or, They Actually Built That Ridiculous Bus Station!Municipality Jebel Bani Hamida, Madaba, Jordan
This week's trip with Tareef was a special one for me, for the beauty of the route, and the nostalgia. This was a route I'd taken by bus almost half a dozen times to visit a Peace Corps friend, Lynn. In fact, the whole route was reminiscent of Peace Corps, as we started in the village of Mshaggar, which was one of our training villages, drove through the center of Madaba past the bus stop for my training village of Ma'in, and ended up in Jebel Bani Hamida where Lynn and Cassie lived as Peace Corps Volunteers.
We actually started in the village of Mshaggar, north of Madaba, where 5 of our J7 Peace Corps Trainees lived in Spring 2004. We Ma'een Trainees went to visit them once, which was interesting to me because the terrain is so different. Ma'een is built on a hilltop, whereas Mshaggar is almost completely flat. It made a good place to start biking, a nice little warm-up to get us going.
Then we regrouped and rode right through the middle of Madaba, which was not as bad as I had anticipated. My memories of Madaba usually involve lots of little boys throwing stones at tourists and other foreigners, and my friend Chris who lives there now says not much has changed. A few boys did run at us as if they were going to push us over, but for the most part it was quite tame, thanks to the Tareef guys announcing in native-speaker Arabic to all and sundry that we were not tourists.
After that, the ride was pretty sedate, a few gentle ups and downs, until we got to this giant hill in Lib. Now, I'd come this way a number of times, at least a dozen, to visit my friend Lynn, to take my Auntie Viv to visit Lynn and climb Maccharaeus, and to take my parents to climb Maccharaeus. I knew that the big hill in Lib was coming, and I wasn't looking forward to it. It wasn't until after I'd walked half way up the hill at Lib, and then ridden a good distance more, that I remembered that the rest of the trip went up, up, up. Nader wasn't kidding when he said that the second 25km were much harder than the first 25km. And a couple km after Lib, it wasn't as fun. It seemed important to stop before it wasn't fun at all anymore. So I rode the bus the rest of the way.
But there was one thing I still wanted to see more than anything on this trip. I wanted to know what had happened with the Jebel Bani Hamida bus station project. I like to tell this story as an example of one of the strengths of the Peace Corps. When Lynn first came to Jdaideh, one of 5 villages in the municipality of Jebel Bani Hamida, she went around asking village elders, "If I could find some money to do a big project, what do you need?" and they immediately said, "A bus station!"
"Nonsense," said Lynn. "I ride the bus out to the village. You have a perfectly good bus, it runs frequently from Madaba, and it goes to every house in the village. What else do you need?" And she bargained them down, as they had probably expected, to a women's center.
A few months later, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) came to Jebel Bani Hamida and asked the village elders what the US could build for them. "A bus station!" they said. And USAID agreed. They arranged for the five villages to share one bus out to the site of the proposed bus station, and then the local buses would have new routes out to the homes in the surrounding villages. It seemed like a good idea, a bus station around which a local economy might develop, with local farmers and shepherds selling their goods to each other, saving them the 45 minute bus ride into Madaba proper. In reality, however, I was witness to several fistfights over this new bus route, which didn't run frequently enough, and put young people from rival families on the same bus. Noses were bloodied, windows were broken.... It could get quite scary. By the time Lynn left Jordan, she told me that the five villages had gone back to the old bus routes. And yet, when we arrived on the mountaintop this afternoon, there was the bus station! Whether it will lead to the kind of economic development that USAID intended remains to be seen.
I kept telling Jennifer she was the bravest person I knew. Not only was she getting married and embarking on a new life a deux, but she was leaving all her family and friends behind and moving to America, too! She knew it would be hard, she told me tonight, and she'd thought she was prepared. But when I went to their American wedding reception in Missouri later that summer, it was clear that it was harder than expected. The sounds at night were different, she was struggling to find a job, she didn't have any friends except her sister-in-law to keep her company while Josh was at work.... Having grown up with bars on her windows like everyone in Jordan, she didn't feel safe in her home in America. It was a much greater challenge than she expected. 
So we left early, in order to arrive in Madaba as St. George's Church opened in the morning. The Greek Orthodox church features a Sixth Century mosaic map of the Classical World, one of the oldest and most accurate maps of the Trans-Jordan region, though the part of the map depicting Egypt is quite skewed, so that the Nile River runs perpendicular and not parallel to the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. Archaeologists interpret this to mean that the mosaic makers were probably from the Trans-Jordan, and were only able to construct the Egyptian section of the map from texts and word of mouth.
Back in the period of the film "Kingdom of Heaven," the European Crusaders had built a series of castles along the mountain range beyond the Jordan River: Aqaba, Wu'ayra (in Petra National Park), Kerak (which features prominently in the film), Shobak, Ajlun, Krak de Chevaliers and others. They were built at such intervals that signal fires could be lit at one castle at night, and seen at the next one north and south. 
We visited one of the best preserved of those, Kerak Castle. One of the fun things about archaeological sites in Jordan is that they're poorly labeled (and likely poorly understood as well), so you mostly get to make things up as you go along. Sadly, I couldn't locate what Auntie Viv and I thought was probably the kitchens, but we had some fun wandering around and wondering.
Even moreso on a precipitous downhill like the road down from Mount Nebo. At least four people did have wipe-outs, and while that may have been because there were more people with less experience than usual, it still made me want to get ahead of anyone I got too close to. And yet, every time I pass someone, I hear Dad's Goose and Maverick impression in the back of my head....
In fact, I learned a lot more than just sailing from Dad. I learned a surprising amount about bikes! On this trip and the last one, I found myself handing out all kinds of instruction and advice on bikes. Your seat should be high enough that your knee is straight when the pedal's at its lowest point; you get more power that way. When you start to go uphill, downshift so that you're never pedaling either too hard or too fast; use your mechanical advantage. Your helmet's on backwards; it's more aerodynamic the other way around. It was maybe the sixth time I'd said, "It's all physics!" in just four hours that I realized how much I sounded like my father. So, you see, Dad, I really was listening to you all these years, even when I was rolling my eyes!
We actually started in the village of Mshaggar, north of Madaba, where 5 of our J7 Peace Corps Trainees lived in Spring 2004. We Ma'een Trainees went to visit them once, which was interesting to me because the terrain is so different. Ma'een is built on a hilltop, whereas Mshaggar is almost completely flat. It made a good place to start biking, a nice little warm-up to get us going.
Then we regrouped and rode right through the middle of Madaba, which was not as bad as I had anticipated. My memories of Madaba usually involve lots of little boys throwing stones at tourists and other foreigners, and my friend Chris who lives there now says not much has changed. A few boys did run at us as if they were going to push us over, but for the most part it was quite tame, thanks to the Tareef guys announcing in native-speaker Arabic to all and sundry that we were not tourists.
After that, the ride was pretty sedate, a few gentle ups and downs, until we got to this giant hill in Lib. Now, I'd come this way a number of times, at least a dozen, to visit my friend Lynn, to take my Auntie Viv to visit Lynn and climb Maccharaeus, and to take my parents to climb Maccharaeus. I knew that the big hill in Lib was coming, and I wasn't looking forward to it. It wasn't until after I'd walked half way up the hill at Lib, and then ridden a good distance more, that I remembered that the rest of the trip went up, up, up. Nader wasn't kidding when he said that the second 25km were much harder than the first 25km. And a couple km after Lib, it wasn't as fun. It seemed important to stop before it wasn't fun at all anymore. So I rode the bus the rest of the way.
A few months later, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) came to Jebel Bani Hamida and asked the village elders what the US could build for them. "A bus station!" they said. And USAID agreed. They arranged for the five villages to share one bus out to the site of the proposed bus station, and then the local buses would have new routes out to the homes in the surrounding villages. It seemed like a good idea, a bus station around which a local economy might develop, with local farmers and shepherds selling their goods to each other, saving them the 45 minute bus ride into Madaba proper. In reality, however, I was witness to several fistfights over this new bus route, which didn't run frequently enough, and put young people from rival families on the same bus. Noses were bloodied, windows were broken.... It could get quite scary. By the time Lynn left Jordan, she told me that the five villages had gone back to the old bus routes. And yet, when we arrived on the mountaintop this afternoon, there was the bus station! Whether it will lead to the kind of economic development that USAID intended remains to be seen.
