Iraqi Refugees in Jordan Part 1

Dec 31st 2008
Amman, Jordan (working on behalf of Direct Aid Iraq)

I woke to the sounds of cold rain beating our apartment’s window. I could barely see the view of Jabel Amman’s crowded landscape, a scene normally pregnant with cars and boxy limestone buildings stacked over a mountain terrain. All of Amman’s hills are covered in white, a washed out Lego land dotted with breezy laundry lines, and smooth black disks beaming satellite programming from a shivering sky.

I am about to begin my first day photographing what is hidden and often forbidden amongst the predictable white stacks.

Iraqis – the unwanted “guests” of Jordan. I have learned to stop calling them refugees, for that term is too generous for the predicament they find themselves in here. They are ones without status, in limitless limbo, an appreciative guest who attempts to cross into the comforting embrace of a warm home of a host, leaving the winter at his back. But theses Iraqi guests can neither cross in nor leave behind the political reality of their now unfortunate identity. They stand at one precarious step outside of urgent and unpredictable danger, onto the slower death of an unavoidable and gut-wrenching poverty. Once in the “safe” arms of Jordan, they must remain jobless. Without permission to work for others or for themselves, they attempt at surviving through illegal means. But this risks deportation back to Iraq.

And those who are deported back to Iraq almost always die.

The taxi brings us to Hamid’s home, a squatter shack with a dripping tin roof and plastic nylon stretched where windows should stand. Hamid is a lively fellow and fairly young, perhaps in his late thirties. His three young children, Aseel, Muhammed and Asem run to greet us. The baby sits squarely in his mothers embrace. The children are fair like their father, an Iraqi Shi’a Kurd originally from the North, but grew up in Baghdad after Saddam’s Ba’athist regime confiscated his father’s land. His wife Hanan, a Palestinian woman, kisses our cheeks and welcomes us in. We stand for five minutes as they argue with me not to remove my shoes (which are covered in mud); they are afraid the painful cold of the stone earth floors will make me sick. But I know the inside story about their carpet, it is a donation from Direct Aid Iraq, and so I refuse to leave them on. Finally we strike a compromise; I would wear a pair of Hanan’s slippers.

The house is filled with the smells of tourishy – pickled vegetables mixed with spices, an Iraqi specialty. In fact the smell greets us directly from Hamid’s presence – his hands, his clothes, his smile. The stone floors are filled with neatly lined rows of glass jars packed with herbed stuffed pickles, bright purple beets and cabbage, dibbis (date syrup), thanini and my personal favorite, the very spicy yellow paste known as Amba. As children in Iraq, my brother and I used to dare each other to eat spoonfuls of Amba without rice or bread. Ever the fierce competitor, I’d choked back tears, my insides burning as I tried to one up my older brother with the mustardy mess in my mouth. I’d usually lose, but the training made me a life long lover of anything spicy – for me, the hotter, the better.

After the obligatory coffee and niceties, we get to work. Tomiko and I with video cameras, digital stills and an audio field recorder, pack their tiny crowded hall where Hamid makes the tourishy. He tells us poignant and funny stories about how the Iraqi people have renamed him “King of Tourishy”. An American woman, he tells us, took jars of the pickles to the USA. Her Iraqi friends cried when they opened the jars, the smell welcomed them back to their homeland. They insisted the jars came from Iraq, and not Jordan when Hamid now squats, waiting for his turn to relocate to America, Australia or Canada.

He sells the tourishy to survive. The jar sells for 1.5 Jordanian Dinars. He has two young children requiring formula milk at 4 dinars per day. He has to work, he tells us. The aid he receives is less than 50 JDs a month. Hamid worries for his family, but they worry more for him. He shows us scars covering his body, shrapnel wounds around his head and legs, including an eight-inch snake scar on his arm where he was severely injured. After his taxi exploded in Baghdad a few years ago, he laid in a coma for days. He still loses his hearing for weeks at a time, suffers through profound migraines and is prone to sudden fevers. The shock of the explosion triggered diabetes (as it has for many of the Iraqis we are meeting here), but managing his care has proved nearly impossible. He is passed from doctors who do not care to treat him (one told him he’d die in five years, and that they should save the medicine for someone who will live), or simply are untrained in the field. The Red Crescent caseworkers are overwhelmed; Hamid’s last doctor prescribed a dosage that makes him pass out from insulin shock each day. For four months his wife wakes him from this state, scared to death he will die. He shows us the metal plate that use to be in his arm; an object that was supposed to be removed after 6 months, but stayed in his body for nearly three years because he didn’t have the funds for its removal. Hamid holds out the screws and plate, defiantly demonstrating his will to live past such dire forecasts.

Hamid believes all his misfortunes will vanish if he can be relocated away from Jordan. He is quick to smile and to thank God for his good fortune – primarily his talent in the pickeling department. He believes he can survive anywhere with his gifts, if only if he’s given the chance to legally work, and to be rid of the deep hatred towards him and his family. Like many Iraqi’s, his family’s mixed identity is too complicated to fit neatly in some prescribed package of belonging and exclusion. He’s a Kurdish Iraqi in exile, and accepted by neither group in the current political climate. He hides his Shi’a iconography behind a closet door, but Hamid is the first to embrace another’s difference. He tells over and over that he is simply an “Iraqi”.

Hanan declared us all her sisters upon our leaving, begging for us to return. We argued again at the end of our stay, their wanting to bestow gifts of pickles and Amba on me, and my wanting to pay. Hanan didn’t want to be treated as a poor woman (she said if we treated her like she was poor, it made her poor), and asked that we come back “later” to buy gifts for friends, while letting her give us gifts now. But we knew better to take such gifts from them, even with their dignity in the balance. So I made a joke about my poor Arabic and how they were saving me from a trip to the store and the difficult discussion of ordering pickles, which I clearly had to do before going back to America. Whether they believed my story or not, it preserved their dignity and gave them the permission to accept the money they so desperately needed. Admittedly, I purchased more than I wanted to bring back to America.

That night, Tomiko and I opened a jar of pickles with our meal. The pickles were as delicious as he said they would be. I now know that none will come back with me to America, for surely I will eat them each night for the next few weeks I am here.

I will eat them, and I too will remember Iraq.