I took 108 pictures of Amman, Petra, and some other things in Jordan. 

On film. 

Weird, I know. 

This is just above the jewelry district in the Suk (sook). A place where you can pay not so much money and get your mother’s name in english, or arabic, cut out of silver and made into a custom necklace. Where Gold still costs more than Silver, and where banks don’t look all that different, they just have different times. Like, well, Arab Bank. 

It’s a joy to be in the Suk. It’s a place with it’s fair share of tourism (overpriced kafeas [arabic male headscarfs], chinsey gold aladdin genie lamps, belly-dancer outfits in pink, purple, green, yellow. orange…teal…puce….and software for a dollar [like adobe photoshop CS3...that kind of software]), but by and large, people from many walks of life come here, it’s the downtown shopping mall of amman. On the outskirts there is Mecca Mall for the high-so’s or the girls who want to get away from their parents and out of their burkhas and into some tube tops and gucci shades, and in Abdoun there’s a starbucks for the non-turkish coffee drinkers, but here there are just tons and tons of people, with everything you (or more importantly, any Jordanian) could ever want to buy: Steeples for mosque minaret’s (where the call to prayer is piped out of a circle of loudspeakers) can be bought, or maybe welded and repaired here.  Hookah’s (something that will require a whole separate essay) come in small, medium, large, and “let’s smoke out of a pipe organ” large. 

Fresh fruit smoothies can be bought from competing vendors who lean over their pharmacy stands (a full foot about your head) like overbearing parents and point at mangos, bananas hanging from backets above their heads. (When they do, I search through my pockets for piastras, or fils, coins worth more than their american equivalents that still feel like disney money on the first few days just because, well, they aren’t quarters.)

Underwear and lingerie can be bought. Blue-jeans and english-print t-shirts can be bought. Perfumes (never the brands on the boxes they are put in) can be bought-Playing cards issued by the CIA with the faces of Saddam and his best men can be bought-toy guns, gun shaped lighters, wallets, fabrics, spices, music, (madonna and haifa wehbe scarvesfalafels iraqiflags schwarma can be bought.

All from men with mustaches or slick backed hair or women with pink and green prints or black robes, from blond haired blue-eyed arab surfer bums who speak great english, from old seated women on cel-phones who look like street beggars. From young arab men in white uniforms and green aprons- to old salt-and pepper curmudgeons who shout “one dinar one dinar onedinar oned’nar” like kansas auctioneers.

These are the people at the Suk.

The sounds? Voices, of course. Cars. Kids with ice cream on their upper lip, vendors, tinny radios.

Like any good city.

These are a set of screen captures from behind Jimmy, Doctor’s Brother, in Mbale Uganda. We took a special trip in on red motor-bikes to see him. First we stopped by an old second-story barbershop with dank green-flourescent lighting and a patron who didn’t expect the camera.  Doctor said the barber taught him how to cut hair and was one of his good friends, but the barber didn’t smile too much. Maybe he was shy. 

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965.

He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked.

He wrote me:

…one day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.

-Sans Soleil

I am drawing sometimes during the day now. 

My art teacher in highschool

always told me to draw dumb objects.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

[view gallery.]

This is an inaccurate drawing.

It is late afternoon in Amman. Men are walking up the sidewalk, uphill. Coming home, I guess, from work. Below me, the city, or what I can see of it, lays belly-up. Maybe it’s tanning, cinder-block skin baking in the sun.

Whatever it may be, gravity presses heavy against the tops of  Amman’s sun-slow body. I feel like it is waking, maybe because eyes, visible in the windows of some houses, occasionally glance around and close again; pretending in vain, to dose domestically a few minutes longer. 

Kids run through Amman’s alleys and it’s avenues. Home from school, maybe, playing.

It will get busy very, very soon. Not with the yelling of “buy!” “sell!” like it has been in the center of town, but more likely with the holler of, if it were in the American West, where I am from, “Dinner!” shouted up the stairs of every household.

I am only on my second drawing. I sketched a time-consuming landscape first. A sleepy mosque behind a sleepy olive-orchard, resulting in a sleepy picture with sleepy lines and sleepy realism..

…yawn. 

No one bothered me. The only thing that moved was a restless black plastic bag.

For this drawing, I am spying. I am drawing a porch. The women of the family who lives inside are visible. They have left their living rooms and kitchens and are catching the breeze on the porch for awhile, unaware, at least I think, that I am watching. Timidly, I am grabbing lines for my drawing. Straight ones for the porch, as parallel as my hand can make them. Straight lines for telephone poles. Struggling because there is nothing to hold my paper-back sized sketchbook flat except for four fingers and thumb. Straight angles of stairs, of cinder-block walls. 

Then once in a rare while, a round line of a face poking out from under a black head scarf, a round line of the crotch of a pair of trousers that drift on a clothesline in the breeze. A round line of a girl’s knee, bent as she leans against the wall in her younger-generation tight blue jeans. -All of these, but rarely two at once. The porch, the porch, the porch, blue jeans. The porch, the porch, the porch, eyes-

-a petunia.

porch porch porch.

Without looking like I’m looking at them I wonder if perhaps they are waiting for dinner to cook. There are three older women and a younger teen. I wonder why the younger teen doesn’t wear a full black robe. She is certainly aware of her curves. 

I could go on all day. Inside do they take off the robes and walk around in Dolce and Gabbana? Do they have shades of mascara in more colors than I can name? What’s on on the TV inside? Melodramatic Lebanese music videos or text and voice of the Koran?

Anyway, that brings you up to speed. 

In an artistic sense, basically, the line weights are all-off on a scene where the light is all right. I have a ballpoint pen where I need a paintbrush. I am a shy stranger when I need to be a family friend.

A man in khakis and a dust-white shirt breezes by. The door-welders down the next block must be closing the big clanging garage doors of their shops. Arabic-words lace the air. I still can’t distinguish words from sentences. Conversations are sometimes more like a smell than anything else. You taste their flavor, and come up with three different things they make you feel and no proper way to describe them to anyone else. 

Men are walking by on their way home from work, long sleeved shirts and slacks. I am in jeans and a t-shirt. Acceptable. American, at least on this road, for sure, but were it not for my blonde hair and my blue eyes, maybe maybe I could go without so many second glances in these clothes.

I re-situate myself. The teenage girl, the one in a mis-leading and restrained maroon headscarf and sequin studded pants-pockets is looking at me from the porch. She is talking excitedly. Look at the young American drawing us. 

She is leaning against the wall next to the open door to the living room and when she looks she doesn’t so much smile at me, but there is a smirk somewhere in her eyes that is armed and dangerous. She turns and talks about me with a childish laugh, the kind kids make when a gross bug has crawled on their sleeve at recess maybe, waiting to see what weird thing he will do next.

 I have become an object of conversation.

I keep drawing. I’m looking for the right metaphor. I don’t like to think of myself as a weird bug. It’s like, in a weird way, the arab girl is looking at me like a group of high school girls from across the cafeteria look at a new boy at lunch. That’s closer I think.

A boy emerges from the living room onto the porch. He holds onto the iron bars of the railing. Head peering out at me. He runs down the stairs of the porch and disappears for a quick moment. He appears across the street, he cranes his neck to look at me. He makes some sort of noise, I can’t remember what-a shout maybe, a whistle. When I look up, he waves me over. I stop, close my plain sketch-book, look both ways, and cross the empty street.  (over-long paragraph.)

He is dressed in a white karate outfit with a white karate belt. His head is at about that height where I could hold my hand out and grip it, and he’d never be able to make a move on me. 

He holds out his hand, wrist bent professionally, chin up. I shake his hand firmly. 

I show him what I am doing. I feel a little bit like I am showing him that in fact, I am not carrying any firearms. 

Since the drawing is so bad I explain to him “These are the stairs,” 

“-the telephone pole”

“-the porch”

He nods. “Yes.” He says.

“See…” I trace with my pen and point to the real-life facsimile.

“Yes.” He nods.

“Is it okay?” I ask. To draw, I mean. 

“It’s okay,” He says. He walks back to his house.

I draw. 

He returns. I haven’t done a lot more. I’m frustrated with my drawing and I’m distracted. I’m paying a great deal of attention to the teenage girl and the black robed women gossiping in a circle on the elevated porch. I have drawn a few quick sketches of them on the side. Three circle heads with dots for eyes. Studies for later. 

A new character is on the porch. A colorful spit-fire pig-tailed little girl is going between women and jeans-girl. It’s cute, sometimes she perches on the railings and looks out onto the wide street. Her face smashed just a tiny bit, eyes wide.

In front of me, Karate Boy is just watching again.  He looks at my face and then my pad. I’m not grabbing any of the right lines now but I decide to keep drawing. Illustrating the process for him. It’s working, he’s catching on to where I am looking, seeing me grab a line and try to lay it onto my page, another line, onto the page. His head now, runs a circle from pad to face to porch to pad. 

We are making progress, him and I. I think. There is potential here. 

Emmissary Two arrives. He stands behind Karate Boy as his head spins slow circles.

Two is just focused on the paper. He stands tip-toe. 

I stop to show them both. 

One chats with Two (in Arabic.)

“Where are you from?” One says, head no longer spinning.

“U.S.”

“Welcome.” 

“How long are you here?”

“Five weeks.” I hold up my hand. Five. 

This doesn’t compute as well. “Five, like a month plus…” 

I give up. 

We try this again.

“Your family?”

“Yes.” 

Yes is a response, I have noticed so far, that means just as often “Yes” as “I don’t understand.”

“Are you in school?”

“Yes.”

“And you?”

Nod.

Finally, I ask them if I can draw them. I tell them to look at me, and hold still. They smile and do, I look into their eyes as I draw, not at the page. They crack smiles, this is too weird, too weird. I finish. I show Karate Boy, I let him draw me. 

Afterwards I tell them, write your name in English and Arabic, and they do, and I write mine, maybe with better handwriting, but just in English.

Thankyou Cybjorg.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/52273551@N00/103740476

Take this and add a lot of haze-and that’s what Amman looks like on most days. Without the wide-angle.

After two weeks in Amman I decided to really make an effort to learn a few arabic words. I have picked these up from the students who have been here before, the veterans so to speak, taxi cabs drivers, and by hearing them in the stores when I go to by my “biskrems” (coconut macaroons with chocolate filling) or my guava nectar or Miranda fruit soda at the local 7/11 type bungalows. 

Listed in chronological order (what I learned first…):

1. Shukran = Thankyou. 

This was the only word I knew with confidence for the whole first week. Really, until about four days ago. So I’m saving face by saying first week, it was much worse. I would basically point to things in stores, or to cab drivers-I would point directions, and when I paid (either the clerk or the cabbie) I would give them all my coins, they would take what they needed, and I would say “Shukran.” meekly at first, and then loudly as my pride in knowing a word of Arabic grew.

2. La = No. 

Important to know.

3. Koyes = Good.

This are not spelled correctly for two reasons. One-arabic is written in arabic. Not with english phonetics. To illustrate this point (and protect my ignorance) I was traveling to Abu Na Sayr I believe it’s called-North of Amman-on the road signs, which are bilingual, the first read “Abun Seir” the second “Abun Seer” and the third one “Abu Na Sayr”. English is everywhere-but I guess it’d be generous to call it “phonetic”.

4. Masalaam = Good Day. (Good bye).

I remember this one because it sounds like shalom-which I think it a hebrew greeting. It’s all over the bible. I’m a bad christian…or a bad jew.

5. Marahaba = Good Day. (Hello.)

6. Schweh-Schweh = Bit by bit.

This one is interesting because if someone is speaking too fast, like a Cabbie (most of my language skills are in dealing with cabbies) you can say “Schweh” which means “Slow down” 

6. Iowa = Yes.

7. Asif = Sorry.

8. Amir = Right.

9. Schwah = Left.

10. Toggli = Straight  

All of these directions, I learned tonight-courtesy of a Palestinian Cab Driver, he knew very little english-he said, “Bush?” after a long silence. We said “No koyes.” Corrected ourselves. “La koyes.” He pointed to his head. “Hashnuh.” 

“Crazy.”

“Americans-shops…America. Koyes.” 

“Bush?”

We laughed. We said together. “No koyes, I mean La koyes.”

Literally. Scribbles only.

Journal Day 1

I am laying on my bottom bunk-I only have one mattress and I found a splinter of wood or something in it just a few minutes ago. There is a mattress above me that I’m going to steal-since no one is sleeping there-but right now I’m too lazy and “jet lagged”-(which I’m convinced is just an excuse people use when they don’t want to do something-I feel fine to tell you the truth).

Exciting. I thought the prayer chants were over for the night. They must be out of sync.

Amuteh muteh muteh-a punde-punyaaaaa-unyaaaa-ooo–ale solo-ale solo….

That’s what it sounds like. Deep and meldious but far away-we aren’t close close to any of the towers. I wonder what it’s like to live right underneath one.

AMUTEH MUTEH MUTEH!

Yay. : )

Jason, the film director for the documentary I am about to do sound for here-and one of my best friends is sound asleep next to me. He’s lapsed into that deep in, out….in….out…where you can hear the status of his nasal cavity on each breath. He’s in a beater and god know’s what. He has two mattresses. I don’t know why I am not doing that right now. Laying on two mattresses that is.

The singing has stopped. I really wish I knew what they were singing. I almost want them to sing constantly until the sun sets. For me. Not for any allah-spiritual significance. It makes me feel like I am Jordan when they sing. 

I drew the cityscape a few minutes ago. Not a very in-depth drawing I have to admit. A laxadasical blind-contour with a few peeks. I got some nice buildings-a prayer tower (I really wish I knew their real name)-though you can’t tell, and a satellite dish. I added in power lines over everything and it started to feel more real. I put in a snub-nosed van that was going down the road, and a black pinto-esque SUV which was going down the road too-but in a different direction.  The sky was pink haze to cerulean blue-no, not cerulean blue-that’s an ocean color-slate blue-building paint blue-that blue i see painted on alot of buildings here next to the whitewash. A fantastic blue. Almost like baby-blue but harder, sharper, more vibrant-much more life than baby blue. 

The light’s faliing now. I picked a corner bed (I arrived early so I had lots of choices) so I could peek out the window. Little diamonds of color rimmed in green from the holes in my mosquito netting. 

We have to start really working on the film tomorrow and I can tell I just wasted 100 dollars in DV tapes I can’t use-dissapointing. Apparently the camera didn’t work like I thought it did. You win some you lose some. 

Tomorrow will be a very good day. I can’t wait until we get wireless internet and I can go public with whatever. It’s weird to write it on sticky-notes. Maybe it’s best to write it on sticky notes first though.

It’s 10:09 AM in Portland now. I don’t have to heart to set my clock to Jordanian time. I think that means it’s like 8 PM here. Seems early for the sun to be going down. 

I hope I don’t get lonely here. I need to meet some Bedouins soon or something. That would be nice. : )

FILMING CHILDREN IN UGANDA AFTER THE CEASE-FIRE

It is a cloudy day in Mbale. I never imagined that Africa had cloudy days. I am walking in old oatmeal colored shoes that are meant for the pale dirt of America. They seem ill-fitting next to the rich, sun burnt Ugandan soil. I should be following Dory, one of the students on the team with me, to find transportation to get back to PCCP but I am distracted. I watch old men sewing in front of their shops. I smile when I see huge beet red coca-cola advertisements painted on the sides of buildings. People teem in and out of stores and in alley-ways kids play with soccer-balls and stop to watch me as I walk past. I keep my eye out for a place where I can get bottled water.

A big-headed youngster sidles up along next to me as I walk.  He is already holding out his hand and he looks up at me with his big eyes. His head seems five times the thickness of his legs, which look like short little stilts. He is wearing a knit-sweater that droops to his knees. He does not look where he is going while he walks. “Muzungu. Muzungu!” He says to me. I am holding my video camera. I look down again. Having caught my attention he smiles, his feet pit, pit, pit, pit against the crunchy slab-sidewalk. He starts to speak in his own language to me. He is being very insistent. Pitch increase, high squeaks in his voice. He is making a plea.

            Pallissa Children’s Concern Project (PCCP) lies about twenty-five miles outside of Mbale, Uganda. It is set back from the road, out of plain view, but otherwise arranged like any other village house would be along the single dirt road that connects trading center to trading center. The resident orphans mill around the timber-goal posts of a well-worn soccer field and wait for a game to start now that classes are over. Many of them rush over to me and the ten other American students who are done teaching for the day, who are exhausted after learning how hard it is to teach in a foreign culture. To them, we are now free game to be questioned about America. The barrage of questions is endless, the most shocking being probably, “Do they have the sun in America?”

Under the umbrella of Melchizedek’s Treasure, a small non-government organization based in Maryland, the eleven of us, organized with the help of Pali Dacanay (RISD ’08), came together from schools in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Chicago. In June we flew over the Atlantic on Ethiopian Airlines. As part of the program, we each designed our own personal internship. As a film major, I would be filming a documentary project and helping teach an art class on the side. Others would do other things, art, art therapy, drama, music, even, by popular demand from the kids (and some of the teachers), psychology. As I sat on the plane the one thing I was sure of was that I knew a lot more about my camera equipment than I knew about Uganda.

I distinctly remember getting the first inkling of what I was getting into when I talked to an American-Ethiopian woman sitting next to me on the plane. Ethiopia is not so good, she told me. She had heard that on the streets, some bad men had been known to find parentless street urchins and befriend them. They would then gouge out their eyes, and tell the kids to go out and beg. What the child would make, the men would take.

            Back at PCCP I tell at least five kids I can’t interview them tonight. Beyond the orphanage, behind the soccer field, the sun is now settling into the green bush. Soon the cloudy sky will be a frosty blue. Alexandrine, 17, speaks in English with an elegant, British influenced Ugandan accent as I hold the camera. “I would like you tell you my story.” She says.

            Alexandrine, and over half of the 200 plus kids who now live at PCCP were child soldiers in the Lord’s Resistance Army. Like in Sierra Leone (for those who have seen Blood Diamond), Rwanda, and the Congo, these kids are abducted and given guns to aid existing militaries or opposition groups. In Uganda, the LRA attacks outlying rural villages, kills all of the adults and toddlers and captures the remaining young, looking primarily for those between 11 and 18 years of age.

            The conflict was brought about by Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army who started the LRA to bring power to the northern Acholi Tribe.  Since 1991, however, he has been massacring the Acholi instead of helping them, claiming they have turned away from God and become sinful beings. Statistics currently report that to date over 30,000 children have, at one time, been abducted.

            Alexandrine, who herself escaped and was rescued from the streets, speaks: “My story goes like this, my mother died when I am one year old. I was brought up by my step mom and my father. One night in the village, rebels came and broke the house, brought us out of the house and killed the mother in my presence. Gave me to kill my dad…..and I killed my dad. After-they took me to the bush to be a rebel, trained me how to shoot a gun, and gave me to kill people. After, in the bush they used to rape us. Like in the bush, they could just make us lying, and every soldier could just come and select the one that he wants, the girl that he wants. And then, the ones that are left, they would be tied to a tree in order that they did not escape.”

            She is looking at me now, just at me. Then away. Her eyes retreat deep inside. “I was given to kill so many people, I cannot recall…and sometimes, they could kill people. After killing someone, they give you take that blood of that person, and if you refuse, they kill you, and giving-you taking that blood, was to show them; it means, you are now strong to be a rebel. Like-I was given to take blood of my father after killing him.”

            Tears stain her face. She begins to sing. She sings about how she hoped in no one save Jesus Christ. “One time when I was caught while I was singing that song, I was beaten severely, but I was warned, whenever I was caught singing anymore, they could kill me.” She pauses. “But I could still continue singing, when they are not there.”

            On the last night I spent in Uganda I tried to navigate around scattered luggage bags and piles of medical-supplies, art-supplies, clothes, and other debris that had accumulated in a hurried attempt to leave everything behind for the orphans at the school. In an attempt to create some order I brought kids in one at time to give them each a few of my belongings. My camera is packed.  

            I pointed a flashlight down the hall. Lawrence’s feet, in battered flip-flops, shuffle down the narrow hallway. “Lawrence. Come in here, you can sit down.” Lawrence, 14 makes himself a space on the cement floor and just looks up at me. I sit next to him. Out of all the orphans, Lawrence and I had grown closest over the four weeks. Lawrence wants very badly to be a film director and I spent nights reading his scripts. “I made you a peanut-butter sandwich,” I say, knowing he has never had one before. He tries it. I am afraid it will be too sticky. “It is very nice,” he says.

            “What do you most need?” I ask, pointing to my pile of things. “I need new shoes,” he says. “These ones, they are not so good.” I hand him my dirty shoes, coated with red soil. “Here, try them on.” They are too big. “No, no, they will fit, they are very nice,” he says. He looks at me, my flashlight is lying on my bunk, and his eyes shine white.

j.m. betz november 2007.