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RUWEISHED, JORDAN

It's not the Ritz, but these beds are in demand

By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff, 3/30/2003

n the road from Amman to Baghdad, Ruweished is the last human settlement before the Iraqi border. And that's why this bleak village of Bedouins who've lost their wanderlust has become an international news dateline. The $30-per-night rooms at the Arab Beach Hotel, the sole hostelry in town, don't seem so bad at first. Until manager Fadi Jabr explains that the rate buys you one unblanketed, pillowless cot in a room that holds as many cots as management can cram in. There are about 15 rooms filled with shivering journalists.

Each room has a single bare light bulb on the ceiling. Electricity works some of the time. There are two squat-style Arab toilets on the ground floor, serving all of the guests, who include reporters, photographers, and television crews from six continents. The reek is indescribable. There are also two cold-water taps for fastidious guests seeking a wash-up. No towels, no toilet paper -- bring your own.

Until a few weeks ago, the hostelry was a hulk, abandoned for eight years for want of guests and home only to families of feral cats. But as the international news corps started arriving at the border, the owners sensed their day had come and quickly installed a water tank, a kerosene field stove for the "kitchen" (breakfast of rice and beans, $7), and the cots. An estimated 500 journalists have set up base in Ruweished, awaiting the arrival of refugees or the opportunity to slip into Iraq. In addition to the hotel, they have taken over most houses in town.

"Truly, God has sent the journalists to us," says Jabr, smiling as he adds $120 from a Boston Globe team -- reporter, photographer, driver, translator -- to his crammed cashbox.

The Jordanian Information Ministry has assigned a press officer to Ruweished to "facilitate the foreign journalists," as the sign outside his unheated, unlit office puts it. But he's a cranky soul who plainly resents the posting.

"Because of you I must stay in this desert hell!" he yells at a journalist seeking the requisite pass to get past the military checkpoints along the way to the actual frontier. "Go to Baghdad and hide from the bombs! Or go back to Amman and stay in a nice hotel. Either way, I don't care -- only stop coming to Ruweished so I can go home."

The settlement's full-time inhabitants, numbering about 300, are mostly Bedouin who, encouraged by the government to abandon their nomadic ways, some years ago traded in their camels for cement block houses. Ruweished is almost entirely lacking in activity other than the new, no-star Arab Beach Hotel, a few sorry-looking shops, and a scruffy restaurant that used to cater to long-haul truckers plying the road from Baghdad. There had been fears the war would ruin the economy, such as it was, because hardly any trucks or other travelers dare make the passage these days. But now locals are hoping the conflict drags on for months.

Ahmed Toumari has rented a two-room structure in his backyard to a German news agency for $1,200 a month -- about 13 times as much, he happily calculated, as his last tenant paid.

"Before, Ruweished was the saddest place in Jordan -- no one could find work or make business," he said. "But the newspeople are making even this poor place rich!"