NOTES FROM THE FRONT

     Cameron and Kristina have been in Jordan, trying to get into Baghdad. While there, they also visited the West Bank, Palestine. The following are excerpts from the notes that they have sent back to their friends and fellow musicians. (You may e-mail us at The Caldron for the full notes.)


12/15/2002
     Today we wandered through the spice and meat market in Aqaba, beside the Red Sea. Some boys pointed at my oud case and cleaned some metal stairs for us to sit. With racks full of skinned goats hanging in the background, we sang 3 or 4 songs for the enthusiastic all aged, but all male, crowd....

12/16/02
     Breakfast.... Arabic coffee.... A bedoin guy approaches, asks about oud. We play him songs. We go down beside the Red Sea and sing him another song. "OK," he announces, "you are now part of my family. I want to take you to meet my uncle in Wadi Rum. He plays oud ... very good. You not tourists ... no charge ... just you pay for gas for the camel."
     We climb into the camel, a vintage Datsun Patrol, held together with the Bedoin version of duct tape and bailing wire.... We stop at another cousin's house, go upstairs ... meet cousin, wife, children ... have tea ... play oud. This cousin, Hussein, plays very good oud ... very many styles. His eyes shine brightly into mine as he plays several songs. I play several songs back to him.
     Jafer is very happy with the situation.... Jafer, a very strong and efficient 25 year-old, obviously wise way beyond his years, expounds on the art of balancing work and life. "Not so much work that you lose yourself and forget who you are. It is the silence of the desert that makes it so precious to me." Morning comes. Jafer is first up with fire and tea for all of us. Hussein plays more songs on the oud: Bedouin, Kaliji, Omani and Yemeni styles ... each has its own rhythmic pattern of picking.... Off we go....
     ... We stop at an ancient cistern, obviously carved by hand out of the rock. "Water is the 'gold' of the desert," Jafer reminds us....
     ... A very elderly bearded grandfather sits on his mat in the sun beside the repair yard, where two more ancient diesel tractors receive patching and love. The elder has his shoes parked neatly behind his mat and has obviously already passed into some kind of afterlife here on earth wherein the physical work is done by others. His apparent function now is to pray and to witness....

12/19/02
     Today we were tourists. We walked for six hours through the ancient town of Petra, carved 2000 years ago out of the solid living red and purple sandstone cliffs in the bottoms of myriad labyrinthine canyons. Incredible, but somehow I still wouldn't trade even one second of looking into Hussein's smiling eyes while he sings me another song for this experience in the ruins. I am lucky. I can have both.

12/20/02
     We rode the mini-buses back to Aqaba through the town of Ma'an. Army tanks were stationed here and there in Ma'an because of recent trouble ... several deaths from fighting with the army. According to the Jordanian Times, some of the folks in Ma'an were revolting because they are angry about the Jordanian government's unwillingness to take a stand against the USA regarding upcoming violence against Iraq. But the local folks say that it's just a local problem resulting from some "bad people...."
     ... Walking down the marketplace streets of Aqaba people remember us and invite us to sit and play oud and sing in their restaurant. "Tomorrow," I tell them. We are famous here now on the streets. Now we are working very hard to exercise our contacts and connections and speed our permission to gain entrance into Iraq. I was able to get a call through into Baghdad tonight to one of the main friends there, only to learn that our visa applications are still being held up.      More soon....

Dec 26, 2002
     At the bridge over the river Jordan, at the border into the West Bank, we met a Palestinian family waiting for admission to the next bus. We sang a few bars of familiar popular songs. They said, seeing the little bag of Lays potato chips I was holding for my pre-breakfast snack: "Now we are very careful not to buy anything from America ... nothing, nothing, nothing American. See our two-year old boy. He's only two and he already says he wants to die shooting Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem. Look at what is becoming of our children!" Then we sang some more Arabic songs. When in doubt, sing. It works every time. Big smiles break out.
     We cross the bridge in one bus. We wait for another passport check. We ride in an expensive taxi over tiny back roads away from Jericho, which is currently closed by the Israeli soldiers, through a couple of checkpoints to the outskirts of Ramallah. The taxis are not allowed to go into Ramallah. We walk through a labyrinth of concrete barriers past Israeli bunkers and past coils of razor wire. The soldiers ask us what we want to do there. "Just tourists. We are musicians," we tell them. They look at us coldly, knowing that we are going to visit with Palestinians in Ramallah, home of Yasser Arafat. We walk into the city ... eventually take another taxi to city center....
     ... Invited to perform, we bring out the oud and sing 4 or 5 songs. A group of 5 or 6 young women encourage us: they sing along and ask for more. The waiters listen in the background. For a couple of hours we get to know the owners.
     The wife tells us of the latest curfews and closings. Only a month or so ago the town was cut off from electricity and phone lines. Israeli soldiers surrounded her house a couple of weeks ago because they thought a plastic toy gun her 10-year-old son was playing with might be real. They had been watching him play through binoculars from the settlement above their house. They threatened to destroy the house with bulldozers if it was not found. Finally the boy, shaking and sobbing, was able to lead the soldiers to some alley where he had already thrown it away. "If you ever buy another one, we will kill you and your family!" he is told....
     ... They are raising their three children here in Ramallah in spite of the difficulties of surviving here these days. I wonder how he maintains his artistic focus in the face of the heavy distraction of being under various degrees of siege.
     We return to the hotel at midnight to find a group of Palestinian men sitting downstairs in the lobby. They ask me to bring out the oud. Soon we are busy with song again. It's late at night. It is quiet except for our singing. We focus on the music and it gets really good. (Funny how it does that.) We sing and laugh and smile. They help us with better understanding the lyrics we are singing. (Always more progress to be made here.) Sometime after 1:00 a.m. we go upstairs to bed.
     Rising early (for us musicians) at 9:00 a.m., we leave the hotel and take a cab to see the remainder of the government buildings in which Yasser Arafat is being held captive. I guess he is free to leave Palestine to negotiate on the Palestinians' behalf in other parts of the world if he wants to. It's just that the Israelis have threatened to not let him ever return if he leaves. So there he sits, it seems. Only the central building is intact. It is surrounded by the rubble and twisted metal of several city blocks of what were once government offices (we are told) and smashed automobiles which were pulverized under the treads of the tanks.
     We take a taxi back to the checkpoint at the entrance to Ramallah; our packs and oud case are opened and searched. The two Palestinians in line in front of us are denied passage for some reason and turned back. We ride in a large "service taxi" back toward Jericho ("Ariha" in Arabic) and are held up behind a truck hauling a huge Israeli tank. Above us on various hilltops we see what look like Israeli settlements. We ask the taxi driver.... "Kibutzes," he replies.
     Confusion and expensive taxi rides follow as we are guided and misguided through various checkpoints and bus stations back to the bridge. We pay a large exit fee at the border and breath freely to be back on the Jordanian side.
     And all the visas we needed for the crossing were placed on separate pieces of paper so our passports are not jeopardized for future travel. (Several Arab countries will not allow you to enter if there is evidence in your passport that you have been to Israel.)
     But now we have new friends in Ramallah. And we have invitations, of course, to return and spend more time. Play more music. Back here in Amman it is cold and raining. But we can come and go as we please ... this is a nice freedom. I wonder if those large buses filled with Palestinians we passed near the bridge are still waiting--or what percentage of those were turned back for some reason? Time and time again we are told, "Yes, I have family on the other side of the border, but now it is very difficult for us to get in or out...."
     ... We are still on our way to Baghdad, but more time for processing of our visas still seems to be needed. We may be able to get in mid January with a group of solidarity peace activists. We will see. We must also pay attention to what the possibilities for war are looking like....

Cameron Powers