Bedouin family dinner

For the last evening in Jordan we wanted to do something special so we turned to Airbnb experiences for help. It was there that we found what was described as a true Iftar Bedouin dinner experience.

After a week in this amazing country we wanted the opportunity to meet the people and discuss all of the things that intrigued us and all of the ways in which we were seen by them. In fact, we wanted to interview a true Jordanian!

We drove about 20 minutes outside of Amman to meet our hosts: Oday and his family.

Oday seemed like a cool guy in his late 20’s who had done quite a bit of couch surfing mostly around Europe and his mother was a super nice lady that spoke some English and was going to honor us with a lesson on how to prepare the Iftar feast. According to him, they had set up the Iftar dinner experience in AirBnB in order to raise funds to help a Syrian refugee and her family and with this in mind we were happy to know we would be making some kind of contribution to a noble cause.

The rest of the family was not there yet but we were told that his father was in some kind of public office and the family had some kind of political connections.

We were excited to be there but somehow this was not exactly the Bedouin experience we had envisioned. This was an upper-middle-class family with plenty to tell us about the history of the country and its future plans but somehow they didn’t seem to be the wider representation of Jordan we were thinking of.

We swiftly proceeded to the kitchen and the first part of our experience began.

While we sliced and diced vegetables and learned the tricks of the meal preparation we felt the family trying more and more to treat us as one of them and to make us feel comfortable and I was positively struck by how casual everything was taken and how happy Oday’s mother seemed to be to show us how to do things. It was also very touching to see how respectful and helpful he was to his mother. As someone who definitely does not see his mother enough, I must admit I envied (in a good way) the access to the simple gestures of home and family.

But Oday was as keen to talk to us as we were to interact with him so we moved to the living room and began talking.

The discussion started with an overview of the history of the region but soon enough it turned political and eventually focused on his views of the country and the world around it. He tried to explain to us how Jordan really is a safe place and on how the simple fact that it is in the middle east creates generalized misconception. On the face of it, I would agree given our experiences in the capital and the more touristic places but I wonder if this is true off the beaten track as well…

He explained how the country had received successive waves of refugees and that many of the misconceptions came from the habits these people brought with them. That true Bedouins treated their women as their honour and that they had the freedom to act and dress as they may. True enough, in Amman women did not always cover their hair but in just about every city we visited the great majority of women did so and when we drove at night through smaller villages I cannot remember even one of them that didn’t do so.

We also had a very interesting discussion about the political ways of the world.

The most marking question of the night for me was: “Why is Arab blood cheaper than the rest?”.

The middle east seems to be the place of a multi-layered chess game where countries position themselves according to general interests and religious allegiance. Some countries have historically been aligned with the US and support their policies and some countries aligned more towards Russia. Through these symbioses, US and Russia gain footholds in the region and the local players receive support in different ways in order to advance their local agenda. In a parallel way, and often using the technological support from US or Russia, the countries of the region align more towards Saudi Arabia if they are in majority Sunni or towards Iran if they are Shia.

And it is in-between these games of interest that the middle eastern people live and often die.

Not long after, both his brother and father arrived and dinner was served. Tasty, cozy and with the best dessert we had in our entire stay in the country, it was a pleasure to share these moments with the family.

Traditionally after the meal we sat in the living room and shared a few more moments over coffee and, at the request of A, had an improvised hijab lesson.

She had spent the week fighting the wind blowing different scarves off her hair and we jumped at the opportunity to ask a real Jordanian how to set a scarf up so it won’t fly off all the time. 

In the end, with tons of gratitude, leftover food and the scarf which Oday’s mom generously offered us, we returned to our hostel and contemplated the evening.

True, at times it seemed like we were being shown a bit more how country wishes to see itself today and in the future and than what we perceive it to be but that is also a very interesting perspective and one which we are grateful for.

For the generosity, the warm welcome, the food, the chat and the scarf we’d both like to thank Oday and his family.

Barakallahu Feekum!