Middle East Misadventure

Sammia

Amman, Jordan.

2015

Jordan has a way of keeping you at the edge of your seat, whether it be something comical that you might see on a late night sitcom show. For example when I visited police station to extend our visa, I stood in line waiting my turn in a building that resemble more a concrete box than a police station. As I waited I took a look around, the almost sad iron bars that held the prisoners did so with only a store buy padlock. Cops walked the around station with guns shoved in their belts instead of safely place in a required holster, but the thing that actually made the whole experience delightful to me was when someone, and I like to assume it was the chief of police, got the idea in his head that now, in the mists of the hot and sweating bureaucracy that was taking place in the concrete box, decided now was the perfect time to practice his trombone. Screaming through the halls of the station come this unrehearsed and out of tune trombone music that gave only me a smile. 

There is also the least enjoyable side of Jordan, as I said in this two bedroom flat alone, I had three nights of non-stop machine gun fire. Some shots were distant but others occupied the neighbor's street, illuminate the block with flashes of light. The little information that I manage acquire on the subject said riot, but I still don't know. Needless to say I did not take Hugo, Ashley and Elijah's dog, out for a walk that night. 

However Jordan has a way of keeping you on the edge of your seat in the most confusing and unexpected ways possible; As was the case the Bangladeshi girl named Sammia. It was an early Monday morning, the last night I had stayed up late studying the material for my English class in the morning. But before the time my alarm clock was meant to sing, I heard a sound, not one like the bird's morning choir but one of a girl screaming, a sound I wish never to familiarize myself with, I jumped out of bed to peer out the window and I saw a man with two female accomplices trying to force a third girl into an old white Honda. “Oh-Crap,” I said to myself as I left the room to awake my friends in the next room. In short words I explained the situation and we all rushed to throw somethings on. Wasting no time we made our way to the back porch and caught the man in the act of hitting the girl while still trying to put her in the car. 

Yelling at the man to stop what he was doing, he released the girl and she began to cry and sing quite loudly in Arabic, most like a prayer to the same god that allowed her assailant to do the every act she was praying against. The girl, named Sammia, wondered from her attack and clasped herself to my arm holding on tightly trying to pull me away from the man, my friends retreated to the house to call the police, and I alone stood between the man and the disturbed girl. 

There's a certain feeling you get when you stand in defiance in silence, to a lying giant who finds your lack of compliance the next step to violence. He grabbed her again, like straight chains, I stepped in this wasn't a game. He said he'll take her to the embassy, can't you see; No maniacal plot or enemies just sensibility for her necessities. A noble campaign but lies all the same, like he had nothing to gain; like a press release my friends called the police, but tensions were about to increase. 

The man with the other two girls got in their white Honda and left the scene, I assumed this was the end of the ordeal, but Sammia had not taken a firm hold of the iron bars on our door. When the cops came we told them what happen, with little enthusiasm to do their job we found the cops were actually worse then the man. They mocked her and even slapped her around when she refused to let go of the bars. Unfortunately, like I said I had a class to teach that morning, so I didn't actually see the events that ended the situation, but when my class was over and I return with pained heart, I was told that after I left, the strange man came back. Sammie's attacker told the police that he wished to take her to the embassy. To my horror I was told the police office listened to the man and after a conversation he help put the poor girl into the car and together they left for the Bangladeshi embassy. However two days later we called the Bangladeshi embassy and they informed us that no girl matching the description of Sammia ever enter the protection of the embassy.