Volunteers in the poorest area of Jordan

For three months Danish Lene and Camilla have worked as MS volunteers at a school in the city of Zarqa. The city is widely known to be one of poorest and most conservative areas in all of Jordan.

21 year old Lene Mørup is teaching English to a second grade class in the city of Zarqa in Jordan. Along with 22 year old Camilla Dremark, she is part of MS MENA's “People for Change” program in the Middle East and North Africa.

”I'm going to school...”
”Louder!”
”I'M GOING TO SCHOOOOL!”

The young Jordanian teacher nods satisfied as the approximately 30 children yell the English sentence so loud that their little voices drown every sound in the school building – quite an achievement in a school where all classes mainly learn by reciting in unison. Even the kids look quite satisfied at each other – the louder, the better.

We are in a second grade class at the Ibn Rushd Private School in the Zarqa governorate some twenty kilometers north of Amman, the capital of Jordan. The sun is burning outside the windows of the white painted classroom, where the sound of another class reciting in Arabic rockets through the schoolyard.

“Who would like to read?”, asks a young girl standing at a large blackboard. Several kids - boys and girls - raise their little hands in the air. Some of them are so eager to show their skills that they can't sit still on the chair. Instead they hop up and down with their arms raised.

“Teacher, teacher!”, they shout in the vain hope that the tall girl will pick them. She tries to hide a smile while looking out in the classroom to pick the lucky one. Unlike all other women teachers at the school she does not wear the traditional hijab to cover her hair. The reason is simple: Lene is not Jordanian, she's Danish.

Volunteers for three months

Along with 22 year old Camilla, 21 year old Lene has chosen to spend three months in Jordan working as an assistant teacher. The two girls' stay in Jordan is part of MS MENA's “People for Change” program in the Middle East and North Africa.

“It was a great opportunity to experience something totally different. And if just one of these kids learns to speak better English because of our presence, it has been worth it”, Lene explains.

We are standing in the schoolyard after having finished the English class in second grade. Several girls and boys come to offer Lene and Camilla sweets and even a small, white necklace.

“Shukran – thank you”, she responds.
The young gift bringers smile and disappear into the multitude of other kids in the schoolyard.
“Many of the children want to talk with us, and it motivates them to learn more English”, Camilla explains.

The city of pollution

Outside the school lies the city of Zarqa – the capital of the Zarqa governorate. The city is an urban sprawl of heavy industry, open fields, dust and pollution. With its more than 850.000 inhabitants Zarqa has the second largest population of all the cities in Jordan, and the Zarqa governorate holds more than half of Jordan's industry.

Oil refineries, industrial slaughterhouses, chemical plants, cement factories, a major sewage facility and exhaustion gases from thousands of cars create a daily blanket of smog covering the whole area. According to local media, especially the Zarqa river, which is used as water supply for parts of the city, has been contaminated by waste from the many factories.

“If you wear a white blouse it is dirty after just a few hours here, but we have gotten used to it”, says Camilla and looks down at her clothes, which seem quite clean – at least for the moment.

Massive unemployment rates

The two Danish girls live not far from the school in the heart of Zarqa city. Compared to other parts of the city, this neighborhood looks relatively clean with a mix of old and new buildings. But this is not how most people in Zarqa live.

Zarqa has been growing since the 1940s. It started out as town mainly for military personnel with army bases and large firing ranges. Soon many civilians also moved to the area in search for cheap land near the capital, Amman.

When Israel was created in 1948, International Red Cross established Zarqa Camp – Jordan's first refugee camp for Palestinians - near Zarqa. UNRWA later replaced the original tents of the camp with concrete buildings. After the Six Day War in 1967 thousands of new Palestinian refugees once again migrated into Zarqa. As a result, Zarqa is currently inhabited by a mix of Jordanian Bedouins, Palestinians, Armenians, Chechens and Iraqis.

Even though almost half of Jordans industries lie in Zarqa, the area is one of Jordan's poorest. One of the reasons is that the wages in the industry are very low. Additionally, Zarqas's large army bases has been moved out of the area with massive loss of both jobs and money as a result. 

More than 25 percent of the women in Zarqa city are currently unemployed, while the same number men is approximately 10 percent. As a result of the high unemployment rate and the low wages, approximately 17 percent of the population in Zarqa live below the official, Jordanian poverty line of 556 dinars a year (app. 4000 Dkr.).

Jordan's most conservative area

Most Jordanians don't like the poor and polluted Zarqa, but both Lene and Camilla like it.

“People are extremely friendly and hospitable here. They invite us to their homes without any reservations”, Camilla explains.

Zarqa is widely known to be very conservative when it comes to religion, and in the beginning of her stay, Camilla wore a veil to cover her hair.

“It's very seldom that you see a woman in Zarqa without veil. But I stopped wearing it after a while. People stared at me anyhow”, she explains.

Neither of the girls have experienced any trouble while staying in Zarqa.

“There was one time when some boys from the neighborhood threw small stones at our window in the apartment. But we just closed the drapes, and soon after they disappeared”, Camilla says.

But this episode has not spoiled the two girl's positive impression of Zarqa.

“People are very protective of women here, and the men are generally much more “gentlemen” here than in Denmark”, Camilla points out.

Only once have the two girls experienced a bad side to the religious conservatism in Zarqa. This was when they tried to make a gymnastics project at the school.

Girls were not allowed to do gymnastics

After a couple of months in Ibn Rushd Private School Camilla and Lene got the idea, that they would make a gymnastics project with music for the girls from the school.

Many of the girls were interested, but their parents would not allow them to participate in such a project. Only five girls got permission to participate.

“I really felt like getting the girls to rebel against this, but at the same time I knew, that I had to respect the parent's decision”, Camilla explains.

To sort out things the school invited the parents to a meeting, where they tried to explain the parents what the gymnastics project was all about. The meeting got some of the parents to change their mind, and in the end Camila and Lene got 14 girls on the gymnastics team.

The idea was that the girls should practice to perform for the parents at the end of the school year, but because of exams and the school's general reluctance in supporting the project actively, Lene and Camilla in the end stopped the project.
 “The girls were very eager, end maybe next time someone suggests such a project, the parents will not be as skeptic as this time”.

No matter what, both Lene and Camilla have enjoyed their stay in Zarqa immensely:

“I have had all my prejudices about the Middle East disproved. Our eyes have been opened to their culture, and their's have been opened to ours. And maybe – just maybe - we have also given some of the children the desire to learn more English”, Camilla says with a little smile.