*And, by water,
I mean one little river and a small, really salty sea.
Hi everyone, I’m
sorry I’ve been so behind in my blog posts!
Happy belated Fourth of July – I can’t believe it’s July already. I have only thirteen work days left in Jordan
and then one week of vacation before I come back stateside. I’ll be back in DC
on August 4th. I’ve gotten to
the point in my travels lately where I’m simultaneously starting to get
exhausted and starting to panic that I need to do everything possible before I
leave Jordan. I’ve been traveling every
weekend since I got here, and I’ve had some amazing experiences but man, I am
tired. I think that when I get back to DC in August, all I’ll want to do is
sleep and bum around during my free time. It’s good that I’ll get a couple
weeks of a break between traveling and starting back up at grad school.
Part of the
reason I’ve been so bad at the blog updates is that I’ve spent a lot of
weeknights lately planning my vacation for the end of this month. On July 26th,
my friends Rebecca and Mike and my Aunt Michele will be flying in to Amman for
a visit. We’ll spend the day on the 27th
touring Amman, and then on the 28th and 29th we’ll head
down to Petra, stopping to see Madaba and the Dead Sea along the way. We’ll come back up to Amman on the night of
the 29th, and then cross the border into Israel on the 30th
and go to Jerusalem. We’ll spend two and
a half days or so in Jerusalem and head to Tel Aviv on August 1st,
spend the 2nd in Tel Aviv, and then head back to DC on August 3rd. It’s going to be a tightly packed trip but it
should be a lot of fun!
So…a ton of
things have happened since I last posted, but I’ll start at the beginning and
go back to two weekends ago, June 28th & 29th. On
Friday the 28th, my friend Mohammad invited me to join him and a
group of his coworkers for a picnic and barbecue at the King Talal Dam, which
is just a bit north of Amman. Mohammad used to be a Program Coordinator at
JCEF, the organization where I’m working, and we met at the One Young World
conference in Zurich, Switzerland, that I attended a few years ago, and then
again here in Amman when I visited Jordan in 2011. He unfortunately left JCEF
several months ago, but he now has an interesting job working as a Youth
Activities Coordinator for the International Medical Corps at the Zaatari
Refugee Camp in northern Jordan, where over 140,000 Syrian refugees are
currently living. One of Mohammad’s coworkers knew somebody who was able to get
us into the King Talal Dam to have the picnic (as Mohammad put it, “today we
are going to do a corruption”), so we headed there on Friday for the day with a
big group of other staff members from the IMC and their friends.
The picnic was a
lot of fun – I really enjoyed meeting Mohammad’s coworkers, and we had an
amazing barbecue with shish kabob, grilled vegetables, bread, salad, and fruit.
I ate so much grilled lamb, it was amazing. We spent about 8 hours out there,
cooking, eating, talking and playing games. The area around the King Talal Dam
is stunning…it’s in the mountains and there was an incredible view from all
around the picnic site. In the evening, we headed to the site of the actual dam
(the picnic was about a mile away) to watch the sun set over the mountains. It
was one of the most amazing sunsets I’ve ever seen.
View from the campsite
View from the campsite
Sunset over the mountains
Part of me
wonders about the logic of having dams in Jordan – there are several all around
the country. On the one hand, hydropower
is a good, clean source of electricity, but I wonder if damming some of the few
natural sources of water in the country and thus messing with the environment
will end up causing more trouble over time?
I don’t know enough about the environmental impact of the dams to really
assess it. What I do know is that I have never been so aware of water and how
much I use on a daily basis until coming here. I’ve been lucky in my life to
always live in water-abundant areas and never to really know what it’s like to
have a shortage. It’s not the same here.
Not only do you quickly notice how dry the air and ground is, and the
fact that it never, ever, ever rains, at least in the summer, but water is
scarce even in a big, developed city like Amman. The water has been cut off
twice in my office altogether, and I hear this is a common occurrence for many
people in their homes. I’ve been lucky never to lose all running water in my
apartment, but we once completely emptied the hot water tank, and even when
we’re careful not to use very much, the water when I shower in the morning is
rarely more than warm. I think I’m definitely more mindful of how much water
I’m using now on a daily basis, and I’m careful to always turn off the tap
really quickly and to take much faster showers. I know I should continue these
habits when I go back to the US, and I feel a lot more grateful to always have
water, especially hot water, in my apartment back home.
Anyways, now
that I’ve finished with that side note, back to my weekend. On June 29th,
I went on an excursion to Madaba, Mt. Nebo, and the Dead Sea. I hired the driver who previously took me to
Iraq Al-Emir, Shawki, to take me around for the day. It was a pretty reasonable price, only about
$75. He picked me up at 9 am from my apartment and we first headed south to
Madaba. Madaba is about a 40 minute
drive from Amman, and it’s got a large Christian population. It’s known for its wide collection of
historic mosaics, especially the map in St. George’s Church. The church dates
back to 6 BC, during the Byzantine Empire, and it has a huge mosaic map of the
Middle East from Turkey down to Egypt that stretches across the entire floor of
the church. It’s covered in symbolic
mosaic pictures, such as two fish that are meant to symbolize Christians and
non-Christians, and has labels for tons of cities and landforms throughout the
region. After going to the church, we went to the archaeological area, which
also boasts tons of ancient mosaics dating back to the time of Christ.
Part of the map across the floor of the church
After touring
Madaba for about an hour, Shawki took me to Mount Nebo, which is theoretically
the place where Moses first saw the Holy Land and the place where he died. The
site is at the top of a huge mountain and you can see for dozens of miles all
around the place. Supposedly on a clear
day you can see all the way into Israel, but it was not an especially clear day
when I was there – it was pretty dusty. There’s a church on the site that is
currently being rebuilt, so unfortunately there’s not much to see at the moment
other than the scenery around the area.
It was a pretty cool view though, and has a lot of religious
significance.
View from Mount Nebo
At around noon,
Shawki dropped me off at the Oh Beach Resort on the Dead Sea. Most of the Dead Sea area is really built up
and only accessible through resorts and private beaches. There are a few public beaches, but even
those require an entrance fee. I had heard that it was safest for a solo female
traveler to go to one of the resorts, so I decided to go to Oh Beach, which was
one of the cheapest resorts but still really nice. It has a lot of seating, a
freshwater pool, a nice restaurant, and a spa. The spa treatments were pretty
pricey so I didn’t do any of them, but I spent my day floating in the Dead Sea
and reading and relaxing in one of the lounge chairs.
The Dead Sea is
a nice but kind of weird experience. The water is so salty that it’s more like
a brine, and has a weird texture that’s almost slimy. The floor of the sea has
huge chunks of salt just sitting in it like rocks, and you can actually see the
salt and other minerals swirling around in the water. It’s almost impossible to
swim in the sea – you just kind of float around, and you have to hold on to
something like a rock or the dock to keep yourself from floating away.
Theoretically the water and mud are supposed to be really good for your skin
though, and tons of stores sell Dead Sea skincare products all around Jordan. The sea is also really small –only about the
size of an average lake, and certainly a lot smaller than the Great Lakes in
Michigan. You can see the West Bank
across on the other side, and we were so close to Palestine that my phone
actually thought I was in Palestine in parts of the resort. Whenever I’d go down close to the water it
would send me “Welcome to Palestine!” text messages, and then it would welcome
me back into Jordan when I’d walk up towards the road.
The Dead Sea
The resort was
half-empty when I was there because it’s the low season in Jordan – as
explained by the fact that the temperature reached about 110 degrees in the
afternoon. Luckily I was able to find a
chair in the shade and sleep for awhile when it got too hot for comfort, and I
made sure to drink a ton of water when I was there. Since the Dead Sea is the lowest place on
earth, it’s comparable to Death Valley in terms of heat in the summer. This is
why we’ll only stay a couple of hours when I go with my friends and Aunt
Michele at the end of the month! It got
a lot cooler and more comfortable in the late afternoon and evening once the
sun started to set. The sunset over the
Dead Sea and the West Bank was really beautiful. I took tons of pictures because the colors
were just stunning.
Last week in the
office was pretty uneventful other than the somewhat frustrating attempt to
renew my visa. There is a dearth of
information available on the process and documentation needed to actually renew
your visa in Jordan, other than the fact that you have to go to the police
station. Usually when staff members from my office have applied for visas to
other countries in the Middle East, all they’ve needed is a letter from the
organization where they are working confirming that they are traveling on
business, etc. I got JCEF to sign a letter, but upon arriving at the police
station for my first attempt to renew the visa, I found out that I also needed
the full name and address of the person that I was staying with. Apparently the first and last name of my host
here was not enough, I was also supposed to give her father’s name and
grandfather’s name (in the Middle East, women’s names go as follows – First Name,
Father’s Name, Paternal Grandfather’s Name, Last Name, so I would be Sarah John
John Little. It is not that uncommon to
have the same second and third name if both your father and grandfather are
named alike.) Since I didn’t have her father and grandfather’s name at the
time, I was denied the visa renewal the first day and told to come back. On the second day, I came back with all the
information and was able to renew my visa without any trouble. I now have permission to legally stay here
until September. It was very relieving
to know I would not be deported or fined.
Last weekend, I
headed to the West Bank to visit friends in Bethlehem and Ramallah. It was quite an adventure, starting off with
a long, exhausting, and somewhat scary experience crossing the border, followed
by several amazing days touring Palestine. At least I learned a lot from the
experience that will help my planning process for when my friends and I cross
over to Israel at the end of the month.
But…this is the story for another blog post, which I will try my hardest
to have up soon.
Miss you all!
Love,
Sarah
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