My Bedouin Family

Wadi Rum, Jordan

My bedouin family is big. There's father, 2 wifes and 17 children in total. I was adopted by and stayed with the second wife and her 7 children.
How did I land there? Nothing simpler than that. I took the minibus from Aqaba to Wadi Rum. It was crammed as usual and last minute I gave my seat to a woman with 3 little children. My big pack was blocking the aisle, the small pack was in the way, too, and, of course, heavy. On the back seat row there were already 4 women and a boy. They squeezed together more and made some space for me. Next to me sat Haya, only her beautiful eyes visible and the friendliness in her voice. Her English was sufficient to chat a bit and she invited me to stay with her family. She lived in Wadi Rum. I thanked her, but declined. Then, when we arrived in the village and she invited me to her house for a cup of tea and water I accepted. I had read about the famous bedouin hospitality and did not want to offend Haya or her mom.
In the shady courtyard under the olive trees I was invited to sit down. Haya disappeared inside the house, a slim gracious silhouette in black. Then, minutes later, a beautiful dark-haired young woman in a red sports outfit stepped out. That was Haya. She brought me water and tea. It was still Ramadan time but as a non-Muslim guest I could eat and drink to my liking, they said. Then the invitation came again and I could not find any excuse. I stayed.

If this were all the family it would be easy. It so happened that the following day was the end of Ramadan, the second most important holiday, the Eid-al-Fitr. And my family suggested I stay home to be part of the celebration and learn more about their traditions. It was an incredible experience.
Over the course of the morning there seemed to be like a procession. All cousins and aunts and uncles and sisters and brothers came to visit. The women all had their head covered, the men were wearing their traditional robes - jalabiyya - and headscarves (keffiyeh). The children were all dressed up in their best and most beautiful clothes.
This is how I met the extended family, a few dozen cousins and about a dozen aunts and uncles. I lost track of the names and relationships and the number of hands I shook, but I certainly had fun. I drank more tea than ever before in my life, the sweet bedouin tea served in tiny glass cups.
Communication was a bit of a problem, I have to admit. The men usually working with tourists mastered English a bit better than women, but most of the women did not speak any English. A few kids spoke some basic stuff. However, with the kids it was anyway easy. We could play and fool around together. I had little Sultan - maybe 3 years old - have a crush on me and eventually won the heart of my little sister Heam(5) over the course of my stay. The youngest in the family, beautiful Sana(3) is a princess with a very strong personality. She could give you a very frightening look or the warmest smile. She is adorable. And the oldest in the family, Awad(28) very artistic and yet forced to be pragmatic and support the large family played the oud for me and drove me around when I needed.

I spent hours playing with the children with a punctured ball in the little family orchard or writing on the red sand that carpeted the courtyard. We had a family outing in the desert and there we ran barefoot up and down the sand dune, the kids and I.

It is quite hard for me to describe the whole experience in words. I wish I could do it in images, at least, but I respected my family too much to bug them with the camera. I certainly took pictures of the kids once they felt more comfortable about it, but I did not want to offend anybody and so I mostly watched and captured those precious moments and images in my soul. Believe me, it could have been an award winning documentary had I filmed all this. Well, I never film so this has been taken care of :-)

Any special occasion requires a festive meal and that comes down to slaughtering a goat. For Eid there were 4 goats butchered right in front of the house and in the dark we all sat around the large trays eating the traditional dish - mensaf, the women in one courtyard, the men in the one next door. The baking of bread in the morning was interesting to watch, and the fresh bread, thin and crispy - called shrak - was delicious.
I watched Haya's mother make bread several times, I watched father Mohammed in what looked like his underwear but with his keffiyeh (traditonal checked headscarf) on slaughter the goat in front of the house, then skillfully skinning it. It looked like pulling a soft and heavy something out of a furry bag. Then came the cutting and chunking. The traditional dish - mensaf - is cooked in a huge pot over the fire. The chunked goat is cooking in a broth based on water, milk, salt and spices. Then the meat is piled up on a bed of rice or freshly baked shrak bread on large trays. The gaping head of the animal tops the main tray. The broth is poured on top.

Sitting around the tray everybody eats with their hands tearing chunks of the bread and grabbing pieces of meat. I have to admit, for someone like me it takes some getting used to. It's an acquired taste. And, if the first time I just picked a few bites pretending to eat, the last time I enjoyed such a feast I was starving to the point that I was happy even for the fried guts of the recently butchered goat. Yes, the guts. And I realized how much sand these goats were eating given the sandy crunchiness of what was inside these guts.
I discovered among other things that I have a better survival instinct than I thought. If it has to be goat or goat guts, I'm fine. My sister would have said it's all unhygienic the way it's prepared and eaten, my mom would have become nauseous by maybe just looking. A vegetarian would have suffered big-time. Instead I found the resources to enjoy this experience and appreciate these people and their lifestyle. I think in many ways they're closer to our ancestry than we are. They have given up their nomadic lifestyle and all have TVs, satellite dishes and mobile phones now, but they have not yet sold their soul to the devil. They are closer to nature and simplicity than we are.

Have you ever seen a car assaulted by goats? On the family outing occasion we all drove to the desert camp (well, a little tent and a goat enclosure in the rock wall) in a fabulous location where Mohammed's mom was herding their goats. She wasn't at "home" when we arrived and so we drove around to look for her. When we found her she got into the jeep and we caught up with the goats which were already slowly heading back to camp. As soon as she called them the goats started running towards us and stopped only halfway up the jeep peering into the car. What an easy task it was to pick out a goat to be sacrificed for the family feast. As we were driving through the desert back to camp the scared goat between our legs in the back seat, whining and bouncing like crazy, the other goats were racing to try and keep up with the car. They must have felt abandoned. We left them behind in a cloud of dust and they arrived a little later to camp. By that time their companion was already history and turning into a festive meal.

The morning ritual of giving water to goats, donkey and camels, of feeding them when there was not enough around, the milking of the camel and the taste of fresh camel milk, all these things are hard to describe for me. But they all are evidence of the strong bond between people and animals in these harsh surroundings.
I have now more good friends I certainly want to see again. I have a place to go back to and a family looking forward to see me again.
Insha'Allah! as they say.