When I meet Tahani Shatti and her cousin Khawla Shatti, they pull me in for a warm greeting: a squeeze and three kisses, one on the left cheek, two on the right. They are confident and composed. Over biscuits and cardamom coffee, Tahani in particular punctuates her answers with easy laughs.

The women weren’t always this self-assured, they tell me. Several years ago, Khawla had never entered a foreigner’s house. And Tahani hardly ever went beyond a five-minute drive from her home in Jofa, shown here, a small village in Jordan just a few kilometres from the Dead Sea. For errands, she would take a taxi from her house to the grocery store, then return home.

That’s no longer true. “Now I can go all around Jordan, from one governorate to the other, and I’m not afraid. I don’t lose my self-confidence,” Tahani tells me through an interpreter. “I’ve totally changed. I have the most important things: money to do what I want, and the self-confidence to do it.”

The reason? The women started a new career… a particularly surprising one.