Ammon News - By Nermeen Murad

A British friend of mine recently invited me to a weekly get together at her home, a night of “stitching”. I have to admit that I was really intrigued by it - I love making crochet blankets - but I also conjured up images of a sanctioned gossip session with multiple consenting women participants.

To add to the allure of the evening, my friend suggested that she had prepared a meal of homemade bread and curry.

An emergency was declared at home as everyone was sent scurrying to look for my long-forgotten wools and crochet needles and I nervously fingered all the beginnings of blankets I had designed but never had the time to complete in order to choose the most professional looking start-up crochet project to impress my fellow stitchers.

That night changed some very important impressions I had of life. These ladies lead very busy professional lives but in their free time they commit their efforts to recycling and bargain hunting. Many of them raid every Friday the Abdali bale market to collect wool jumpers which they boil and then expertly cut into strips that they wind into colourful balls of wool. All over the room were baskets brimming with beautiful wool balls that they had prepared in order to expertly turn them into handwoven carpets they design and then patiently stitch into hessian (kheish) material.

One of the ladies had almost finished one of the most beautiful rugs I have ever seen. My foray into crocheting, for which I had congratulated myself, suddenly dimmed into insignificance as I realised that buying wool from a store and transforming that wool into a blanket is just not creative or beneficial enough when compared to the task that these “foreign” ladies have undertaken in Jordan.

They showed me a carpet that they made all together for a friend of theirs who recently got married and I envied her because I realised that this gift did not cost them a tonne of money but it was made with a tonne of love, commitment and patience. I am sure she will treasure it.

The bale market is the open stalls Friday market in Abdali area - not the high-rise Abdali but the one at the bottom of the hill, past the Palace of Justice - that most Jordanians are unaware of and, dare I even say, they completely dismiss as beneath them.

Many readers will now be wondering why I am about to encourage them to buy used clothes or recycle old jumpers, but that is not the issue, is it?

To me, the issue became the attention that these ladies gave to a task and the thought process that went into producing a simple product. For the uncomplicated task of giving a wedding gift, there was a complex series of decisions, including one to safeguard the environment or use recycled products, a choice to encourage small businesses and weekly markets, a detailed design process and then an unselfish collaboration to jointly produce a product that not one single person can claim credit for but represents their shared commitment to creativity and their one message of congratulations to their friend.

And I wonder whether any of our tasks or any of our decisions is really that studied. Do we really consider the myriad of areas that will be affected by our simple decisions - even if only to a miniscule scale - or by our thought processes that at first instance seem so simple but are in fact a link in the chain of activities we undertake to benefit ourselves, our homes, our country and our universe?

This month is filled with holidays for the two monotheistic religions that we Jordanians celebrate in earnest. These happy occasions come against a backof a global economic crises, poverty, violence and intolerance that marred 2009 and threaten to spill into 2010.

I am not ready to write my message for 2010 yet - I will do that next week - but wouldn’t it be great to begin that message this week by reminding us all of the far-reaching impact of our decisions and the responsibility we must all take in forming our collective and shared future - even if it is an apparently simple decision to shop at the bale market in Abdali?

Happy holidays!

(Jordan Times)