“I called him yesterday and said, listen, I’m not earning any money.
The pair had a falling out, and the man refuses to give back his passport unless Muadth can pay him for the cost of his working permit, he says. His debts include to a pastry shop owner who sponsored his working visa a year ago. “My younger brother sells water and the family lives off that.” Even in bad months, he says, he could send about 200 dinars home to his family in Sana’a. The Yemeni, in sandals and a corduroy suit jacket, arrived in the tourist hub a year ago. “This is the everything we’ve made in the past two months,” Muadth gestures at the handful of bills in the cash register, at a convenience store a few metres from Petra’s gates. The rest of the country’s workforce, including tens of thousands of migrant workers, have no safety net at all, and are totally exposed to the vagaries and predations of the market. Without external aid, the fund could run dry within months. The welfare system in Jordan is relatively advanced compared with many of its neighbours, but still has huge gaps.įewer than half of Jordanian workers are registered with the country’s social security system, which is already rationing its welfare payments. Governments in developed countries are scrambling to weave again the safety nets some have spent the past four decades unpicking. “If the situation continues like this, it’s a problem,” he says. But he needs to pay down his balance at a local market by the end of the month to keep buying groceries, and money is already running short. He’s survived so far on small grants from the government, remittances from his brother in Europe, and by selling his 17 sheep to settle debts. He says he used to earn about 30 dinars (£34) every day selling rides to tourists, enough to support his six children. “We’re tired of doing nothing,” says Umar Ayyad, 36, riding a donkey in the midday glare. Just as for the hundreds of years before the site was “rediscovered” by a Swiss explorer in 1812, Bedouin people are the only sign of life inside the sandstone city. Umar Ayyad is surviving on small grants from the government, remittances from his brother in Europe, and by selling his sheep.
Across Jordan, tourism contributes about 15% of the country’s GDP and sustains an estimated 55,000 jobs. “In a community like Wadi Musa, up to 80% of people rely on tourism as their source of income,” says Suleiman Farajat, the chief commissioner of the Petra tourism authority.
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How to survive a year without tourists is the challenge facing its modern ones. Surviving for long stretches without rainfall was the test of Petra’s original inhabitants. They will not be spared the economic blow, with countries that were banking on tourism and hospitality to be major engines of their growth projected to suffer most, according to the International Monetary Fund. Most, like Jordan, have so far avoided the worst of the virus. The site in southern Jordan is one of the centres of an unprecedented crisis for the global tourism industry, with 120 million livelihoods under threat and no end in sight.īut the empty streets, hotel rooms and restaurants in Wadi Musa, the town that serves as gateway to Petra, also illustrate the dire challenge facing middle and lower-income countries over the next years. “If we knew it would be better in, say, two years, we could plan. Those visitors tended to be older people, the demographic most at risk of the virus. “We just had our best year since the Arab spring, which affected us really badly,” says Jihad Kaldany, a guide who specialises in taking Christian tourists through the country’s Old Testament sites.
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