Travel Stories

Travel Stories >> Jordan >> From my office window....

FROM MY OFFICE WINDOW....

[ Amman, Jordan, September 2000 ]

In the outskirts of Amman, my office looks out over the airport road - a two lane (each direction) highway. Every day I sit at my desk typing away and I watch the cars and truck speed by, I watch people in the small parking lot in front of the building getting into and out of their cars, I watch the supplies and furniture trucks unload and I watch the goatherds. The goatherds.

Amman was a tiny village less than 50 years ago, and even twenty years ago, people say, it was a small town. No major highways, no big supermarkets, just a trickle of vehicular traffic here and there - down in the center of town. As the city grew - blooming out into what are now neighborhood but were just recently "suburbs" - the western side of the city began to be inhabited by the wealthy, the foreigners, the richer embassies. The neighborhoods of Sweifieh and Abdoun (now called the Beverly Hills of Amman) expanded to receive the villas with their rich (well-watered) gardens and trees, the Egyptian house boys washing their wealthy owners' cars every morning, the Sri Lankan maids shaking out rugs and sweeping front walks. These villa 'compounds' were built out in the middle of hilly desertous terrain and still along many streets in these neighborhoods are sudden patches of empty open plots of land - perhaps bought but not yet experiencing the digging of basements and construction of affluent family homes.

These scattered empty plots actually break up the city scape and provide the locals with a place to toss their garbage (the Jordanians have not yet reached the point where they are aware of their environment and are ignorant of the damage they are doing to it - it is a daily occurrence to be driving behind a Jordanian and watch him/her throw his tissues, cigarettes, Big Mac container, potato chip bag and whatnot from the window in your face), and where their gardeners throw their garden refuse (olive branches, bush trimmings, dying flowering plants that have not survived a dry, dusty summer).

It is in these plots that the nomadic peoples of Jordan (who perhaps have always roamed these particular areas of the 'outer' city) graze their sheep and their goats. It is a pleasure to watch the business man in the snappy BMW sit and wait to pull into his garage while the scarved-headed man on the donkey navigates his flocks around the street's garbage dumpsters and the Mercedes Benzes parked along the sidewalks. It is particulary sweet to watch these animals up on their haunches reaching high over the villa walls to chew on a particularly green (well-watered) tree branch or tall bush.

Three weeks ago, driving back from a meeting at USAID, I took a back road to the office building (which is located in these wealthy neighborhoods) and suddenly came across a herd of goats. I slowed to stop (they were traveling the same direction I was - although their destination was the large open space next to our building while mine was the basement garage) and I watched and floated along with them. In my CRV, which sits me high enough to look down on them somewhat, I had a lovely vantage point. When I had left AID I was in a little hurry to return to the office - as I always feel a little discomfitted being away from my desk (as I imagine things piling up on it) - but I was calmed immediately by the sight of these animals and their sweet-faced pre-teen keepers. I rolled the car ever so slowly and watched as the boys lightly tapped their whip-like sticks on the pavement to herd the group off to one side so that I might drive past. As I did so, I rolled down my window and smiled broadly at the boys who had their eye on me, and said, "Shukran" (thank you).. to which they both grinned (bright white smiles) and said back, "Afwan" (you're welcome) and then waved and yelled after me, "ma-esalama" (go in peace)... and I was practically in the garage by then.

So as I sit at my laptop responding to complex emails about procurement problems and why the server installation is not going as we planned and why, or talking on the phone with our contracting officer about why the ministry is having trouble getting a waiver for the duties on the vehicles we want to procure for them... I watch and marvel at what now seems to me to be the complete and utter 'normality' of the boys and their herds who cross the highway in front of my office four times a day. It is a beautiful dance. The young shepherd brings the herd to the shoulder. He tap-tap-taps his fine long stick on the pavement - as if the click will keep the goats in a line - it does. The mass of brown and white bodies sway like a pool of water and the boy taps and moves and taps and moves - the creatures follow him - first across the in-town traffic lanes where an occasional vehicle must stop... to the high flat concrete median - where the animals act like their mountain cousins, all 30 of them teetering on the median (which is about four feet wide and flat), their bodies crushed up against each others' so they neither hang arse out in the in-bound lanes nor their beards out in the out-bound lanes.

The boy as well - calculates the speeds of the approaching vehicles and holds and taps his stick so that the brown-white mottled mass floats into the out-bound lanes but stop in order and en masse when a large truck trundles by in the slow lane, then break into a run at the boy's behest and off they scatter in the line of tall dusty oleander bushes along the out-bound lanes. I watch them travel beyond the oleander and into the open space found there.... where the goats wander and graze and the boy squats beneath a narrow evergreen to capture the shade.

Four or five times a day I watch this ballet with different herds and different keepers - the traditional weaving in and out of the modern - the modern calming down and making way for the traditional - the movable life versus the sedentary - the outside free world versus the inside confined world (of my air-conditioned office and the vehicles, most with windows tightly closed). And I reflect upon the natural simplicity and ease of the goatherd's world and the man-made complexities of my own. That he should always be free to graze his goats in the dusty scrub brush and remind the rest of us that a complex life is not necessarily the kindest life, nor the most 'valuable'. There is a balance to this scene - like a train that runs on time, or the muezzin calling all to prayer five times a day. I find it both a comfort and an amusement and would suffer slightly should it disappear.

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