A Call For Moderation

Amman, Jordan

I am not a touchy-feely person. It takes a great deal of effort for me to not laugh or at least roll my eyes at touchy-feely people. But what I have seen on Facebook today has really hurt me. I am literally crying as I write this. What is happening in Gaza is tragic, it really is. It is painful to watch. It has also engendered some real positive movement, like the food and clothing drive I contributed to today, and the decision of the Tareef Cycling Club to donate the rental fees for Friday's ride to the Red Crescent Society.

Unfortunately, there has also been a lot of vitriolic response as well. I have seen a lot of hate on Facebook and elsewhere on the Web today, and it really pains me. I know that a lot of it is engendered out of fear, anger and frustration. I've seen fellow Goucher Girls rail at Palestinians out of fear for their families in Israel. I've seen my Arab friends, whether Palestinian or not, lash out at Israel with equal vehemence. It really saddens me.

After the 2006 Lebanese War, an interdisciplinary group of Arab and Israeli professors (and all good friends) was formed at Indiana University, calling themselves the Mid East Conflict and Reform Group, and they began a series of guest lectures with a panel of those same IU profesors on the 2006 Lebanese War. I asked in this panel discussion if it was not true that economics has a great deal to do with the Mid East conflict, that from the Arab side of the border, Israel looks like a green, modern paradise, built on unequal water rights, unequal treatment by the West, and unequal military power, and this frustrates many on the Arab side. The Lebanese political science professor, Dr. Abdulkader Sinno, said something to me that has really changed the way I look at this conflict. He said that life is not a paradise in Israel, that poverty and especially child poverty are very high, and that this is largely because Israel chooses to spend its money on fighting its neighbors rather than providing services to its own people. The Bank of Israel released this report 18 months ago, including the following statistic:

Child poverty, as measured by the relative indices, rose by 2 percentage points in 2005 to an unprecedented 35.2 percent, which is high also by international comparison. The high rate of child poverty not only harms the children's current standard of living, but also adversely affects the creation of human capital, which is important for future earning power.

This is one of the highest child poverty rates in the West, right behind the good ole US of A!

I took a class on Palestinian nationalism from another member of IU's Mid East Conflict and Reform Group, Dr. Shaul Magid, who grew up and raised his own family in Israel, whose son is in the Israeli Defense Forces right now, and who is blacklisted on the Internet as a "self-hating Jew" for his views on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. He told us a horrific story about a triathalon in Israel, during which a bridge collapsed under a dozen professional cyclists, who fell into the river; half of them died of the effects of pollution in that river. This is not, he assured us, the only instance of ecological disaster in Israel.

I am generally pro-Palestinian because I feel that they have definitely gotten the short end of the stick in this conflict. As a teacher, a woman, or simply as a human being, I cannot help but be touched by the plight of children in the Palestinian Territories, generation after generation of them, who have lived in fear and uncertainty all their lives, who are dealing with enormous and weighty issues of traumatic and post-traumatic stress, all because they were unfortunate enough to be born on the wrong side of some arbitrary line in some "Imagined Community."

I simply don't understand why this isn't obvious to everyone! We don't choose where we were born, we don't choose our ethnicity, our mother tongue, or our childhood cultures. None of us did. We can grow up and change our language, our culture, our community, our identities (though not our ethnicities, if there even is such a thing), but Palestinian children are trapped in their parents' hell, as are Iraqi children, Sudanese children, Zimbabwean children, Tibetan children, Kashmiri children, Afghan children, and many Israeli children.

I do not believe in collective guilt or collective punishment. Not for Gazans, not for Lebanese, not for Iraqis, and not for Israelis. When we close a border to basic humanitarian aid, when we bombard a civilian population, when we cut off the electricity or water to an entire community, when we pray for a painful New Year for an entire nation, whenever we inflict or call for collective punishment, and whenever we are silent and allow it, we are also condemning large numbers of undeserving children and adults who are victims of circumstance and genetics.

So I beg you, my Arab friends and my Jewish friends and all my other friends alike, that when you speak of this conflict in Gaza or any conflict anywhere, remember that every community is made up of a great many diverse individual stories, many of them only just beginning to be written!

Scrapbook Of My Summer

Amman, Jordan

Happy New Year!

I've spent my holiday week working on an electronic scrapbook of my summer Critical Language Scholarship program, and I finally managed to get it onto the Internet where you can all see it! It's a big file, so it takes awhile to load, but I hope it's worth it.

Enjoy!

Tom and Jerry, plus Spike and I

Amman, Jordan

My roommate Ryan's boss Eric and his wife Judy (my second favorite Filipina!) took us out for Christmas drinks at the Dubliners last night, Ryan and I and his friend Shauna who's been staying with us, and Lowen who teaches history at the Middle School of the Modern American School. Judy said again how much she loves to give Ryan and Lowen a couple drinks and watch what happens (as do I), and then she explained why. It was a perfect explanation of the relationship of Ryan and Lowen (and Fadi the former MAS drama teacher).

Lowen is Tom, and Ryan is Jerry. Ryan, an avid Marxist obsessed with the imminent fall of the American Empire and the rise of a more perfect world order, starts out challenging Lowen, an ex-Army socialist frustrated with Ryan's Marxist rants devoid of any practical solutions. Eventually, however, Lowen become entirely exasperated, even angry. That's when they're most like Tom and Jerry: Ryan always needling Lowen, Lowen constantly trying to crush the little nuisance!

And then there's Fadi, who is also a Marxist, but somewhat less adament about it, and more able than Ryan to sense when the argument has gone too far. Like spike, he will step into the fray and can usually bring it to a decisive end. When Fadi's not around, as he has not been lately, it is often I who step in. While I am philosophically probably closer to Ryan's positions, I get just as frustrated as Lowen with Ryan's inability to sense when he has gone too far,and find myself defending Lowen.

Like Judy, I never tire of the ongoing argument between them, and in fact find myself wishing, as I did while listening to the Poli Sci instructors at nerd camp, that I had spent more time learning about political theory so I could jump in the fray with something approaching expertise.

Employed!

Amman, Jordan

I signed a contract today to be an English teacher for the newest location of Bell International here on the outskirts of Amman. I'll be doing much the same thing I've been doing for AMIDEAST, teaching English to adults, but Bell provides full-time contracts to their teachers, with opportunities for vertical and lateral movement that are much harder to get with AMIDEAST. If I work with Bell long enough, I can move up to be a Senior Teacher or administrator, or could apply for contracts to teach all over the region (or the world!). Bell has facilities in Libya, Qatar and Saudi Arabia at this time, and may expand into more of the Middle East if I stick around.

I'm also really excited about their professionalism. They screen their students much more carefully to place them in the right classes, and there will be a full week of teacher training before we even start registering and testing students.

I should have more variety in teaching assignments, too. I will start out teaching adult beginners; I was hired in part because my command of Arabic will allow me to do so, whereas the other teachers don't speak much, if any, Arabic. However, I was also hired for my experience teaching writing, and with young learners, and will be given the opportunity to do both as Bell's classroom space is finished and they begin expanding their palette of courses.

They may also ask me to teach some basic, taxicab Arabic to foreigners later this spring. I was thinking about this and laughing about teaching foreigners my hick village accent. It won't be so bad for the men, because village Arabic is a sign of strength, but the women in the city are supposed to speak a far more delicate accent that I've never mastered. I was reminded, though, of my experience teaching Arabic to my cousin Gwen; despite my thick Swiss accent, she managed to come out of my lessons speaking a more sophisticated Berliner German, because everyone else she encountered spoke that way.

Not only has Bell re-awakened the excitement about teaching that was nearly killed by the Modern American School, but my financial worries have been solved for at least the 6 months of this contract. This is the most generous pay package I've been offered in Jordan, which will allow me to start my student loan payments and pay off my credit card debt without effecting my lifestyle here at all. I should have some money to travel with, as well, and I have hopes to visit friends across the region this spring: my current roommate Megan in her Spring Semester at American University Cairo, Ann who will soon be studying in Ramallah on the West Bank, and Chris who is thrilled to be studying at American University Beirut. (Plus, there's that Swiss Chics reunion in Switzerland this summer that I'm hoping to squeeze in....)

Best of all, but I got a nice Christmas surprise on my way home from signing the Bell contract yesterday. I stopped off to check the balance of my bank account at the ATM in Safeway, and was quite disturbed to see that I had only about 150 dinar left to tide me over till my first paycheck from Bell in February. Then I remembered that I should have a small paycheck waiting for me at AMIDEAST for proctoring the SATs on the first of December. I was walking over there when they called me to say that there was a check waiting for me, but when I arrived, the SAT checks weren't ready. What I picked up was the November paycheck I thought I'd already deposited, a nice cushion of 600 dinar to keep me till February. So I won't be buying extravagant gifts for my friend Chris's family in Madaba, where I've been invited to spend Christmas, but at least I can get them something, and not have to pinch pennies too strenuously!

Giving Cycling One More Chance

From Dead Sea Biking

If Eshrak is willing to try, I can certainly give it another go!

Bethany Beyond Jordan, by the Dead Sea

Though I had totally wimped out on the last bike trip, Megan and Stephanie and Aktham and the guys convinced me that it was worth another try, so there I was a week later, at 8am on a Friday, getting on a bus for the Dead Sea with the Tareef Cycling Club. I reminded myself that it had been my intention in graduate school to become competent on a bicycle (until I realized that southern Indiana isn't flat!), and that the last trip proved that I am sorely out of shape. This time, at least, the route would be warm and almost completely flat.

Not only that, but I was really looking forward to seeing the people. I had learned that Jad is a friend of my friend Emily, who used to sometimes go on trips with the cycling club. Megan and I had also met a very nice kindergarten principal named Muna while getting our nails done by our favorite Filipina Angie, and Muna said that she'd been a frequent participant in Tareef events, except that they are generally too early in the morning on her only day off. She had said, however, that she'd be coming to the Dead Sea. There are, unsurprisingly given the activity, a number of Germans in this group, too, and the prospect of maybe practicing my German is generally too good to pass up. There was also an Internet journalist who studies at UWashington, and wrote this article with a short video about the trip. Plus, as meeting Aktham proved last trip, it can be a great networking opportunity, and that's something I should be learning how to do if I'm going to be having so-called "real jobs."

As it worked out, this was a perfect trip for a wimp like me. The first long, slight incline got tough after awhile, but then it was a little up but mostly down a few little bumps hardly worth calling hills, and the scenery was wonderful and the weather perfect. And it felt so good to know that I didn't have to walk my bike even once, and was right in the middle of the group, neither fastest nor slowest. And afterwards we had a great lunch, met some more fun people, and Aboud even showed up in his cool paraplegic car for a cup of tea!

From Dead Sea Biking

...I'm much more comfortable hiking!

Wadi Ghwayr, a tributary of Wadi Araba, Jordan

From Hiking in Wadi Araba

This is more my pace, a nice moderate hike up the Wadi Ghwayr, a tributary valley to the Wadi Araba. I only wish I'd known in advance that we'd be wading in the stream on the way up, or I would have picked up some hiking sandals instead of wearing my hiking boots, which gave me blisters when they got wet, and are going to take days to dry!

I couldn't help but think, as I picked my way across the rubble-strewn ground, of the Eastern side of the Cascade Mountains in Washington State, USA. After our Swisschicks reunion for Christi's wedding in Seattle, Karla took Staci and I hiking up a very similar mountain valley on her side of the Cascades. It was also a trip in which I failed to keep the water from spilling over the tops of my hiking boots. I remembered, too, how I had said, on my first trip to visit Karla in the desert of Eastern Washington, how much the cliffs and hills looked like Jordan, and she said, "That's why I didn't need to visit you in Jordan!" (I still think she needs to come and see Bethany Beyond Jordan, Mount Nebo, Um Qais/Gedara and the other religious sights in Jordan, plus Petra, Jerash and Wadi Rum, of course!)

After the halfway point, though, the Wadi Ghwayr looked less like the Cascades and more like the siq at Petra or any of a number of other sandstone canyons across Jordan. At one point, the most athletic and confident of the group had to brace themselves horizontally between the siq wall and an enormous boulder so that we could, essentially, walk across the sides of their feet in order to pass. Next time Wesley comes to Jordan, I'll know just who to introduce him to!

There's one club member in particular, Anis, who fascinated me on the hike. He's one of the professional cyclists in the group, so of course I barely even saw him yesterday. On the hike, though, I was first struck by how much he looks like Carter, and how, like Carter, he can interact in a group like natural introvert, but as we were hiking it seemed more likely that he is actually a solitary sort. While everyone else was hiking in clumps of two or three or five, Anis always hiked alone. A couple of times, he took the high road, scrolling effortlessly along the slick sandstone walls of the siq some 10 or 20 feet above the rest of us. That was when it occured to me how much he looks and acts like my brother Wesley, too!

It all just goes to show you that Jordan and America are not all that different after all. The scenery can be similar, and of course, people are essentially the same everywhere I've travelled.

Despite how sore and blistered I was by the time we got back to the bottom of the wadi, I'm so glad I went on this trip! Glad because, despite my wimpiness on a bike, I proved perfectly competent for a moderate hike. And glad because the people I've met are fun, lively, interesting and engaged, and constantly plannning for something new and exciting.

From Hiking in Wadi Araba

Conservation Meets Job Creation

Feynan Eco-Lodge, Wadi Araba, Jordan

At first, when the Tareef Cycling Club said we'd be staying at a hotel with no electricity, there was skepticism, especially from high-maintenance Stephanie, who was only convinced to go on this overnight trip when it was revealed that there was electricity in the bathrooms. We were all worried that it would be cold, especially after coming over the mountains from Wadi Musa to Wadi Araba.

We were still more skeptical when our two rented kindergarten buses, one laden with two dozen mountain bikes on its roof, began bumping across a dirt road so faint that, for all intents and purposes, we were off-roading. There was some disagreement among the men in the back of the bus as to which faint dirt track, exactly, we were supposed to take, and we seemed to bump about in circles in the dark for a very long time. And then, right there in the middle of the desert, the busses stopped and everyone was ordered off. There was a stream to cross with a low embankment on the far side, and the busses couldn't make it with their passengers aboard. This really raised our eyebrows, but we switched on the flashlights in our mobile phones and filed out of the bus.

However, as the two busses carefully maneuvered the obstacle, Megan, Stephanie, Nara and Ester quickly determined that this was the perfect opportunity for a much-needed bathroom break, and crept off in the dark, determined to believe that no animals live in the Jordanian wilderness. Everyone filed onto the first bus, and the man in charge came looking for the riders of the second bus. "They're waiting for the girls," I said. He got an annoyed look on his face and began to say, "Why are they waiting for the g--Oh!" Even as dark as it was, he quickly turned his back on the direction the girls had gone and hurried back to the busses.

When we did get to the Feynan Eco-Lodge, however, it proved to be an amazing place full of indoor courtyards, wrought iron furniture and fixtures, and candelabras and shelves and chandeliers of locally made candles bathing the whole place in a romantic glow. They served us tea and assigned our rooms, putting Megan, Stephanie, Nara and I in one room, and we went up on the second floor to find the corridor open to the sky and the full moon. The room was built like a Nabatean triclineum, with a wide shelf on three walls holding our mattresses, with mosquito nets draped from the ceiling over each bed, and niches on each wall, lined with fragmented mirrors to reflect and refract the light of three candles so it filled the whole room. It was surprisingly warm, considering how cold it was outside, and we all stripped down to the lowest of our sweaty layers of clothing. The brochure on the table said no showering after 7pm, because the water was only hot when the sun was shining, but it proved warm enough for showering. And in the bathroom I discovered Orjan Soap, handmade by the women of a village up north in Ajloun where my friend Betsy was a Peace Corps Volunteer.

Normally, I've read, the lodge serves a vegetarian menu, but we were visiting with a significant number of Jordanian men, and when Jordanian men travel, they grill meat! With all the outings we've been on with Aboud and his friends, or the regulars of the Dove Bar, we should have known better, but we girls made the very American mistake of offering to help. We were very kindly but unequivocably told that we should just wait and let them handle it. And I have to say, they did an excellent job with shish-kebabs and gallayat bandoora (tomato and onion cooked in a frying pan, in this case with added big chunks of the men's excellent grilled beef).

Much to our chagrin, we girls were so tired when we'd finished eating at 10 that we went to bed, except for Nara, who filled us in the next day on the games and singing that went well into the wee hours of the night.

From Hiking in Wadi Araba

I tried the biking....

Beidha (Little Petra) and Wadi Musa, Jordan

From Biking in Wadi Musa

I woke up this morning remembering the dog, Thomas, that belonged to my first host family in Switzerland. I was staying in the bedroom of the oldest son, Niklaus, who was studying in Philadelphia, and along with the bedroom I inherited his responsibilities, including taking Thomas for a run every day after school by bike. While Niklaus was a pretty typical Swiss cyclist who frequently biked the 30k to school and back, I was not. More often than not, Thomas took me for a run, until such time as I crashed the bike and Thomas could escape to do what he loved best, chase cows. After a number of bloody knees, my host mother said to me, "Maryah, I have never seen a girl your age who was so bad on a bicycle!" I've barely been on a bike in the decade since. This memory was not an auspicious start to the day of my first biking excursion with Tareef Cycling Club of Amman!

I gathered my determination and went anyway, and I'm so glad I did!

In the bus on the way down, Megan reassured me that the trip had been labeled "moderate" on Facebook, and if all else failed, I could always ride in the backup bus. I made some great new friends, including Aktham, who does exactly the kind of work with Iraqi refugees that I would like to be doing, and offered to help me find a similar job for myself. (He also DJs at my favorite radio station, Mood FM, which our Filipina manicurist friend Angie always turns up loud for Megan and I at the salon.)

When we got to Wadi Musa in the south of Jordan, we made a brief incursion into Beidha, aka "Little Petra," while the bikes were unloaded, and then we were off. For about the first 90 seconds, I felt pretty confident, but then there was just the slightest long incline, and by the top of it, I couldn't remember why I thought this trip was a good idea, anyway. Those of you who know me well are probably wondering the same thing. (It was because of tomorrow's hiking in Wadi Araba, where I've long wanted to go but have never been, because it's virtually impossible without my own wheels!) The club members, particularly the ones who are professional cyclists, were very patient and encouraging, and they convinced me to do the long downhill portion. But when we turned off the paved road at the Wadi Musa Water Reclamation Project, a startling patch of green in the mostly red and brown mountains, the ride turned sharply uphill, and I took to the pickup! My host mother was right about my bike riding abilities back then, and it's probably more true now, out of shape as I am! And, to my credit, most of the cyclists agreed that this was one of the most difficult excursions they'd done to date in the club.

There are distinct advantages to riding in the bed of the rescue truck, though. You really get to see the scenery that way, putzing along at the pace of the slowest cyclist, and you don't have to stop to take pictures along the way. Unfortunately, my old-fashioned camera hasn't fared well in the desert this time, with the heat of our trips this past summer washing out all my film beyond what I know how to fix with Photoshop, so my pictures didn't come out nearly as well as other people's. But the scenery was simply breathtaking, especially when we got to the overlook of Wadi Araba at the top of the mountain!

From Biking in Wadi Musa

There are many more pictures of the two days of biking and hiking by Jad.

Megan Saves Maryah from Marriage

Mshairfeh, Jerash, Jordan

From Megan and Maryah do Eid al-Adha in Mshairfeh

After all the Eid al-Adha festivities at the homes of Abu Saleh's sons, many of them went to Amman to help Dar Saleh make a sacrifice, as Saleh himself has been tragically incapacitated by a brain tumor. My roommate Megan and I stayed in Mshairfeh and went down the hill to celebrate with Dar Nasri, the family of my best friend and Arabic teacher in the village, Wijdan Umm Tareq. (To better make sense of these names, read this earlier entry.)

Though I have managed to avoid him till now, Wijdan's dirty old man of a brother-in-law Nasr came to visit, along with his second son, Sahem. He started out talking about politics and telling us how the US legal system works, since he's recently begun a law degree at Jerash University (God help us!), and is always eager in any case to make himself look smart. But eventually, as always, he wanted to know why I hadn't married an Arab yet. Before he could recommend his own son as a groom, Megan said, bless her heart, "Maryah! Don't you have a list of requirements for your future husband?"

She was referring to a defense mechanism I had developed in my Peace Corps days to fend off marriage proposals from my colleagues at the Mshairfeh Girls School. I told them that they shouldn't even bother to mention any man to me who didn't meet these 5 minimum requirements, which I began to relate to Nasr, his son Sahem, his wife, and all of Wijdan's family.

1. He must have at least a Masters degree, as I have a Masters degree and don't want him to feel he's less educated than I.
2. He must speak English, not because I don't like to learn new languages, but because it's the global language, and with it we could live anywhere in the world.
3. He must have lived abroad and liked it enough to do so again, because I hope to continue my globetrotting lifestyle for some time.

At this point, Sahem leapt to his feet and stormed out of the house.

4. He must make me his first and last wife.

Now Sahem returned to the house, just in time to hear the last condition, which I didn't always have to mention, but which has never failed to make a Jordanian throw up their hands in disbelief and admit defeat:

5. He must allow his children to choose any religion they choose, by which I don't mean merely Christianity or Islam. My children must be free to choose anything: Hinduism, Taoism, Wicca ... or none at all.

As predicted, they told me that these were absolutely unreasonable requests. Children always follow their father's religion, for a start! It would be absolutely impossible to find someone who met all those requirements!

But of course, this is very good news for me. It will be a very long time, if ever, before anyone asks me again to marry Sahem!

From Megan and Maryah do Eid al-Adha in Mshairfeh

Later, Wijdan wanted to know how I could possibly expect to find someone who would meet my high standards. I pointed out that I had met many men in America who met those requirements, they just weren't the right men, or weren't available. But what about love? she asked. If I fell in love with someone who didn't meet all those requirements, would I still be able to marry them? Of course, I conceded, all of these requirements are ultimately negotiable, but they sure do a great job of fending off marriage proposals in Jordan!

From Sheep To 2nd Breakfast by 10:30am

al-Mshairfeh, Jerash, Jordan

This is the day, Eid al-Adha, that Muslims believe the Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham in English) was supposed to sacrifice his son Ishmael (in Judeo-Christian tradition, it's the other son, Isaac) in Mecca (not Mt. Moriah, as it is in the Old Testament), when an angel intervened and told him to sacrifice a ram instead. In honor of Abraham's extraordinary willingness to obey his Lord, Muslims go on Hajj to Mecca at this time to sacrifice a sheep there, or try to sacrifice one at home as they can afford to. Megan was so fascinated by the stories and pictures of Auntie Viv's Eid al-Adha in the village that she went with me to see for herself. That's her on the right with the big cheerleader smile! So we got up early with Dar Radhi for a fabulous breakfast that included homemade olive oil, home-cured olives, and homemade apple and fig jams, and went out to see the slaughter.
Dar Mohammad and Dar Radhi both sacrificed a sheep apiece. There was great enthusiasm about watching every step of the way. I remember that when Auntie Viv was in the village, everyone was trying to keep the littlest kids, Ziad and Saddeen, away from the sacrifice so they didn't see the sheep die, but not this time. This year, everyone watched every minute of it, except for Megan and I, who got a real ribbing from the Jordanians for not being able to take it.


All of this was watched by Grandpa Abu Saleh with great sanguinity.
Later, when one of his sons asked him why he wasn't helping with the sacrifice, Abu Saleh turned to me and said, "Why should I have to help? I did this for years for these guys! I paid my dues, now it's time for them to do it! Why shouldn't I sit and watch?"

Auntie Viv was much missed in the village this Eid al-Adha, because when she was visiting, we chopped meat with Umm Anis and the other women, but this year Megan just took pictures, and I kept her company, while everyone worked to chop up the sheep...

From Megan and Maryah do Eid al-Adha in Mshairfeh

...deliver bags of meat to all the houses in the neighborhood, and then fry some up for our second breakfast!

From Megan and Maryah do Eid al-Adha in Mshairfeh

almost NO degrees of separation!

Amman, Jordan

So, another student in my program, Chris, knew this girl, Heba, who had been a Fulbright Scholar at Smith, teaching Arabic at the Five Colleges. We only met once, and very briefly, during the summer, but we've become friends since. Heba went to Smith with this girl Abby, who's now working here in Amman. As I recall, Abby first came to Jordan as a volunteer teaching English at the Greek Orthodox School in Madaba, which is doing really amazing things I seriously considered becoming part of, and all for the Jordanians who really need it most.

In any case, Abby knows Emily, who's doing this really cool project, "Meet the Foreigners," trying to introduce Jordanians to us odd duck foreigners who've decided to give up what many Jordanians would love to have in America in order to come here for as many different reasons as there are expats. Heba put us all in touch, and I agreed to do an interview today, which I will put up on this blog and on Facebook as soon as it's available.

But it doesn't stop there! Oh, no! The network of expats in Jordan is much more complex than that. Because when I found out that Emily was working in Madaba at the Orthodox School, I realized that she had probably taught with my friend Chris, whom I taught with at the Modern American School. Not only that, but Chris's husband is still teaching at the Greek Orthodox School with Emily. And, of course, Emily and Heba have met through Abby as well.

So Emily, Heba and I met for the fabulous Friday breakfast at Books@Cafe, where we determined that we really have a lot in common, and should do this more often. Then Heba had to go home, and as I was finishing up my latte with Emily, her friend Arnoux showed up. (He's using Books@ as his office for the week, between trips to Lebanon and Iraq.) I recognized him immediately from a concert we went to in the park of the National Gallery for Fine Arts to see Ramallah Underground, where some of the other girls from the CLS Program had a nice chat with Arnoux. (Come to think of it, I saw him again in the crowd at Ramallah Underground's subsequent appearance on the back patio of Books@.) Oh, and Arnoux used to teach at AMIDEAST, and I noticed when I was dropping off my timesheet yesterday that his phone number is still up on the bulletin board in the teachers' lounge. And he gave me some fantastic suggestions for finding my next job!

I could go on, about how a friend of Abby's I met tonight works with my roommate Ryan at his second job, and how another friend of Abby's who also interviewed with Emily tonight was just at the home of the current financial guy at Peace Corps. And then there's the copier repairman I met at AMIDEAST this week who is also the copier repairman for the Peace Corps....

Teaching Experience:

I'm No Adriana!

Amman, Jordan

People have, naturally, been asking a lot of questions about how and why I left the Modern American School, and I've been doing a lot of soul-searching about what went wrong. I mean, I've been teaching on and off for a decade now, and I'd been told I was good at it, even had a talent for it. It wasn't just my friends and students saying I was good. It was my bosses, too, always saying they wished they had a hundred more like me. Even my supervisor and my principal here would frequently tell me I was a good teacher.

But I didn't feel like one. At the end of every class, as I graded each test, every time I read a parent's note that her child didn't have the book he needed to study for his assessment, I didn't feel like a good teacher. I didn't even feel like a mediocre teacher. Although having two jobs has been a real drain on me physically and emotionally, I'm very glad I've had the AMIDEAST job. Otherwise, by the time I was fired, I'd have felt like a complete failure as a teacher. Instead, I've come to some very different conclusions.

I can be good with second graders. I really like eight-year-olds, and in small numbers, they generally seem to like me. I had a blast teaching Arabic and the debkeh to a Bloomington Brownie Troop last March. But I don't have the skills to manage a classroom of 29 second graders. It's not just that, though. Some people, like Adriana, a slight slip of a woman who teaches the 2nd grade classroom next to mine, just walk into a classroom with the presence that is just the right mix of strength and compassion to make kids really believe that she is a teacher. It helps that she can think like a second grader. She was always telling me about brilliant ways of relating the materal to the kids' interests, and the best ones were the ones she came up with on the spot.

On the other hand, when I was in the second grade, Mrs. Herbst apparently said to my mother at the Parent Teacher Conference, "I like to stand next to Maryah when she does math. She does it aloud, under her breath. I know she has a system, because she gets the right answers, but for the life of me I can't figure out what that system is!" And I think that's exactly why I succeeded as an instructor at nerd camp; I routinely and constantly think outside of the box. But if I couldn't even think like a second grader when I WAS a second grader, how did I expect to teach the second grade? Especially second grade math!

No, I do better with slightly older kids. Students who already understand the basics of logic, who have learned how to control their bladders and stick to the point. Most importantly, however, I need to teach children who can be trusted to remember their own responsibilities, like homework, and can be penalized for their own failure to fulfill those responsibilities. Maybe the problem isn't second graders, but the factors peculiar to private schools. In any case, it wasn't a good fit.

But all this has also made me rethink a conversation we frequently had in Peace Corps with Jackie and Lynn, who were retired elementary school teachers, and had been students in the American system fifty years ago. They would frequently say that Jordan's education system is about where America's was 50 years ago, and it would take time to catch up. I would say that the Modern American School may be where the American system was 40 years ago, but I keep thinking back to a video I saw on YouTube some time ago:



We can't afford to be stuck in an educational philosophy that is 40 years old. We can't even afford to be stuck in today's educational philosophy.

Freelance!

Amman, Jordan

I finished my first project for Questscope today, and it occured to me that I've unexpectedly gone freelance. I mean, I'd always read about being a freelance technical writer, and I'd given it sometimes glancing, sometimes semi-serious thought. It had always kind of scared me. I mean, for starters, your income is awfully unsteady as a freelancer. I know this well, with a father who's an entrepreneur, and a mother who's become a freelance artist. It was common dinnertime conversation.

Suddenly, however, I find that I am, at least temporarily, working freelance. And immediately I thought of my father. I think this is what he means when he says, "You have to be young and stupid to go to work for yourself!" Out of a job, in a foreign country, too stubborn to retreat to the comfort of Mom's kitchen, I'm taking a leap of faith.

It's not that much of a leap of faith, it's more of a trial period before the founder of Questscope comes back to Jordan and meets me. And the way a week of upset stomachs just melted away as soon as I got started on the first project tells me that I'm not really as scared of going freelance as my conscious brain thinks.

Do we speak our own language correctly?

Amman, Jordan

I've been having an interesting series of conversations about language with my top-level adult English students. We've been doing a chapter on language registers: business vs. casual English, written vs. spoken language, the English of different age and cultural groups. There was a question in the book asking whether students believed most people spoke their own language correctly.

Now, you have to understand that asking this question in the Arab world is like asking it in Switzerland or Bavaria. The difference between the dialects of those regions and High German are so great that northern Germans swear they can't understand a word. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is like High German, the language of writing, TV news and official speeches, except that there is no population which speaks Standard Arabic as their native language. All Arabs first learn a dialect of some sort. Many say that the Levantine dialect of Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon is the closest to Modern Standard, but it is still significantly different.

So I asked my students what they considered to be their native language. Was it dialect, or MSA? About half the class said of course dialect was their native language! They never spoke a word of MSA till some time in elementary school. MSA, which they simply call "Arabic," was a foreign language to them. The rest of the class said that Levantine was not a language, that it was just a corruption of real Arabic. (As a hobby linguist who believes languages are organic, evolving systems, this answer always irks me, but I held my tongue.)

So then we asked the book's question, Do most people speak their native language correctly? Their answers fell predictably along the same lines. Those who considered Levantine their first language said yes, of course we speak our first language correctly. Those who considered MSA their only language claimed that it took years of study to speak even one's native language properly.

The whole conversation reminded me of a conversation I had with my adult class last session. I showed them my resume, which says I speak Standard, Levantine and some Iraqi Arabic. My students considered it completely illogical that Iraqi, Levantine and Egyptian dialects should be considered worth mentioning separately. For an Arab, they're all Arabic. They grow up watching Egyptian films, news from al-Jazeera in the Persian Gulf, and call-in shows with dialects from Morocco to Oman.

But for me, the differences are huge. Egyptian is unintelligible to me. I was listening to Yemenis on al-Jazeera talk about the recent flood in Hadramawt, and barely understood one word in three. Just listening to the newscasters on al-Jazeera with their fully-inflected MSA is a frustration to me. But put on the Syrian mini-series Baab al-Haara or any other miniseries in Levantine dialect, and I feel very much at home.

This is, of course, opposite to most non-native speakers of Arabic. Unless you learned your Arabic by marrying an Arab, chances are that you learned MSA first and best, and the dialects are just so much grammarless jibberish to you. This is why, when I gave directions home from Club Nai for my American and German friends the other night, the cab driver said, "Are you Jordanian? No? But your Arabic...!"

My standard reponse has become, "I learned my Arabic by living near Gafgafa for two years." Everyone laughs, because everyone knows Gafgafa as the site of one of Jordan's most infamous prisons.

Goodbye

Amman, Jordan

Today was my last day at the Modern American School. It was an odd day, because I'd been asked not to tell the students I was leaving, which in retrospect was the right decision, as you will see. This meant, however, that every time the kids said something about next week, I had to either lie or, whenever possible, evade.

I had forgotten, until the end of the day, that Ranjith's parents will not be able to come to Parent-Teacher Conferences on Saturday, and had asked to meet with me after school today instead. When he and his wife and both children showed up at the classroom door, I invited them in and we all sat down at a classroom table, and we had our PT Conference. Because I had been asked not to tell the kids I was leaving, and Ranjith and some of the other kids were running about the room, I didn't mention it. Ranjith is a joy to have in class, and a model student, and that was pretty much all I had to say, over and over. In return, his parents said that Ranjith absolutely adores me, and talks about me all the time, and argues constantly with his little sister about whose teacher is better. Ranjith's father said with a grin, "He used to be really proud that I speak 5 languages, but now he says, 'You only speak Indian languages, and Miss Maryah speaks 5 international languages!'"

Then they wanted to meet with my supervisor, so I set up that meeting and sent them off.

Twenty or thirty minutes later, they were back, and Ranjith and his mother were both in tears. And all I could say, over and over, was, "You'll get an even better teacher and this is the best thing for everyone," and hope that this will prove true.

Fired! =D

Amman, Jordan

The personnel manager called me into his office this afternoon. No one knew why he was calling me into his office. When I came in, he got up and closed the door behind me, and I knew what he would say.

He sat down and explained that the 3 month "trial period" in my contract was almost up, during which time the school could terminate the contract if it didn't look like I was really suited to the job. Then he explained that the director had told him to fire me, but hadn't said why. The poor personnel manager (new to his job) was clearly very worried about having to give me this news, but I was thinking, "Yes! That means I don't have to pay the 2,000 dinar penalty in my contract for quitting!" so I said that I thought I knew what the reasons were, and it was probably the best thing for everyone, yadda yadda.

I'm relieved. And when I went to tell my supervisor (who had no idea that firing me was even in consideration), the first thing she said was, "It's probably the best thing for your health. You'll be much happier." (It's fortunate she's taken it so well, as she's also my landlady! Then again, her husband was laid off on Wednesday, too, and she's hardly gonna kick me out of the apartment now!)

I never found out why I was fired, and frankly, I don't care. It was probably because too many parents complained about their students' grades or my lack of classroom discipline. Really, it was the classroom discipline that was doing me in the worst, and I've been saying this to my supervisor and my boss since the beginning of the year, but they either tell me that my classroom management is great, or that I'm a good teacher and I'll figure it out. But then every time I tried something new in classroom management, the principal would come into my classroom and tell me that I was too harsh and expected too much of my students.

(I knew I needed to leave when I found myself walking home from school saying to myself, "Mom expected a much higher level of respect and responsibility from all of us in the second grade, and she wasn't a bad parent, was she?")

It could also, as my roomate Ryan suggested, be concern about liability after a mother walked into my Math class Tuesday, demanded that I rearrange my classroom seating to give preference to her child, and I walked out of the classroom and had an anxiety attack on the floor of the teachers' room....

Anyway, it's all for the best. There are lots of jobs I can do in Amman that would pay lots more money and be much less stressful. And it is time to do what I've been wanting to do for a decade now, which is to get into the humanitarian field for real.

Obama-mania, Arab style!

Amman, Jordan

First, let me say that my faith in American democracy has been restored. Regardless of who won this election, I was hoping that we wouldn't have the same quagmire we had in the last two elections, with no one quite sure who really deserved to win, even four and eight years later. I'm glad that McCain and the xenophobic, bellicose GOP right and especially Sarah Palin didn't win, but I'm mostly glad that the election was an unambiguous one.

Those Jordanians who had a preference in the recent election are also mostly pleased by the result. I can't tell you how many people, upon seeing me for the first time after the election, have said "Mabrouk! [Congratulations!]" So tonight in my adult English class at AMIDEAST, I decided to ask my students for their thoughts on the election. Most Jordanians I've spoken to tend to agree that as far as the Middle East is concerned, the two candidates are basically the same. On Palestine, the same. On Afghanistan, the same. On Iran, Obama is calling for more dialogue, but is not significantly less belligerent.

Wait a minute, I said. All of that I can agree with. But what about Iraq? Don't you see a difference there?

No, said Ghassan. Whether it's a few hundred troops, or thousands, both candidates want to leave a troop presence in Iraq. They came for the oil, he said, and that hasn't changed.

However, everyone here seems to recognize that, while there isn't a difference where Arabs are concerned, for Americans there is a huge difference between McCain and Obama on domestic issues. All the Jordanians I've spoken to here know that Obama is calling for national health care, and they will all tell you that he has the better plan to help ordinary Americans in their current financial crisis. On domestic issues, all the Jordanians I've met would say that Obama is clearly the best choice.

And, of course, all the Muslims I know here are delighted that America has elected the son of a Muslim. I haven't actually asked anyone why yet. I can think of two likely reasons, though. First, under Islamic law and tradition, any son or daughter of a Muslim is and always will be a Muslim, so although he's been a practicing Christian for years, many Muslims may be telling themselves that America has a Muslim president. The other, probably more likely reason that comes to mind is that, whether Obama is Muslim or Christian, Muslims in America have come under an awful lot of not-so-flattering scrutiny in America in the last seven years, and at the very least, Obama knows something about Muslims. I think that Muslims may well be hoping, as I am hoping, that an Obama administration will be sympathetic to the troubles of both Muslims and Muslim Americans, or at the very least, will be more rational.

Kids Are So Caring!

Amman, Jordan

I've been very sick this week, so much so that I stayed home from school on Wednesday, but my supervisor said that she was going to postpone all my scheduled assessments till I had come back to give my students their review for those assessments, so I decided I had to be back in school today no matter how miserable I felt (which was pretty miserable!). Anyway, I only had 3 classes to teach, and I'm not scheduled for cafeteria or playground duty on Thursdays. Or so I thought.

However, when it came time to take the kids to the cafeteria for lunch, my TA refused to go, because she'd had to do my duty for me the day before. I was in great pain at the time, just counting down the seconds till I could see the school doctor, but this made no difference to my TA, and I had to take my students to the cafeteria anyway.

So there I am, sick, exhausted, clutching my stomach in pain, trying to keep my kids from running amock in the cafeteria. And eventually I can't keep the tears out of my eyes.
Much to my embarrassment, the students start to notice. "What's wrong, Miss Maryah?"
"I'm sick."
This gets me several hugs, which was sweet. Now I've got a small crowd gathered around me.
"Why don't you go to the doctor, Miss Maryah?" someone asks.
"I have to stay here with you now." Maybe this is unprofessional, but I'm beyond caring at this point.
So then the kids do the sweetest thing. Four or five of them march off together to the principal at the other end of the cafeteria, and a minute later, there she is, offering to take my cafeteria duty so I can go see the school doctor.

They can be real rascals, but I sure do love those kids of mine!

Options!

Amman, Jordan

On the recommendation of a new friend, I sent a blind query to Questscope, without knowing if they were looking for people or what kinds of positions they'd have to fill, but I found the work they were doing so exciting that I just had to get in touch. So Bob and I tweaked and tweaked the email last night over IM and email, and I sent it off last thing before I went to bed. I fully expected to be round-filed.

So this morning in my free period, my phone rings, unknown number. It's Questscope. The guy says, he'd love to know more about what my skills are. Well, if that's not a vague, hard to answer question, especially considering that he'd already seen my resume and email, and I thought I'd been pretty clear about what my skills were.... So then he asked what kind of job I was looking for, and I said I didn't know anything about the development sector, and was looking for some introductory admin kind of job that would help me learn the system. So he says he couldn't justify to his donors offering that kind of position to an American. But he said he'd let me in on a secret: the real money in the development sector is in writing. Well, I said, that's my best skill! So he said he's been working with Questscope since it was founded; the founder finds the donors and grants, and this guy manages and spends that money. He said they would have about 16 mos of work for someone who could write grant proposals, project proposals, project reports, etc. And he said he might be able to offer me more than I'm making at both of my jobs at once! And then he asked me if I could come and meet some project coordinators today!

I told him I couldn't make it today (I'm too sick and drugged up for it to be coherent at the moment, anyway), but have agreed to come Sunday or Monday after school.

He also said he's gotten lots of unsolicited resumes over email like mine, and occasionally he asks his secretary to write them a nice rejection note, but this is the first time he's actually gotten in touch with one of these hopefuls. I guess Bob wasn't just being a nice ex-boyfriend last night when he said he wished he had a job to offer me with such credentials, and that it was a pity it was so hard to fit all my great qualities into a readable cover letter! But I guess we managed to do just that between the two of us!

So, I'm not giving the American school my notice just yet, but it's so nice to know that I've got some options!

Peace Corps Wasta, Still

Amman, Jordan

I love it when being a former Peace Corps Volunteer still gets me stuff, like a free ride home, all the way from the village!

This weekend in the village, I stayed longer than intended, and missed the bus. So a couple of the boys got me a ride down the hill to Bleela with a carpenter going home to Bleela, and even though it was on his way, I gave him the last few coins in my wallet. He tried to protest, but I know how much everyone needs the money here, especially in the villages, and I insisted.

So I'm standing on the side of the highway, trying to flag down a bus to Amman, which is much harder than it used to be, now that they've established at the Irbid bus station a ticket system, instead of paying the driver directly. Another man with his wife and infant son were also trying to flag down a ride to Amman, and I heard his voice behind me: 'Isma3i! [Hey, girl!]. I turn around and he's flagged down a car. He asks me where I'm going. When he ascertains that we're going the same way, he tells me to get in. Normally, I wouldn't do such a thing, but he had his wife and baby with him, so I decided it was probably safe, and got in.

I had a nice chat with the wife, who is originally from Bleela but married an Ammani. She told me that she had once met the Peace Corps Volunteer in Bleela. I pointed out that Bleela requested a Peace Corps Volunteer after I worked in Mshairfeh with teachers who were mostly from Bleela.

The family paid 2 dinar and got off about ten miles before the edge of Amman. I asked the driver where exactly he was going, and it turned out he was going to the Eighth Circle, just a hop, skip and a jump from home, so I told him I'd get out there. So then he wanted to know if I was Jordanian, and since I wasn't, how had I learned such excellent Arabic? so I told him I'd lived in Mshairfeh, and he told me he was from a town just a few miles further north, al-Na'eemah, and that I should visit sometime. I pointed out that the mother of one of my 8th graders was from Na'eemah and I had gone there once to meet some of her 11 brothers who had all studied in the States.
"Really? Was she from the X clan?"
"Maybe.... The name sounds familiar...."
"Or from Al-Akaleeq?"
"Yes! That was it! Her name is Rihan."
"I wouldn't know who she is. It's hard to meet women in the village. But I probably know all her brothers."
I mentioned that all her brothers were named Abed (Abdullah, Abdassalaam, Abdarrahman, Abdalmalik, Abdalmajeed, etc.).
"She has an uncle who's a dean at the Jordan University for Science and Technology, and his hand's all curled up." My guess is, the uncle has had a stroke.
"Yes! I met him at a welcome home party at her house for one of her brothers!" We had, in fact, a fascinating conversation about Jordanian women in universities.
And so the conversation went on.

When we got to the Eighth Circle, he wouldn't hear of dropping me there. I was now his guest, and he was determined to deliver me all the way home. We compromised on his dropping me at Safeway, where I needed to pick up a phone card and some groceries anyway. When I tried to give him a couple dinar for his effort, he refused to take it. I insisted, but he was adamant that I was his guest and he wouldn't accept money. So I did what I had seen my headmistress do dozens of times in the village: I dropped the money on the seat beside him. Well, then he was almost angry, and threw the money back over the seat at me. So finally I thanked him and accepted my free ride. And I didn't even have to give out my phone number!

Olive Season

al-Mshairfeh, Jerash, Jordan

This morning I'm back in Mshairfeh, and I can't help but wish that Megan had been able to come this weekend, while everyone across the north of the country is picking olives. I know I had fun helping when I was here before, and learning all about how it's done, and I know my brother Ben had just as much fun helping his family pick olives in Croatia.

People call olive trees their children, because like children, they can take up to a dozen years to yield fruit, but thereafter, they offer substantial support to a family in many ways. That is why it is always so heartbreaking for me to see footage of Israelis uprooting olive trees with bulldozers in Palestine. There are the olives themselves, which yield all kinds of foodstuffs I'll get to in a moment. Then, after the harvest, the trees are pruned, and the pruned branches are given to the goats to be stripped of their leaves. Then the wood is chopped and used to heat the house in the winter. In addition, the "jiffet," or what is left over of olives after the oil has been pressed out of them, is mixed with water, made into balls and left to dry in the sun. These balls of jiffet are used as fuel all winter, each one burning for about 15 minutes, at temperatures higher than wood because of the residual oil left after pressing.

In addition to olive oil, there are several ways to preserve olives. The whole olives can be put in water with some hot peppers and halved lemons, but they take several months to cure this way. I helped to crack olives this morning, by pounding on them with the bottom of an empty glass soda bottle. These cracked olives can be put in water with peppers and lemons, and will cure and be ready to eat in a matter of weeks. I'm not a big fan of whole olives, myself, but there is one way of preserving olives that I do love: The olives are chopped, added to chopped hot peppers, onions and carrots, and canned. Within a couple weeks, this relish-like topping is ready to be scooped up with pita bread for a light lunch at school.

And of course there is the olive oil. I am looking forward to sampling the bottle of olive oil sent home with me by the headmistress, Umm Alaa. Not to be outdone, her sister Umm Anis has promised to send me home with a bottle of her olive oil next time I visit!

"Baba Jordan"

Ayn Jenna, Ajloun, Jordan
[Ayn Jenna means "font of Paradise"]

I'm in Ajloun visiting Wijdan's family. Here, again, not much has changed except that the kids have gotten bigger. It was nice to be able to visit them, not just because of the fond memories it recalled, but also because it so obviously gave them an excuse to see each other.

When I talk about Jordan, I always talk about how close families are. I like to describe to people how I lived next to my headmistress and all her in-laws, and how they all used to gather at the grandfather's house every night to just be together, to be a family. I talk a lot about the family from Zarqa coming to visit, or going to visit the family in Zarqa. But that was with the headmistress and her family.

What I don't often take the time to talk about is how economics can divide a family. I'm beginning to see this even with the headmistress's family in Zarqa, who are not able to come out to the village and visit as often. But it has always been an issue with Wijdan.

We had to postpone this trip to the village twice because of last minute obligations I had to the school, and we almost postponed again when we determined that Megan would not be able to make it to the village and/or Ajloun this weekend. But in the end I decided that I, at least, needed to go, because otherwise Wijdan wouldn't have the chance to see her family. It's always been expensive to hire someone to drive from Mshairfeh to Ajloun and back, a trip of well over an hour, but now it's getting rapidly more and more expensive as fuel prices have gone up all around the world. Prices are down a bit at the moment, but no one is counting on that lasting. But I know that Wijdan could only justify the expense on my behalf ... and anyway, I fully intended to pay for the trip and not take 'No' for an answer, which she probably expected.

And I'm glad that I did, because we got to stop along the way and see her sister Zain, and once we got to her parents' house in Ayn Jenna, two of her other sisters came with their families, one all the way from al-Khaldiya, a village in Mafrag where not one but 3 Peace Corps Volunteers I knew were living. Some of Wijdan's aunts came, as well, including a fascinating woman named Umm Hamze. She's a Macedonian Turk, so she grew up in Yugoslavia under Tito, but her native language is Turkish. Then she married a Jordanian, and has lived here for 10 years, and her Arabic is nearly perfect. Her children are both bilingual, Turkish and Arabic, and fluent in English; unfortunately, I didn't get to meet the children, even though her son had brought her to Ajloun, as the men were all sitting in the parlor. (Wijdan's father is rather more conservative than I'm used to from Mshairfeh.)

I also just really enjoy spending time with Umm Firas and Abu Firas, Wijdan's parents. Abu Firas has always referred to himself as my "Baba Jordan," my Jordanian dad, and although it's a little weird coming from someone I barely know, I find it very heartwarming, in large part because it shows me just how important my friendship is to Wijdan.

Hands Culturally Tied

Amman, Jordan

As I've mentioned before in my blog, Jordan is a very hard place to be handicapped. Aboud has it better than most, as his family has themoney and social standing to maintain their status despite his handicap, and to send him all over the world and give him all the possible opportunities to improve his condition. Even in the developed world, however, all the asistance and opportunity in the world can't always make up for the harsh realities of being handicapped.

Aboud has for 5 years been the boyfriend of the supervisor of our summer Arabic program, Eshrak, and the love of her life. When he was 14 years old, he woke up one morning to find himself paraplegic. Apparently, he's one of only about 6 people in the world to have this particular kind of spinal infection, and there is as yet no cure. Fortunately, his father owns a major manufacturing company in Jordan, and can offer him all the asistance money can buy, and has told him that he needn't work if he doesn't want to. But Aboud is a strong, independent sort, and doesn't want to be more reliant on others than absolutely necessary, not even on his family.

What's more, Eshrak's family once heard about her relationship with Aboud, and her father even met Aboud, and he forbade them from any further contact, but said afterward, "He's a very nice young man. It's too bad about the wheelchair." Eshrak has continued to see Aboud, but in secret, because they don't dare let her father know until he can prove that he has the means to marry and support her.

In Jordan, for a young man to get married, he must first provide a fully furnished home, right down to the silverware and bed linens and in some cases even a complete wardrobe for the bride. He has to be able to pay for a big engagement party and wedding, and for several thousand dollars worth of gold to be given to the bride in part at her engagement, and in part at her wedding. In some families, he is also expected to pay for the bride's engagement and wedding dresses, and her wedding night lingerie. In short, it is a huge financial undertaking for even a perfectly fit and normal young man, which is why most Jordanian men can't get married until they are 30 years old or more.

So in September, Aboud went to America for a month to look either for a spot in a clothing design BA program, or for a job. Not surprisingly, considering the global financial circumstance currently, he didn't find one. When he returned to Jordan, he was absolutely devestated, convinced that all his options had been exhausted, and he would never be able to marry Eshrak. In order to protect himself from being further hurt, he cut off all communication with Eshrak. He hasn't spoken to her or seen her except once, and she's devestated. So is he, but mostly too manly to admit it.

Instead, he's been calling my roommate Megan and asking her to relay messages to Eshrak, and Eshrak has been calling Megan and asking her to relay messages to Aboud. Perhaps because we're Americans and more sympathetic to their desire to be married, and more willing to believe that they'll be happy despite his disability, we've been put squarely in the middle.

The hardest part is that there's absolutely nothing we can do. Eshrak wants this desperately, she wants desperately to be Western and to be one of the boys, but she loves her family and respects them deeply, and is unwilling to offend their relatively conservative beliefs. And all we can do is sit by and watch.

Sometimes They're So Sweet!

Amman, Jordan

I've told my student Nadine over and over that she doesn't have to buy me things at lunch break, but should spend her money on herself. I thought I had finally gotten through to her, so I was surprised today when she offered me a bottle of water. When I started to protest, she launched into a story about how, once, when she was three, she choked on some food, and then got food poisoning, and had to have an injection and all this stuff, and that her mother had said it was important for her to drink a lot of water, so she wanted me to have some water for my food poisoning.

It was so sweet, how could I turn her down? (And it sure hit the spot!)

Jordanians from Abroad

Amman, Jordan

We had some very interesting conversations with Syrians about their perceptions of Jordanians, and they were not very flattering. In fact, the Syrians we spoke to were downright disdainful of the Jordanians. Frequently we heard "They have no culture" or "They left their tents and forgot their culture."

It's not hard to see where this attitude comes from. Here they are, living in the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, with the citadel and a 9th century mosque that was a cathedral before that, in the seat of dynasties and kingdoms. Just two hours away, we're living in a city that was a village of 5,000 people just 50 years ago.

But in Jordan's defense, and it's been my home long enough that I feel obliged to defend it, I said a number of times that Amman is a totally different country from the rest of the country, and in the villages like al-Mshairfeh where I lived, that history is not so far behind them as the Syrians suggest.

Carter's Revenge

Damascus, Syria

Well, we had a nice, slow vacation day in Damascus yesterday ... finishing up with a nice triple case of food poisoning, which started with me vomitting in the street and being pelted with plastic bee-bees by some local boys. So I guess this is what I get for breaking my promise to Carter not to brave the wilds of Syria ... diarrhea and nausea on the day we're supposed to be driving home from Damascus and dealing with Jordanian Immigration....

Pilgrims and Passion Plays

Damascus, Syria

Wow. What a day. With our fairly early start, we had a nice brisk walk down mostly empty streets to the Ummayad Mosque (once a cathedral). We donned our culturally appropriate cheap polyester robes, and I my hijab (photos forthcoming), and first saw the tomb of Saladin al-Ayyubi, the great noble opponent of King Richard in the Crusades, who eventually united his Kurdish people and the Arabs to their southeast to retake Jerusalem and most of the rest of the Holy Land from the Europeans.

Then we rounded the corner and rejoined a crush of what, judging by the women's abayas and chadors, were several tour groups of Shi'ites. It took a while to figure out what they were doing in Syria, a predominantly Sunni country ... until I read on the tickets that Hussein bin Ali bin Muhammad's head is supposedly enshrined in the Ummayad Mosque. (There are actually three possible locations for Hussein's head, but this is the most likely, since Yazid bin Mu'awiya lived in Damascus, and he ordered the army against Hussein that took his head.)

Hussein was the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, and it is one of the formative moments of Shi'ite Islam when the Caliph in Damascus sends his son Yazin to kill Hussein, whom Shi'ites supported as their rightful Imam and Caliph. When Hussein sent to his supporters in Kufa, they failed to come to his aid in Karabala, and a central theme of Shi'ism is atoning for the failure to protect their God-given leader and his entourage, mostly women and children.

So, intrigued, we followed these Shi'ite tour groups and their mullahs through the mosques, and sat for some time to watch one mullah's abbreviated recitation of Hussein's martyrdom at Karbala and the mourning of Zainab his daughter ... or at least I think so; it was all in Persian. In any case, the intersting part is watching the weeping and wailing and mourning in religious trance, much like what you would see in an evangelical Christian Passion Play.

Then we followed them into the shrine of Hussein's head, and saw them mourning again, including one middle-aged man leaning against the wall and flat-out sobbing so that his whole body shook. It was a very deeply moving experience for me, how these people can feel such a profound personal connection to a 1,300 year old story. And of course evangelicals are known to react similarly to the Passion of Christ, and Jews at the Wailing Wall, but in some inexplicable way, this just felt so much more legitimate....

And then, to top it all off, we went shopping. Oh, did we go shopping! Scarves, scarves, scarves! and jewelry and inlaid boxes and shoes (including some really fun ones for the little girls in the village)! I'm almost ready for Christmas already!

P.S. Apparently, there are quite a few sacred places for Shi'ites in Syria ... going all the way back to the hill where Cain killed Abel! Find out about them here.

Damascus or Bust!

Damascus, Syria

Well, here we are! And it only took us 6 and a half hours on the border and 30 Jordanian dinars (about US$40) to get here.... I feel bad for poor Megan, who, unlike Stephanie and I, already had her visa and was ready to cross the border in an hour....

We got here so late that we haven't really seen much yet, just a few blocks of the modern city. It reminds me a lot of Dresden and East Berlin and Prague, with the architecture of the buildings and the muras of Presidents Hafiz and Bashar Al-Assad in such a socialist-realist style. And of course I visited all those Eastern block cities long after the fall of the Soviet Union, but I can imagine that the security presence must also feel similar. There are military everywhere, whether in little beefeater-style booths painted with big Syrian flags, or just lounging in the street. I didn't notice the kind of weaponry you'd see in Switzerland or Jordn, but the sheer numbers of personnel are sufficiently intimidating ... or reassuring, if you're a tourist like me, worried about last week's car bomb blast....

Eid Sa'eed!

Jordan, Amman

Tomorrow or the next day will be Eid al-Fitr, the feast day that ends Ramadan. We won't know for sure on which day Jordan will celebrate Eid until the evening news at 8 tonight, by which time the official government sheikhs will have seen or not seen the new moon. (In some other Muslim countries, like Pakistan, the day of Eid is calculated using mondern astronomy, but the Hashemites are traditionalists in this regard.) Eid will be the first day in a month that practicing Muslims will eat during daylight hours, and most will be feasting throughout the day. It's a lot like Thanksgiving, with everyone gathering around the table or a platter on the floor with their families for a big feast, and then visiting and drinking tea and coffee and juice for hours. At the same time, Eid in the village always reminded me a little bit of Halloween, with all the neighborhood kids going from door to door collecting candy and "shillin" (nickels) in return for the traditional Eid greeting, "May you and yours be well all year." But no doubt this will be different in the city. Just like Ramadan, I expect eid to be better in the village than in the city.

In any case, we have the next five days off from school, and I'm looking forward to the change of pace!

Bribery and Extortion

Amman, Jordan

I decided that honey catches more flies, and perhaps sugar would tempt my students to behave more than rules and consequences. So last night I went out and bought pens and erasers and tofees and little note cards and wrote something for each student about why they deserved to have a present for Eid. I handed them out today, and I have never seen my class so quiet, as they sucked on their toffees and puzzled out what I had written for them.

And then I sent them off to Art class with their sugar highs, and was done for the week!

Sarah Bernhardt, I presume?

al-Mshairfeh, Jerash, Jordan

All throughout Ramadan, I've been thinking that the holy month just isn't as fun in the city as it was in the village, and I've been dying to get back to al-Mshairfeh. And the more I've said this to my roommate Megan, the more psyched she's been about seeing the village.

Unfortunately, the transportation's a little difficult to arrange in Ramadan. We'd been trying to get a ride from Abu Alaa' or Abu Anis on their way home from Amman after work. Unfortunately, their oldest brother Abu Ahmed, who was my landlord in the village, has been in the hospital. He has brain cancer, and since an operation in mid-Ramadan, has been deteriorating rapidly. He no longer recognizes his family, and speaks as if from twenty years in the past.

Eventually, however, we decided we'd take a chance this last weekend of Ramadan, and see if we could get a "service taxi" to the village, and we had good luck. For once, Um Anis actually told me I'd gotten a good deal on the trip!

It was so wonderful to be back in the village, even if it meant fasting with the others. It was really like going home. The food tasted right, the language sounded right, the people were familiar and did all their familiar things, the weather felt right.... I felt more certain than ever that coming back to Jordan was a good thing ... a place where I already have a safety net and a family. (Although I still maintain that I wouldn't want to live in the village again, as nice as it is to visit.) And given no alternative, Megan proved to be more than competent at Arabic, despite her constant protests that she was not very good.

Just like last time in the village, too, everywhere I went, people knew me and would shout out my name. When we went to Wijdan Um Tareq's house, all her in-laws came to see me (except, fortunately, the creepy brother-in-law). Megan kept saying, over and over again, "You're a celebrity!" ad I thought, it's just what my mother would say I always wanted; that's why she called me Sarah Bernhardt as a child.

Standard Arabic, anyone?

When we got to Wijdan's, she asked if Megan spoke much Arabic, and I said that she didn't speak much colloquial, but that she was brilliant at talking politics in Standard Arabic. "Then we'll talk about politics in Standard Arabic later!" declared Wijdan, and in true Wijdan fashion, an hour or so after Iftar, she started asking Megan questions about politics in Standard Arabic. This sparked an intense conversation with Abu Tareq's cousin about why America had such a thoughtlessly heavy hand around the world, to which we could really only say that we agreed. And although Megan frequently turned to me for translation, she really understood as much or more as I did of the conversation.

Google Yourself

Amman, Jordan

It's fun to google oneself every now and then, and today I found a little gem on the Internet I wasn't even aware of, which reminded me of some details of my trip to do clean-up in New Orleans that I had forgotten. That was such a fun trip, and it was so wonderful to do something for someone else after all the hours I'd spent reading in grad school for my own selfish edification!

Ramadan's Children

Kids say the darnedest things!

Amman, Jordan

My second graders get a mid-morning break upstairs in the cafeteria, where they can get all sugared up for the rest of their classes :-S and yesterday, one student looked up at me and asked, "Miss Maryah? Are you fasting for Ramadan?"
I waved the Coke in my hand. "What do you think?" (Fortunately, caffeine IS forbidden for my Junior School students, but teachers can still get it.)

This morning, I was riding herd on one of my students to get him to keep writing in his copybook instead of talking to his friends when he looked up and asked, "Miss Maryah, are you fasting?"
"Nope," I said (a bit gleefully, I must admit, but I knew he wasn't fasting either).
"Why not?" he asked.
"Because I'm not a Muslim."
"Oh, right," says my student. "You're an American."
And this from one of my students who has lived in Canada!

Ramadan Kareem!

Amman, Jordan

Yesterday was the first day of Ramadan, the month of fasting and abstention for Muslims. This includes not only physical abstention, but also the practice of restraining oneself from speaking or thinking ill of others, day and night for a whole month. Those who choose to fast will not eat, drink or smoke from first light till sunset, and then will probably stay up most of the night partying and stuffing their faces with delicious food and a whole array of special Ramadan sweets.

Fasting for Ramadan is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, one of the 5 things which Mohammad said were the most important religious duties of a Muslim, in a test by the Angel Gabriel related in what is known as The Hadith of Gabriel.

Technically, second graders are not required to fast. They're too young. However, they are encouraged to try it for part of the day on some days, and perhaps especially in majority Muslim countries, many second graders do fast because it's perceived as a sign of being grown up, something second graders everywhere are desperate to be! (I don't know why! Being grown up and responsible is over-rated!)

I'm noticing something this year that I didn't notice when I taught in the village, perhaps because the village students are so habitually over-caffeinated and hyperactive generally. Yesterday I was really frustrated with students who couldn't concentrate on copying notes from the board into their copybooks for more than five or six letters at a time. They almost had to be prompted word by word through the whole day, until I began to worry that we had some serious learning disabilities in the classroom. Today I figured it out. My least "on task" students yesterday and today are the ones who are fasting. No wonder they can't concentrate!

Actually, I'm feeling really disconnected from Ramadan this year. I think it's probably living in Amman, which in Peace Corps always seemed like it may as well be America compared to village, and working at the American School. I don't often feel like I'm really connected to Jordan. (Then again, I suppose I haven't really been here all that long yet, either.) After reminding my students yesterday morning to be extra patient with each other in this time of fasting, I went yesterday afternoon to Starbucks to use the Internet, walked right in, and ordered a frappuccino. "Sure," said the barista, "but only to go."
"Oh, right!" I exclaimed, feeling stupid. "It's Ramadan." In Jordan and many majority Muslim countries, it is not just inconsiderate but illegal to eat in public in Ramadan. "But I came all this way to use the Internet!"
He just shrugged. So I guess I'm stuck with my stolen wireless connection, slow and frustrating as it may be.

All My Children

Amman, Jordan

Well, I never thought of myself as an elementary school teacher, but I was right when I told everyone I would feel much better about myself as a teacher once I met my students.

I've got a lot of boys, most of them just bursting at the seams with energy, and several of them prodigious talkers, but so long as I'm interesting enough to keep their attention (which I should be moreso once we start teaching actual curriculum next week), they're really quite well-behaved. I have several girls who demand a great deal of affection, but it's nothing compared to having the whole village school trying to touch me all at once every time I went on break as a Peace Corps Volunteer! And despite a couple new international students with very limited English, I have a very quick, capable classroom (and I know from experience that the new international students will come up to speed very quickly!).

I feel confident that it will be a good year.

Another Hick Dialect Under My Belt

Amman, Jordan

After I had been an exchange student in Switzerland, I met with Prof. Uta Larkey, who IS the German Dept at Goucher College in Baltimore, to object to the results of my placement test, which would have had me in third semester German because my grammar was so bad. I had hardly said two sentences in my heavily Swiss-accented but very best High German, when Uta grinned and exclaimed, in German, "Oh, your accent is so quaint!" I felt like I'd just dropped in from Hicksville.

The same thing happened to me yesterday. Here in Jordan, there are two ways to pronounce the words in colloquial language containing the Arabic letter qaaf. If one prefers to sound Bedouin and therefore macho, one pronounces this letter like an English G. If one wishes to sound sophisticated, one prefers the Palestinian custom of dropping the letter qaaf in favor of a little hitch of the breath called a hamza, usually represented in English as an apostrophe ('). Most women in Amman prefer the Palestinian accent. However, having learned my Arabic from the Bedouin in the village, I never learned to use the Palestinian accent, and often even find that the missing qaafs make it really hard for me to understand city people at all! Once again, I speak with a hick accent.

So yesterday morning I lent my pen (gellam) to a Teacher's Assistant, and promptly forgot that I had loaned it at all, as things were crazy preparing for the first day of school. Later that afternoon, I passed the same TA in the hall and she called, "Maryah! Maryah! 'ellamik! 'ellamik!"
I'm translating in my head and thinking, "My flag? What flag? I don't have a flag!" But I stopped anyway to see what she wanted.
Now, the student teacher in the fourth grade just happened to be standing there, and said to the TA, "You have to say gellam or she won't know what you mean." Suddenly I realized, the TA was trying to give me my pen back.
The TA, meanwhile, was incredulous. I get this frequently, the look that says, 'How is it that a foreigner like you sounds like a bred-in-the-cloth Bedouin?'
"That's right," I said. "You'll have to speak Bedouin to me. I don't speak your city-talk!"

Culture Shock At Home

Amman, Jordan

I'd been having trouble getting along with my TA this week, and finally figured out why. In part, of course, it's because I've been really nervous about getting everything done in time and feeling like I might be in over my head, both of which make me mean (just ask my mother!). So some serious apologizing was needed.

The main thing, though, was a cultural misunderstanding. Neither she nor I has studied education, but in addition, Diala has none of my teaching experience. Perhaps more to the point, she's never been in an American elementary school before, so she has no conception of what I'm picturing in my head as my classroom. Added to that, with so many native speakers and fluent speakers of English on staff, I forget that Diala is very advanced but still very much an English learner, and I often talk too fast for her, she tells me.

So we sat down and I explained the major difference, as I see it, between Jordanian and American educational culture: In Jordan, the emphasis in the classroom is put on the information being transmitted; rote memorization is de rigeur here, and the classroom environment is more or less irrelevant, or at best, haphazard. American educators, on the other hand, tend to feel that the learning environment is at least as important as the material; if a student is comfortable and happy in his classroom and stimulated by bright colors and lots of informational input around the room, he will want to come to school and be more engaged in his learning.

I can't say I find either system ideal. I admitted to Diala that I often think American educators, and perhaps especially administrators, sometimes put too much emphasis on the environment and not enough on the curriculum, but I also recognize that the Jordanian philosophy is also flawed, and fails many of its students. In any case, we're in the American system here, and thus it's American educational culture we have to respect.

And when she told me that I often talk too fast for her to understand, I realized that we needed to go back over much of the material that was covered in lectures given to the faculty as a whole, in which native speakers of English had spoken too quickly for Diala to take in all the important information.

However, once we'd had a couple little pow-wows about the American teaching philosophy, once we acknowledged and began to bridge that cultural gap, things have been so much smoother in our working relationship!