Interview with Carla...

Notes from taped interview:


“The sad part of it is, that they will tell you, if they know you’re in an abusive istuation, they’ll tell you you’re lucky, because you’re going to go straight to heaven.  Because a woman who’s abused and doesn’t say anything, keeps silent about it, and stays with her husband, will go straight to heaven.  So these women are grinning and bearing it, and they’re ashamed to say anything, and … it’s bad enough that they’r being abused, but they’re like I’m going to give up this special gift … ‘  … it brings shame on the family to talk about it.  I remember seeing a program one time when I was still there, where they asked little kids at school how many of them had ever seen their dad hit their mom.  And I think it was two out of three that said they had seen that.  And, in my mind, I was sitting there thinking that it was the one in three who said ‘no’ were probably too afraid to say.  They had probably seen worse than what the others had seen, but they were too afraid to say anything.  It’s rampant.  It’s rampant.


The only protection a woman has in that society is to have a male champion – a man who will stand up for her.  If her brothers or father are pissed at the way her husband is treating her, they might go beat him up.  But that, of course, could just make things worse for the woman, in the end.
“The best recourse they have is a male figure that they can talk to, they can trust, that will go and talk on their behalf in a calm way. . .”

“I’ve heard men say that, that ‘our religion says that if your wife disobeys you, you can beat her.’  That’s not what it says, because I had someone explain it to me, because I said, ‘Well, their religion says that you can beat her,’ and they said, ‘No, no, that’s not what it says.’  It says that there are 3 ways that you can punish a wife that’s being disobedient to you.  It was explained to her the highest level  And the third, the most high level thing you can do is hit her, but without hurting her, like a spanking you would give to a child – that to me is still wrong, because you’re an adult – but at the same time, it’s taken way, way out of context and it gives them a religious basis to say, ‘I can do whatever I want.’

The biggest thing is those kids.  If a woman wants to try to save herself from a situation . . .  There are no custody battles in the Middle East.  The kids go to the man, period.  The kids go to the man.  No questions asked.  It’s up to him to decide whether or not they even see their mother.  My ex-husband’s aunt was in a very miserable situation with her first husband, but she tried and she tried and she tried for the sake of her kids.  Finally, he divorced her and sent her away, and wouldn’t let her see her kids anymore at all.  The only glimpses she got of her kids was standing outside the fence at the school yard peeking in to see what they looked like.  That’s all she could see of them.  No pictures, no visitation rights, not like what we have here.

For me, what I had to learn personally, the hard ways is when you’re an American and you’re in a foreign country, you think you can walk into the embassy and everything’s going to fall into place.  The embassies in foreign countries are tied by the laws of those foreign countries.  The American embassy could not do anything to help me.  Nothing.

A few days after I got home a lady from the State Department called and asked ‘how did you do that, because we have women there that would like to get out and can’t.  What did you do?’  And I said, ‘I got in my car and I went to the airport and I got on a plane.’  And she said, ‘And they let you on?’

The fact that all 4 kids had American passports was essential.  They were driving to work one day and he was slapping her around in the car.  He told her she wasn’t going to go to work that day, that she was going to turn around and go home.  And when he got out of the car, he said to her “This is the way the rest of your life is going to be.”  And something just snapped in my brain, and I thought ‘rest of my life, rest of my life … I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  I’m 30 years old, and that’s the rest of my life?  I can’t do that.  It’s going to have to get better.  I guess I always thought, ‘it’s going to get better.  Something’s going to change.’

She went home, emptied draws into the biggest suitcase she could find.  Got the 2 kids from home with the babysitter, got the 2 kids from school and said they had doctor’s appointments, went to her office and used the travel agent her work used to buy one-way tickets to New York and charged the tickets to her office, because she had no money.  Her month’s salary then paid for those tickets, with a little bit left over after the bill came to them, after I left.

“Especially in an abusive situation, it’s all about control, and he’s not going to want to know that there’s money somewhere, even if it’s a secret stash that her parents sent or whatever.”

When she picked up the tickets, the travel agent told her there was no way she was going to make it, because there was no time.  At the ticket counter, they told her there was no way.  She started to panic, because if she had gone too far; she couldn’t go back.  She started crying, telling them that her mother in the States had been in an accident, that she had never seen her grandchildren, she had taken the kids out of school, etc..  They told her there was no way they would hold the plane for one woman.  Five minutes later, a tour group of 17 people came in, and they told her there was no way they would hold the plane for one woman. But they had to hold it for those 17 people.  “So I really lucked out that those people came in behind me.  And they didn’t ask any questions about permission.  I mean, that’s the fluke.  They should have said, ‘where’s the written letter from your husband saying it’s ok for you to travel.’  I don’t know if it’s because I had an American passport.  I don’t know if it’s because I was crying and distraught.  The one thing that was in the back of my mind was that the family name was a known name, and I think that they wanted to try to help me because they thought that the family was going to end up doing something nice for them because they had helped me get out in time.  And on the contrary, they ended up getting in trouble for helping me get out without all of this, because they shouldn’t have.”

He had a green card that had expired when I left, and they assured me at the embassy that there was no way he was going to be able to get his green card renewed and get back into the country.  They said there was no way he could get back here, but within 2 months, he was here.  He used that expired green card and got in on his expired green card, and the INS has been after him ever since he’s been back, and that’s been ‘89.
He’s still here?
Mm-hm.  Been married twice since me.

Doesn’t contact her or try to see her or the kids or anything.  After 10 years her former mother in law wanted to see the kids and came to visit.  She didn’t understand why Carla cared about child support, because all of his money would go to the kids when he died anyway.  He’s gonna will all of his money to the kids someday when he dies, I don’t know why you don’t just forget about this child support thing.  He’s going to will all of his money to the kids when he dies, why can’t that be enough for you?  And I said, ‘who do you think is feeding the kids now?  Who do you think is clothing the kids now?  It’s not going to hurt him to send a little bit of money to take care of those kids.’ . . . And ever since then, I don’t know if she’s doing it, but from that point on, I’ve been getting tons of stuff.  But he still doesn’t contact me.

**Is the INS still looking for him?  Your son was able to find him and you know he’s been married twice?  What’s the status?

When her oldest son, now 23, first moved out, he made contact with his dad.  He was excited about learning about his roots and culture.  At first, everything was great.  He was excited about getting to know his dad and was going to go spend a summer in Jordan and thought everything would be great.  Somehow, they had a falling out.  He would never tell her what happened, but he cut off contact with his dad.  He told his dad not to call him again; that if he wanted to talk to him, he would call him.

Stewardess recognized her kids, and she panicked.  They had stayed at the hotel where he worked, and the stewardess had seen pictures of them.  She panicked because she was on Jordanian Royal Airlines, and they could get to New York and they could tell her she wasn’t getting off the plane.  The lady across the aisle leaned over and said, ‘unless you trust somebody, they can’t help you, but if you trust somebody, maybe they can help you.’  She responded by saying that she couldn’t talk to her because her very young children were with her.  Hisham, her oldest, was 4 years old.  If she were to start talking, she wouldn’t be able to hold herself together and would start crying in front of her kids.  The woman told her that when she was younger, she had met an Iraqi man, and he was so exotic and exciting, but she made the choice to go back to her high school sweetheart, and she had always wondered what her life would have been like if she had chosen to go with the Iraqi man.  Carla said, ‘Let me tell you, you made the right choice.’  She said, ‘you gotta talk to me,’ and Carla said, ‘I know, but I can’t talk with the kids here.’  The group was a church group, and the woman went to her minister and just told her something was wrong, and they started praying.  Pretty soon, someone came up and asked if they could play cards with Hisham.  And then someone wanted to read a book to one of the other ones.  And pretty soon, all the kids were gone and the woman looked at her and asked her what was wrong.  She told her, briefly, that she had been in an abusive situation and didn’t know anymore how to take care of herself.  She had no money, no tickets, no nothing to take care of herself when she got to New York.  The woman said that they would take care of her when they landed.  Carla reiterated that that wasn’t the problem.  She was still on Royal Jordanian Airlines, and the stewardess had just recognized the kids, and she was afraid her husband would have time to figure out what had happened and keep her from getting off the plane.  The woman went and talked to the minister.  She asked her if she trusted her.  She said, I just told you my life story, I guess I do.  The woman told her to give her her passport.  So Carla gave her their passports, and they put them in with the groups’ passports.  She said, ‘you’re now part of our group.  You’re leaving when we leave and nobody’s going to stop you when you get off of this plane.’  And literally, when we got off of that plane, I had a circle of people surrounding us.  And you know the really sad thing, that lady gave me a quarter to call my mom. . .

Her mom told her that someone would be there to pick her up.  Carla had told one woman at her office what she was doing, and given her her mom’s phone number so that, if something happened to her, this woman could call her mother and tell her what she had tried to do.  So the woman had called her mother when she would have been about half way there.  Her mom had called the church, and the church had gotten in touch with the Kleinkenechts, a family that was doing mission work in New York City, and they had sent someone to pick her up.  So right when she was talking to her mother, a man walked up to her and asked her her name and said that she was supposed to go with him, and she did.  She went to the woman who had been “her angel” through the whole flight, and she gave her her address and just asked that Carla let her know that she got home ok.  Out of all of the things that she brought with her, the birth certificates and paperwork, etc., she lost that address.  She can’t remember her name or where she was from.  She doesn’t know if she was real, or if she really was an angel.  She called the airline a few days later, but they had purged their system for the end of the month, and they said they had no way of knowing who was on that plane.

The woman who her mother had been talking to at the State Department got in touch with her and just said, ‘there’s no way you did what you did.  Tell us how you did this so we can help other women get out.’  They had been in touch with Betty Mahmoudi, the woman who wrote “Not Without My Daughter”, and she had said the same thing:  there’s no way you did what you did.  The one thing that I had been told was that they keep a list of flight risk people.  Men who are smart enough to know that their wives or whatever are going to try to get out of the country, they have a list there, and if my name would have been on that list, there would have been no way.  And he hadn’t put it on there.  I guess he thought I was too much of a mouse, I’d never try to do what I did.  Which I was too much of a mouse.  Like I said, if my name would have been on that list, there would have been no way I would have gotten out of there.  And the only way I did get out was that that group came in behind me and they just didn’t have to time to pull it.

How long was he in the States?

I don’t know exactly.  He came here as a 17 or 18 year old.  At least 4 years.  … I just don’t want to think about it, so I’ve forgotten.

They only knew each other for 2 months before she agreed to marry him.
I was so naïve.  I thought I was having this big adventure.  I thought I was having this big romantic adventure, just like a Harlequin romance.  The dark stranger from far away comes and swoops you off your feet, and I fell for the whole thing.  Really dumb for a smart girl to be that dumb.

It’s not something that Westerners know very much about.  We don’t expect it.

No.  No.  And you also think, you know, when you go to a foreign country that it will be just like here, just a little different.  I had no way of knowing.

Did you have any indication before you went to Jordan of what it would be like?  Did you get any red flags that you kind of dismissed, or was he totally charming?

We got in an argument once, and he slapped me, before we left.  And I told my mom that night, ‘you gotta help me.  Don’t let me go with this guy.  Please don’t let me go with this guy.’  I knew.  I knew before I left.  But I had already quit school and I had already given up my scholarship, and I just decided, if I don’t do this, what am I going to do?  Stupid.

So it was pretty quick, once you got there, that he started being very abusive.

Yep.  And the thing with abuse is that it starts in small ways.  You really don’t think about it.  As a child, I wasn’t even spanked.  That’s not how my family handled it.  There was no spanking.  There was silent treatment, but not spanking.  And to get slapped in the face at 20 years old and think, ‘that’s supposed to be the person that loves me, what is wrong with me?’  You start internalizing, you internalize the whole thing.  And the one thing I learned when I came back is you have a cycle where you have a buildup.  You have tension building, building, building, and then there’s an explosion and there’s violence.  And then you go right into the honeymoon situation where he’s gonna make up to you.  I don’t remember him ever saying he was sorry, but he’d be real nice.  And for days afterwards, he’d say, ‘I know I didn’t do this [i.e., the injuries].  You did this.  You’re trying to make me upset.  You’re trying to make me even more upset with myself.  You’ve bruised yourself.  You’ve done something to yourself.  There’s no way that I did that to you.  I know I didn’t.’  He had no clue.  And that’s why I can say he can be the smartest, sweetest, smoothest suave guy out in public, sweet as can be, cry crocodile tears for you, ‘Oh, I would never do this, and how sweet I am and nice I am,’ and the be able to switch just like that.  And the eyes … he just had a temper.  He just had a temper.  Out of control. . . I’m not saying that all men in this culture are violent.  Their culture is violent.  The way they’re taught.  But not all men are evil.  There’s good ones, and you just hear all about.  Because they don’t feel the consequences.  If he was here, I could file a police report, or I could go to a shelter, or I could go to a counselor, or whatever.  But there, there’s just nowhere to turn. 

What kind of interaction did you have with other women when you were there?

None.  His family.  That was it.

And you weren’t really able to talk to them about the abuse.  But you did try to talk about it initially?

There was no talking to his mother.  And his dad, I tended to hide things from his dad, because his dad would defend me to him, and then he’d turn around and be angry with me because his dad was defending me.

That’s interesting that his dad would defend you.

There was one time, probably the worst beating I ever got when I was there.  I was so frightened.  I thought he was going to kill me.  He had his hands around my neck, and I thought, ‘this is it, I gotta get out of here.’  And my kids were in the house.  I left the kids, ran out the door, and I took off running, and I ran all the way to his parents’ house.  And when I got there, my hair was falling out in handfuls because he’d use my hair to bang my head up against the thing, my lip was bleeding, he’d ripped the earring out of my ear and my ear was bleeding, and I was a mess.  I was a mess.  And it was obvious what had happened.  And I walked into his mother and dad’s house, his dad was at work, and his mother sees me and immediately starts crying.  ‘Cause they know.  They know what he’s like, and they just hope it’s never gonna blow up in their face.  And his mom gets on the phone and calls his dad and says ‘you get here right now.  We’ve got a problem.’  And his dad came home and, I said I’m scared for my kids.  I left them there and I’m scared for my kids, but I’m also scared to go back.  And he said, ‘I’m gonna make a promise to you right now.  You don’t have a protector here.  I’m your protector.  And you’re not going back to that house until he has changed, until he’s not gonna do that to you anymore.  You and your kids are going to come and live right here with us, and he will not step foot in this house.  I swear to you, he will not step foot in this house until he has mended his ways, until you tell us that it’s okay.  So he went and got the kids, brought them to the house.  My brother in law sat there – he was 13 or 14 at the time – and he sat there with a cold rag, wiping my face, cleaning me up, and they brought the kids back.  And his dad went back to work, and he said ‘We’ll talk about this when I get home.’  And as soon as his dad left, his mom said, ‘You know you can’t stay here with those kids.  You know we can’t have that many kids running around this house.  You know there’s not room for you here.  We gotta work something out.’  I mean, I could tell she didn’t want me there.  And she got Kamel and brought him to the house, and before my father in law even got home from work, I was already back at home.  And she told everybody that she was, you know, this miracle worker, because she got us back together, and we were so madly in love, and everything was gonna be great from now on.  She just didn’t want me in the house, she didn’t want me there, ‘cause she knew that her husband wasn’t gonna let me leave.  And she was probably the worst about, you know, if Carla had a fat lip, made sure nobody went back into the room where Carla was, because she didn’t want anyone to know.  She was the protector.  She didn’t want there to be shame on her family or on her son that she’d have to explain that her son was this way.  So she made sure.  If there was any mark on me, nobody came and saw me for a long time.  I was back in the back room by myself.  And you know what’s funny is, probably the biggest thing that made me want to get out was fear for my kids.  Is my daughter gonna end up with the same kind of guy?  Is my son gonna end up this same way?  ‘Cause Hisham had just started preschool at the time, and he was trying to learn stuff, but there were some things that I couldn’t teach him.  I knew some Arabic words, but I didn’t know a lot.  And it was very frustrating. . . So lots of times, we’d go over and tap on the neighbors door and say, can you help us with this? – ‘cause we just didn’t know.  And he [Kamel] got very frustrated with Hisham one night ‘cause he wasn’t, couldn’t get something on his lessons.  And he grabbed his [Hisham’s] face like this and he shook him.  And like I said, he doesn’t know how much strength he puts behind it.  The kid had bruises on both cheeks.  Well, he kept him away from grandma and grandpa’s house for a long time, trying to make sure they didn’t find out.  Finally, we went down to their house for whatever reason, and his mom took one look at Hisham, and turned around to Kamel and said ‘Did you do this?’  And he said ‘Yes.’  And she just, pow, smacked him right upside the face.  But that was all the punishment he had.  That was it.

The lady that ran their school, she and her aunt ran the school, and she also worked at the office where I worked, and she told me, she said, ‘If I wasn’t sure that this would all come back on you somehow, he’d go to jail for that, for what he did to that boy.

For what he did to the boy, but not what he does to you.  So he could go to jail for bruising his son’s face?

But beating your wife is discipline allowed by the Koran.

So he can do anything he wants to his daughters, to his wife, whatever but not to his son.

Mm.hm.  And like I said, the laws there are so protective of family honor.  And it’s always the girl that is the troublemaker.  The girl’s the one that’s gonna go out there and entice all these people to do things to her.  You know, it’s never the man’s fault.  In fact, I saw a movie one time on TV there that, it’s, you know the same logic, that if your brother or your father or your uncle saw you on the street, an unmarried girl, talking to some guy, he might have been saying, ‘Can you tell me where the nearest bread store is?’, it could have been nothing, but if they saw you talking to this guy, and they’re gonna take it into their head that you were doing something wrong, you were flirting with this guy, or making a secret arrangement or something, they could kill you.  They could go into court and say that it’s all about family honor.  They were afraid that she was doing something wrong.  Three months.  What they would get in jail.  Three months.  A woman, if she caught her husband cheating on her and went up and stuck a knife in him because her husband was cheating on her, she’d be in jail for the rest of her life.  There’d be no excuses.

So did you ever hear about things like that happening, as far as honor killings?

Yes.  And to be fair, I can also say that one time, some soldiers raped a little girl, and they hung them.  They hung them and left their bodies hanging.  That’s the only time I ever heard of a man.  And in the papers almost everyday, you’d read about some woman that her brother threw her down the well, or . . .

So it was in the papers?

Yeah, a little bitty story.  Like I said, they get nothing.  And I think the little stories in the paper were for the women to say, ‘better be careful, or this is going to happen to you.’  It wasn’t for, don’t do this, this is a bad thing.  It was a warning.

Do you think it happened more than was reported in the papers?

Oh, sure.

***Ask about this.  How did she know?

So what kind of things?  Was it totally capricious that he would get angry, or were there things that aggravated him?

You know, his mom and dad sat down with me one day and said, ‘You’ve gotta stop back talking.  You’ve gotta be quiet.  You’ve just gotta stop backtalking, ‘cause you’ve gotta be doing something.  What is it you’re doing that’s making him so mad?’  And I said, ‘Let me give you an example of me backtalking.  I’m in bed sound asleep, he comes home late, I have no idea where he’s been, and he comes into the room and starts hitting me while I’m in bed asleep.  And what have I done?  He went in and tasted the food that I’d made, because I cooked at night for what we’d eat the next day, because I worked.  He tasted the food and didn’t like it and threw it in the trash can, and came in and hit me, and told me to get out of bed and go cook, because he didn’t like what I’d made.  I said, ‘Now you tell me.  What’d I do?’

So how often?  Once a week?

Starting in the beginning, it was really rare.  It was only like once a month.  And I started learning to zip a lip.  I didn’t talk back, I didn’t think, I didn’t have opinions, I didn’t say anything, ‘cause I was too afraid.  But in the end, it was daily.  Daily.  And I’m not talking a slap and then walk away, I’m talking marathon beatings.  That last time when I told you, that really bad time.  First he used his shoe.  He beat me with his shoe for quite a while.  And then when he got bored with that, he had my hair and hit my head up against the head board of the bed.  And the neighbor finally came over and knocked on the door ‘cause they heard me crying so much.  And when he heard the neighbor, he got mad.  So he rolled me in a rug, ‘cause he didn’t want them to hear me.  He rolled me up in a rug and was beating me when I was rolled inside of this rug.  And you know what’s sad about that time is, that’s the only time.  The maid who lived in the house would always take the kids to the other room, ‘cause she didn’t want them to see what was going on.  And that’s the only time, ‘cause I was so scared, I cried out for my son.  I said ‘Hisham, Hisham, you gotta help me.”  And to this day, he feels so bad about that, and he says ‘I couldn’t do anything, I was so scared.’  He was five at the time.  He couldn’t have done anything.  I was an adult and I couldn’t help myself.

So that was the only time he saw it?

He knew.  He’d seen stuff before and he knew.  That was the worst that he had seen.  And it wasn’t even a matter of seeing it.  It was just a matter of sitting in the other room with the door closed and hearing your mommy scream, saying, ‘Help me, help me, he’s gonna kill me, you gotta help me.’  That was the worst.  He got a gun.  That scared me.  ‘Cause every time he’d get mad I’d think, you know, this is it, he’s gonna get the gun and blow my head off and there’s gonna be no getting around that.  I don’t think he really wanted to destroy me, I think he just wanted to hurt.  I rememebr one time I was standing in the kitchen, and I was cutting something, vegetables or something, with a knife, and he came in and he goes, ‘Please, just stick yourself.  Just stab yourself.  Just put it in yourself.  Put me out of my misery.  Just get rid of yourself so I can go and have my kids and live a happy life without you here.  Just kill yourself.  Just do it.’  I mean, he just stood there for half an hour and tried to get me to stab myself with that knife.  And he was saying,’You are use-less.  Use-less.  Do you understand me?  I’m writing it on the wall. Use-less.  You don’t have any use to me at all.  None.’

And why?  There was no reason for this, right?

No.

It was just a power trip, right?

Yeah.

I didn’t say what happened to start the big beating . . . We were eating a meal at the table, all of us, we were sitting at the table, me and him and the kids and the maid

So that was as bad as it got?  That one time?

Mm-hm.  I went to the doctor one time.  ‘Cause my ears rang for a whole couple of days and they wouldn’t stop ringing, so they took me to the doctor, and I told the doctor about having unusual headaches.  Arab man.  Everybody’s gone.  And he goes, ‘Let me tell you something.  You’re not having headaches.  Unless you’re a boxer, which I’m thinking you’re probably not, I can tell you how you got your headaches.  So he knew.  There’s nothing he can do.  I mean here, a doctor, if he would have seen somebody who looked like me, he would have found some way to let an authority know.  I mean he wasn’t gonna help me, he was just kinda giving me the no-nonsense, I know what happened, don’t think you’re fooling anybody.

Did you go to the doctor regularly, when you needed to?  When you had your kids?

Mm-hm.  Family doctor.

Male?

Mm-hm.  He went with me.  It was their family doctor.  They, well, his family utterly trusted him.  After I had his first son, he always said that he thought somehow or other Dr. Oudi had gotten me pregnant with that baby.  He was so jealous.  I’m laughing and I know I shouldn’t because it’s so inappropriate, but it’s funny now.

Oh, I know.  I know.

On our honeymoon, we were sitting at this resort, Accaba, it’s right on the Red Sea.  Beautiful place.  I mean, what do you do when you’re sitting at a resort?  Look around, look at all the scenery, look at the people, ‘Wow, this is so cool, I’ve never seen anything like this, this is so pretty.’  And he goes, ‘Come here.’  And he takes me over to the side and he says, ‘Put your head straight down like that and stop looking at all these men.’  I’m not looking at men, I’m looking at beach.  It’s beautiful, I’m looking at everything.’  He said, ‘I want you to sit right down in that corner and keep your head down in your lap.  Don’t you look up once.’  On our honeymoon.  I sat in the corner like this, afraid to even look up, ‘cause I’d make him mad.

From untaped interview:

Hibba was their second child – a daughter.  Kamel was angry with Carla for giving birth to a daughter, but did not beat her.  Carla said that there are lots of girls named Hibba, because it means “gift from God”, and it’s the family’s way of consoling themselves to say that even though the child is a girl, she’s stilll a gift from God.

Kamel would just stop by her workplace once a week or so to check on her and make sure she was not out of line.  One time he came when she was in the front office having a sandwich with two other women she worked with.  He “beat the snot” out of her for that instance – because she was sitting in the front part of the office where someone could have seen her.  However, she went to work everyday by herself.

Violence toward women was common there.  She could tell the women that were not beaten because they were calm.  She said these women were all from Christian families.

Her father-in-law was her protector.  He would have saved her from Kamel’s abuse, but her mother-in-law would not let her stay in their house.  The situation was much worse for the women on her mother-in-law’s side of the family.  There were a few times that she was in the middle of the situation.  She got hit with a shoe when it was thrown at a sister-in-law.  Kamel’s grandfather threw a few cup of coffee at one of the daughers-in-law because she asked for financial help from her relatives so she could buy her children shoes and a few school supplies.  Her husband had died and she had no means of supporting her family.  Carla said that it was very often a stigma for the women to work.  Partly, it was just practical.  Most gave up their educations when they were married at a young age.  But for many, it was shameful to be out in public working, interacting with men, etc.  She said that the women in Kamel’s family did not cover their hair, in general.  Sometimes, his mother would cover her hair when she went out.  Kamel thought it was clever that he had a wife that worked.  He did not have a job for quite some time, and he thought it was clever to have a wife that worked and supported him.  Carla, though, never went out by herself other times.  If she needed clothes, her mother in law bought them.  Kamel bought the food.  Carla did not go out.

**How old were most girls getting married and having children?

**

Indoctrination from the time they’re young.  Little kids are taught to be martyrs.

Carla told a story that illustrated the Arab Muslim mentality clearly.  She said that one time, Kamel had given the children and their cousins some toy pencils that had candy in them.  One of the cousins broke his, and started to cry.  Hisham, as an innocent little kid, immediately offered his pencil to his cousin.  Kamel “wolloped him one” for that, and said “Stupid!  Stupid boy!”  He told him angrily not to give away the good things that he had.  Here, we would praise a child for sharing, and punish them for not sharing.  This took place in a family environment where a lot of other relatives were around, and they all seemed to concur with this philosophy on life.

Carla said there is no concept of looking out for your fellow man in the Middle East.  If you go to the bread store, there is no line.  People push and shove and try to get to the front.  People push and shove one another out of the way to get into a taxi, no matter who hailed it.  One time, when she was very pregnant, a man actually pulled her out of a taxi she had just gotten into, and got into it himself.  Of course, she’s a woman, and he probably would not have done this to another man, but there was no courtesy extended to other men, either, when there was some sort of contest for resources.

Carla said that Hibba was the meanest of her children – she exhibited more of this selfish survival instinct that was so highly valued in men than her other three boys.  But if they would have stayed in Jordan, that would have beaten out of her at a young age.  What is valued in boys is beaten out of the girls.