Connecting with Locals and Making Portraits in Jordan

Whenever I think of travel, my mind always goes to the people I meet along the way. The kind stranger on the street in Beirut helping me with directions. The beautiful barista in a hip coffee shop in Chile chatting about local attractions. The children playing in their front yard in a village in Cuba, letting me take their photos. The people I meet during my travels are what makes the journey real special to me. 

Jordan was no different. Similar to Lebanon, the country is home to a mixture of distinct peoples and backgrounds, a fact I found fascinating and didn’t know much about before I booked my trip there. Although overwhelmingly Muslim, the level at which religion is practiced varies across the country. Walking the streets of Amman for example, one can easily notice that women here enjoy greater freedom of personal expression and fashion than in Jordan’s neighboring countries. We have seen women dressed in abayas as well as those who could have easily been found on the streets of Paris or Milan instead of the Middle East. The experiences we’ve had in Amman compromised a mixture of activities that have both surprised me and enforced some of the loose ideas I had about the country. For example, we have danced alongside young women at a hip night lounge in Amman as well as cooked a traditional Jordanian meal with abaya clad ladies in a small village of Iraq-al-Amir just outside the city limits. We have found women who were shy of camera and worried about being photographed to those who eagerly smiled and even asked to be photographed. This concoction of behaviors and styles still fascinates me and is precisely the thing I’ve come to love about Jordan. I have this innate desire to go back and to photograph the people of Jordan to bring more of their individual story to light.

Regardless of whether such diversity is something to embrace or to scoff at, one thing is for certain regarding the Jordanian people: they each welcomed our presence and went out of their way to make us feel safe and comfortable in their home country. Monika and I always seek out to connect with local people whenever we travel and in Jordan we had no problem engaging in frequent conversation or a friendly exchange. I think it’s worth mentioning some of the wonderful people we’ve met and the experiences we’ve shared with them along the way:

• Muneer, our guide and driver in Amman who went out of his way to accommodate my crazy photography related requests! Let me know if you guys ever need his services, I will connect you with him and you’ll have an Amman experience like no other.
• Beautiful Aya and her twenty-something friends who invited us for a night out in a hip part of Amman for a night of dancing and drinking (despite the fact that we are way older than them 😉
• The lone young Bedouin boy with his herd of sheep and his donkey who let us photograph him as we randomly pulled over to the side of the road to meet him – he did not speak a word of English and yet the exchange was incredibly pleasant and fulfilling for us all.
• The wonderful family in the town of Petra whom we met while taking a sunset stroll and who invited us into their home for a hot cup of tea and a conversation about our travels. 
• Our wonderful guides in Wadi Rum, especially Akram and his crew who made sure we had the best experience for all the days we were there.
• And lastly, the amazing ladies of Iraq-al-Amir village who cooked a delicious vegetarian meal for us, joked and laughed and told stories of their life in the limited language capabilities that we all had yet never allowing our differences to ruin the overall experience.

All these memorable encounters in Jordan reinforced my ideas of why I love to travel and how important it is to connect with local people to make the experience even more meaningful. Visiting ancient sites and buildings is important, but does it ever, in itself, become life changing? Why travel if not to expand our horizons and our points of view about other cultures and the distant lands? What would the trip be worth if we came back home exactly as we were before we left, with our preconceived and media-biased notions of what the place and its people are really all about? I ask myself these questions a lot, but perhaps the one person that summarized it best is a British-born American travel writer and essayist, Pico Iyer. In his words precisely,

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”