garden confessions

Living in a high, dry city, we've had the windows open all day and night for months. The screens usually keep out the occasional night-time mosquito. 

The problem is the flowers. In the morning, the dainty 5-petal white flowers smell faintly of honeysuckle. At night, they are nauseating, and no I'm not pregnant. They look like lovely decorative barrettes on a huge tangle of vines across the front wall of the house. But they reek of lilies or worse, old roses. The smell of them can wake me up, on the other side of the house.

We had no idea that the back garden was full of fruit trees until the spring came. Two lemon, two plum, four olive, two peach, and two enormous grape vines that cover the 10x10' trellis. How wonderful! A regular garden of eden! We'll eat them, I thought. What a lovely lesson for the children.

Then the fruit started growing. I had no idea that peaches grow along the branches like giant insect eggs. There were hundreds of them on the little trees. I missed the window for picking them. The weekends I put in the effort to climb and pick were too early and they were impossibly sour. Then they started rotting and falling while I was at work. Then the ants came. And the peaches from the hard-to-reach branches fell and blackened the tables and chairs and tiles with over-sweetness. We abandoned the back garden for a week or more to avoid the carnage.

where nighttime entertainment meets daytime drama

Last night I watched Generation Kill, the first episode. I'm always up for a really good series. And I do feel like I need to watch more films about Iraq, from every perspective. 

The cultural divide between me and the soldiers was grand canyon-like. They are marines trained to kill. There's a lot of testosterone and some talk about the supremacy of the white man.

Meanwhile, I spent the day writing up interviews I'd had with some Iraqis. I got teary-eyed at my desk as I wrote about a an ex-soldier wounded in the Iran-Iraq War who did a puppet show for the Iraqi children at a kindergarten we support. He was this deep-voiced guy with meat hooks for hands. He told me later he'd never held a puppet before in his life. "It gave me great pleasure to make the children happy since I had such a sad childhood myself."

It's going to be a tough on the outside, healing child on the inside kind of story. Corny? You had to meet the guy.

So in the last scene of the GKill episode, these marine kids come across some defecting Iraqi soldiers trudging through the desert, and they treat them badly--pour out their meager ration of water, steal from them, force them to the ground, mock them...

I felt like I was watching invaders attacking my neighbors. It was extremely offensive. The Iraqis were more familiar to me. 

Yet the kids were familiar to me, obviously. They're Americans for god's sake. 

I know TV is not reality. But dehumanization and cruelty to others is apparently a natural ingredient of war, no matter the justification. 

It made me feel naive in my little aid-worker bubble.

People sometimes wonder how I can bring my children into such a dangerous part of the world. But my world, the people we know and hang with, the expats and internationally-minded nationals, are of the same peace-loving, diversity-celebrating mindset that we are. We're all globe-huggin humanitarians. 

the beginning, off to a late start

The usual morning. Sipping coffee. Dressed for work. Trying to rush through my personal emails while Fe is outside with the children. I can hear her talking about how to take care of each other instead of fighting. Miles is conversing on a favorite topic: I am the biggest! I am bigger than Telmo. I am faster than you are. I am the winner!

No need to rush Miles to school. It's August. No need to rush to work. I'm part-time, after all. And I want to meet Thair who's coming to cut back the trees in the garden. This being Jordan, he's an hour late. 

Tardiness comes naturally to me though, and it's definitely a perk living abroad to have people be more understanding about it.

That said, most Jordanians seem to have higher expectations for punctuality than say Sudanese or Sierra Leonians. Infrastructural development makes it easier to get to places on time. Fewer real excuses.

So this is my first blog, naturally a bit late for a person who considers herself a writer of sorts.