Sheep and Goats in Jordan: Reflections

My family moved to a farm when I was 10 years old. My city life suddenly turned rural and the farm became a biology lab. I attribute my choice of medicine as a career to the experiences of watching the birth of lambs, and sometimes helping, watching a chick or duck peck its way out of the egg shell, and assisting my dad and grandfather butcher chicken or lamb for our dinner table. A fascination with the intricacy of Mother Nature and the cycles of life was nurtured on the farm.

Reed and I looked for sheep and shepherds as we walked the Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain last May/June. We saw very few, and mainly in the cities. A minister from New Zealand happened upon a flock in the Meseta and found himself reciting Psalm 23. The Meseta is the bread basket of Spain. For us, the 3-day walk across the Spanish plateau was a modern experience, a path though big ag (Big agriculture with irrigation, huge tractors, pesticides and by-pass roads). The only sheep we saw, was a sick one. Therefore, we were delighted at the flocks and shepherds we watched during our recent forced-holiday in Jordan.

For those of you who have not read my earlier posts, Israel demanded that I have a volunteer visa to enter and because the organization needed time to secure it, we embarked on a tour of southern Jordan which took us outside of Amman. Sheep and goats were common in the rural areas, even in the tourist spots. In Petra we watched a flock negotiate a narrow path along a mountainside across from our lunch spot up near the Monastery. We saw a flock drink from a spring in Wadi Rum.

One of the highlights was meeting the shepherd-brother of our Wadi Rum climbing guide on the way back from a hike that took us into the mountains to look down at Wadi Saba and a view of Israel to the west and Saudi Arabia to the south. Our guide, Ahkmed hired a distant relative, Abdullah, as our climbing guide for the day since Ahkmed didn’t know the route. Both twentysomethings hopped up and down the rocks in sandals, but their speed increased when they saw Abdullah’s brother who was shepherding the family’s flock for the day. The brother took shelter from the hot sun under a rock outcropping and was building a fire for tea. Both young men moved more quickly than us, despite our hiking boots, and we teased them about their goat feet. Abdullah’s brother was accompanied by a dog and a miniature donkey, Fufu. When the coals were right, the brother pulled a tiny blackened kettle from his backpack, filled it with water from a plastic bottle he carried and heated the water for tea. When the water boiled, he opened a pack of tea, threw a few pinches into the pot, unrolled a bag of sugar and poured in a small cupful. While he waited for the tea to steep, he washed two small glasses for us that he also pulled from his pack with his bottle of portable water. Our guide served as translator, as we sipped the sweet tea.

The path we climbed to Wadi Saba had been discovered by Abdullah’s father when he was herding sheep. Both Ahkmed and Abdullah often sang or whistled as we drove and hiked, and sometimes used their smart phones to play a tune. Hence we were more charmed than surprised when Abdullah and his brother sang a song and danced a jig for us. The dog slept in the sun and Fufu rolled on the ground despite her saddle blanket. Reed and I felt like we had stepped into another century.

We said our shukrans and good-byes then headed down to the truck, or rather the “magic truck” as Ahkmed called it. The truck had been repurposed after life in some western country to drive in the Wadi. A sheep or camel hair rug covered the dash and prayer beads hung from the rear-view mirror. We sometimes followed the 4-wheel drive tracks and sometimes did not. We stopped at a “farm” Ahkmed had waved to on our way out. This was the home of Abdullah and his shepherd brother. I use the term farm loosely as it was nothing like what I grew up on in the US. Ahkmed and Abdullah are members of the same clan, one of three Bedouin tribes that live in Wadi Rum.

Abdullah’s father, a cousin to Ahkmed’s, is retired from the Jordanian border patrol and now lives on his family’s land in Wadi. Up against the canyon rock face, several caves are walled off with stone work. A fence stakes off a twenty by fifty foot area out from the wall. Several divisions in that fencing are home to a pregnant camel, due any day, and two dozen lambs who were held back from grazing with the herd. A tarp windbreak stretched out from the part of the fortified canyon wall and surrounded a wide grass mat and rugs covering the space of a small dining room. There Abdullah’s father lounged after lunch with his wife. She disappeared into a rock room when we arrived, but stepped out to feed the camel and sprinkle grain for the lambs. After introductions, our guide Ahkmed asked if we wanted to eat our lunch there. We had packed a lunch of pita, cheese, nuts, dried fruit and oranges, lifted from our breakfast spread, after finding lunches ordered by Ahkmed to be expensive with too much food and too many packaged sweets and sugary juice.

Abdullah’s father directed him to bring out a tray of food from behind another tarp shelter. The large tray held the roasted head of a sheep or goat, a leg and hip bone as well as cooked onions, tomatoes and cauliflower. We opened our contributions and Ahkmed made a makeshift plate out of a plastic bag and paper plate so that when done, the garbage sat in the bag and the plate was recycled. We ate Bedouin style, using small pieces of flat bread as silverware, tearing off small pieces of food. Lamb or goat seemed interchangeable, both were milked, used for breeding and for meat. The dish was cooked Bedouin style, buried deep in the sand beneath a hot fire and coals that are built over the meat and vegetables.

We asked our host about his work and family. Like my dad, he had retired to the farm and loved the simple, hassle-free life. I found myself entertaining them with my own stories of birthing lambs, up to 100 in a season, then helping to butcher them for the family freezer. I didn’t mention clipping tails, castrating, or dipping them to prevent bugs in the wool. Their eyes grew wide, and Ahkmed checked my words several times, I suppose surprised that someone from America who was a doctor might also have experience as a farmer. I thought about my dad and how much he would have enjoyed this place and conversation. During his final years on his farm, he went out of his way to buy sheep for the Muslims in Dayton, OH, and allowed them to butcher them in his barn with space to use their prayer rugs before the process.

We continued to see shepherds and sheep throughout Jordan. The sound of a bell, or a bleat would cause us to study the landscape to find the herd and shepherd. We found them in the Dana Nature Reserve, where the Royal Jordanian Conservation Society tried to give new skills and jobs to locals as guides, hotel managers, or craftsman to limit the impact of herds on the fragile landscape. And we saw them in the vast desert west of Amman as we visited the desert castles, one of which was T E Lawrence’s hangout for a winter.Our final experience of cooked lamb was Mansaf, the special Jordanian dish cooked for occasions like weddings and graduations. Our Jordanian drivers turned friends took us to a restaurant in Amman named for the dish for lunch. The tender lamb is served with a gravy of yogurt and spices, along with basmati rice. Mmm good. In fact, that was our final meal in Jordan, and a very pleasant way to end what was a wonderful holiday, despite being “forced.”