Ahlan! Apologies for such a long delay. The new semester has begun; regular classes began last week. I moved in with my host family three weeks ago and so far it has been a very positive experience. My family consists of host parents, three sisters (ages 16, 14, and 6), and an array of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Actually, my host mother’s sister and her husband (and Roba, my good friend and classmate) live in the same building, so I see them every day as well. I have eaten wonderful food, including trying okra for the first time! It was stewed with tomatoes and onions and eaten with yogurt and bread- yum. One of my main goals for this semester is to learn to cook Arabic food; insha’Allah it’ll happen.
On a random note, I'm still trying to put pictures up, but I think that the university's wireless connection is just too slow for it to work. I'll try to find a faster connection someplace else this week.
It’s time for Business Writing now, but I’ll leave you with an entry that I wrote on Jan. 28 for the Intercultural Communication journal that we had to keep for a couple of weeks.
28/01/08 - Tela
Last semester, I remember listening to a friend’s tales of living with a maid in her homestay. The way my friend told it, the woman, constantly ordered around by the matriarch of the house, slept on a cot in the kitchen, rose before everyone else in the morning (and was the last to bed), and had almost no personal freedom to speak of. I confided that I was glad that my future host family had no maid. I didn’t know if I could deal with the inevitable awkwardness of having someone there to serve me, and what if having someone at their command would bring out an uglier side of the family I would hope to love?
Her name is Tela, short for much longer name that no one seems able to pronounce. She is a twenty year-old Sri Lankan woman who speaks just a few words of English and even less Arabic. She lives fi beit khalti [in my cousin's (Roba's) house]; her time is shared between our two households. When she arrived last week just a couple of days after it snowed, she was wearing a light, short-sleeved shirt and sandals. Although she never stopped smiling, she looked clearly uncomfortable sitting in my family’s living room. To their credit, my host mother and aunt each made strong, Arab attempts at feeding Tela large amounts of food, making her sit by the soba to warm up, and trying to get her to go straight to bed thereafter. From that moment, I have seen my family treat Tela with full respect. She does wash the dishes and do general housecleaning, but she also sat with us at the latest mass family birthday party and had thrust upon her the same plate of four types of birthday cake as everyone else. If I had doubts about family members’ personalities changing when in command of a maid, those doubts have already been erased.
As pleased as I am with the way my family treats Tela, it does not eliminate the awkward discomfort I feel because of her presence. This evening, Najwa asked if I wanted the maid to clean my room. Before I even thought about it, I responded in the negative and said that I would do it myself. Thinking about this later, I realized that my unwillingness to have her clean my living space was about far more than not wanting someone else touching my stuff. This was where cultures clashed. In Jordan, status is very much conferred. In this hierarchical society, maids are of a significantly, significantly lower status than my host family. Therefore, it is appropriate that they hire her and can order her to do what they want. Regarding her mental capacity, someone mentioned proudly how shatra [clever] she is, especially since Sri Lankans are usually stupid.
Conversely, my reaction (discomfort) to having a maid stems from my culture being one where status is earned and universal equality is an ideal. To me, Tela is not worth any less as a person than anyone else is. I am not surprised that she was able to learn to count to ten in Arabic (prompting the shatra comment); she is probably a perfectly competent woman simply stuck behind a formidable language barrier. In fact, I find myself wanting to help bridge that barrier by having her teach me some phrases in Sri Lankan, more for her sake than mine. I’d like to make her feel a little less alone, a little less uncomfortable, in what I would guess is a strange, intimidating new environment. In terms of her duties as a maid, because of my subconscious assumption that we as humans are equal, there is internal discord at the idea of her cleaning my room or making me tea, things I am perfectly capable of doing myself. Being treated like this makes me feel like a guest in my own home- perhaps a feeling viewed much less negatively in the Arab world than in the U.S.?
And so I find myself treading the line between what is acceptable to me and what is expected from my host family. If she mops my five square feet of tile floor space and runs a dust cloth along the window sill, then okay. I’ll keep the room as clean as possible to keep her role to a minimum. I haven’t yet acted on the desire to learn some Sri Lankan because I am still not sure of what type of relationship is acceptable in this culture. Would it be far below my conferred status to greet her in Sri Lankan, as opposed to her making the effort to greet me in English or Arabic? Am I allowed to attempt to form any sort of friendship with this woman, or should I keep the relationship as formal as possible? I’m still not sure.
