Settling In

Hi everyone, sorry for the long delay in updating the blog!  I can’t believe I’ve been here for almost three weeks, time is flying by.  I’ve been settling in pretty well here in Jordan, and I’ve started gradually learning my way around Amman. While I certainly don’t know the whole city yet, I’ve started to get at least a feel for where I am and the neighborhoods, and I’m getting better at giving taxi drivers directions. I think that traveling to the Middle East (and probably many areas of the world) can be confusing for Americans/other Westerners because people really don’t use addresses or street names here. You can’t just put an address into Google Maps or a GPS and expect it to find the location, and you definitely can’t just give a cab driver a street address and have him know where it is. You have to memorize landmarks around the place or tell them which “circle” it’s near (Amman consists of a series of huge traffic circles and they’re major landmarks for getting around). It might not be a problem if you’re just a tourist and only going to well-known places, but given that I’m staying in a residential neighborhood and going to offices and stuff that aren’t necessarily known, it can be a little challenging.  The first few days I literally had no idea where I was going when I’d get in a cab and would get frustrated when they would ask me tons of questions just to get me to the office.

Work has been a little crazy – the office here doesn’t have a lot of grant funding at the moment and is really understaffed, so I’ve been taking on a ton of projects.  It’s good though, I’ve been doing some interesting work and I’ve gotten to use a little bit of my Arabic there.  The whole team has been really welcoming and friendly. I’ve become friends with my colleagues and some of the Media Fellows at the organization where I’m working, the Jordan Career Education Foundation (JCEF).  The Media Fellowship Program was a training program that JCEF started running this past February to train youth in a range of media skills, like journalism, news anchoring, photography, graphic design, PR and event management, filmmaking, etc. There were ten Fellows in the program, all of whom have now completed the in-class training and are doing internships with companies and organizations in the media industry, and eventually will begin jobs with these companies or start their own media businesses.  In the meantime, they’re also all volunteering with JCEF to help with its communications and marketing strategy, so they’ve been in and out of the office and helping me a lot.  I’ve also been helping with doing English translations and editing for the marketing materials and videos that they’ve been producing.

Last weekend, my new friend Dana, who is one of the Media Fellows, invited me to join her and some of her friends in this program put on by the East West Initiative.  It’s an organization that brings British and American youth to Jordan and Jordanian youth to the US or UK for week-long cultural tours.  Dana started volunteering with them a few years ago and also participated in one of their trips to the UK, and this past week she was acting as a host for a group of people visiting from the US and Britain. This weekend they were doing a bunch of tours and activities around Amman and in the nearby city of Salt, and Dana invited me to join the group. On Friday, she picked me up in the morning and we met up with the rest of the group of Americans, Brits and Jordanians – there were about 25 of us in total. We were divided into groups and hosted by Jordanian families for a large, traditional lunch. My group went to the home of another volunteer named Asal.  She lives in a beautiful home in West Amman, and her whole family was really nice and welcoming.  We had so much amazing food – chicken biryani, kefta (spiced lamb meatballs) and potatoes, salad, rice, yogurt, and some sort of pudding type dessert with pistachios.  I seriously wished I could expand my stomach so I could just keep eating.

After lunch, the program organizers designed this scavenger hunt in downtown Amman.  We started up at the Citadel and then were given clues that we had to figure out as groups to get to the next destination.  My group had a lot of fun until we started going to the wrong destination at one point and ended up having to walk up one of the most miserable hills I’ve ever climbed in my life under the blazing sun with no water.  At that point I considered just sitting down and calling in reinforcements.  The weather in Amman is really different from what I’m used to.  It’s actually not as hot here as it usually is in DC, and because it’s a dry heat it feels a lot more comfortable a lot of the time.  However, the sun is really strong, and because the air is so dry I think I get thirsty here a lot more quickly than in DC.  It’s a terrible idea to walk anywhere without a huge bottle of water.

My group eventually caught up with the others (although we came in last since we started heading in the wrong direction), and then we had some free time to explore downtown Amman.  We walked along Rainbow Street, which is a really famous street right in the center of the city with a ton of shops and restaurants.  On Fridays they also have this huge open-air market and art show called Souq Jara, where there are tons of artists selling jewelry and paintings and souvenirs of all types.  It’s really cool and I hope to go back sometime, especially because they had some really pretty and unique jewelry there.  We ate dinner at this hot dog restaurant called Wazzup Dog that specializes in selling (all-beef) hotdogs with a variety of toppings.  It kind of reminded me of one of the food trucks that line the streets in DC at lunch time and usually specialize in certain types of street foods.  Although it wasn’t that different from what I could get in America, it was still pretty good, and nice to have a small dinner after such a big lunch.

After dinner we sat for awhile at the Jordan Royal Film Commission, which is an outdoor movie theater that shows artsy films.  It’s built into the side of a hill and looks over the entire downtown area, including the Citadel and Roman Theater.  We only saw part of the film they were showing that night, which was a French movie about the Algerian War, but it was still a really amazing experience. The place is government owned and completely free for everyone who comes, and they serve water and tea to everyone there. I’m going to check out their website to see what other films they have coming and hopefully I’ll go back with some of my colleagues or something.

We spent the night on Friday at a hotel in Salt, which is a city about 20 minutes outside of Amman.  The hotel was brand new – it just opened last month – and it’s also a vocational training school for youth in the city of Salt.  The city didn’t have any hotels until this one opened, and its run by local residents who are also students in their hospitality business school.  It was actually really nice – clean, well-decorated, and with friendly staff – and a really good deal too, only about $25/night.

On Saturday morning, we went for a little tour around Salt, and then came back to Amman for a tour of the King Abdullah I Mosque.  It’s the only mosque in Amman that allows non-Muslims inside, and it’s got a beautiful blue dome on the top and cool architecture on the inside. Women have to put on an abaya, which is a full-length robe that covers your body (the ones they had available to tourists were actually indistinguishable from a graduation gown), and either cover your head with the hood on the abaya or with a headscarf. I had a scarf with me so I was able to turn it into a hijab. We toured the inside of the mosque and then listened to a lecture on Islam by a prominent Muslim scholar. Then we went to another office for a lunch and a discussion about Jordan’s economy.

Later in the afternoon on Saturday, we went to the Baqa Refugee camp to do a community service project.  Usually when I think of refugees, I think about temporary camps with tents and stuff, but the Baqa camp by this point is a pretty permanent settlement and is mostly filled with Palestinian refugees who have been forced to live there for generations. After Israel was established in 1947, millions of Palestinian refugees were forced to leave their homes and fled to nearby countries, especially Lebanon and Jordan. Most of them weren’t able to obtain any sort of legal status or identification in those countries because doing so required a lot of money and connections, so they’ve been living in these refugee camps with their families for years as stateless people.  Although the camp had permanent buildings, touring the inside of it was still pretty horrifying.  Huge families were living together in tiny rooms, without much indoor plumbing, and bugs were running around everywhere.  There aren’t any landfills or places for people to put their garbage so for the most part it was just rotting in the streets.  The smell was pretty putrid. It was a sad and eye-opening experience – nowhere in America have I seen this type of poverty.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a pretty contentious issue around here, and I try to avoid discussing it whenever I can.  I’ve studied it a lot and written numerous papers about it so I have a pretty good understanding of the issues, but it’s just such an emotional issue for people in the Middle East that I don’t like to talk about it. I consider myself to be fairly neutral on the issue – I understand the desire of the Israelis to have a Jewish state, the religious significance of the land to them, and the reason they take their defense so seriously.  However, I know too many Palestinians who go through hell everyday just trying to live their lives not to have sympathy for them and their cause. Most of them are unable to travel from the occupied territory or refugee camp in which they live, and they have very few opportunities to improve their lives. Unemployment is a serious issue throughout all of Palestine, but it is appallingly high in the Gaza Strip. Seeing the refugee camp last weekend made me feel pretty disgusted because it seems like the world has just turned its back on these people.  I don’t think there are any perfect solutions at this point, but something has got to be done.  It’s no wonder that people turn to radical religious groups or violence in such desperate conditions. The status quo is clearly not working.

Anyways, at the Baqa Camp we were divided into groups for a tour of the camp and to do a community service project.  We delivered food and supplies to an elderly woman, and she told us about her experience fleeing Israel in 1947 and coming to the Baqa camp on foot. I also met a couple of nice Palestinian women and their children, who stayed with us for most of the afternoon. I got a nice opportunity to practice my Arabic with them, and they complimented my speaking abilities.  I think they were mostly being polite, but most people are impressed that I speak any Arabic at all.  After touring the camp and talking to some different residents, we helped paint used tires and turn them into planters for flowers and other plants along the entrance to the camp.  A lot of kids came out to watch us and we had fun playing with them.

The rest of the people in the East West Initiative were having a cultural night and then going south to Petra, but unfortunately Dana and I had to leave them after the Baqa camp to go back to Amman because we had to work on Sunday. We went out for dinner in Amman at this restaurant called Abu Jbara, where we ordered a whole bunch of Arabic appetizers, like hummus, foul, some sort of hummus/yogurt mix, and falafel.  The falafel was the best I’ve ever tasted – crunchy, a little spicy, and it just melted in your mouth.  I’m getting hungry now just thinking about it.  After dinner, I headed back to my apartment and just got ready for the work week.

Anyways, I think I’m going to bring this novel-length blog post to a close here, and I’ll write more about this week in a couple of days.  Tomorrow I’m going with Dana and my colleague Farah to Jerash and Ajloun, which are two cities about 30 and 45 minutes north of here. Jerash is supposedly filled with amazingly well-preserved Roman ruins dating back to 64 BC, and Ajloun has an amazing castle called the Qala’at Ar-Rabad, which was built during the Crusades for protection. I’m pretty excited to see them both, I’ve heard from a lot of people that they’re really cool.

Anyways, I’ll try to get another blog post up soon, hopefully quicker than I got this one up.  Talk to you all soon!

Love,

Sarah