LIVE FROM JORDAN: Letters Home from My Journey Through the Middle East ~ On July 16, 2002, 10 months after the 9/11 attacks, Ben Orbach, a 27-year-old Jewish American from Pittsburgh, left for Amman, Jordan.  The purpose of his trip was to do research on a Jordanian-American trade program, and to expand his budding language skills from Modern Standard Arabic, to the Shami dialect spoken by Jordanians and Palestinians.  He returned in August 2003, four months after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, full of fresh insights, unexpected lessons, and colorful tales from 13 months of living in Jordan and Egypt and traveling throughout the region.

LIVE FROM JORDAN presents slices of life from his adopted neighborhoods in Amman and Cairo, as well as his four-week trip across Turkey and Syria.  Drawing on his private journal and e-mails home, he shares observations, conversations, and encounters with wide-ranging Arab men and women.  

Carrie:  What inspired you to write Live from Jordan?

Ben:  When I lived in Jordan and Egypt and I traveled throughout the Middle East, I was struck by the human, everyday stories that I saw on a daily basis and the points of similarity between the people I met and the people I knew back home. When I came home from my year of living this intense experience, I was struck by the disparity between the reality of the people’s lives that I met and the world of unconditional violence that was depicted as daily life on the nightly news. I decided to turn my letters home and journal into a book that would attempt to bridge that gap for people who wanted to know more about the Middle East, but did not know where to begin asking questions.

Carrie:  Tell us about Live from Jordan.

Ben:  As a grad student from Pittsburgh, I lived the American-Arab relationship 24 hours a day for a year, after 9/11 and during the war with Iraq. I studied in universities, backpacked across countries, partied at exotic night clubs, shopped for camels, sat in coffee shops late into the night and spoke to anyone who would speak back. This book is my colorful first-hand account of my experience and of the lives of the people I met along the way.

Carrie:  What is the primary message you’d like your readers to take away from Live from Jordan?

Ben:

1. There is more to the Middle East than angry people and political violence.
2. There is much that Americans can do to contribute to solving the problems that exist between that part of the world and our home.

Carrie:  Tell us about your writing process.

Ben:  This was a labor of love and a full time effort, but I was never able to devote my full time to it. At different stages in the process, I wrote this book as a grad student in faraway lands, as a waiter working two jobs, and as an official at the State Department.

In times of stress, when I was alone in Egypt and our country went to war with Iraq, or when a young man in Zarqa, Jordan tried to convert me to Islam, my letters home were my only English outlet to the world. Similarly, at times when I felt like I was the luckiest guy in the world, like when I camped under Mars and a full moon in the Western Desert of Egypt near the Libyan border, my writing was my only English outlet to the world. My words are genuine and filled with honesty.

Carrie:  Who are your favorite authors and who influenced your writing?

Ben:  My favorite travel writers are Robert Kaplan and Tiziano Terzani. I love to read travel essays that take you away, crime novels, and historical fiction. Thomas Friedman and Seinfeld influenced this book; Friedman because he takes hard concepts and breaks them down for non-specialists to understand (without being condescending) and Seinfeld because he tells the tale of nothing and makes it fascinating.

Carrie:  What are you reading right now?

Ben:  I just finished Taking Down the House. I’m now reading a book about social entrepreneurs as well as Only the Nails Remain, a travelogue about the Balkan Wars that I got in an “author trade” with Christopher Merrill.

Carrie:  Can you offer a glimpse into your “real life” and share with us a bit of your personal life—Outside of writing, what’s important to you?

Ben:  I’m still a Pittsburgher living overseas. I work in the Palestinian territories developing and managing foreign assistance projects at the community level. I’m very close to my wife, brother and parents, and believe deeply in communities and service for the public good. When I lived in D.C., I used to be a volunteer ESL teacher for adults. I’m still looking for a place to volunteer in Israel. I’m passionate about the Steelers and playing poker.

Carrie:  Tell us something surprising about you and/or something very few people know about you.

Ben:  I’ve got huge hair. If it weren’t for hair product, I’d be an apartment building for birds.

Carrie:  Would you be willing to share your biggest challenge/failure and how it changed your life? How about your biggest success, personal and/or professional and how it affected your perspective?

Ben:  Yes. In writing this book and while looking for a job, I had to live on a friend’s couch and return to waiting tables (wearing a jungle shirt no less while waiting on people who I’d gone to graduate school with). When things improved, I moved into a furnished room in an apartment with a tall skinny Polish guy. It was one room with a futon, a table, a bookshelf, and the washing machine and dryer. One time, when I came home from waiting tables, there was a Polish-American art show going on in my apartment and some of the apartment’s furniture had been pushed into my room. I learned that IT isn’t easy, you have to really work to get what you want and even then you will only get it if you are lucky. If you are lucky enough to get it, you should realize how lucky you are and make sure to keep it all in the proper perspective.

Carrie:  What’s next for you ~ Anything else you’d like to offer?

Ben:  I’m looking to write another book and am playing with some different ideas. I’ve really enjoyed the experience of engaging with the public about real people in the Middle East and would like to do that some more, perhaps on a different topic.

From Ben Orbach’s website:

Live from Jordan is a myth-breaking book, combining the lyricism of a travelogue with the insight of reportage. Engaging, witty, and evocative, Live from Jordan transports us to a world that is more complex, more beautiful, and more seductive than many of us have ever imagined.

On the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 27-year old Pittsburgh native and grad student Benjamin Orbach traveled to Amman, Jordan, in search of answers. Young, confident, and optimistic, Orbach anointed himself America’s secret diplomatic weapon. He was finishing a degree in Middle Eastern studies, had a working knowledge of Arabic, and possessed enough determination to “negotiate a peace treaty.” He also had no place to live, little money, and no friends to speak of in Jordan. As Ben Orbach spent his first few days in the Middle East searching for a hot shower, the address of his new flat, and a decent haircut, he began to discover something unexpected and much more important. In the cafes and salons, and on the buses and streets of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Turkey, he found conflicted, curious, and multi-layered people who had more to teach him than he ever imagined. From bustling bazaars to an underground brothel, Live from Jordan is the incredible story, told via eloquent, thoughtful, and irreverent letters home, of Orbach’s 13-month journey through the Middle East.

Through Orbach’s eyes, we begin to see a world where nothing is quite what it seems, a world more intricate than what is portrayed in thirty-second sound bites on television. We meet people like Sundos, a shy Jordan University freshman who digs surfing the internet and Fadi, his passionate Palestinian flat mate, who belts out the lyrics of Mariah Carey songs and decries the policies of George Bush. From the privileged young clubbers of Amman, to the beleaguered workers who cram themselves into buses everyday, we begin to see a different, more nuanced Middle East. As he travels from the throbbing streets of Cairo to the friendly living rooms of ordinary people in Jordan, Ben Orbach offers an honest, balanced portrait of a region in turmoil.

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