Waiting... (on exile in Amman)

Hi everyone,

We have been in Amman now, our Iraq-team-in-Diaspora, for a little over a
week, waiting for the time when we can return to our work.

It is difficult to be waiting.

First of all, we are spending more time around each other than ever, and
therefore have more time to get into arguments, or ponder, “What exactly
did he mean by that?” Perhaps I am more vulnerable to this than my
teammates. And then there is Matthew, who is a philosophy major just out
of college last year and still eager to debate. Without the interference
of actual work or war zones, there have been some pretty intense
hashings-out. Still we are friends. Hopefully, we are getting to a point
where we can begin to laugh about this. Myself included.

Jeering travelers call this place the ‘Hashemite Kingdom of Boredom,’ a
waiting room, a crossroads to more interesting places and people to do
those things with. It still strikes me as amazing that cars are lined up
across the street to Syria, Lebanaon, and Saudi Arabia—it’s as close as a
car ride away now, but also as far as arranging a visa in times like
these. I also then remind myself that I have team responsibilities—and so
could not even begin to fathom such a fantastic trip. Even a quick zip
into Palestine (which is never really a quick zip when dealing with
Israeli border security) is just far enough beyond me as I cannot just
ditch the team for a few days.

Fortunately, there are meetings with other humanitarian workers who have
departed Baghdad, once a week. Sometimes we can go to meetings twice a
week. At least one of my teammates is going because there are cookies. I
am going partly to keep up on what they are doing, and partly just to see
some other like-minded souls. Thursday nights include plenty of social
invitations from the other organizations also, and these have been much
welcome. Throughout the week, friends we didn’t know were here have been
showing up to take us to dinner, to tea, to watch a video, even some of us
went to the Dead Sea. We haven’t been for lack of things to do, actually.

We are still working, yes, but we are doing so while sitting in a hotel,
which makes you feel like you’re not working, and then you wonder why you
are tired.

A good chunk of our work is discernment about the timing of our return,
and indeed the future of this project. Discernment is difficult. It was
unnerving trying to do discernment in a country about to blow apart, and
it is equally difficult to do so in this vacuum of a country, although in
different ways. We are meeting roughly two hours per day.

Baghdad, as with the region, was and is quite a high-pressure environment.
We do wonder if we ourselves and each other are up for the task of
returning.

In Baghdad, we were waiting for a plane, or waiting for trouble to show up
at our doorstep before we could get to the plane, or—could we still
imagine?--waiting for things to get better. The waiting there was
draining enough in itself, probably a good additional reason for our
tiredness now. We were running so much on adrenaline, and eventually the
adrenaline stops.

Our team is tired—deeply tired, we tend to hold our meetings in horizontal
positions, sprawled across the beds in my room by the end. We each zonk
out in the afternoons for a few hours. We’re almost too tired to go see
the ruins downtown, which are actually interesting.

It is difficult to get through on the phone lines to Baghdad. We have
been able to communicate with far fewer of our friends and neighbors than
thought. This also adds to our sense of limbo, not having known what is
really happening on the ground for such a long period of time.
Finally today, we got through and got some solid news to go on. That in
itself is quite energizing. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

Our Iraqi friends are saying it’s calm in Baghdad now but give it a few
days. Our landlord’s family misses us. Our friendly taxi-arranger at the
hotel here says the same thing. Our international colleagues who were
hunkering down, then wrote to say they were flying out to join us, then we
didn’t hear from them for several days—finally also, contact at last.
They are well. They are able to do some work, but still it’s difficult
for them to leave the house.

Perhaps we will not be waiting forever.