During our visit to Jordan, we had the opportunity to experience Bedouin culture in several different contexts. Our first contact was with a Bedouin municipality in central Jordan, where we met with leaders of two local tribal societies who had formed a cooperative to address critical issues such as water scarcity, land stewardship and social welfare that have threatened the very existence of the Bedouins. The Bedouin as a whole are comprised of hundreds of tribes who travel nomadically in the region of Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Syria. As with indigenous people all over the world, their existence has been threatened by politics, globalization and the realities of life in 2010, with traditional values giving way to gradual, grudging acceptance of modernization.
Later that same day, spending time in the tents of Bedouin, with the women segregated in one section and the men in another, as we did in an encampment near Feynan, I had the sense of viewing a lifestyle that had changed only slightly in the past hundreds of years. The tent’s tarpaulin roof was supported by smooth, honed wooden poles and the floor was composed of colorful rugs and blankets smoothly laid on the desert floor. Our hosts welcomed us with all the warmth that the Bedouin tradition prescribed – ‘three days of welcome before they ask your name, after that they may ask your name and choose whether to welcome you further.’ This was the mantra and I loved hearing it said over and over like a prayer. We had sweet, bitter tea and spoke in low tones and it was so easy to pretend away the centuries. It saddens me greatly, as it does so many others, to think of this disappearing— so the challenge continues, find a way for the Bedouin to endure and not become an anachronism. Find a way for sustainability and for the maverick beauty that they represent to so many to make sense in our century.
In this particular region, pooling resources has allowed the tribal societies to share funding and expertise, as well as to collaborate on the essential efforts of schools, health centers, charitable societies and a women’s center. These facilities represent ‘resettlement,’ an effort that is fraught with contradictions for an indigenous people whose very lifestyle has been defined by nomadic tradition. The Bedouin tribes have traveled the deserts and arid lands of this region for thousands of years , living out of tents using intimate knowledge of the land and environment to farm and support their livestock.
Understanding the particular needs of the Bedouins is notoriously difficult, bordering on impossible for outsiders; and the leaders of the cooperative explained that volunteers were scarce. The representative who spoke to our group was frank – those who did volunteer either left after a short period of time or developed programs that didn’t meet the particular needs of the community. As he explained, the educational system has been so poor for so long that teachers had to come from the outside – the community itself had been unable to produce its own instructors.
Because the Bedouins are indigenous not, as most would assume, rural, the cultural nuances are extremely difficult to grasp. The Bedouin representative explained with a great deal of passion that the people of this region have different needs from any other people in any other region in Jordan. He claimed that programs targeted at rural populations assume a desire to economically improve oneself in a material way. But the Bedouin “do not want iPods” – he explained – they want access to water, health care and education. His description of the scope of their needs was plain: agricultural training and greater economic access to markets. The Bedouin creed, as explained to us by every Bedouin we met at every stop along our journey, is to live lightly on the land. A week later at the Ministry of Agriculture, we were told a story that we were assured was true of Bedouins who had beautiful concrete block homes built for them by the government – only to have the government find a year later that it was the goats living in the house and the people right back outside in the tents again. Who can say what is fact and what is fiction? But all can agree that the problem is a difficult one – great need and tiny resources.
These tribes, according to their own calculations, are farming only 2,000 acres of the 10,000 available due to the extreme water shortage in Jordan. Jordan ranks near the bottom in the world in terms of water shortage – a ranking that is unlikely to change for the better anytime soon given the world’s climate change trends. By tradition, the Bedouin grow the water intensive crops of tomatoes and melons. The math doesn’t appear to work. Dramatic changes in agricultural methodology and crop selection seem necessary for permanent sustainability.
The Bedouin host at the tent where our group had tea had a clear message to send back to Amman – they were thirsty, he said. The black piping we saw in the arid desert seemed like an impossible means of conducting enough water for a family, much less livestock and crops, but somehow he and his family were living off of it.
There are creative and sustainable solutions still possible, and one of those was at the other end of that black water piping. The Bedouin family and tribe driving and hosting our group took us to our night’s lodgings at Feynan Ecolodge – an innovative nonprofit hotel that uses profits from its programs to support both the Dana Biosphere Reserve where it is located and “to sustain the cultural integrity of the local people by hiring members of the community.”
Feynan had been developed by Chris Johnson, who has created similar efforts in other areas of natural beauty around Jordan, in original cooperation with Muntaha Sayyad, who is a volunteer for one of our sponsors, the Jordanian Alliance Against Hunger, and who had been accompanying us on our travels. Feynan paid the Bedouin women to use their traditional skills to create stunning handicrafts, which were then sold in the lodge’s gift shop. It is an innovative and successful concept and though probably not a solution on a large scale, it is the kind of thinking necessary if sustainability is to be built over the long-term.by Camaro Elliott Powers
Photo credits: Camaro Elliott Powers; Feynan Ecolodge photo property of Feynan Ecolodge
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