastward to Jordan, one of Israel’s few neighbors that allow travel across the border.

My friend Rebecca had given me a heads up about Jordan, saying that she’d seen almost no women during her time there, and I was watching for this as I left Israel’s tourist playground of Eilat and crossed into the neighboring Jordanian town of Aqaba. Rebecca was very right: there was probably a six-to-one ratio of men to women out on the streets of Aqaba, a touristed and Safeway-studded beach city.

Sand and stalls selling bikinis, circa 1986, were not on the itinerary for this trip, so Will and I quickly headed northward to Wadi Rum, a stunning desert wilderness where we went “trekking,” if that’s the correct term for being driven around in a pick-up truck by a Bedouin guide. Known for their hospitality, Bedouins will invite passers-by into their homes for sugary mint tea, a tradition that stemmed from practicality: if a nomad wanders by your tent you offer him tea and food, knowing that when you’re traveling through the arid desert another Bedouin will invite you in, and potentially save you from dehydration and starvation. The Bedouins we ran into in our four days in Jordan live in immobile cinderblock homes, and the nomads passing by are mostly well-fed and slightly hungover French backpackers. But the tradition has continued, and I grew a cavity or two from the multiple glasses of saccharine tea that I was fed throughout the weekend. But even in the living rooms and courtyards of homes, the women of Jordan were still conspicuously hidden.

Our first cup of tea was in the home of Madullah, whose cousin Abdullah ended up being our desert guide. (More on that story later.) Madullah disappeared to the back of the house to “prepare” the tea, which meant telling his wife to start brewing. A while later, when his young daughter wobbled into the room on a busted tricycle I went to help her readjust the wheel, and from my new vantage point got to see his wife, who was hovering behind the door jamb, staying out of sight and waiting for Madullah to take the tray of tea and serve the guests.

Their living room is covered in painted paneling.


I encountered this throughout the weekend. Bedouin wives (often a couple per husband—polygamy is widespread) would emerge when the guests were just us foreigners. But when local men showed up, the wives disappeared, turning into invisible tea brewers in the back rooms of the house.

So this was my impression of marriage in Jordan when we headed into the desert with a pair of French sisters and our too-cool-his-kifya guide, Abdullah.


Abdullah was filling us in on his life and Bedouin culture. He is married and has two children, but he’s looking for a second wife right now, preferably a foreign woman. As it turns out, I’m what he seems to be looking for. Before heading to the campsite, Abdullah pulled me aside. “I want to talk to you with secret.” He’s already worked it out. I can finish up my year in Jerusalem. Then I’ll head to Jordan, become his second wife, and help him run his business, liasing with the foreigners. “I have a very big house. I will treat you very nice. I will pay for everything. My wife? It’s no problem.” I informed him that actually, yes, it still was a problem, at least for me. “No, it’s not.” Uh, yeah, it is. He offered a trial period where I could just be his girlfriend, starting that evening at the campsite. No thanks, Abdullah.

The friendly guide schtick quickly turned into the surly guide of wounded pride schtick, and that lasted for the rest of the trek. The following morning, returning to Rum Village, our sandy entourage was of course brought in for tea at Abdullah’s home, where we met his tea-brewing wife and their two kids. Compared to the wives I had met so far, Mrs. Abdullah seemed a bit feistier than most. She had painted toenails, she chilled in the living room with us, and she didn’t cover her head until she went outside to fetch her husband’s cigarettes from the truck. This could be my life. Mom? Dad? Do you want to weigh in here? You might get a herd of goats out of the deal.
Wadi Rum is spectacular, by the way:







These are pretty old.


This is the Bedouin-style campsite where we spent the night in the desert.

To counter this culture that was such a shock to me, I had a great experience when Will and I hiked up to a spring set back in a sandstone canyon on the edge of Rum Village.


First, these boys sitting on the trail offered me a piece of baloney.


As we got deeper into the canyon, we started to hear the sounds of drumming and singing echoing off the rock walls until we saw a group of people gathered up ahead at the spring. Pretty soon we could make out hijab-covered heads, so Will stayed back while I hiked ahead to this group of young women gathered in the middle of a lonely canyon. It was a fieldtrip from the local girls' school, and the students and teachers had hiked up here where they were singing, dancing and beating out hot rhythms on a drum that the teachers passed from one to another. They invited me over as I approached, fed me tea, and one of the girls pulled me into the circle to dance with her as all her classmates let out these great tongue-wagging trills and laughed at the atrocity of me trying to dance like a Bedouin and her trying to groove like an American college student on MTV's "Spring Break: Cancun.” I let Will wait back on the trail for a good 30 minutes as I hung out with these women who were having such a great time with each other and not just shuffling around kitchens with teapots chained to their ankles.
Here are some of the teachers. Most of the students were in their late-teens and didn’t want to be photographed.



We spent two days in Wadi Rum. Day Two Will and I hiked a few miles into the desert and spent the day sitting under this rock, orbiting around with the shade and watching camel trains plod across the desert.


Then we went to Petra, which might be a world wonder, where there are massive facades carved out of cliff faces and more than lots of in-your-face Bedouins selling Petra kitsch. I got scammed and paid four times too much for a necklace made out of camel teeth. Serves me right.


Lots of colorful stone in Petra:



This is a German film crew that stuck a Bedouin family inside a little cave to interview them for a documentary. The girls in the foreground demanded one dinar for taking their picture. I pretended I didn’t speak English.




Here’s Will playing geologist in Wadi Rum. He leaves tomorrow for Azerbaijan, Georgia, and a few other countries you might have trouble finding on a map. Then he goes home to Maine.