What’s going on in Amman?
Trash babies and inflation of prices are making the headlines on a daily bases now leaving us in wonder of what is really going on. The other day I got scared reading the newspaper, every single economical sector announces a raise in prices for its services, from food to medications, from necessary items to luxurious ones. Everything is going up and that is even before the big raise of fuel prices that is coming this month.
Since the first news of the first trash baby few months ago, news of other babies found in trash are making the headlines every couple of days. So now, every single citizen in Jordan is asking himself, what is going on? It is a weird situation to move from a state where no trash babies at all to a situation with one every couple of days, isn’t it? If we are going to believe the news, which we have to, because there are people who follow up on those cases, then we owe to ourselves an answer to the question of : What has changed?
Of course people come up with various logical and illogical explanation of what has changed, from blaming domestic workers supposed freedom of movement, to an assumed increase of poverty, and an increase of moral corruption of our youth. In reality, domestic workers haven’t gained any more freedom for ages, in the contrary their slavery conditions are getting worse every day. And according to governmental statistic poverty hasn’t increased in the past few years. That leads us to the moral corruption of our youth, in which there seem to be a moral shift of being more tolerant to pre-marital sexual behavior for our society at large, it doesn’t explain the phenomena of abandoning those babies.
For me, I am not sure how far would I be from reality if I reason the whole situation to be due to our cultural love of copying. We love to copy each other. When someone fart, we all fart! Just look at the amount of shawerma and saj places in Amman. When the Day3a hit a big success with their arabic shawerma meal, every other single shawerma place copied it, and many others opened even next to their shops.
It is the same with reporting business. When the first reporter covered the story of the first trash baby which hit the news at large, other reporters became more active to report such incidents. This is quite scary to realize that trash babies is not a new phenomena, but reporting it is what new, isn’t it? It makes me wonder about the amount of babies who have died in trash for their parents abandonment.
The same goes for prices, it is becoming like a fashion thing. Everyone is raising the prices of his services, why don’t I? This is the exact reasoning people are following, each on his turn. The problem is that it became like a cycle and those raises in prices are becoming periodic rather than special cases.
Yesterday I went to Zaatar o Zeit for dinner with my friend. To our surprise, it turned out that they themselves have raised their menu prices (just few months after their opening). Their prices haven’t been low in the first place for the kind of food they serve or the type of restaurant they run, and if the raise was for few amounts, we wouldn’t have noticed or protested, but we seriously were shocked. For some items the raise even reached 60%.
‘I am not taking this’ me and my friend told each other. This is too much. It is one of the things that we can make a choice about and refuse. Fortunately our lives are not dependant on Zaatar o Zeit, and thus we took ourselves and left the restaurant knowing that we would never visit it again. The waiter wanted us to meet the manager to explain to us their reasoning behind raising their prices, but we refused to wait.
But what is really going on around Zaatar o Zeit? Now their Valet parking service is mandatory if you are to park in their parking lot because the other day someone tried to park himself and ended hitting another car, so their brilliant solution was to force their clients to pay for valet parking.
Another incident that is causing rage in the Ammani community occurred around Zaatar o Zeit premises. A young teenager was hit by a hammer in the middle of the night. The boy died instantly and the hammer driver, where rumors say that it was a ‘She’, flee without anyone being able to catch the numbers of her car’s plate.
The poor parents of the victim are at rage, and everyone in the country are waiting for the police to catch this woman. We do have a big faith in our police. They have never failed us and I know that in few days, they would reveal the identity of that woman. It isn’t hard counting the number of hammers in amman, or is it?
To tell you the truth, I feel bad for the boy’s parents as much for the woman. Guilt and fear must be killing her now. The boy is not the only one who lost his life in this accident, she lost hers as well because of her car speed.
There should be stronger regulations on speed and driving under the influence of alcohol. Such accidents occur a lot lately and some actions are ought to be taken in order to prevent them.
Fadi Zaghmout 
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