Jordanian Dishonesty?

A lot of foreigners in Jordan--and not a few Jordanians too--think Jordanian society is dishonest, and not just dishonest, but markedly more dishonest than the average nation or society. And while this may seem to be true to some extent sometimes--taxi drivers can be particularly trying, and the agreed upon details of any business arrangement seem to always be open to later revision (see this post for a description of a full day of dishonesty)--one must always be careful not to exaggerate the tendencies of the society in which you live.

By this I mean that when you are living in a foreign country it is always tempted to be dragged down by the differences between it and your home country and by the bad things that happen to you there. Yes, it is true that each culture has its positives and negatives, but if you are not careful, all the things that are just different can become negatives. Also if you are not careful, the bad people you meet or the bad experiences you have can become representative of the country and society as a whole, and not just people or events that happen to live or occur in that country. One must work hard to be realistic about the foreign country in which you live--in our case, Jordan--and be truthful to yourself and others about both its positives and negatives.

Because here in the United States of America we experience dishonesty too. A few days ago we wrote about our car getting hit while parked on the side of the road as I was putting our 8 month old son in his car seat. Afterwards it made me think about the issue of relative safety between Jordan and America. Now it has me thinking about the issue of dishonesty.

I'm thinking about this issue of dishonesty because today I discovered the insurance information given to us by the driver who hit us was false. I asked her for her information, and she pulled out an official looking piece of paper with the name of the insurer (a well known national company) and all of her information on it, all of which turned out to be false. The policy number that I copied from this piece of paper didn't even have the required number of digits. She lied right to my face.

Not only this, when I called her--why she gave me false insurance information but her actual telephone number, I do not know--she quite aggressively told me that the accident was as much my fault as hers, because I had opened the car door as she was driving by. Again, this was also false. Yes, the door was open, but I hadn't just opened it, only to smack her car as she drove by. I was standing inside of it, my back to the street, strapping the kid in his car seat while parked in a legal parking spot on the side of the street. I was a part of the normal flow of the city street, something to avoid hitting like an oncoming car or a person walking on that same spot. Again, another lie, this time over the phone.

It's frustrating to be cheated and lied to. And although I can be cheated and lied to on a semi-regular basis in Jordan, events in my life this week have reminded me that dishonesty is not specific to Jordan. As if I needed reminding. Because in the country of Bernie Madoff, Enron, Arthur Anderson, WorldCom, rock solid intelligence on Iraqi WMD's, Mark Sanford and all sorts of Wall Street chicanery, we don't.

Safety

* We've taken quite a break from this blog as we've been in the United States and out of Jordan, but this post represents our return to regular blogging. In case anyone wants to know.

When people find out we've been living in the Middle East, or when we talk to people who want to talk about our lives in the Middle East, one of the first questions we get asked is this: "Is it safe there?"

Now, "safe" is a relative term. What one person means when they wonder about the safety about a place or an activity could be quite different from what another person means when they wonder about the same place or activity. And, as someone who has moved halfway around the world to live in a country and culture much different than mine and thus must deal with all the pitfalls (and joys) that this entails, perhaps my own definition of safety is different than the person asking me. On top of this, even my own perspective on safety changes depending on the activity. You will never catch me sky jumping, bungee jumping or working with teens, for instance, as all of those activities seem very unsafe to me for one reason or another.

So, although this question always has me wanting to break into the mind of the interrogator, my answer is always this: Jordan is in fact very safe. Jordan is not Iraq, which, although it is somewhat more stable now, I would call unsafe. Jordan is not Gaza, which was recently the scene of terrible fighting and bloodshed. Jordan is not even Beirut, which, although seemingly stable now, often seems to have the threat of civil unrest or Israeli incursion hanging over it. Jordan is safe.

But how safe is America? Two days ago as I was leaning over to put our 8 month old son in his car seat, a woman sped by in her car and smacked the open door that I was standing inside, perfectly oblivious that a car had managed to miss hitting me by perhaps a few inches. No one was hurt--although our little boy was strangely silent while stuck in his car seat for 30 minutes afterwards--but, as people say, it could have been worse. A few inches, a foot, closer to our car, and I'd be in a hospital bed right now. Maybe we all would be.

As I think about this incident, I think that if this had happened in Jordan, part of the narrative about it would have had something to do with the safety of living there. People would have bemoaned the crazy speeding habits of Middle Eastern drivers, the lack of order on the roads or something along those lines. The foregone conclusion might have been drawn that--although for different reasons than the usual--Jordan was not safe. I write about our experience the other day, though, to point out that bad things can happen anywhere. A lot of people seem to think that living in the Middle East brings us to the precipice of death. Without being too dramatic, though, this is the closest I have come to suffering extreme bodily injury since moving to Jordan in 2006, and the closest I've come in life--which includes a previous stint in Jordan between 1999 and 2001--since I rolled my car off an icy winter road after a date in high school and ended up upside down in the front yard of my girlfriends' parents.

Does this mean that there are no risks living in Jordan? No, but it doesn't preclude there being risks in America too. Because although when people ask how safe we are in Jordan they are wondering about the possibilities of being caught in the middle of a war or the victim of anti-American anger and aggression, the most unsafe I have felt over the past several years involved casually strapping my child into our parked car after leaving a coffee shop in south Minneapolis. As an American friend of ours in Jordan remarked, that would never happen in Jordan. Nobody uses car seats.