Thank you for your birthday wishes
I was away for ten interesting days. I'll try and recount the events, with my bad memory it's a good thing I took photos.
You know, journals come in four sizes. Small, Medium, Large, and Oh My God It's Coming At Me.
October 4-5-6-7
LTC
Damoor, Lebanon
It's a sort of leadership training exercise. Students are grouped and each member leads their team for a while through certain challenges, at the end of which their performance is evaluated by staff members (who otherwise do not interfere with teams.) My fourth year attending, third time as staff member.
Students are given a strict minimum of allowed clothes and food, then they walk, splash and climb through kilometers,
kill for food, etc etc.
People are like toothpaste tubes, really. When you squeeze them, put them under pressure, what's inside comes out. Obedience,
teamwork, trust, adaptation, resource management, stress control are put to the test.
This year's students were mostly foreigners, from Tunisia, Brazil, Germany, USA (Alaska & Pennsylvania), and England among others; and they were mostly girls. Girls generally have
better endurance, and they generally
communicate better. It was really evident in this course: they did great.
This time we spent one of the nights down on
the beach. It was great sleeping on a beach, even if I had to spend half the night keeping guard and digging a trench between the sleepers and the advancing waves (night tide) the best part was the morning, I just did not want to get up
Click photos for more + descriptions.
October 8
HomeDentist in the early morning, when all I want is to sleep in and rest.
A bad surprise waiting at my return. Death makes you think really; just a month earlier she was jokingly arm-wrestling me and showing me how well she was doing. Ninety-four years old and piercing blue-grey eyes, like my father's.
But there is some laughter back in the family already. Go back home, pack again for the next trip.
October 9-10-11-12-13
Desert camping
Jordan wilderness
Offroading around dry open spaces and
sleeping out can be oddly beneficial. Three vehicles packed with camping gear, food, water, GPS devices and maps and whatnot, zooming and bumping along.
By the last day I was exhausted and short-tempered, being a city mouse and having been on two such events consecutively, but the experience was well worth it.
Mostly Westerners (USA, Australia, UK, Germany, Switzerland), excepting my brother and I, and an Egyptian friend of ours.
Main purpose was to
visit the traditional tribespeople in the area: a British friend on the trip studies the Arab language, specialising in bedouin dialects. The man knows my own mother tongue better than I do
My brother, a medical-social worker, also has been on development projects with the Turkmen tribes here in Lebanon.
Here are some notes I wrote down, in no particular order as memories should be.
Sitting on a fence.
It's a fun moment when you're sitting with a Bedouin in his tent and you hear the "Nokia - Connecting People" ringtone on his cellphone.
Bedouins are like cowboys in a way. Do cowboys still exist? they certainly do, but they're not the same legendary folk. Today they herd their cattle with pickup trucks and helicopters, communicate by cellphone, etc. Same now with Bedouins (minus the copters.)
Nearly all tent-dwelling families own a regular home in town but they do not use it much.
It's a strange hybrid lifestyle, old and new combined. They wear really fancy watches too.
Daily life.
They are into the herding of sheep, goats and camels for the most part. I walked into
a flock of around 1,200 sheep once, fluffy white critters moving in lines inside a huge dusty expanse.
One shepherd called his in, and they responded instantly. When all were
gathered close, he called *one* sheep by its name and it trotted forward to stand quaintly and look up at him. It's... biblical, for lack of a better term.
The men leave in the early morning in their pickup trucks to tend to the cattle. The richer families (and some are
rich) employ shepherds from Syria or Iraq (a young Iraqi shepherd wearing funky sport shoes.)
The women stay in the household and collect firewood for baking bread in the afternoon.
Tents are made of goat hair woven by the women (tho most tentcloth now is bought from Turkey or Syria.) They have winter tents and
summer tents, the winter ones being thicker, darker and waterproof.
The
cattle graze on the sparse shrubbery in the area, and when it's depleted, the household move to another location in a nomadic fashion, travelling at the pace of a hundred kilometers every three days (the speed of the cattle.)
Lifestyle.
diyafa (hospitality)- "Whoever seeks refuge in your household must be protected with your life and the life of your family, even if they are your enemy."
tha'r (vengeace)- "If you kill my brother, I will not kill you. But when I find your brother, I will kill him."
Of course nowadays vendettas are not allowed, and local authorities handle any crimes according to the judicial system.
The women stayed in their own curtained section of the tent with the children. Matriarchs would sit by however, and a favoured child would often huddle in the lap of our host, staring at us with open mouth and wide eyes. The women prepared food or drink and the men served it to us.
When the men were not there it was a usual scenario: we approach the tent, a few dogs bark at our vehicle as they run alongside it, a child sees us approaching and runs into the tent, then a woman or two walk out, covering their hair with their
hijâb (veil). We ask, "
fi zilm?" (are the men here?), they say no, we say thank you and bye. The dogs again bark at us on the way out, all proud for singlehandedly kicking out the intruders.
There was
one lady though, the most covered actually (except for her eyes and hands), who stopped us when we were about to leave. "Do you have a camera? come, take photos, it's no problem." She was really outgoing, taking liberties in the absence of the men; I quickly disembarked, snapped two photos nervously, then we said goodbye and drove away, all the while expecting to hear angry male voices approaching.
An evening meal.
On the first evening we were invited to
iftar in a bedouin household.
Traditional arabic seating does not include chairs or couches; instead, one reclines on cushions and mats placed upon the floor. It's actually pretty comfortable, mellow even. Shoes are removed at the threshold and the floor is carpeted.
We were served orange-flavoured Tang (kool-aid)... now that's a first.
The sheep came back home. They rubbed against the tent ropes because they were itching. They look so cute when they do that
A small crowd of
children shyly stood behind us, staring with those sparkling wide eyes and silent open mouths.
My bro examined an old man's eye, and listened to the son telling about having insomnia.
Dinner came - a large circular tray placed in the middle of our crouched figures. No individual plates. There was rice on the bottom with minced tomates & green pepper. On top was goat meat, or rather an entire goat carcass with the skull in the middle facing up and open mouthed. Hungry yet?
The Bedouin pulled some meat off a bone, with his hands, and plopped it on my side of the tray, handed us spoons (he ate with his hands), we ate and it was good. On the side was lentil soup, fresh baked bread, and
laban.
For dessert we had.. custard. Custard, my favourite dessert. You can bribe me with the stuff. And it was properly done too, firm, the way I like it. The last place I expected to have it was there.
Then we had tea. Not any tea. Bedouin tea, my favourite in the world since my old visits to the Turkmen clans in Lebanon. Thick, boiled for an hour, highly sugared - Earl Grey, eat your heart out.
Much better than the black coffee we sometimes had there, with cardimon (
hal), bitter, slightly perfumed... but very bitter. I can't stand coffee, and bitter coffee is just ick.
Bedouin tea == drooling Bassem.
Then a large tin bowl filled with water was passed around to everyone to drink from. I'm fine with that though the water was a bit.. hm.. meaty.
Tales.
- Vendetta story: one blood feud goes back forty-five years. A man had killed another, and now fourty-five years later the victim's descendant takes revenge upon the other's. The killer this time is apprehended by the police, who now suppress this practise. But the new victim's family have sworn revenge - "even if it takes us another fifty years."
- At a wedding, a man fired his rifle in the air in celebration, as is usual. The bullet came back down and killed his best friend's father. By bedouin custom the dead man's son could claim the killer's life, but he forgave him - an almost foreign concept among them, according to the storyteller - because they were best friends.
- A tribesman marries his cousin (normal occurence) and she would not conceive. The wife's friend concocts for her a love potion to give to the husband so he will not marry another (polygamy is also practised there.) The wife, refusing to resort to magic, feeds the potion to a young sheep. The sheep starts following her everywhere. Then after a few months, it drops dead. The wife cuts it open and it is crawling with worms inside. She shows it to her husband and tells him, "this would be you now if I did not have more trust in you." He does not marry another.
Encounters.
- In the town of Azraq I was surprised how many stores were named after Lebanon: Lebanon Restaurant, Lebanon Rest Area, Lebanon Mechanic, Lebanon Net Café..
-
One old Bedouin, a retired soldier, told us how he served under
Sir John B. Glubb, or "Abu Huneik" as they call him because apparently he had a broken or odd jaw. Glubb pretty much formed the Jordanian army entirely out of bedouin troops, because they had high endurance and knew the desert best.
The old soldier's wife sat beside him. One of
his sons was telling how he will marry more than one woman. His father scolded him and said, "you will marry only one, like I did." true love among the Bedouins.
- I asked one
badawi (bedouin) named Mufleh how they went about finding a wife.
"I would see her around briefly passing by - we don't date here or meet in the cinema or in college - and I would talk to her family, and it's pretty much in the bag."
itdabbarit.
When I asked him what criteria he would use to choose his wife (or wives), he said, "
al jamâl, al mâl, wannasab." Beauty, wealth and ancestry.
Mufleh's brother came in as we were sitting together and he smelled so nice. most of them don't smell or they smell like sheep or such. But he was nicely prefumed and stylishly dressed in black and I told him that. He's so funny too, always laughing. Saleh is his name, known as Abu Eid. Him and Mufleh told me about ancient ruins in the area, and how they sometimes stumble upon old artefacts and currency. They want to acquire a metal detector so they'll search for more old coins. I don't know why, but I found that so cool.
- During another visit, I said to a man cuddling his young brother, "many think that you are a gruff or dry people, like the land you live in. But I see this is not true. You love your brother very much" He said, "Yes, I do. And we live harshly, but we are
not a harsh people. We have rough hands but tender hearts."
Elemental.
The mornings and nights were my favourite time, when we would all gather and swap stories and joke around and
build a fire and prepare a meal. Sitting by the fire and furry moths landing on my trousers.
I saw a gerbil! if you're don't know those, it's like a mouse, but with a longer tail and hind legs. Sort of a cross between a mouse and a kangaroo. Poing, poing.
While in Jordan I discovered Dido deeper (on my brother's iPod) and her songs speak to me so well. Particularly this one
[link]The clearest personal memory is walking away from the encampment at night, looking up and gazing at the stars which never looked so clear to me in all my life, wind buffeting against my windbreaker, looking back at the campfire light spreading in a starburst between the elongated shadows of the people sitting around it.
On the last night I thought I'd
sleep outside the tent under the stars. Sleep on the world's floor and look up at its ceiling. From the angle I picked, the Milky Way was stretching above me vertically in all its details. The stars, breathtaking. The cold, bitter. The guy sleeping nearby, snoring. The jackals in the area, howling. Interesting night.
(Click photos for more + descriptions. My connection gave me hell to upload these.)
Sta.sh
Tired 
Content 
Suggestive 
Fear 
Mazette!
When I was a kid, someone jokingly applied shaving cream to my cheek, and I freaked out because I thought that it won't come off unless I used a razor.
Bassem - `
Mad 
Bassem B. - `
Disbelief 
I'd gladly volunteer to hug girls at night, just that. I mean I'm squeezy and cuddly and I emit warmth even. 
After a minute of excitement at the idea, I wondered why this was in a chain email and I hadn't heard of it on any tech news website, not even Popular Science. So I ran a Google news search for 'planet mars' 
poor suckers!
Links to interesting websites
Hello everyone! 
Step this way ladies and gentry! Feast your eyes on the new Salad journal.
Happy new year! 
Salad Journals - mixed ingredients
Lovely Devious Habits - "laugh til you pop your pimples."
Bassem 
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