PEOPLE ARE ‘REMOVED’ from Jordan. Sent back to where they came from. I first saw it happen to a talented young gardener, good looking, with a liking for white straw hats, which set him apart in that world, where men covered their heads in red- or black-check keffiyas, or if they were poor, tied any old cloth around them, so they weren’t bareheaded in the ferocious summer sun.
He told me later how he had been headhunted and interviewed in London, where his qualifications, and experience in managing large gardens and teams of skilled or unskilled gardeners, boded well for him. He had been employed with much fanfare, to start the slow process of redesigning one of the old Palace lawns, which stretched as far as the eye could see beneath ancient jacarandas, cypresses and Lebanese cedars, and reducing the amount of water the gardens required.
At parties in the early evenings, in the best suburbs and in Palace gardens, princesses, ambassadors’ wives and young beauties stepped out of their Manolo Blahniks, making little noises, like doves, at the feel of the dark green velvet on their bare toes. But some murmured that the time was fast approaching where such lavishness would be disapproved of—even in this part of the world, where displays of wealth were appreciated. The roses and hydrangeas would have to be replaced with hardier species from Australia and South Africa. Foreign consultants would arrive from Dubai or Bahrain, to design cactus gardens, and lawns with coarser grass, and even discuss mulching with woodchips. This young man was flown in from New Zealand, I think it was, to take charge of all this.
He was popular from the start. His gaze from under his hat was direct, and his manner charming, rather than servile, which endeared him to everyone. He knew his plants. He admired the antiquity of the Lebanese cedars. He asked intelligent questions about the original plantings and design by the wife of the British high commissioner, in the late 1920s, in the days when Jordan was a few years old and a British protectorate.
From the window of the pavilion where I was working, I could see the new head gardener early in the mornings, talking earnestly about relocating shrubs, and perhaps opening up vistas across to the stables. He had taught himself some Arabic salutations, in order to enquire about the families of his work team, as was expected, and he listened to their answers, which was not. He gave orders in Arabic, which was also unusual. The housekeeper, who was British, always spoke English to the ousters, raising her voice a little and speaking slowly. The Australian PA spoke many phrases after fifteen years, and she, too, always listened to the answers, and looked sad if the answer was muffi quais. The colonials were kinder than the English or the Arabs, or the Pakistanis; or so it seemed to me. The Princess—Pakistani, clever and beautiful beyond compare—made no attempt to hide her impatience with Arabs, even though her husband was a sharif and a Hashemite, and part of forty-two generations in a direct line to the Prophet.
It did not seem to occur to the young head gardener to keep an autocratic, or even a managerial, distance from the Egyptian crew, who worked from early morning to late afternoon, then retreated to concrete bunkers out of sight behind the outer walls, where there were no gardens. I imagined them lying on their bunks, watching television under the fluorescent light I could see flickering from my balcony, smoking their Egyptian cigarettes and thinking about the families they were sending most of their wages to each month. The head gardener, it was said, visited the bunkhouse and played cards with them once or twice. That may have counted against him.
After he disappeared, word was put about that he had been too close to someone whose cousin worked in the kitchen and who had told this someone’s father about it. The alarm was sounded and he was gone. Those of us who had grown fond of him, and sometimes had a mint tea with him at the end of the day, were told nothing. When I enquired, it was made clear what had happened was no business of mine.
He had no rights. Like me, he had no visa. He was officially ‘a guest of the Palace’, which sounded impressive, and even privileged, until I really thought about it. Persona non grata truly meant something there.
Much later, I heard the head gardener was given twenty-four hours to leave Amman. The deal was that guests of the Palace had to return to where they’d come from: Wellington, in his case, I believe. His protestations that he had had offers of work he wished to pursue in Dubai, where gardens were being invested in in a big way, were of no avail. His bags were searched, and he had no chance to speak to anyone; not even me, who had the apartment below his and was not part of the Diwan. A soldier sat outside his door all night, and his phone was disconnected, his mobile number blocked; he had no right of reply. The next morning, a driver was instructed to hand him over to airport security.
No one spoke out in his defence. The foreigners said to each other, when they gathered in the evenings, Poor man, how unjust. The PA rang his mother in New Zealand, which I thought was very decent of her, to say how sorry she was. But soon he became the foolish head gardener, then the rumours began spreading, until the foreigners were telling each other they probably didn’t know the whole story. Within a few weeks, he was no longer mentioned and had been replaced.
He sent me an email after I had left Jordan. I had written him a couple of references that may have helped get him an interview for a job as a gardener for someone who hadn’t read the initial publicity that had followed his appointment to the royal court. It was okay to be headhunted and praised, but not to seek personal publicity after taking up the job—a mother speaking excitedly to her local paper, maybe, with an old photograph of Prince Hassan found on Google; Local lad to transform royal gardens. Any transformation had to be the inspiration of a Princess, who might summon her head gardener to move the privet hedge to make room for a croquet lawn. The article would have been sent to the Diwan by some friend of the Royal Family or former employee with faintly malicious intent.
The Princess and her head of the Diwan would have had the young gardener vetted before he’d arrived. She prided herself on her modernity, and may even have thought the elegant young man in the white panama hat would be an asset at a garden party. As, indeed, he would have been.
We were told later the reason for his disappearance would have been something to do with the tribes, meaning he’d overstepped some line in the sand, or offended someone’s brother or cousin. Perhaps also, it later occurred to me, he had not been obsequious enough to a daughter or a gun-toting son. Foreigners keep the household, the garden and the office running smoothly. This means they are relied upon, confided in, but not respected. Entering Jordan as guests of the Royal Palace, they hand over their passports when they are met at the arrivals gate, and ushered through a Crowne Classe VIP entrance to a silent, empty lounge where they sit on a velvet banquette and drink a glass of tea while their bags arrive. No visa, no stamps in their passport, no customs, no delays.
The first few times, you sit composing faintly surprised stories for family and friends. The work you’ve been summoned to do must indeed be valued. Only later does it start to dawn on you that you’ve been thoroughly investigated, and fast-tracked into a world where an eye will be kept on your every move, and from which you will be removed without explanation if you are no longer required, or have committed an offence of which you are only dimly aware.
At the end of my first week in Jordan, I was taken to an orange grove; a lovely place for a picnic. The Prince drove me in a huge black SUV with guns in the back. There were guards in other SUVs behind us, coming alongside our SUV wherever the road was wide enough, or we came to a crossroads where danger might lurk.
I was being taken to see the Palace’s farm, and something of the countryside in the north near the Syrian border, which was, of course, patrolled. Later, as more SUVs pulled up and small children spilled out, with their Filippina nannies and their beautiful young mothers, and a young Prince arrived in an army jeep, with a gun mounted on the back, I realised I was to meet the family—or they were to meet and vet me. The small princelings were charming and greeted me solemnly. The three daughters and the son were formal and slightly distant. What is Baba up to now?
Oriental rugs were laid on the ground and strewn with cushions. We sat among the trees laden with oranges, at small tables in a little open tent with a pointy top, like the ones in paintings of medieval jousts. It all enchanted me: the wicker picnic baskets; the china; the safari chair for the Prince, who surveyed the family from a small hillock and puffed his hookah, while his wife arranged the lunch of flatbread and olives, mezze, cold roast chicken legs and drumsticks.
After we’d eaten, the small children seemed to like it when I told them stories of kangaroos, which they knew how to imitate from television. And I demonstrated a kookaburra laugh I learned to do as a schoolgirl. It sounded lost in the orange grove with the Golan Heights only a few kilometres away.
Charming and disarming. A closed world you were invited to enter and, if you played the game, accepted it at its own estimate of itself, a magic circle for as long as it lasted. There were foreigners for whom it had lasted for nearly twenty years. Each of them said to me that they thought of leaving at the end of every month, when the demands had become unendurable. Each of them told me to write a book about it. Not the one I was there to write. Each of them was utterly loyal and devoted to Sidi and Sitti. I was told the next generation was the problem—whose sense of entitlement to the services of the extremely efficient foreign staff who had run the household and its grounds for most of their lifetimes, now felt free to issue orders, and express irritation, and even outrage, when tasks weren’t carried out to their satisfaction.
Sometimes it seemed to us foreigners, who were permitted to witness aspects of the private lives, that the younger generation and their spouses were set on undermining their parents. This can happen in any family, but a monarchy is more than a family. This one had a mother who was a glamourous outsider. And a father who was the Crown Prince no longer, and a melancholy figure sometimes as he trudged across the lawn to spill his story to a hireling.
The dramatics of everyday life kept everyone going. There was the ouster’s son who wanted to go to college, but the one he desired to go to had a higher entry score than he was capable of achieving, or he needed more wasta than the boy’s father could legitimately ask the Princess, who kept the purse, to supply. Then there was the able young woman dressed in hijab and jeans who had a degree in engineering and replaced the poor New Zealander in his white hat and managed a team of Egyptian labourers. When her wedding ring was lost, the entire family was out with torches, searching, the evening before one of the summer garden parties. The generosity and kindness of the House of Hashemites was legendary.
Then banishment happened to me. Except that I removed myself, after many visits and months there, and several pleas to stay. I left because of a tone of voice angrily giving me orders. So trivial it seems from this distance, I am astonished. But then I unpack the events of that last couple of weeks—though ‘events’ is the wrong word. They were more rumours spreading from the Hashemites’ London household to their household in the Royal Palace in old Amman; mere descriptions of what was observed, through a window or a doorway, in a lovely summer garden. These observations were part of my life in Jordan. Rumours and gossip, second- and third-hand most of them, and impossible to check.
Princes don’t answer mobile phones or emails; intermediaries do it on their behalf. Once, though, I was called to the phone in the Hotel Zenobia in Palmyra. The PA had insisted the Prince tell me what he thought about one of the earlier drafts of the book. He told me how much he liked it and how very pleased he was. Writers, editors, amanuenses—whatever I was—need feedback, and his words kept me going for weeks. Hearing from Sidi Hassan while in Palmyra meant something huge.
The PA and I had taken ourselves to Syria for a few days. We went to Damascus, and explored the Old City; sat in the courtyard of the Umayyad mosque, watching the families and their beautiful children playing between the pillars. A stall holder and his mates, jewellers, in Bab Touma Street, told us how lucky we were to live in Jordan because it was a monarchy—which, of course, we reported back to Sidi Hassan. He couldn’t go into Syria because of the ‘bad blood between the governments’, the PA told me. Then we were driven east to Palmyra and the Roman ruins, to see the baths of Diocletian, his camp and the Temple of Al-Lat, as the sun set and the Turkish tourist buses filled up the car parks.
Very soon after I left Jordan, word reached me from London that I was being badmouthed, my name blackened. I had let them down. I had spoken rudely to Princess Badiya. I told myself I didn’t care. Then I found I did care very much, and wondered how I would have felt if my daughter had been criticised for speaking angrily to an underling.
Inconceivable. My Australian daughter, when I told her on the telephone that I had withdrawn from the project, didn’t know what an underling was.
Nella had an apartment in Rome, ‘at the Vatican’, because, she told me, her uncle, Pier Giorgio Frassati, had been beatified in 1990. He had died of polio aged 24, caught while working for the poor in the slums of Torino. Soon after the Hashemites had visited her, and perhaps to make some kind of amends, Nella invited me for soup in her kitchen, and for advice on coffin handles ‘suitable for Australia’. Her uncle’s remains were to accompany Pope Benedict to Sydney for World Youth Day. I had nothing useful to say about coffin handles, but the body did go to Sydney, and crowds of young people followed his coffin.
When I was no longer working on the book, I put the word out to literary editors that I was available to do occasional reviewing. Stephen Romei at the Australian asked me to review Alex Miller’s complete opus. He told me copies were on their way, but they were taking their time to arrive from the publisher in Sydney, to Cortona, high above the Valdichiana. First came a message from UPS that the town did not exist and I must have the name wrong. Then came phone calls from first Rome and then Milan, informing me that, as I lived in campagna, I must tell them how far I was from the nearest town. A week went by. Then from Arezzo, just 50 kilometres away, came a call from a delivery truck, asking for directions through Cortona’s one-way streets only wide enough for a motorino or an old Fiat. My suggestion that I meet the truck in the nearest piazza was refused. Delivery had to be to my door. Another week went by, then my name was shouted below my window and and I looked out to see a smiling delivery man holding a large box. Miracolo, he said. Alex Miller’s nine novels, his life’s work, had arrived.
This part of Italy, near the border of Umbria and Tuscany, is covered in a glistening web of writers. Some of the greatest, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, were born around here. Then came the flag bearers of the canon in English: the Brownings, the Sitwells, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Edith Wharton. During the summer, English tourists walked through olive groves scattering the seeds of field flowers, exchanging writerly stories and literary gossip. Sometimes I joined them. They pointed out the house where Sonia Orwell stayed for a bit after George died, where one of his best biographers still lived, just down the hill. There was the table and the little chair Germaine Greer left behind in a farmhouse. Nobody approved of David Plante’s memoir Difficult Women, for his exposé of Jean Rhys and Sonia Orwell, but the verdict was that Germaine could look after herself. Cortona now offered creative writing classes and writers’ residencies in convents, a demand triggered no doubt by Frances Mayes, reputed to be part of a syndicate building a replica of a Tuscan village in California. Umberto Eco would approve.
I sometimes mentioned Australian authors as I walked through the hills. No one had heard of Miles Franklin, whose huge biography by Jill Roe, I would be reviewing, or Alex Miller. Or Christina Stead. But Patrick White and Peter Carey cut the mustard. So did Alan Moorehead, whose daughter’s family had a holiday house on the west coast, which I visited one long weekend. David Malouf and Germaine Greer had houses near Cortona for years. And Australians often stayed with Jeffrey Smart when he was in the neighbourhood. Barry Humphries visited Jeffrey often and everyone there knew both of them.
Who is Alex Miller? asked Carmen, by far my best-read friend in London, when I mentioned I was waiting for his books. This produced in me a frisson of fear. Would Miller stand up? Would something have happened to me here to leach the life out of his words? Would they sound thin, his concerns provincial? Would I have to quietly back away from writing this piece?
I first read Patrick White and Christina Stead on a beach in Greece; Márquez in a park in Rushcutters Bay; and Ismail Kadare while waiting for my daughter in an ashram in Tamil Nadu—but it was the writing that affected me, not where I read it. Alex Miller’s opus indeed still did—and what seemed to me his best, Journey to the Stone Country and Conditions of Faith I passed on to English friends who needed to read them. As I walked, I longed to describe Australian flowers that bloom after rain, the colours of coastal heath, the sand dunes, the long, empty surf beach where I swam as a child, and still do when I am at home. But words failed me—so I recommended books instead.
It was summer and I’d hit the wall again. I’d had an array of visitors staying: couples, friends from my old shared life with my husband. No one mentioned that his book was out and making waves along with the US primaries. He hadn’t sent me a copy, which hurt, but the mail was slow. I sometimes listened to interviews on my iPod when I walked alone, including one where my husband mocked Tuscany as a place that doesn’t really challenge you like the backblocks of Amerika. Oh, really.
The woman fruttivendola at the market quizzed me about being a donna sola. Si si, I said firmly and bought ten clementini e prezzemolo I didn’t need. Then I went back to the apartment and worked out how to die.
First, I would post a letter to the children, then send an email to Lyndall and Carmen. Then I would cancel tonight’s dinner with Lyndall’s friends. Then I would put the keys under the doctor’s door and tell him where to find me.
Then the power failed again and I had no internet, so I couldn’t check to see if I had anything strong enough to do the job. Then I took half an old painkiller and stopped weeping. Basta.
When I had first travelled to Damascus in 2006 with the PA, she showed me a small, cheap hotel close to the Old City, near the Umayyad mosque, and where the town’s best rug sellers were. Later, I went alone several times, loving the anonymity, the din and the people.
Here, a foreign woman sitting alone represented a chance for a conversation. I’d sit outside in the morning at one of the cafés in the Old City, with coffee, and a bread roll covered in sesame seeds, and parents would send their child over to me to ask politely if they could practise their English. Other people told me about their work. I once met a woman who told me she was a child psychologist who was trained in Aleppo and was now the first to be working in a school. She introduced me to her brother, who was an engineer working on a bridge-building project in the south, near Homs. I met an old woman at the spice market who showed me how to mix zahtar. She had the spice man grind the ingredients—dried thyme, ground and roasted pistachio and sesame seeds, a pinch of paprika, coriander, cumin, allspice and sumac—for her in a shallow wooden bowl lined with brown paper, sniffing every spice before he mixed them. After she was satisfied, he gave us both a taste, with a saucer of olive oil and a piece of flatbread.
I loved Damascus, with its walled Old City, and its eight gates and the central spine of the Roman Straight Street—the world’s oldest continuously occupied city, since the third millennium BC. Temples, churches and mosques, even a few hammans and madrassas, bakers and butchers, coffee houses, and stalls selling everything from nuts and bolts to fine leather goods and carpets. The Old City of Damascus housed people from all over the region but ghettoes never formed. In houses overhanging the narrow alleys lived Maronites, Copts, Catholics and Greek Orthodox people, right alongside the Jewish, Sunni and Shia Muslim quarters.
Each morning, I’d join the queue at the Umayyad mosque for a ‘foreigner’s ticket’, and a grey abaya to put over my clothes and my headscarf. Built after the Muslim conquest of Damascus in 634, on the site of a Christian basilica dedicated to John the Baptist, the mosque is a holy site for all—Shia and Sunni Muslims and Christians. The mosque has three minarets, a vast colonnaded courtyard open to the sky, and four glowing Mihrab niches in prayer halls. I sometimes sat for hours on the steps in the courtyard, watching family groups in the shade of the colonnades, parents taking it in turns to go into the prayer rooms, children playing quietly, others picnicking.
The space was cool and peaceful. I felt very welcome; invited in, to add my shoes to the pile and to sit. The sounds of commerce from the suq and the narrow maze of streets of the Old City did not penetrate, but once I was outside again, the noise and crowds were deafening.
Eighty kilometres from Damascus, on the north road through the Qalamun mountains in the Nebek region, is Deir Mar Musa, a Syrian monastery originally founded by Abyssinian monks in the sixth century AD, and restored in the 1980s by an Italian Jesuit priest, Father Paolo Dall’Oglio. It is an astonishing place—a self-contained fortress high in the mountains, growing its own food, providing a retreat for Christians and Muslims who worship together in the extensively frescoed chapel. Staying overnight once, on my way back to Jordan, I helped dust books in the library, then sat on the flat rooftop, looking out over the mountains towards Lebanon.
At the start of October 2008, I returned to Amman for a few weeks. This was to write about the work of Ruwwad Al-Tanmeya, a non-profit community development organisation, in the old refugee camp in Jabal Al-Nathif, which had impressed me on an earlier visit. But it was also to check if I would be stopped at the visa counter at Queen Alia airport and sent back to Rome, as I had often seen people being stopped at small airports in Italy and refused visas. I am not black, which might have helped; nor was my name on any list at the visa counter. My passport was stamped. I hailed a cab, and went to the lovely apartment belonging to Teresa, a friend of my Australian friend the PA and of several of the other foreigners who work for the Hashemites. Teresa was pleased when I asked if I could stay in her apartment as a paying guest. She is also the great-niece of Nabokov, which interested me a good deal.
Except for my contact with Teresa, silence had fallen, as though a plug had been pulled. My emails to acquaintances in Amman were unanswered; my phone calls not returned or the line went dead. That I’d chosen to leave seemed to have put me in the category of beyond the pale. My efforts to leave graciously, and with maximum efficiency, so the book I’d been writing for the Prince wouldn’t suffer would, I could now see, be turned around and inside out, until it became about my intransigence, my inability to complete the book I took on, with such high hopes and unreal expectations, more than two years before. But I did complete it. And left it in six neat photocopied piles, and later, as advised by the PA, who said if I were to write about this time, I must not use her name.
I was outside the protection of the Palace. Teresa told me that Sitti Sarvath was furious with me after Nella’s inside story, whatever that might have been. I was shocked, though not surprised. Nella, with only the vaguest notion of what I was doing in Jordan, would have sniffed the wind and flattered Sitti Sarvath. Nella laughed and said she can’t remember when I asked her what she said.
When I’d arrived at Teresa’s, she told me she had been roundly criticised for allowing me to stay, as if she had breached some sort of protocol. She was very angry. How dare someone I haven’t even met tell me who I can have in my own house! Recently widowed after a long marriage to a Jordanian army man, she now needed to speak up for herself, she told me. I felt anxious that Rabeea Al Nasser and Raghda Butros who were expecting me at Ruwwad would also have been got at—but they said nothing about this and were happy for me to interview them about their work.
Staying at Teresa’s was delightful. Her apartment was cool and beautiful, with lovely rugs, cane furniture bedecked with her tapestried cushions in patterns collected from all over the Middle East. She suggested I invite friends to dinner, but I was no longer sure any of them would be happy to hear from me.
I went for a walk that first afternoon, to try to orient myself. No one walked in Amman except poor Egyptians looking for work and Filippina maids exercising small dogs. In this affluent neighbourhood, there were guards in sentry boxes outside the Russian embassy and the houses of the rich.
I was heading in what I thought was a direct line from the street with the red chilli house that ran at a right angle to Mecca Street, just above the Fifth Circle. Each time I came, there seemed to be another circle, more rubble, and more hideous jerry-built office blocks and cheap housing.
There was no traffic in the side street, so I walked down the middle of the road because most of the footpaths were broken, with olive trees growing through the pavement. It was the second day of Eid, so people would be sleeping in the afternoon after the deprivations of Ramadan, before the feasting after dark. I saw only poor men who looked like they’d been dismissed for the day from some small job, of cutting grass or holding a hose. They didn’t look at me as I tried to keep track of where I was. The streets curved and ran out, and headed up hills into blank walls, or took a sudden turn to the end of the precipice above the highway. Piles of rubble from building sites blocked the way and mangy cats searched for food—one limping cat slunk across my path, mean and desperate looking. The dogs were on leads except for those behind the high fences, which all seemed to be German Shepherds or Rottweilers, leaping at the wire and barking.
I started to realise walking was a dumb thing to be doing at five o’clock in the afternoon on a cool day when the sun would set soon after six and I didn’t know the way back. But I had to get out for a bit. Teresa was preparing dinner and wouldn’t let me help her. Over a sumptuous meal of iced basil and tomato soup, Turkish lamb and aubergine, and a sorbet of fresh mint, Teresa told me stories about her grand Polish and Russian forebears—Nabokov, especially. And she brought out the family tree, the photographs and press cuttings. We talked about her nieces, and my children in London and Australia, and about cooking.
Teresa had a satellite TV, so could watch everything she wanted: Nigella Lawson on the BBC’s The Food Programme, and political news from all over the world. In Cortona, where the reception was unreliable, I too had been glued to Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and to Rachel Maddow, when I could see them through the static. In Amman, we learned the astonishing news that John McCain had chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate. In the evenings, we watched as the financial crisis spread to Europe and Asia. After Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and Lloyds in London rescued the UK’s largest mortgage lender, there was no knowing where it would end. We sat up late together watching a re-run of Roger Federer beating Andy Murray in the US Open. Teresa was much more knowledgeable than I about tennis and also about economics. We shared our anxieties about our small amounts of capital. The rich will be moving their money, she said; ‘mainstreet’ always suffers.
Each morning, the cab dropped me in Jabal Al-Nathif, a poor suburb close to the centre of Amman and near to the entrance of Ruwwad. I would follow the flash of green paint on a low wall marking where I would turn left into a street of sparkling yellow, green and blue buildings proclaiming themselves a library, a post office, a children’s workshop and a meeting room for tertiary students. Greenery hung over a pink wall, where a bunch of bright-eyed children waited to show me the way. I followed the murals down a long alley to a shady playground and crowded upstairs offices.
Urgent solutions were being sought in Jordan, and elsewhere, to neglected areas made vulnerable to extremism and manipulation. Jabal Al-Nathif was such a place. It began life in 1948 as a temporary camp for Palestinian refugees. Then, after the Six Day War in 1967, when hundreds of thousands more Palestinians were displaced from the West Bank, the camp, and others like it in Jordan, became permanent. Apart from a couple of poorly funded schools, for sixty years there had been no official recognition or new services, not even a police station.
Just a few weeks before my first visit to Amman, in December 2005, the Al-Qaeda suicide bombings of three international hotels killed fifty-seven people, mainly locals. One of them was Mousab Khorma, then deputy director of the Cairo Amman Bank, whose legacy of community activism already ran deep.
Corporate philanthropy—any kind of philanthropy—was new to the Arab world when Aramex, the Jordanian global transportation and logistics company, selected Jabal Al-Nathif as the community they wished to engage with. Raghda Butros, Aramex’s founding director, told me that the people of Jabal Al-Nathif had identified repairing the run-down primary school as their first priority. Materials were donated, labour volunteered; and, crucially, the process was documented and filmed. In February 2006, the film was shown to thirty businesspeople, and some of them joined Aramex in forming a foundation. By the time I first visited Ruwwad, in 2008, it was funded by ten local and regional companies and individuals, with the determination neither to solicit nor accept donor funds, which almost invariably have strings and other people’s agendas attached.
Government agencies had always failed the area—and Ruwwad’s motives were at first queried. But today, where once people struggled to raise children in makeshift housing without services, there is a health centre and a clothing depot, a police station, an employment agency, a nursery, a ceramics workshop, a computer centre—all run by local people to meet what they perceive to be their most urgent needs.
Pivotal to it all is the Mousab Khorma Youth Education & Empowerment Fund, which Ruwwad created in November 2005. In less than ten years, more than 1500 young people have been awarded full or partial tertiary scholarships in a wide range of fields—art history, veterinary studies; many girls do engineering. They choose these fields for themselves, Ruwwad encouraging them to think big. All the scholarship recipients must agree to a fundamental contract—to repay in kind with four hours a week of volunteer work back in their community.
Students choose from Jeeran, the neighbourhood program, where they repair and otherwise improve houses, to help the housebound; or Shababeek, the children’s program, where they share their talents, and pass on some of the skills acquired through study, by mentoring younger children. All volunteer work is to be done with respect for the people being helped. This, too, is fundamental. Volunteers are formally assessed each semester, as a condition of the continuation of their scholarships—a crucial component often lacking in other such programs. So, the young people avoid developing a sense of entitlement and learn the satisfaction of giving back in their own community. Volunteers and staff told me again and again that this circle of interdependence was Ruwwad’s most valuable lesson.
Ruwwad’s genius is that it is home grown. Instead of a one-sizefits-all approach, as with so many aid-based projects, the emphasis is on human interaction, skills exchange and having a minimum of paperwork. Juggling the community’s priorities, and extremely modest budget, depends on the know-how of local people. The volunteer medical program helps families once crippled by drug dependency. Children who had been unable to read now gravitate after school to the sparkling Jabal Al-Nathif library, with its blue tables and full bookshelves, where local women read stories and help the children select books. A volunteer who describes himself as a poet teaches a group of boys the complex spelling game he has invented.
More than 85 per cent of Ruwwad’s staff come from Jabal Al-Nathif and everyone has a story to tell. Rabeea, a librarian and distinguished writer, established the library. Telling children stories and reading to them is the most important work of all, Rabeea said, because it releases their imagination, and helps them deal with their difficulties and often traumatic memories. Libraries are safe places, without hierarchy, that create a spirit of impartiality, she said.
Rabeea told me about an impoverished municipal library with empty shelves she had been trying to help a few years before. One day, the large northern city it was situated in was to be honoured by a visit from Prince Hassan, who had asked to see the library. The day before the visit, the Ministry of Education delivered several truckloads of books, so that the Prince, an intellectual and a reader, would not be embarrassed by what he saw. Rabeea threatened to tell him this, and the library was allowed to keep the books. Now she works to establish outreach children’s library programs, run by volunteers, in villages where the schools often have no books at all.
When I visited again, in October 2008, the room at the top of the stairs was packed as it always is for Dardashaat, the session where the young students share their quandaries and ideas each Saturday morning. The girls sat together. They wore long-sleeved blouses, jeans and trainers, and white scarves covered their hair. The boys, who had made an effort to look cool, stood at the back. They were all from some of the poorest families in Jordan, and were now recipients of Mousab Khorma scholarships. They were Palestinians mainly, but now Iraqis and Syrians displaced by war had moved into Jabal Al-Nathif, as had Egyptian labourers, who queued each morning hoping to get work on Amman’s innumerable construction sites.
Only one boy and girl sat together, rather self-consciously. ‘They would be punished if they did that outside,’ the translator whispered. She told me the girl’s name meant ‘revolution’. The group discussion a few weeks before was about men and women respecting each other and being friends.
Often Dardashaat is about manners: about treating people with dignity, why modesty matters, and how to cope with change. Western values come up in the Saturday sessions: which ones are good and which must be resisted; how parents and brothers can be helped to understand that a girl can be both virtuous and out in the world. There was a real sense in the room that day that the girls were strong. Later, one of them told me: ‘All girls know how to be strong and brave. Boys have to be encouraged.’
Ramadan had just ended, and this Saturday morning one of the coordinators asked, What happened to you in the last week that made you think again? First, there were a few minutes’ silence and everyone was encouraged to close their eyes. Then, a young man, a sharp dresser, with slick black hair, pointy shoes and a neck chain, took the floor. He spoke with great feeling and much breast-beating. ‘He has been crossed in love,’ the translator said in my ear. The girl promised to him three years before had left him because his studies were going on too long and she wanted to get married and start a family. A widowed man in his fifties, with money, had approached her father, who agreed that the older man was a better bet.
Everyone listened intently: the girls with downcast eyes, the boys nudging each other and making comments. Then a young woman stood up, went to the front and said firmly that the girl did the wrong thing, and should wait: A young husband with qualifications is worth waiting for.
You are living in a dream, another woman contradicted her. If the girl can marry now, she should. This boy will be two more years studying, then he’ll have to find work in another country, send money back home to support his brothers and sisters, as well as his wife and children. What kind of a life is that?
The boys seemed to think the young man was badly treated, that the girl must be no good and must have done something to encourage the offer. You’re well out of it, they told him. Some of the girls disagreed angrily. The last to speak was a boy in a blue T-shirt who sold roasted corncobs day and night on the streets of Downtown. An orphan, he lived in a hut nearby and a student volunteer was teaching him to read. The translator told me he never missed a session. You must stick to study, the boy told the room, and trust that the right wife will come. Insh’allah. Everyone seemed to agree.
The issues raised that morning ranged widely. The girls’ questions were mainly about friendship and fathers. One thought her friends all wanted something from her. One realised her father could never change, but she loved him and didn’t want to defy him. The boys were more open than the girls. One wept when he described the death of his grandmother, and how she had cared for him in Jabal Al-Nathif after his parents had died in the first Gulf War. Loss and rage drove this small community, who knew each other’s stories and the calamities that had brought them there. Many had relatives trapped in Gaza.
Wounds ran deep as wave after wave of displaced and struggling people arrived in this impoverished community. But something else was happening that ran counter to the despair and poisonous ideologies that were fuelling extremism all over the region. The young participants in the Ruwwad programs knew they had been given a chance they would not get elsewhere—and that there is hope.
At that point, plans were taking shape for similar communities in other parts of the region: in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. I returned to Cortona and started to think about how Ruwwad’s methods might work in Australia.
In Cortona, the weather had changed and the pool was closed, so Lyndall and I sometimes went to soak in the ancient Bagno Vignoni in the Val d’Orcia, breathing in the warm mists from hot mineral springs. We planned journeys together and made some of them happen—to Damascas and Aleppo; and later to Dubai, where some of her family were based. I hoped to persuade her to visit me in Australia but she never would. The distance, the politics, the treatment of refugees. We imagined meeting in India, which we both loved and had visited often.
Then it was the seventh anniversary of 9/11, and I was sitting looking out over the Valdichiana, which still had loops of pale mist on the fields. The hills were blue against a pink heat haze and the air was cool. I loved it there, where I knew I had grown stronger. I fell in a heap sometimes but not so often.
I had been fantasising about staying there, toying with the idea of finding a small, crumbling house to rent, and hoping my family would find ways to visit me. I even looked at a couple of houses below Cortona, and one rather derelict one up the hill, opposite Nella’s. What I’d live on was even more uncertain than where I would live. The occasional requests to do reviews and columns would soon dry up. I had written about the earthquake, and about what was happening in Dubai, but that was about it. I could teach English and help a few people with money write their books, but not much else.
My way of life was an anachronism in these times, which were a hideous hinge between one era and another. Hard-heartedness was on the rise. I was a privileged woman bobbing around the edges of things, while millions were moving across borders, trying to feed their children and find a safe place to sleep.