Usaid Al-Hawamdeh is twenty-one, from Tafileh, and interested in artificial intelligence. His centre decided that was worth backing.
The staff at the Queen Alia Centre in Tafileh describe noticing him. That is the ordinary, unremarkable act on which this entire story turns.
Usaid Al-Hawamdeh joined the centre's youth committees as one of many young members. What set him apart was a serious interest in artificial intelligence, an interest which, in a governorate like Tafileh, could very easily have gone nowhere at all. There is no shortage of curious twenty-one-year-olds in the Jordanian south. There is a considerable shortage of places for that curiosity to land.
“The rarest resource in a small governorate is not talent. It is somebody deciding that a particular young person's talent is worth backing.”
The centre's response was to invest in him: to provide the environment, the support and the encouragement to keep learning. This is not a large or expensive intervention. It is mostly attention.
Two things followed.
The first is that he entered the Irada technology hackathon and took second place out of 77 teams, for an interactive application called Jordan Roots, a guide to Jordan's heritage sites. Read the pairing again: a young man drawn to artificial intelligence built something whose subject is his country's history. The most contemporary tools available, aimed at the oldest material there is.
The second is that he is now a trainer at the centre himself, teaching artificial intelligence to others.
That progression (noticed, supported, competing nationally, then teaching) took a matter of years and describes exactly what a functioning youth committee is for. Not to occupy young people, and not to entertain them. To find the ones with a serious interest and to make sure that interest meets equipment, mentors and a deadline.
There is a particular economic argument here too. Tafileh, like much of southern Jordan, exports its capable young people to Amman and to the Gulf. Every one who finds a reason to build something at home is a small correction to that flow. Usaid is currently teaching AI in the governorate he grew up in.
His app is called Jordan Roots. He is, at twenty-one, a fairly good argument for staying in the soil you came from.
