my clothing

Staying with the Bedouins requires more modest dress than Amman. I wore long sleeved shirts with a long black Ex Officio skirt and REI pants under it, as well as the hijab covering my hair and neck. Basically, imagine my normal camping-wear, only with a long black skirt and a black scarf.

They insisted that I wear close-toed shoes the first day, and I didn't take them off until I was playing with Laith and Haneen towards the end of my stay. The kids go barefoot alot, but I found that it hurt my feet on the gravel.

One day I saw Um Laith wash a dress, so I washed my pants. Rinsed, rather. The camping pants under skirt was kindof awesome, and I couldn't wait to put them back on because my long underwear kept me noticeably warmer. After a few days, I noticed that my skirt had abruptly become inexplicably dirty, as though it had reached it's saturation point or something. It really is kindof an awesome skirt, to take a few days to appear dirty.

I tried to wear the Bedouin dress I had bought in Amman, but concluded that the six pins were no substitute for a hem in a long day of walking. I opted not to deal with the issue publicly and just kept wearing what I'd been wearing. Even though it wasn't traditional, it felt very fitting to me, maybe just because it was optimal for the physical setting, and I had been so struck by the way the Bedouins had embraced the technology which best facilitated their desert lifestyle.

The difference, of course, is that my clothing was specialized, optimized even, and not cheap. If I were really being Bedouin, I would have been wearing something that was cost effective and worked just fine, rather than paying so much extra for something designed to be optimal in this specific occasion.

I guess I won't know until they build an REI in Agaba.

The hijab is the windbreaker of hats. I liked wearing it. I didn't take if off on the bus ride home. It wasn't so much that I felt a need to keep wearing it as that I felt no desire to take it off; it had become my default. Back in Amman, I felt strangely naked not wearing it. If that transition was noticeably strange for me, imagine how unfathomably traumatic it must have been for the women forced to unveil for the first time in their collective memory. Seriously.