More on Attack

Um Tariq and I went to the site in the afternoon. Jaramana is not far from where car bomb went off, which is on my daily work commute. We walked there.

The bomb went off at the Saida Zeinab offramp of the highway, near the big signs for Tariq bin Ziad greeting cards. Even the earliest reports I saw fixated on how Sayda Zeinab is a Shi'i shrine and packed with Iranian tourists. It was early so news items were three short paragraphs, with one describing Sayda Zeinab and its significance and the type of pilgrims that usually come. The NYTimes for example, describes the bombing as "close to a major Shiite shrine". Then again they are reporting from Beirut, not Damascus.

Based on where the bomb actually went off, this doesn't seem that relevant to me. The offramp from the highway is still a couple miles away from Saida Zeinab. Riding a servees to Sitt Zeinab, you still have a good 15 minutes after taking this exit before actually reaching the town, with the shrine a bit further. But perhaps the American news is so used to reporting everything from this part of the world in terms of Shi'i, Sunni they thought it must be significant. The car bomb went off, geographically, much closer to Mughayyam Jeramana (Palestinian) and Jeramana (Druze and Iraqi) but none of that was mentioned in the reports.

At the site, all of the nearby apartments had busted out windows. There were a lot of parked cars around, most of which had busted out windows as well. There was glass everywhere and even little parts of car that had missed being swept up. The bomb warped nearby shops and destroyed part of a wall that apparently is a mukhabarat building, which workers were already rebuilding. The nearby school didn't look that damaged. There was a crowd of people standing around, one guy showing pictures of the smoke and fire afterwards on his cell phone to others. Um Tariq started talking to a woman who lives there. She said they first thought it was an earthquake this morning, then they saw the smoke.

Several people there said they saw the police arresting people on the site soon after the explosion. They said no one was in the car when it exploded.

Despite reading foreign reports that said the explosion happened at 8:45, the woman at the scene and all my neighbors and friends who heard it go off said it happened at about 20 to 8.

Syria news that night had an official statement from the president calling the terrorists cowards, which was repeated often throughout the broadcast. There were also interviews with the wounded in the hospital. One had been on his way to work and described seeing a car drive up onto the sidewalk, which he thought strange, and then it exploded. There were other wounded, one of whom called whoever did it "not human". It is stupid for some (ahem Daniel Pipes) in the West to criticize "moderate" Muslims for not denouncing terrorism. They are freaking denouncing! If your head wasn't up your own ass maybe you would hear! Some of the injured had been praying in the nearby mosque and got hit when leaving. It was Leilat al-Qadr, the celebration of the Quran's first relevation. Many people spend all night in a mosque, praying and reading the Quran (like Um Tariq. She invited me but I was sleepy. And not Muslim).

The report thanked God that it was Saturday, a sentiment repeated often as well. Saturday is weekend, not a schoolday, so the nearby technical and electrical engineering college and the very nearby school was closed. The school would have had something like 1000 students (I forget what the news said). While the damage was not apparent from the outside, TV cameras showed the inside, with doors knocked down, glass all over the floor, walls warped. Almost everyone interviewed, including the injured in the hospital thanked God it was not a schoolday.

Car Bomb

Car bomb exploded this morning in Damascus around 8am, where the highway meets Airport Road. Killed 17 and wounded 14, civilians. While I was sleeping, some of my friends heard it and Sale7 said he saw the smoke from his apartment. The Syrian Interior Minister on Al-Arabiyya blamed it on terrorists.

Runaway

A friend ran away from home last week. She's Druze. She's finally back at home, after a week out, fighting to stay away, and a night in prison. She didn't want to go back. I don't know how much I'm going to write about what happened, I'm still processing it.

Born in the U.S.A.

How to broach a topic like this, littered with landmines? Especially when a woman from the supposedly-enlightened bastion of freedom and equality that is the United States deigns to bestow her help and knowledge upon the poor oppressed masses of the other, chained by their religion and backwards culture and, perhaps, hummus. The portrayal of all Arab women or all Muslim women, or all non-Western women as pitiable creatures draws some of my more exasperated sighs. The falsehoods that are perpetuated, the generalization of the restriction of one country to all, the thought that the hijab might as well be a stamp marked "Please Liberate Me!". The undertone (though not always so under) accompanying much of this hand wringing that "we" are so much better. That we have achieved gender equality. That much of this is insincere is unsurprising: there's a long history of using "Save the brown woman from the brown man" to justify occupying and controlling both. Lord Cromer, the British colonial head in Egypt (1883-1907), decried the treatment of Egytian women and thundered against the veil, then went home and co-founded an anti-women's suffrage group. The sudden sympathy of American government officials for the poor Afghani woman coincidentally arising with the desire to invade brings to mind certain parallels.

And at the same time, I'm glad I was born a woman in America.

Most of the time I can't even comprehend how much privilege I have, and not just from my nationality. I am a white woman born into a middle-class educated family in America. Despite the relative strictness of my upbringing, at 18 there was never a question of my shipping off to college a thousand miles away, in New York City, no less. No sense that the honor of the entire family rested between my legs. And it doesn't in every family - but it does in some.

Just the fact that I'm here in Syria, a woman living by herself, is something. Most weekends I hang out with my guy friends more than girls because a lot of the girls have to be home at 8 or 9, or if lucky, 10.

A lot of my freedom comes from money. I could afford to travel here, can afford to get a place on my own and have no responsibilities other than myself. And sure enough, among the more well-off, daughters go off to college in Beirut or England and stay out late. And there is a contingent of girls who come from other areas of Syria to go to college in Damascus, and live alone or in groups, especially from the Jolan (whose seperation from their families is quite understandable). But I'd say from my Western woman perch that more typical is going back to Jeramana from Capoeira class with a 28-year-old woman, her cell phone ringing every 5 minutes with parents telling her to hurry up and get home, as if she can will the traffic away or the servees faster. It is 8:30 pm.

Even as pharmacists refuse to give out contraceptives, even as rape victims are blamed, even as the worth of a woman is measured in fuckability, even as lifting your t-shirt for a free hat are being trumpeted as "expressing yourself", I thank fucking God that I am woman from America.

Damascus Can Be A Tiny Place

They say there's something like 5 million people in Damascus and its environs, but honestly sometimes I feel like there are 30 with how I keep running into people.

UNFPA and SHABAB (that's an acronym) did some training of kids (15-30) for interactive theatre last week. The week ended with two performances where they did their skits on education and women's rights for youth and NGOs. I covered the training for UNFPA, showing up early and on a Saturday to get photos of the first day.

Soon, I was recognized. A guy came up to me and asked if I was "that girl" at the Danish party in Jeramana the previous Thursday night. "You dance well!" he said, which is exactly how you want people to identify you when trying to be all professional. "To Nancy Ajram - remember?"

All too well. The Thursday evening in question I and several others from Capoeira class went to a party hosted by Danes at a pool in Jeramana. They rented out the entire pool, and we ate meshawi, swam a bit, drank a bit, argeelaed a bit and danced. At one of the later points in the night, for a large group of us debke became booty shaking or raqs sharqi depending on the music. A Nancy Ajram song came on, one of those that my roommates and I back in Cairo 2006 had spent long nights dancing to, and I busted out the raqs sharqi.

For this, I was recognized by two of the interactive theatre actors who did not know each other but both happened to be at the party. Well, nice to meet you too.

Friday I skipped the first performance because of a conflict with my Capoeira class. It got out at eight, and as I was walking on Sharia Baghdad I ran into two of the actors. "Why weren't you at the show??" they demanded. "Tomorrow, in sha Allah" I said, but was a little embarrased because I was wearing a tiara.

It was my birthday, so my capoeria class had surprised me with cake and a tiara, which I was now wearing for all of Shariah Thawra and Baghdad to see.

So I think all of those people in the theatre group think I've crazy and possibly on crack. Which sucks because I know I'm going run into them in the future.

In Sha Allah Mabrouk

I had a weekend just chock-full o' parties, beginning Thursday night when I went to Um Mohammad's daughter's engagement party.

Um Mohammad is a Palestinian woman who cleans the UNFPA and sometimes we ride the servees together. We got to talking, and I no longer lament my Jeramana -Mezzeh commute as she lives in Husayniyya, out past Sitt Zenaib and the airport. It takes her an hour and half to get to work.

She further told me she had 8 girls and two sons. I remarked that it must be crazy with all those kids, to which she replied that oh, all the girls but three are married off so there's not that many. And Iya is getting engaged next week! Would you like to come? You can sleep over! We'll kick the men out so you don't have to worry, it'll just be girls!

I accepted the invitation for the party, which is how I found myself dancing with 50-year-old muhajjibas to reggaeton.

I had been expecting a lot more meat. It's almost shameful that I've been here 11 months without a single Shami wedding, but I had heard what to expect: Ladies be off by themselves, stripping down to impressively gaudy dresses and putting Rotana video to shame. But while the party was predominantly female, there were a few guys so many hijabs stayed on. This however, did not stop the Sexy Dancing. Neither did the heat, which had hit 43 C that day, compounded by the sweaty multitudes dancing inside a concrete room. I thought that I would be able to impress with my ability to bust a move, but I was put to shame by grandmothers and 12-year-olds in belly tops.

The engaged girl, Iya, who is 18, looked mostly bored as she sat on her raised platform above the revelers. She must have spent hours at the salon: makeup heavily done, each strand of hair shackled down, and everything topped off with glitter and stick-on stud rhinestones. Her pink dress had an impressive circumfrence that, when she sat, fanned out behind her. An aunt helpfully stuck a kleenex into the halter bustier to cover up the cleavage.

The groom was brought in with much fanfare and photos. The fiances looked at each other nervously when he walked up to her and took his seat next to her on the platform. For the official photos, the mother of the bride hauled out a matching pink cape to drape over her daughter's bare shoulders. The two awkwardly shuffled a dance, careful with her dress, before retaking their thrones and we, the masses, began to shimmy and debke again. Then the groom left to go back to his party in Mughayyam Jeramana.

The evening ended after 9pm, but the seeminly endless sisters of Um Mohammad and their children and children's children stayed. We sat out in the garden sipping sugary tea and talking. I had to focus a bit more than usual because they are from countryside Palestine and have a different accent: most notably they say gaff for qaff, though a few of them used kaff. They all lamented the tiny size of my family (my brother and I) while boasting of their own. Um Mohammad has her 10, one of her sisters, 13, another 12. "Palestinians love children!" they told me. Um Mohammad's 24-year-old niece has three and one on the way. There were children everywhere during the party, running underfoot, being handed off, staring at me and offering me candy.

A Syrian friend later told me, "Oh the Palestinians. They have children like they're competing against each other."

Yes Palestinians and Irish Catholics! We will breed our way into taking back our lands!

Um Mohammad and her son refused to let me go home alone. "We understand its different in Jeramana, but girls don't walk by themselves in Husayniyya." They came with all the way to Mughayyam Jeramana, despite my protests of knowing the way. Really sweet woman, Um Mohammad - since I didn't stay over I've now promised a sleepover in the near future.

I love how people say, "In sha Allah mabrouk!" (Hopefully congratulations!). It is after all just the engagement, with the actual wedding planned after a year or so. Anything could happen between now and then, so mabrouk, in sha Allah.

Middle Class Refugees

According to an official at UNHCR, one of the problems facing the Iraqi refugees in Syria is their Middle Class-ness. When the money runs out "they don't have the survival skills of most refugee populations."