Take a Step Outside and Look up!

Oh, I just love autumn in Amman!!! Rather the opposite of the US/Europe, the fall/winter rains make the country green again. Roses and aloe flowers are blooming in my backyard.

Yesterday’s light rain was just enough to clean things up, deliver that rain-fresh smell but not send piles of cement construction stuff cascading down hilly streets. Not so wet the puppy paws get caked with mud, not so cold the cement walls take on a chill and necessitate three layers of clothing.

White fluffy clouds course through the sky, as if borne on the breath of God. I just walked outside, looked up, and breathed in His goodness. MMMmmmmmmm. Let the whole earth praise Him!

Pakistani Christian Saved Muslim Girls From Suicide Bomber

From CNN The quick-response action of a school janitor saved many:

“If he didn’t stop the suicide attacker, there could have been great, great destruction,” Zafar says.

“He’s now a legend to us,” says another 20-year-old student named Sumaya Ahsan. “Because he saved our lives, our friends’ lives.”

The janitor’s name was Pervaiz Masih. According to eyewitness accounts, the attacker approached disguised in women’s clothing. He shot the guard on duty, and then approached the cafeteria, which was packed with hundreds of female students.

Masih intercepted the bomber in the doorway, however, and the bomber self-detonated right outside the crowded hall, spraying many of his explosive vest’s arsenal of ball bearings out into the parking lot instead of into the cafeteria.

“The sweeper who was cleaning up here saw someone outside and went towards him,” said Nasreen Siddique, a cafeteria worker who was wounded in the head, leg and arm by the blast. “[Masih] told him that he could not come inside because there were girls inside. And then they started arguing. And then we heard a loud blast and all the glass broke.”

Aha Moment with Writer’s Block

I have had SUCH trouble getting a specific project on screen. I love the story, so inspiring, but in spite of the various distractions there was no real reason I couldn’t ‘get into it’. I was beginning to think it was a symptom of age (these do keep popping up).

I have to sort-of immerse myself in a topic or story to write about it. I just can’t write about something I am not passionate about (at best) or interested in (at worst). With this story, I could not understand why the connect was not happening, as all the elements were there in theory.

After days of sitting at an empty screen, I finally had my ‘aha moment’. This story had such a tragic element that it was too painful to enter, even though I knew the happy ending. Immersion had a personal price I was choosing not to pay. I couldn’t risk trying on their suffering in order to write about it.

Worse, I realized there was a superstitious part of me that feared if I wrote it, it may happen to me. That connecting too strongly would draw such tragedy to my life. This revelation brought me a bit of embarrassment, but also unhooked the fear. Fear is the opposite of faith, and as I rebuked the fear, faith was built and fingers flew.

I am thankful. Not only is God good, He is always on time.

Watch Out World, Banan Malkawi is BACK

I had the privilege of meeting this petite pistol of a journalist last week. Back in Amman only two months, writing for Ammonews.net, she revealed what she was made of in having her first submission a critique of the so-called ‘virginity-device’. Woohooo, she goes for the good stuff without fear, and with kindness as her edge rather than anger.

I googled her to find a sample of her writing, and was pleased she called a spade a spade in the recent  2009 International Religious Freedom Report issued by the U.S. Department of State. Rather than follow the bland Jordan Times direction that ‘wow, all things are well for religious minorities in Jordan’, she went back to the reality of the matter. Some commentors on that thread will be familiar to you. So will the last comment, bringing up the *gasp* Z-word to validate pressure. It gets a little tiresome, as few know how the Jordanian Evangelical community is diffusing some Western Z-adherents. But it wouldn’t be news, ya know, to rock the status-quo boat with truth.

I can add that one reason there haven’t been complaints is that the crack-down a few years ago succeeded in silencing those who had complained. Fear of reprisal works to maintain the status quo. It may not be being reported, but people are still talking. Not on phones, not in emails, but word still gets around. Some stuff I wish I could blog about, but I am toeing the line too.

On that subject, i can share that out of the five long-term Egyptian pastors married to Jordanian women then deported, two have been allowed to move back to Jordan. Three haven’t, and which has necessitated that three banaat al Urdun are now forced to raise their kids in Egypt if they want their family to be together. Just sayin’.

Banan will be a force to contend with, and I look forward to her addition to the Jordanian journalism community.

My New Umbilical Cords

I’ve had sick kids again this week. All because I mentioned to someone awhile back that the kids had been remarkably healthy for some time, I’m sure. I am as tied to the house as a baby to its womb.

So writing has been very slow going, and my distraction level is high as I home-school and entertain the little ones while churning out  the word-count. I am owning it, but also a little cross with myself and the situation. I messed up Word somehow too, so in a little mental trick to remove writer’s block, I am writing my articles on my blog as drafts until The Hub can tell me what I did wrong in Word. Pretend work is really blogging, I’ll get it done faster, yea?

New challenge: my laptop portals all have dock-connectors trailing. Spikekid’s new ipod,  History Buff’s new MP3 player, Project Boy’s MP3 (Spikekid’s cast-off he foisted on him, but the kid feels cool so who cares). My work area is like Chelob’s liar, my mouse is as paralyzed as Frodo therein. It struck me all these ‘wires’ remind me of umbilical cords, recharging my kid’s musical worship tools.

The kind of cord has changed, but they still come to me to connect with a life-source. God is good, all the time, imparting object lessons of truth even in the midst of frustration and pressure. I need to stay firmly connected to my Life Source, as they still experience Him to a degree through my connection. Lord, I am clinging, help me hold on with the right heart during this time.

 

So, About Jordan Gates…

My news source (the falafel sandwich lady) tells me construction has ceased again on the Jordan Gates, the owner is bankrupt and it will not be finished.

Yikes. Anyone who reads Arabic news have more info?

Latest Domestic Worker Dilemma

It seems there has been a round-up of Filipina nail-care providers at the salons in Abdoun. Bad news for the mani/pedi crowd, but even worse for the beleaguered women who work two jobs in Jordan.

Even if a worker has valid work and residence permits, she will still be picked up, incarcerated for the day and perhaps put on a plane.

It seems now, in part of the crack down to help domestic workers, that they may only work for the employer who provides the permits (a work permit now costs an employer 570JD). Many independent-living workers have two jobs, as a result of community-initiated cross-training. A few years back, the local governance of the Filipino community saw too many women unable to make enough to live on (or if their employers didn’t pay them), and began cost-free training in other services, such as nail-care.

Some women have to pay for their own work permit, and are not getting the minimum $500/mo that would supply cash-flow to pay for it, necessitating another job.

If you have sponsored a domestic worker, and she has a second job, make sure she knows.

 

 

 

20 Years Ago, the Berlin Wall Came Down & The Hub Was There

It was an amazing time to be living in Europe, the late 80s. I lived in Austria, much to my parents dismay, bordering a Communist country! Austria itself, beautiful as it is/was, had so many legalities and restrictions it seemed like one itself. Don’t flush the toilet in the apartment blocs after a certain time, no laundry visible laundry hanging on the balcony, no mowing grass on Sunday, no closing cabinets loudly on the weekend. Better darn well sort those three colors of glass, two kinds of paper and three kinds of metal in the proper recycling bins or your neighbor would turn you in to the green police. Did I tell you that to get an Austrian drivers license you had to strip to the underwear in a room with no door just to get a blood pressure check?

I worked in a UN camp helping process refugees. They came from all over, Romania, Czechoslovakia (it was that, then) Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Albania, Kosovo, the former Yugoslavia, and refugees from the Iran/Iraq war. It was the first place I saw the Palestinian kefiyya, there were not a few Palis there, too.  It was multi-cultural overload, but the people were absolutely stunning. The stories, oh the stories! These were brave thinkers of the time, the brain-drain of talent socialism forced away from rigid mentalities. Poets, PhD holders, surgeons, journalists, free-thinkers, adventurers. I spent all my free time soaking up their wisdom and experiences.

They risked so much to leave. Reputation, inheritance, family and most of all, their home-land. They simply could not live under the restriction of thought and spirit. I recently found the story of a guy who was a good friend, Jaro Snopek. I knew him through our church, he had become a Christian there. His father had been a part of the Prague Spring uprising in 1968. He lost his professorship as a result, and was demoted to being a PE teacher at an elementary school, and moved to an ugly town far from his home village.

He was in an English class I taught for a bunch of refugee teens, we had watched “The Sound of Music” for a class and then taken a field trip to Salzburg to do a hitch-hikers SoM tour. While taking the train home that day, they all remarked how much they felt like the Von Trapp family had, having to escape a beloved and beautiful place that had become a prison. They also said how much they loved feeling like normal kids again, not looked down on as refugee spawn (some Austrians did NOT like refugees). After Jaro arrived in California, I had the privilege of taking him to Disneyland for the first time.

Once his sister communicated that the only factory producing feminine products had burned down, and she was without. He asked me if I could make his hometown a stop on a trip I was planning to see Czechoslovakia, and take her some. So I became a Kotex smuggler . It was wild, the train lurched to a stop at no-man’s land and armed soldiers jumped on top of the train, and very roughly passed through inspecting passports and bags. They didn’t see my stash, which was precisely the contraband  they were looking for. Definitely designed to inspire fear.

A few years later she was a runner-up in the Miss Czechoslovakia Beauty Pageant. She had longed to escape as Jaro had, and at the pageant met a minor Saudi sheikh who promised her US citizenship. True to his word, he got her out, then kept her prisoner as a sex slave at a swank Los Angeles hotel. She escaped by tying sheets to the balcony and climbing down to the balcony below. She got back to Czech as fast as she could.

I didn’t even get to The Hub’s story. Hopefully soon.

Oxymoron of the Month

“The Dental Spa Center”

Maybe they offer manicure while scaling plaque off your dentin? Foot massage during your root canals? Dead Sea mud mask while bleaching those pearlies white?

This is will be one stretch of the imagination to fulfill their brand @@

In Um Uthayna on Medina by the u-turn.

(S)mother’s Love Like a Blanket

Last year dear friend blogger Desertmom joined the ranks of mothers who have left a part of their heart at a university in the US. I am watching my friends begin this process, I as a later-blooming mom want to learn it well. As she aptly put,

And here is a glimpse into God’s beautiful providence: soon after Oldest Daughter arrived back on campus, pressures came to bear on her that caused my mother’s heart to ache. I was challenged by the irony of the word “mother” being contained in the word “smother” as God gently, though painfully began working on my smother love, refining it into a more fitting mother love. (With more children to send off into the world, something tells me God will have more refining to do in the future.)

Incrementally letting go of those we spend our lives investing in is one of the most empowering gifts we can give our children. I am praying for Desertmom, and other friends, as they live with hearts in two countries. I am also saving denim.