Mr. Hakel Meets Ashraf

Blog 17 July 20, 2010
Happy Barthday to the benefactor of the feast, Dr. Patty Kubow. We’ve just finished celebrating with Patty here on the Jordanian shore of the Dead Sea. Today took me out of my comfort zone. Sure enough, every time you are asked to stretch, you do. Today we visited the SOS Children’s Village of Amman. An orphanage.
A word about how the orphanage is structured and then a word about the people and children we met.
This orphanage is a permanent placement for the children who come here. They are assigned a bed in a three bedroom house with three beds in each room. The people they find there are a family. There is one mother who lives with them full-time 24/7. There may be an auntie who assists. An auntie is a mother-in-training who served a 2-3 year apprenticeship. Brother and sister units are kept together. They attend public schools in the area. Mother’s are paid and given an additional monthly food budget and they do all the traditional work of a stay-at-home mom. Cooking, cleaning, rocking, help with homework and so on…They become a family. The orphans have a mom. After they reach 14 and before they turn 15 they will move to a youth house. The youth house is staffed by a youth leader, an adult that doesn’t assume the title of mom, because they already have one of those. A 22-year old was home for lunch with his mom today. When they turn 18, its off to the real world, but with support, job services, assistance with college tuition and finding scholarships.
Now, the people. The adults we met were kind, committed, generous and smiled a lot. The children we met were polite, clean, generous and smiled a lot. Ashraf, a boy of 11 years was in one of the houses a small group of us visited. While all the children in Jordan begin learning English in first grade, that doesn’t mean there isn’t still shyness. Ashraf does not bear that particular burden and has an unusually strong command of our language. One of the adults was kidding him that he may know more about English than he knows about Arabic. Ashraf became our tour guide as he showed us around his house and the rest of the village. He introduced us to the children in the house next to his and read our larger group a story. “Bacteria” was the only word he got stuck on very long. He received a lot of praise and was just glowing with pride. I would think he’ll remember this day as long as I will.
The second event I would like to tell you about is ourlunch. We were split up into pairs and we were each the guests of one of the houses. Leilani, a group mate, the name is Hawaiian, not Arabic…and I were led by Muhammed to his house. When we arrived, the TV was on in one corner. Several pictures of the King smiling with his family were above the table. The table itself was set with enough plates and food to feed an army. Leilani and I were asked to sit by the Auntie who was in charge while the mother was on vacation visiting her parents. We ate chicken with rice and a cucumber salad. Our early attempts to communicate were halting and wooden, but things gradually loosened. Seated next to me was an irrepressible boy, Samid, who was six. I pulled out my phrase book and started pointing at things and trying to say the Arabic name, which provoked some laughter and then pointed to a glass and said, “Baid” which I knew was egg from my phrase book but provoked a lot more laughter. The oldest girl who is fourteen disappeared for a moment and appeared with an egg, which provoked a great deal more laughter. After that it was magical. No, we never did talk about Jordanian/American relations blah, blah, blah, but we did make connections. Two Americans and nine Jordanians.
Our next stop was one of the youth houses. It turned to be a large apartment in an apartment building. This was a boys house. The youth houses are separated, but the villages are not. It was a nice apartment, both the village and the youth house were considerably more decorated than any of the Jordanian family houses we’ve visited up to this point. We had a nice visit and my group was able to talk with several of the youth. They brought a birthday cake for Patty, we sang, badly.
If you are in a position to be able to donate funds to SOS Children’s Village, I urge you to do so. They are active around the world. The website for Jordan is www.sosjor.org.
By the way, that wasn’t a typo at the beginning, the cake really did say, “Happy Barthday!”

Salaam,
Lane/Mr. Hakel/Dad