Bargaining: The Arab Superpower

Those of you who have spent some time in the Arab world will know that bargaining is essential if you ever go to the markets.  This essential cultural feature became poignantly real for me yesterday. 

On Saturday, Al Raja School hosted a small Model United Nations conference (though I'm not working there, I am helping out to direct the MUN program).  If you have never heard of MUN before, you can go to this wikipedia article and read about it.  Essentially, students from multiple schools research a country and represent it at a Mock United Nations conference to solve a pre-determined issue.  This time, our school hosted the conference, which was organized by two of our students, two girls from Al Raja. 


About two hours into the conference, we realized we had a problem when fewer students showed up than expected, and we were not going to have enough money to cover the food we had ordered from the caterer.  The dinner was going to be 225 dinars and we only had 140 left.  Uh-oh.  I explained this to our student-directors, and so one of them took on the challenge of working with the caterer.

Now, you need to understand that already with in the last 5 days, we had changed the time twice and the number of people at least once.  And here we were trying to change the number of people - AGAIN! 

So I looked at one of the girls and said, "The stereotype of Arabs is that they are bargainers.  What do you think you can do?" She smiled at my joke and said she would call him and see if they could get the price down. This girl is ambitious, so I figured that she would be able to knock a little bit off, and then I would have to cover the rest out of my own pocket.

She came back about 20 minutes later with a huge smile on her face.  100 dinars.  From 225 down to 100 dinars.

Oh. my. goodness.  My jaw dropped.  I couldn't even believe how she had gotten the caterer to drop the price.  I was just stunned.  "Its... its like your secret weapon!  If you were a part of the Incredibles, your superpower would be bargaining!"

She responded, "My mother and grandmother are going to be so proud of me!  I can't wait to tell them and see their faces when I tell them!"

In an attempt to harness her superpower, I will be hiring her as the designated shopper for Alison and I.  I'm going to see if I can get my rent cut in half.