Disentanglement

The little wet towel they gave us in the aeroplane (Royal Jordanian this time) had written on it: 'Have a refreshing flight' which struck me as a bit of a stupid strapline, until I realised I was having exactly that. I managed to read half a book, and start a new one, learn a few Arabic words, and have a very stilted conversation with my Jordanian neighbour who spoke no English. I had to help fill out his UK immigration card, so I discovered he was 19, and going to the UK on business. But by the look of his hands, Rami was not someone who sat at a desk. They were thick and calloused and etched with black grease. It turned out his family deal in used car parts, and he was off to Bolton to see his sister, also part of the family business. He gave me his peanuts, and covered me with his blanket when I fell asleep, in a brotherly kind of way. He's one of 9 children, and his mother still managed to bring him up this well. Let's hope the Lozenge and Rashimi turn out that nice.

The flight was a welcome, stopped moment in time, where I could look both back and ahead in relative peace with no interruptions. It's important to have some distance from people you're entwined with occasionally. You can see what you've got from a bit further away. Once, on the bus in Camden before we left London, with an even younger Lozenge and Rashimi dangling from me, mewling and puking as Shakespeare once said it, an old lady said sagely to me: 'Make the most of these days, dear. You'll look back and you'll miss them.' But often we can't see this when it's happening, and because we're so far from family and friends in Amman, I see the Lozenge and Rashimi at point blank range all the time. There's little time to observe and be thankful as you swing, monkey-like, from branch to branch answering their immediate needs. So to be able to disentangle oneself from the ivy grip of offspring every so often and concentrate on your own roots, is a blessing.  I will not be a good tree if I don't tend my own roots, and flying back to my homeland, albeit alone, to give thanks for my Granny's full and integral life, feels like the right thing to be doing. Though it does hurt a bit, and makes you fret no differently from a little bird, about the chicks left behind, although in extremely capable hands.

I watched a lovely film the other day which is part of the Why Poverty series. It's about an organisation called Solar Mamas, which is based in India and teaches women from the most remote areas of the world to create and maintain solar power in their villages, including how to make a business from it. The film I saw focuses on a Bedu woman from Jordan who leaves her family for a total of 6 months and travels to India, to do it. After a few weeks she cracks, because her husband can't deal with it, and having never left home before, she misses her children and one of them is ill while she's away. She cries onto the shoulder of a Kenyan lady and says: 'I can't do this anymore. I want to smell my children'.  I really understood what she meant. The physical distance is so strange. The film will take an hour of your time, but it's wonderful, and the bravery and eventual conviction of this woman is humbling. People like this woman change their own realities,  surroundings, and communities, but at a great cost to themselves.

http://www.whypoverty.net/en/video/37/

I looked at the electronic map as the little image of the aeroplane edged closer to our tiny island, dissecting the great, arid belt of land with all those names we are so currently familiar with: Bamako, Tunis, Benghazi, Cairo, Aleppo. Each of those places have made news headlines in the Western press this month. They've become places in their own right, as trouble spots - more bad news from dusty places in that arid belt - the Arab Spring strapline uniting them all, in an ever-looser way. But maybe we should look at 'spring' in another way. We didn't read much about these places in the press until the information started flowing into our consciousness more regularly. And that, surely can never be a bad thing, even if the news is frightening. The lid is now off and there's a lot at stake, and a lot to fight for.