The one topic….                      6/30/06

I’ve learned there’s one topic I should never discuss with Arabs….parenting.  Wait, I should qualify my statement….middle and upper class Arabs.  They farm out all their parenting duties to house help and they can’t understand why Americans don’t do the same.  And then I wonder why I constantly come across brick walls at work of people telling me, ‘You don’t understand our culture, we can’t be held to the same standards as westerners.”  In my moments of greater frustration, this just makes me want to scream – why are people in this part of the world so unwilling to take responsibility for their actions and to hold others accountable for theirs?

I was talking about parenting, right?  Ok, so I asked Kimberly how she deals with the questions and comments about how she should have full-time, live-in help to take care of her son.  She told me with a smirk, “I tell them that I’ve decided to raise my son the “American way” and that usually shuts people up instantly.”  It shuts them up, because for a lot of people they want their children to grow up "like Americans" which is some fantasy image they have of Americans, and bears no relation to how they view American politics. Borrowing on Kimberly's style, when one of the partners said to me today, “House help makes our lives so much easier because they take care of our children, so I feel sorry for you Americans who don’t have that.”, I told him, “Actually, most American parents feel that its very important to have a close relationship with their children because they need that relationship when the kids grow older and there is so much “trouble” they can get into.”   It’s not necessarily the reason why I parent as I do, but I know it would have the desired effect – it shut him up.

Omar is certainly not a perfect kid, he challenges me in ways of relating to him as another being that I’ve never been challenged before.  But, we know each other like the back of our hands.  I never dreamed of having such an intimate relationship with my own child.   I enjoy spending my free time with him (except when he wakes me up at 6am on Sunday mornings!), he’s definitely a part of my life that I gain the most pleasure from.  I think parents who don’t have this in their life are missing something big.  And I can understand why parents would want to shrink away from the responsibilities of parenting…it requires you to be completely present to your child, which often means suppressing your own childish desires at the moment to put your child’s ahead of yours, it means often feeling inadequate and incompetent because you can’t really “control” this other being that came from you, and it means coming face to face with any guilt for never being exactly what your child wants you to be.

What is the meaning of partnership?                              6/27/06

I have instructed myself – when something gets me angry, step back, take a deep breath, and don’t act on it until the thoughts are no longer completely pre-occupying my brain.  With over 12 years of career experience, I sometimes feel like it is only now that I am learning the most important lessons.

The first troublesome “partner” is my own colleague from CHF who runs the Jordan office.  She is completely flighty!  She tells me information, we have conversations on which things are decided, and 3 hours later she is contradicting herself and claiming she never told me these things.  I have decided I need to step back and keep my distance from her and try to work my own way with my own sense and logic and just try to deal with her as “background noise”.  Then again, she has this charm that makes people open up and reveal themselves to us in meetings and I sometimes feel like she's my essential side-kick.

Second we have another partner who owns a consulting company.  The company we are doing the work for has asked me propose strategies which are creative and which have been successful in other countries.  When I ask this partner to be creative, he comes back with outdate 20 year old theories.  I told him that we have to examine labor DEMAND, labor DEMAND and labor DEMAND. He hands me a workplan that has 25 items of labor SUPPLY, and 2 items for labor demand.  I wanted to scream!  Not to mention, he gets completely wound up nervous over the littlest thing.

We have another partner who has spent so much time negotiating over already agreed upon money, and is posturing so that they can try to look like they are leading the work.  I’m about to pull my hair out because they aren’t actually doing any work yet.

I’m remaining optimistic. The only way to get through the next 6 weeks is to just day each day at a time and concentrate on the task in front of me.

Hotter than Hell!                                   6/26/06

I don’t know scorching heat.  I come from Rochester, NY with average snowfall of 60” per year and where summer doesn’t come until July and sticks around until August. I know biting, cold wind.  But I’ve never known stinging heat.

The daily high temperatures in Aqaba over the past three days have been 107 degrees.  Today is supposed to be cooler, maybe only 102.  I walked the one block from my apartment to the office, and I had heart palpitations.  Walking in the heat felt like I was walking through molasses. I wonder how people have survived this heat for thousands of years.  My guess is that their daily schedules called for a long stretch of siesta for the better part of the day – 12pm-7pm. 

In fact, yesterday at 6pm I headed out to run some errands, and to my surprise there wasn’t a soul on the streets. But then by 9pm, the streets were lively and crowded.

In general, Aqaba is a very lovely place.  The backdrop is red, desert mountains which slope into the Red Sea.  The streets are lined with palm trees sprouting dates.  There are green, attractive parks which both local residents and tourists stride through.  It is serene.  I just fear that the fast and big development planned is not necessarily the best for the community.  I guess that is why I am here.

Now I know why the Jordanians are proud people            6/25/06

I no longer care what people think about me and my habits in this part of the world, not that I am insensitive (I don’t wear a string bikini, not that I have the body for one, on the beach as I saw one tourist doing.  I don’t walk down the street in short skirts like I’ve seen tourists doing).  But, I am not going to settle for less based on assumptions of what women “should or shouldn’t do”.    I guess a woman driving herself the three hours from Amman to Aqaba is one of those things that people assume a woman just shouldn't do because she's not as capable as a man.  I laugh!  Three hours along a straight, easy highway?  Even Omar’s phillipine Nanny was a nutcase with nerves because she thought I couldn’t handle it.

Last year, I drove to Petra without a problem.  Petra is on the way to Aqaba.  This time, I got to travel the 100km past the Petra turn off and it was absolutely breathtaking.  Now I know why Jordanians are so proud of their country.  I didn’t have time to stop and take pictures, but I intend to do so on my way back.  The scenery is red, flat dessert with red mountains rising out of it.  The landscape is formed by the yearly winter rains that rush through the normally dry wadis (river beds).  I can easily imagine how Lawrence of Arabia fell in love with this area of the world.

Birthday wishes                                                            6/24/06

I no longer have high expectations of any “special days”, that sort of went out the window with the divorce.  In fact, I chuckle by now expecting the worst from these kind of days – holidays, birthdays, anniversarys, they are just a few days out of the normal 365 days, and since some of those normal days out of the 365 days can be crappy, there are no exceptions for the “special” days.  Call me a cynic?  I will hold the believe until otherwise proven wrong.

Today was my birthday. I look forward to my birthday.  Historically, I have really crappy birthdays.  I don’t understand why I continue to look forward to them.

The day started with a 6:30 Am wake-up call from Omar, telling me he needed to pee.  I was exhausted from going to bed late.  I ran some errands in the morning with Omar, then returned to the house to find the landlord who was there helping Kimberly because the washing machine was broken.  As I tried to keep the kids occupied and out of everybody’s way, the landlord, who I had met when I lived in the apartment last fall, tried to start a conversation with me by telling me “Wow, you are Fat….I don’t remember you being Fat….were you this Fat last year?”  According to my doctor’s appointment last month, I am 1lb lighter than the previous year.  Since it was my birthday, I found no reason to hold back my sarcasm or rudeness so I told her, “Is that the most polite thing you could think of to say to somebody you haven't seen in 6 months?”  I’m not sure what was lost on translation, but she did quickly duck out of the room.

I have been called fat since I was 13 years old.  My brothers called me Fat, my mother called me Fat, I called myself Fat.  A few years ago, I was looking at some pictures from high school and college and suddenly realized, I was not fat.  I wasn’t thin and skinny, and I will never be.  I’m not even sure my birthday wish would ever be “to be thin.”  I like traveling in Spain, Italy and Egypt because I am surrounded by women with similar body types and I find myself not even thinking about my body image.

Kimberly was insistent that I leave her with the kids for a couple hours in the afternoon so I could go do something for myself.  That “something” consisted of running out to the shops in Amman so I could find some culturally-appropriate long-sleeved shirts since Aqaba is so much more conservative than Amman.  The kids were absolutely miserable while I was gone, and everything I tried on made me feel fat.

We went out for sushi with a colleague who shares my birthday.  She just returned from spending 10 days in Baghdad.  It was a nice evening – we talked about dating, getting old, motherhood, and how eating sushi and chocolate and drinking a margarita on your birthday with friends is sometimes the best you can wish for!