Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Three Days of Rage

It started with a town hall meeting at work with all the employees, both Americans and Jordanian staff, in attendance.

The President was planning to announce he was moving the U.S. Embassy in neighboring Israel to Jerusalem. The reasons this is controversial are too numerous and politically-charged to mention here. Suffice it to say, the news would not go over well in Jordan.

Most of the town hall meeting was spent fielding questions on authorized departure...read: evacuation. Elise had stayed up late the night before, wrapping duck tape around a water bottle, begging the question of which eventuality she was actually preparing for. She was going to strap the babies to her back and crawl across the desert if events warranted. I write this tongue firmly planted in cheek now, but had a meteor fallen from the sky and landed in our living room, we could hardly have been more prepared. I have Elise to thank for filling the bottom of my closet with chewy granola bars, fruit roll-ups, and beef jerky.

We equated the whole experience to preparing to weather a hurricane. We knew it was coming and we had a pretty good idea of when it would blow ashore. Elise and I had been through our share of hurricanes together. We just had to make sure we were safely home with the hatches battened when the first winds started to howl.

In all seriousness, we didn't know what to expect. We are Middle East newbies. It was impossible for me to reconcile the reality of the Amman we have come to know over the past several months with the scenarios being constructed by the security personnel in my office. Everyone we have met has been incredibly welcoming and kind. Everywhere we have gone, we have gone without compunction or second thought. I wasn't afraid. Far from it. If anything, I was mostly sad. We had a really good thing going here, and to think that might change after only a few months left me feeling, selfishly, down. If I was feeling disappointed and sad, I couldn't imagine how the Jordanians must be feeling.

The town hall left everyone with a feeling of unease. The head of my office here in Amman said he kept his remarks purposefully sober, so sober is how we all felt. That night the kids had their winter concert at school. They had all been practicing for months and were super-excited. Earlier that day, they had a three-hour joint rehearsal, the first time all elementary grades who would be performing together were all in the same room for their final run-thru. But right before the performance, emails and text messages were bouncing back and forth: parents asking each other if they thought it was safe enough to go.

I left work early, so Elise and I could get the kids into their nice clothes, expecting a struggle. 'Struggle' is an understatement. It was all-out war. Peter -- perhaps overwhelmed with anticipation -- had a complete and total meltdown when he pulled on his nice khaki slacks only to discover they were two inches too short. Add to that a heaping scoop of having to wear loafers instead of sneakers, and the kid was done for. Fortunately, he was able to compose himself after Elise told him he could wear jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie. Perhaps, in light of current events, she decided to go soft on him. Either way, Peter was at the front door, wondering what was taking us so long and if we were going to be late. Never mind the fact it was his 25 minute tantrum that threw us behind schedule in the first place.

Inside the school gym, the superintendent of the school gave welcoming remarks. When he pointed out the emergency exits in all four corners of the room, Elise and I glanced at each other uneasily.

The performance was cute and, fortunately, without incident. My blackberry rang several times, and I spent nearly half of it texting my staff, instructing them the office would be closed tomorrow and to stay home. We made it home a little after 8:00. The President was set to begin making his remarks any minute. We lowered the black-out shades on our windows. A nice feature to have during the hot summer months, they also serve to dampen noise from the outside; we live directly across the street from a small grocery store and a coffee shop which is more like a nightclub emptying out when it closes at eight or nine, with caffeine-filled young men and women revving their motorcycles and tearing up and down the street outside our apartment, tires squealing. Elise and I wrestled the kids into the pajamas when we heard a crash. I thought it came from the front of apartment and didn't think much of it. Elise thought it might be a dish falling from the stack in the sink. Neither of us were going to open the shades to investigate further. And at that moment, neither of us had any idea what to expect. Perhaps, at that moment, I felt the slightest pang of fear. The Middle East is an incredibly complex and intimidating place, steeped in beauty, mystery, and wonder, but also filled to the rim with layer upon layer of history and conflict. Who was I to think I could wonder naively into this bog? Moreover, what did I get my wife and children in to, who trust me implicitly and follow me mostly without question?

Fear, if it were there, would not be tolerated and would be tempered with a sense of practicality and not just a little whiskey. We put the kids to bed. They, fortunately, had no idea what was transpiring around us; We wouldn't tell them until the next morning when my office asked they not be sent to school; though they have always had an uncanny knack of feeding off our -- Elise and I's -- anxieties, whether spoken or not. I dropped in a giant cube of ice into two highballs and filled them to the top.

In the morning, we tentatively raised the black-out shades. That was when Elise discovered something or -- more likely -- someone had shattered the glass table top on our back patio table. It was tempered glass, to boot. No mean feat. Though it was Thursday, the office was closed, and the kids would not be going to school. Elise and I were faced with the reality of keeping three rambunctious kids cooped inside all day. They did watch TV on three separate occasions, but we tried to start the day, at any rate, with some calisthenics.

When we were in India, we used to do this thing on Saturdays called "Dad School". It was basically a way to get them excited about spending prolonged stretches of time indoors, but hopefully knocking out a few lessons, as well. In what has been a very short span, the kids have become much less malleable than they once were, and now even I can't make math exciting. There was initial resistance to "Dad School", and if it entailed arithmetic, forget about it. Dad School in India incorporated P.E. (running on the treadmill), reading (learning letters on the dry erase board), math (doing long addition problems), art (Play-Doh), and, of course, snack time. This time around, I was only able to get through P.E., about fifteen minutes of jumping jacks, running in place, and burpies, before they started to revolt and beg for the TV.

We also played backgammon and Dungeons & Dragons as Elise and I followed current events from our iPhones. We squatted in the kitchen, squinting at a live feed on Elise's iPhone; we could see the name of the place where the live feed was coming from in Arabic in the corner of the screen, and we were using the five Arabic letters we had learned to try and decipher where the feed was coming from. There were demonstrations outside my office on Thursday, but the first real test would come when Friday prayers let out in the afternoon of the following day. Fearing a bout of cabin fever would set in if we didn't run the kids, we set out in the morning to meet friends for breakfast and to go to the park before morning prayer ended. To continue the hurricane metaphor, it felt a little like sneaking out in the eye of the storm, that short moment when the winds quiet and the rain stops and you can see blue sky as the eye of the storm passes directly over you. At the park, the kids played tag as the ladies talked. I pretended to have the "cat touch" from petting a feral (though very friendly) tabby in the park, then chasing the kids around in an attempt to infect them with the "cat touch". A grandmother pushing a sleeping toddler in a stroller admonished me in an unfamiliar dialect I didn't think was Arabic. Russian, perhaps. All with the singular goal of making them as tired as possible before going back indoors. Some have to walk their dogs. We have to run the kids.

After Friday prayers a demonstration in downtown Amman drew 20,000. The crowd outside my office was smaller, about 2,000. Both protests were peaceful. Jordan is a special place, and I believe Jordanians take a lot of pride in being a place of stability in an otherwise volatile region, despite their close ties with Palestine.

By Saturday morning, I had to go for a run. Afterwards, we took the kids to the winter bazaar at the school. We probably wouldn't had otherwise gone, but we needed an excuse to get out of the house, and the school as safe a place as any. The kids mostly played on the playground, but there was also a free breakfast which was nice. Saturday evening was quiet. Local religious and political leaders had called for 'three days of rage' following the announcement. I know the protests weren't all peaceful across the region. Personally, I don't think one life (as was taken in Gaza) or one dollar of property damage could be worth what may have been gained by making such an announcement. But I am thankful the protests in Jordan have been peaceful.

A sense of calm has started to settle. I don't think things can ever go back to "normal", but they can be calm again, if not "different". I don't want to take for granted the worst is behind us. As I said, the Middle East is a complex place, and we still have a lot to learn.

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