Berkley Center

What is luxury? I have always thought of luxury and wealth in the same way I have seen it growing up: perhaps being able to travel extensively, to buy name brand clothing, or to go to an expensive private college. Coming to Jordan has made me realize that my American “list of luxuries” isn’t just incomplete, but it’s also a definition of luxury as applies to a slim percentage of the world’s population—luxuries for the upper middle class of the world. 

Jordan is not among the poorest countries in the world, although it certainly isn’t one of the richest. Especially in the Middle East of today, Jordan is considered a center of stability and education. While it isn’t as extravagant as the oil-rich Gulf states, Jordan still does well enough. Yet two weeks into my study abroad experience, being in Jordan has totally revised my definition of luxury.

Luxury here isn’t being able to travel extensively—it’s being able to say that you are living in the country that you were born in. It isn’t the possibility of buying whatever you want, but instead, it’s the possibility of showering every day or doing laundry more than once a week because your family has enough water. And it isn’t affording an expensive college, but instead merely affording college without having to stop to work for a year in between.

But what Jordanians lack in terms of my American perspective on luxury, they make up for in familial and relational wealth. In Jordan, most families live together—at least until they run out of space in the house. The panorama in Amman is made up of hundreds of beige, stacked houses; families start their home on one floor and then as children grow up and subsequently marry, they build their own floor on top of their parents’, so long as zoning laws permit it. And families here are large: many students from the local university that I met have told me that they have 4, 5, even 6 siblings, and I've learned that the average is 3.16 children per family. While that doesn’t define everyone here, the American average of 2.01 kids per family definitely doesn’t apply. Those big families also stick together. Mothers are very close to their children and apparently know where their kids are at all times (and all ages), whereas most parents I know in the United States only have a vague idea of what their children are doing, especially after college. Relationships here are prized—not the romantic ones involved in dating, but particularly those between friends and family. Even simple neighbors have strong relationships; while I don’t share extremely strong bond with my neighbors back home, the neighbors here keep an eye out not only for each other, but on the comings and goings in the neighborhood.

Finally, and perhaps what struck me most, is the culture of welcoming that Jordanians have—an unimaginable richness in spirit that is hard to find in big cities like Washington, DC and New York. I cannot understate the amount of times I have been welcomed (“Ahlan wa sahlan to Jordan!”), been offered free bites to eat or snacks because I was new to Jordan, or have been given the promise of any and all future assistance if necessary. All of this from complete strangers—new friends and my host family have been even kinder.

In two short weeks it’s been easy to find out that true wealth in Amman isn’t in material items, but instead in the spirit: a culture that the Jesuits try to imbue in us as students as Georgetown but that can be hard to appreciate from the strong and very money-drive culture that we live in.