Moab Musings 3

The Wadi Sakra construction site, courtesy of Muwared, more hideous development, the bigger the better they say. This site was once a verdant landscape, a valley, a green belt zone - a place of natural beauty for
the patients of the hospital.

Today is Friday, the one day of the week when I wake up to silence, but I didn't. The jack hammers and giraffes were at it from 7am. But it's Friday, a day of rest, why the rush. I went out. As I was driving home through Abdoun, the affluent part of Amman, I noticed a man rummaging through a public rubbish bin, a common sight around Amman for at least the last fifteen years. He was probably looking for anything salvageable, like discarded perfume bottles, tin cans or the odd trinket or two. He was a kind man, he was also throwing tidbits to a group of cats that had gathered around his feet. Flashback to the 1960s England and I was sitting watching the cartoon, Topcat, all over again. Flashback 1967. And someone said "Why don't those Arabs give the Jews some land … they have so much of it" I didn't understand why they said that then, I still don't. Words, empty, ignorant and stupid … and people were dying in an unjust war …

Fastforward to 2006, people were getting ready to demonstrate in Jerash, the Amman Governor had denied a group of Baathists, Communists and young people supporting Palestine to march inside Amman, for fear it would get out of hand; other people were preparing festivities to marry off the young, the muethin was getting ready to call the people to mid morning prayers, and the noise continues to permeate my bedroom all the way up from the Wadi Sakra Road. I wonder if that Hospital will withstand all that pounding from below?

All that pounding. A pregnant woman in the north of Jordan died from fright, too many fireworks going off these days; too much noise. Too much of everything, as the Middle East is thrust into yet another senseless war – in Lebanon of all places – our beautiful, vibrant jewel of the East, the soul of the Arab heartland that was emerging from the ashes … maybe that's why? We are sending out an SOS, but who cares?

Why the rush? Arabs continue to die in an unjust war … words don't change anything, only weapons do, we have learnt that from the UN, the US Secretary of State, the US president, the British PM and that perpetrator of crimes against humanity Olmert, the Israeli PM – another Anthony Eden (British PM 55-57) – we all pray. And as Jordan becomes the centre for humanitarian aid into Lebanon, my former country England, becomes the route for more deliveries of weapons of mass destruction into Israel.

Why the rush? Keep on killing, they all sing in unison at the United Nations. J