Notes & Thoughts

“We lived in a stone house in al-Abdali, on the seam between East and West Amman, where my parents landed after fleeing the civil war in Lebanon, privileged enough to bypass the east’s refugee camps but not yet sufficiently affluent to settle in the west.” [page 7]

Al-Abdali is a district of Amman, the capital city of Jordan. Amman is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Amman was once called Philadelphia by the Greeks, who rebuilt it as one of the cities of the Decapolis. Before that, during the Iron Age, it was called Rabbath Ammon when it was the capital of the Ammonite Kingdom.