I met Sally K. over tea in the Four Seasons Hotel in Amman, the capital city of Jordan. The lobby bar is coolly elegant, a place where visiting businessmen hang out with Jordan's elite. It was an unlikely setting for a desperate
woman.
Sally (that's her childhood nickname) is trying to get out of Jordan. Australia, Canada, the United States -- any of these places would do. The problem is that she's divorced. Like other divorced women here, she endures daily harassment and discrimination that are almost unimaginable to Westerners. "It's a very, very hard life," she says.
At 33, Sally is an attractive woman, with dark, fashionably cut hair and pink lipstick. She has deep smudges under her eyes -- the product of years of stress, worry and fatigue. She is not, she emphasizes, looking for sympathy. She's simply looking for a way out. "I am trying to go anywhere. Anywhere. Anywhere."
In this culture, divorced women are regarded as damaged goods. Sally is a Christian, which makes it worse; many Muslim men consider Christian women, especially divorced ones, sexual fair game. She lives with relatives of her mother because it's impossible to live on her own.
"They are good in many things," she says of the family. "But there is no privacy."
Some of the young men in the family bother her from time to time, too. To defend herself against unwanted advances, she carries a knife in her purse.
Jordan, a prosperous kingdom of five million people, is widely regarded as among the more progressive Arab nations with respect to women's rights. The newspapers now publish details of honour killings, of which there are about 20 reported cases every year.
The penalties for these crimes are gradually getting stiffer. But honour killings are simply the most visible evidence of a culture that is obsessed with women's sexual purity, and deeply misogynistic. Those attitudes are shared by both the Muslim majority and the small Christian Arab minority.
Sally's father, a builder, was much older than her mother. "They were my friends, especially my mom," she recalls. "I told her everything about my life. I didn't want to be married. I wanted to stay and live with her. But she was very anxious for me to get married while she was alive, so she could make sure he was a good man."
It was not to be. By the time she was barely 20, both parents were dead. Sally's uncles pressured her to marry, and she succumbed at age 23. "I knew he was a bad man," she says. He used to beat her brutally, sometimes until she was unconscious. After two years, over the strenuous objections of her uncles, she divorced him. Since then, they have refused to have anything to do with her.
Sally makes a living, but it's hard. For a while, she worked as a sales manager for communications products. Her male customers made it clear that they expected kickbacks, in the form of sexual favours. "If I didn't give them something, they wouldn't buy anything from me. So I didn't make enough money to live."
After a time, she decided to go into business for herself, making visa arrangements for Jordanians who want to work in Europe.
She was cheated by a government employee, who took a large sum of visa-application money from her, pocketed it, and gave her a clutch of phony visas in return.
Her clients took her to court. One of them told her he would drop the case if she would become his girlfriend.
Even the government investigator who came to look into the case propositioned her. "He pressed me again and again. I said I was engaged. When I said no, unfortunately he became my enemy. He refused to help me."
Sally's voicemail is full of obscene messages from her former client. He wants his money back. She would gladly give it to him, but she makes only $500 a month. "He is a man," she says bitterly. "He can do anything he wants in this country. I am the girl. I have no rights here."
Sally has a sister in Canada who is deeply worried about her. But she hasn't been able to qualify as an immigrant because, despite her job skills and her excellent English, she doesn't have a university degree.
She can't get a student visa because she's too old. She hasn't been able to qualify as a refugee, either.
So Sally and the thousands of other women like her have no way out. Not one that I can think of, anyway. All I could offer her were tea and sympathy, which struck me as cruelly useless.
"My dad gave me the strength not to fall into the dirt," says Sally, who is determined to keep her dignity in front of me and not to cry. "I prayed very hard yesterday. I said, God, please get me out of this. I am in God's hands. Maybe He can help."