New Years in Amman is expensive, a real upper-class endeavor. A New Years party can easily be over $100, and may only include one or two drinks in that price. Ester suggested we opt for a cheaper option, and we showed up early at Books@Cafe to grab ourselves a table for just the price of whatever we ordered.
Ever since we reconnected last summer, the day before he converted to Islam and signed his marriage contract with Noureen, Andy had been telling me that I was invited to his wedding in December. I waited and waited, and yet no invitation was forthcoming. Finally, I decided I'd just ask Nadia when and where the wedding was, and crash it!
Turns out, Nadia was exactly the right person to ask, since Andy actually spent the night before the wedding at the house she shares with so-much-more-than-an-LCF Ahmed.
...to a long wait at Muad and Ali's place while the car was at the florist and Andy fulfilled a 21st Century obligation: changing his Facebook status...
...to their grand entrance at the Palmyra Hotel where Noureen works, and where Andy met her during his Operation Smile Iraq missions as a Peace Corps Volunteer...
Christmas, for obvious reasons, isn't a real big deal here. I was thinking of going to Israel to experience it there, but this was also Martha's last week in Jordan, so I stayed home, and Martha and I did Christmas in style, starting with a morning at the Turkish Bath. While she was scrubbing me down, one attendant asked me why I wasn't out celebrating Christmas. "This is me celebrating!"
Then there was Christmas Day dinner with colleagues from work.
But, for my family, it's not Christmas without waffles with strawberries and whipped cream. The morning after Christmas, I got Eshrak and Zoe (visiting from Alexandria, Egypt) to go out to breakfast with me, and convinced the waiter to tweak the menu a bit to make it a real Converse Christmas!
Oh, how I wish I'd had my camera this morning! From the taxi down the Airport Road this morning, I saw a garishly amazing vehicle. It must have been an ambulance once; it still had "AMBULANCE" spelled backwards on the bonnet. It had rows of squares of colored reflective tape on all sides, and from either side of the back door flew Irish and Palestinian flags. Stamped across its sides were "Gaza Freedom March," "Viva Palestina" and "Derry Anti War Coalition."
Then I arrived at work and opened my email, and what should I find in my Inbox but a message from Jewish Voice for Peace to support their Gaza Freedom March through solidarity events and a petition urging the Egyptian government to let the convoy through. I've blogged about Jewish Voice for Peace before, and believe that this is the way peace in Israel/Palestine has to be achieved: through coalitions that include Palestinians, Israelis and voting citizens of Western governments with interests in the region.
But I was curious. I wanted a good picture of that crazy ambulance I'd seen on the Airport Road. I googled "Derry Anti War Coalition," and found something completely different from what I expected. DAWC made a big splash back in 2006 in response to Israel's attack on Lebanon, which was aided by bunker-buster missiles manufactured by an American company, Raytheon, in a plant in Derry, Ireland. Some coalition members, dubbed the "Raytheon 9," blockaded themselves inside the Raytheon facility for days, and were later tried under anti-terrorism laws. Last year, they were found not guilty. I have been unable, however to find anything about their ambulance travelling (presumably) to Gaza.
I did, however, learn a little more about Viva Palestina, under whose umbrella DAWC is sending its ambulance. There's been plenty of reporting on their caravan of ambulances, lorries and other vehicles making its way from London through Europe, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Egypt to the Rafah Crossing into the Gaza Strip. They've been picking up participants all along the way, in addition to having the very public support of British Member of Parliament George Galloway.
And finally I found it. You can catch glimpses of the DAWC ambulance at the beginning and end of this video, as well as seeing many other fantabulous vehicles.
It turns out that I'm still not fully on board the digital revolution. With my old-fashioned film camera, I changed my battery not more than once a year, and then usually just because the battery had expired, not because it was used up. So I wasn't thinking about batteries when I chucked my new digital camera in my bag....
When I arrived at Dana Village, my camera had just enough juice to push out the lense ... but not quite enough to close it again! Much to my embarrassment, I'm back to stealing other people's photos from Facebook.
Not only that, but of course there were dozens of great shots I saw on my way down the valley that I just wish I could take.... But I guess that just gives me an excuse to do the hike again!
It's a longer route than I usually do in Jordan - 18km or so - but all downhill. From Dana Village to Feynan Ego-Lodge is a drop in altitude of about a kilometer, from Kerak Plateau above sea level to Wadi Araba below sea level. (Wadi Araba is the region between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea.) Wadi Dana is also a dry wadi, unlike the narrow, wet wadis that Tareef Cycling Club tends to prefer for hiking. Though still carved by water, Wadi Dana is less of a canyon and more of a valley, broad and U-shaped with gentle gravel slopes instead of steep rock walls. The vegetation was different, too, more widely scattered, with even some broad slopes of new grass peeking up among the scree.
Everywhere I turned, there were these stark, bare trees, as well.
We finished the trip with a good deed. Dr. Ramzi and his brother, who organize the trips for Walking Jordan, are very interested in getting the money and cast-offs of rich Jordanians in Amman out to the desperately poor who need them in the countryside, as well as doing other projects like trash pick-up in Orjan. One of the families they've recently hosted set up a Bedouin tent for us and served us mensef, the left-overs of which will feed them for days. Some hikers also brought along second-hand clothes and other things to give away.
Winter is here in earnest today. It's cold and rainy and blowing a gale. They call this wind al-marba3inia, which comes from the word for 40, because these winds are common in an approximately 40-day window in the fall and early winter. This is similar to the khamsin that is common over a 50-day period in the spring in Egypt.
This has kept me occupied for most of the evening thinking about the prevalence of the number 40 in this region. It shows up a lot in the Bible. Many Muslims, especially Shi'ites, and Orthodox Christians mark the 40th day after a person dies with special rites. The Egyptians took 40 days to embalm a body.
To understand a people, you must live among them for 40 days. ~Arabic proverb
It's that time of year when I've got olive trees on my mind, and all the uses to which they are put here in the Arab world. The felaheen, the Arab peasant class, invest in olives as they invest in their children, and an olive tree can produce benefit for the family for hundreds of years.
The obvious uses are for eating and as olive oil, but this is only the beginning. Olive oil is a popular cosmetic ingredient. It can be made into soap, as they do at the Orjan Soap Houseand many other places. It can also be used in lotions. Many young men use olive oil instead of hair gel, and Wijdan even said her son's doctor reccomended it as healthier for the hair and scalp.
After the olive harvest, the trees are trimmed, and the branches sit on the ground for a few days while the sheep and goats strip them of their leaves. Then the wood can be used for heating, but it's not the only way olive trees contribute to household heating. Many villages are heated by jiffet, what's left over from the pressing of olives for their oil.
This sludge is mixed with water and formed into balls, which are left for several days to dry in the sun, turned over, and left several more days to bake on the other side.
These balls, about the size of a softball, will burn for about 15 minutes each, and much hotter than wood because of the residual olive oil in the jiffet.
Altogether, a family can heat their home for the 4 months of the winter for about JD100, which is far less than if they used propane, kerosene or diesel, and with a much more pleasant smell, in my opinion. The government also pushes for more use of jiffet in communities where olives are grown, because it is an eminently renewable resource, making use of what would otherwise be a waste product of a major Jordanian industry.
Jiffet is also prevalent in the Palestinian territories, where olive trees and all their byproducts are similarly integral to the felaheen way of life. That's why images like these from Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem make me so angry and anguished.
When I'm not plotting world peace or obsessing over the news from the Arab world, you'll find me writing about werewolves and epic battles of good and evil, or working on my memoirs of the Egyptian Revolution and Peace Corps Jordan.
Then I arrived at work and opened my email, and what should I find in my Inbox but a message from Jewish Voice for Peace to support their Gaza Freedom March through solidarity events and a petition urging the Egyptian government to let the convoy through. I've blogged about Jewish Voice for Peace before, and believe that this is the way peace in Israel/Palestine has to be achieved: through coalitions that include Palestinians, Israelis and voting citizens of Western governments with interests in the region.
But I was curious. I wanted a good picture of that crazy ambulance I'd seen on the Airport Road. I googled "Derry Anti War Coalition," and found something completely different from what I expected. DAWC made a big splash back in 2006 in response to Israel's attack on Lebanon, which was aided by bunker-buster missiles manufactured by an American company, Raytheon, in a plant in Derry, Ireland. Some coalition members, dubbed the "Raytheon 9," blockaded themselves inside the Raytheon facility for days, and were later tried under anti-terrorism laws. Last year, they were found not guilty. I have been unable, however to find anything about their ambulance travelling (presumably) to Gaza.
I did, however, learn a little more about Viva Palestina, under whose umbrella DAWC is sending its ambulance. There's been plenty of reporting on their caravan of ambulances, lorries and other vehicles making its way from London through Europe, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Egypt to the Rafah Crossing into the Gaza Strip. They've been picking up participants all along the way, in addition to having the very public support of British Member of Parliament George Galloway.
