Week 6: Decentralization and the Desert
From atop a sand dune in the middle of the Wadi Rum desert, I watched as the sun began its descent behind the mountains in the distance—painting the sky with vibrant shades of pink, yellow, orange and red. My hand sunk into the soft sands as if the dune was trying to hold me in this place forever. If only it could. Sand blew past my sunglasses straight into my eyes, trying to waiver my attention from the sight before me but ultimately unsuccessful. For miles and miles around there was nothing but sand and rocks. I escaped the familiar streets and traffic in Amman for the weekend to bathe in the desert sun of Southern Jordan.
We piled into the jeep as our Bedouin guide drove us towards camp. Here in the desert Bedouin traditions remain strongly intact—the preservers of Jordan’s history and culture. Our guide was dressed in traditional clothing—a brown thoab and white serwal and upon his head sat a shemagh, protecting himself from the desert elements. Camp sits just beyond where the desert sands suddenly transform from red to white. We drive between two huge boulders and camp appears around the curve. A long hut sits to the right and on the left in a row stand our tents made from black and white dyed camel hair. We ate dinner cooked the traditional Bedouin way: in a zarb—an underground oven covered with sand. We watched as the sky turned from pitch black to glowing white as the moon rose from behind the mountains to take the sun’s place. It lit up the white sand beneath our toes. Never before in my life had I seen starts glitter the way they did that night. We laid across a flat rock and stared up at this once in a lifetime view. For a few hours, we too were desert dwellers.
Decentralization is about dissipating the magnetic pull of Amman and giving the people of Jordan in every municipality a voice. As our guide, Oudi sang old folk songs to us after dinner on his oud, I thought how the silent desert around us may give Bedouin tribe members a sense of never being heard—of living in a vacuum. But decentralization is about turning the volume up on his voice so that he is heard not only in our isolated camp but throughout the desert and four hours north in Amman, as well.