Jordan Trip Update: Jordan Needs Topsoil!

Work is progressing quite well here in Jordan and my hosts have been most gracious and generous. I have spent two days on the job so far and am stunned by several of the customs of Jordanian IT managers. First, they love their tea and coffee. A butler serves sweet hot tea and thick bitter coffee (I’m not a coffee drinker, I go for the tea) every few hours. The second thing that stuns me about their customs, is that they smoke cigarettes. A lot. Indoors. In the server room. While configuring switches and large storage units.

My hosts are also gracious enough to have provided transportation to and from the job site, which is great, because Arab drivers are crazy. All those Arab taxi drivers that drive aggressively and way too fast? They learned those skills over here. I think the only people on the roads with a bigger deathwish than Arab drivers are Arab pedestrians. If crosswalks exist over here, they are studiously ignored. One woman, dressed in an all-black burka, including the hood, tried to cross the road in front of a bus, and in my mind, I heard the sound effect of Pac-Man eating “Inky,” the blue ghost.

On these trips to the worksite, when I’m not shutting my eyes when pedestrians jump in front of the vehicle, I am on the lookout for one decent plot of grass where someone can take off their shoes and scrunch their toes into the greenery. I haven’t see it yet. Jordanian ground is not sandy- its rocky. Little rocks and big rocks in every open space, almost as if the world has been using the empty spaces of Amman as dumping grounds for them. In some rare spaces, groundskeepers have raked furrows into the rocky terrain and sprinkled some grass-seed on it, but you wouldn’t want to go tiptoeing through that yard without boots on.

And its not like it doesn’t rain in Jordan. It does; its raining tonight, in fact. So grass would grow, if only Jordan had topsoil. I figure several hundred million metric tons of rich dark soil and some grass seed would make this town look a little less grim. Then maybe the citizens would have somewhere soft to walk instead of dodging traffic in the middle of the street.