Aziz's cuppa of life

With motions made routine by practice, Aziz Suwair poured a heaping spoon of powdery coffee into a long-handled pot of scalding water. He stirred, then danced it on a flame like a marionette. By a conservative estimate, he has gone through these motions 600,000 times.

As he worked, the clouds finally parted, ending a winter rain that has turned the arid bluffs over the Jordan Valley into rolling green hills. By 11am, the sun began to arch overhead, on a Friday — the traditional day of rest. But Suwair, in his roadside shack, serving coffee to the drivers of farm trucks, passenger buses, police cars and taxis, was just a little into a day that stretches from dawn to midnight.

"For six years," he said, with a hint of a smile, "I haven't moved from this place."

When he was 20, Suwair hauled two battered cabinets, painted red and blue, to the shoulder of the well-travelled highway that ties the Jordanian capital, Amman, to the Dead Sea.

He propped them on cinder blocks, now fastened to the dirt by time. He slung a burlap sack overhead, where it shares space with cardboard and tattered upholstery in a floral pattern of green and yellow.

Almost every day since then, he has tended a tea kettle and a charred coffee pot on a stove, fed by a butane tank, with spare fuel under the rusting cabinet. Scattered near the cinder blocks are his jerrycans of water, drawn from the Adasiyya Spring, a short walk away.

"Aziz's Shopping Mall," he declared, with a mix of grandiosity and self-deprecation.

But he takes his business very seriously. "My coffee is peerless," he insisted. "Like a cappuccino."

Suwair's rickety shop is along a bend in the road, about 10 miles west of Amman. On one side are verdant bluffs, punctuated by trees of olives and pine. On the other are the rock-studded valleys known as wadis, a gentle, ancient landscape. A little above, patches of snow linger from a storm the night before.

Promises of a better future line the highway. "The New Lifestyle," proclaims an advert for a new resort, Tala Bay.

"Isn't It Time for a Great Vacation?" Alongside it, sheep nibble at the sprouting grass.

"God give you strength," Suwair shouted out at noon as a customer, Ahmad Ali, pulled up in a yellow taxi.

"That is my cousin," he said, a name Suwair gives to anyone from his family's village of Ajram.

Suwair estimates that he makes 300 cups of coffee a day, along with 50 cups of tea. Coffee sells for 30 cents, tea half of that.

With each, he brings a flair that suggests art. A flick of the wrist puts the water into the kettle, another pours in the coffee, ground to his specification. It boils, with a slight froth, and he pours a little into a plastic cup. He lets it boil again, then pours again. The sugar depends on the customer — plain, medium or sweet. He goes through nearly seven pounds of coffee a day and twice as much sugar.

By early afternoon, a few vehicles were waiting for him on the shoulder — trucks carrying sand to build the villas and offices in Amman, pickups laden with tomatoes from the fertile Jordan Valley, taxis carrying tourists to Dead Sea resorts.

"This road stays alive 24 hours a day," he said.

'Single is beautiful'

Suwair is not married. "Being single is far more beautiful," he said. He goes home for an hour or so every two weeks. The rest of the time he is at his roadside cafe or in a corrugated tin shack, just up the hill, where he sleeps for a few hours on a rickety cot with a crumpled pillow.

He would rather work, he says, fearful of missing a customer plying the road. He insists they come from as far as the West Bank across the Jordan River, where passengers ask about coffee from the boy from Ajram.

"I consider the drivers my family," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "I see them more often."

More trucks, cars and pickups pulled over. Faisal Adwan told him to say hello to his father.

A policeman parked, kissing Suwair on both cheeks and receiving a cup of coffee for free. Other vehicles honked, drawing a wave from Suwair. Then came Mohammad Adnan Shilbaya, his pickup filled with bags of discarded cans, bound for a recycling shop in Amman.

"He is the best one," Shilbaya said, sipping his coffee and smoking a cigarette. "I am telling you the truth."

Suwair laughed. "All I can do is write those words on a snowflake," he said. "When the sun comes, they will be gone."

Shilbaya left and then Suwair took a break. It was 2pm and he dragged easily on a cigarette.

"No one is my boss," he said. "No one is over my head. I want to ask you," he went on. "Is it better to sit on top of this hill, by yourself, looking out at the view?"

He pointed to a valley along the nearby salt mountains. "Or is better to be in the middle of a crowd of people?"

He wasn't waiting for an answer.