"no like america"

Amman, Jordan

My colleagues and I were, as usual, sharing a taxi back from work this evening, and chatting about some harmless subject related to our teaching. I had given the directions to the cab driver in Arabic, though he insisted on speaking to us in his very broken English. About half way into Amman, he asked, "You American?"
Before I could reply, John jumped right in. "No, no. British. Well, British and American. Two British, one American."
The cab driver said, "No like America." He had to say it twice before we understood it. There was a moment of silence before John turned to Martha and continued whatever innocuous conversation we'd been having. I don't know how they felt, but I felt extremely awkward.

What's a girl to say? I ask this as a rhetorical question, but it's not really rhetorical. What is a girl supposed to say to that? I'm not going to say, "I don't like America, either," even though that's how my Nana thinks I feel. I do like America. I'm a big fan of Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, George Washington and the two-term presidency, Ralph Waldo Emerson and "The American Scholar," Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dream, John F. Kennedy and the Peace Corps, and the other noble ideals with which the United States of America has been built. I wouldn't want to have been born anywhere else, because being an American opens doors to me that aren't open to so many other people around the world.

But I sympathize with America's detractors. A friend asked me today why my G-chat status message read "Maryah can fly her country's flag again with a clear conscience." I've never been a great fan of patriotic gestures, but since 9/11 and the dictatorial, damn-the-consequences cowboy diplomacy of the Bush Administration, I've shuddered every time I've seen an ostentatious show of American patriotism. For the last seven years, the United States hasn't had a government I could be proud of, or that I even really wanted to be associated with.

But today on BBC I've seen clips of President Obama's appearance on Al-Arabiya television network, saying that too often America dictates what other countries should do without knowing all the relevant factors, and that this new administration is prepared to listen first, and not make decisions until all the factions have been consulted. (Much has been made of the fact that he still won't talk to Hamas, but he does support Egypt's talks with Hamas, and we can't expect too much so soon.) I can't tell you how impressed I am that our new president, despite the pressing domestic issues like economic crisis, health care, lobbying reform and transparency reform, has taken the time out of his very first week in office to address the Arab people directly, and in such self-effacing tones. In addition, I've been listening to the Secretary of the Arab League and other regional spokespersons express their delight at the appointment of George Mitchell as the Obama Administration's Middle East Envoy, and praise him as someone who listens. Finally, the United States has leadership that I can believe in, that I am comfortable being associated with.

Backing Hope With Action

If you've been following this or my other blog, Alternate Witness, you will know that I have been following two causes very closely in the last few year, one which gives me great hope, and one which gives me great pain.

I have followed with great hope, though equal amounts of skepticism, the campaign and now presidency of one Barack Obama. Since the very beginning, I have admired in him a humility one doesn't see in many politicians. Where other politicians, most notably our recently departed president, choose a political line and toe it against all opposition, Barack Obama is willing to admit when he doesn't know, and even when he is wrong, and is willing an eager to seek out the opinions of experts and hear all sides before reaching a conclusion.

I have also been following, since I was an undergraduate, the situation in the Palestinian Territories. I have been particularly concerned since Hamas won free and fair elections and the serious blockading and humanitarian crisis began. If you've been reading carefully, you'll understand that I am concerned about both sides of this conflict, both the Palestinian and Israeli victims. They are both victims of birth, of circumstance, of history, of violence, of intolerance, of religious extremism, of poor governance, and of propaganda on both sides. There are children dying in this conflict who did nothing wrong but be born on the wrong side of some arbitrary line in the dirt. That pains me in ways I can't describe.

Recently, I've started following an organization that unites those two causes. Jewish Voice for Peace is encouraging Americans, Israelis, Arabs and others to speak together in calling for a resolution to the conflict in Palestine. They started Thank You Jon Stewart, which I've seen posted on a number of my friends' blogs and Facebook pages. They petitioned President-elect Barack Obama to support a ceasefire in Gaza. Now that there is a ceasefire (of sorts), they are preparing an open letter to President Barack Obama about the situation in Gaza. I received the following as part of an email encouraging me to sign the open letter, and the words express very accurately how I am feeling right now:

Every time I saw one of those Obama posters with "HOPE" on it, I felt it. Hope, that is. Hope against hope that perhaps this new President would pursue a just peace with the same fervor that he pursued hope before he was elected.

And in the short time since the inauguration, we're seeing reasons to believe our hope was justified. But, here's the big challenge: Israel, Palestine, Gaza. Turning hope into reality comes down to how President Obama deals with this ongoing tragedy. This week's announcement of George Mitchell as Middle East envoy -- the man who helped broker peace in Northern Ireland-- signals that Obama is serious about even-handed diplomacy. For so many, our hope is that Mitchell and Obama will now take serious and meaningful steps towards a just and true peace.

I am also quite passionate about the idea of balanced journalism, not just in regards to Gaza, and I thank Amina for forwarding me information about a campaign by Avaaz to improve fair journalism vis a vis Gaza.

The American Condition

I was chatting with Carter today about his attempts to find a job that would let him join me in Jordan when he passed on this comic by The Chalkboard Manifesto, which he got from our mutual friend Erica from church:

an american map of africa

Of course, Carter's probably right ... no average American would think to add Madagascar to the East Coast of Africa!

Always Check Your Child's Homework

A teacher sent home a note to a parent about her daughter's artwork.

Here's the reply the teacher received the following day:

Dear Mrs. Jones,
I wish to clarify that I am not now, nor have I ever been, an exotic dancer. I work at Home Depot and I told my daughter how hectic it was last week before the blizzard hit. I told her we sold out every single shovel we had, and then I found one more in the back room, and that several people were fighting over who would get it. Her picture doesn't show me dancing around a pole. It's supposed to depict me selling the last snow shovel we had at Home Depot.
From now on I will remember to check her homework more thoroughly before she turns it in.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Smith

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu!

Amman, Jordan

Megan left Jordan today. Most of the pictures from this, her last week in Jordan, are stuck on her camera, but at least I have these:

From Megan's Last Week in Jordan

Change Has Come

At the very least, there's a new face on the American reputation. I don't know if things will really change. No one does. All I know is that we have a chance to change the direction of the American experiment, and I like our chances for the first time in a long time. Were I teaching at Bel Air High School tomorrow, I would be proud to pledge allegiance to the American flag with my students, for the first time in 7 years.

I know the Pledge of Allegiance is only words, just as the Inaugural Address was only words, but words have power. Words are what set us apart from the rest of the Animal Kingdom, words are what give us justice, conscience, faith and hope. Words are how we build compromise, and that's exactly what Barack Obama's words promise to Americans and to all the peoples our policies effect. I will no doubt be hearing complaints here that he didn't reference Gaza specifically, but not only was this not the pulpit for that, but I was pleasantly surprised at how openly Obama addressed the issues that effect us most here in the Middle East. I'm impressed by his humility, that he is resisting the urge to wave the Big Stick, and instead extending an olive branch. It was hard to tell if my goosebumps were from the chill in the apartment, or the chill of hope inspired by Barack Obama's words. (It could well be the former, since I got goosebumps in the middle of Rev. Jeff Warren's inaugural prayer, as well, though I admit that he was pretty darn good, too.)

The decisiveness of Barack Obama's election restored my faith in American democracy. Obama's words today have gone a long way towards restoring my faith in the American experiment.

Yes, Rev. Dr. Lowry, let our tanks be beaten into tractors!

See Jordan the Tareef Way!

I discovered this video on Facebook today, and I just had to share it with everyone!

Return to Madaba

Ma'een, Madaba, Jordan

From Dead Sea Panorama Downhill

This week's trip with Tareef Cycling Club was the Dead Sea Panorama trip, starting midway between the town of Ma'een and the Ma'een Hot Springs, and coasting down the hill to the Dead Sea for tea and manakeesh. On the way there, the bus passed through the town of Ma'een, and I was reminded of Naureen, Jennifer, Jeremy and Audra, my fellow Peace Corps Trainees for Pre-Service Training in Ma'een. I could still pick out the home of my host mother, Auntie Nayfa Haddadeen, and the center where we had our Arabic clases, the little restaurant where we got falafel, and the girls' school where I did my student teaching under the supervision of Miss Mary Haddadeen. Outwardly, not much seems to have changed since I lived there almost exactly five years ago.

The trip itself was quite a rush, as we rocketted downhill, through switchbacks and chillier weather than expected, down to the Dead Sea. It was pretty easy, but sort of nerve-wracking, too. But beautiful. Definitely beautiful.

From Dead Sea Panorama Downhill

Are You From Bleela?

Amman, Jordan

Today was our third day of placement testing at Bell Amman. The placement tests themselves have been pretty popular, though the numbers of people who actually enrolled in classes is still disappointingly low. But there are three young women I'm going to come after personally if they don't register for classes!

The first question on the placement test is, "What's your name?" Sometimes the names are vaguely familiar to me, or I can place them as Palestinian or Syrian. The first girl in my 6:00 speaking tests came and sat down with me and told me that her family name was Magableh, and immediately I said, "Magableh? Are you from Bleela?" She gave me a puzzled look. "Yes. How do you know it?" I smiled. "I lived in Mshairfeh for two years. My two favorite teachers were from Bleela and named Magableh." Sure enough, she knew exactly who I meant, and it turns out that this student is a cousin of my Peace Corps counterpart and her sister. So we chatted a bit about this relative of hers and that one. Her English is quite good, almost too good for the classes we're offering on our soft opening. My very next student was also a Magableh from Bleela, a first cousin of the first girl, and it turned out that they went on the same vacation to Aqaba last summer.

(Only much later did I remember that I knew another Magableh from Bleela, Emad, the Mshairfeh English teacher I thought was just my friend, but who didn't have a category for 'female friend' in his worldview. He proposed to me repeatedly for months, and then took a teaching job in Kuwait because "it's too hard to live in the same country as you, Maryah! I'll come back when you leave." He's still in Kuwait, according to my headmistress in Mshairfeh. Now I suppose he'll probably find out that I'm back, and won't be able to come back to Jordan once again.)

Then, right after the Magableh girls, I had a third young woman come in for testing with the surname Mohasneh, which I recognized as being the name of one or more of my colleagues in Mshairfeh, but I wasn't sure from which village. When I asked her the third question, where she was from, I expected to get some clue, but she said Amman. But then, like a good intermediate student, she kept going, saying that she lives in Amman now, but that she came from a small village in Jerash, I'd probably never heard of it. So of course, I had to ask which one! And when she said Kufr Khall, I said, "I worked in Mshairfeh with some teachers from Kufr Khall!" She was less impressed than the Magableh girls, however. (It wasn't until much later that I remembered it was one of my favorite teachers, the teacher of the class for the deaf, who came from Kufr Khall, and I think perhaps one of the Arabic teachers was the Mohasneh I knew.)

It's a small world, isn't it? And if those three young women don't register for classes, I'm going to hunt them down and demand to know why not! (I already cornered two of the students I tested to find out if they were registering or not!)

It's a Small World!

Amman, Jordan

My roommate said several months ago that he'd met a girl who should move into our third bedroom in January and, hey, she's from Maine! You'll have a lot in common! I immediately scoffed, I'm not really from Maine, it's just where my parents live. I've really only vacationed there.

Well, she was going to be our third roommate, until a few days ago when she let us know that she'd be back to Jordan for a week, but wouldn't be staying for another semester after all. We're still looking for her replacement.

But today she came home wearing a T-shirt from Camp Pondicherry. I burst out, "Camp Pondicherry! On Adam's Pond? That's where my parents live!" And she says, "Nobody knows where Adam's Pond is! Bridgton, maybe, but Adam's Pond?" Turns out, she was a Girl Scout camp counselor at Camp Pondicherry, where I have also considered applying more than once. When I described my parents' house to her, she recognized it.

What are the odds?

Crick-Stompin' Shoes

...or, What Protests?

Wadi al-Kerak near the Dead Sea, Jordan

On Protests
I've been getting messages from Germany, Switzerland and the USA concerned about my safety here in this volatile part of the world. And yes, it's true, there were protests in Amman today. The US Embassy sent out warden messages advising caution:

The Arab Islamic Leaders asked the people to demonstrate over all countries and they called it the anger day against Israel and to support Gaza, so in Jordan the people will demonstrate after the pray and start from the biggest mosque in each province, in Amman from the Al-Husseini Mosque to the Amman Municipality building.

I understand that tear gas was fired into the crowds again at the Israeli Embassy today. One of our friends from Tareef Cycling Club, Jad Madi, was there and has put up his photographs on his blog. But the photos of my Friday midday are far more serene:

From Wadi al-Kerak

This weekend, Tareef Cycling Club left the bicycles at home and opted for hiking far, far away at the other end of the Dead Sea. And this time, I came prepared with my crick-stompin' shoes! (For those of you who didn't grow up in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, a "crick" is what some parts of the country call a "creek" but may also describe a "stream.")

On Jordanian Customer Service
You see, when we went hiking in Wadi al-Ghwayr, I didn't know that I would not be able to avoid getting my feet wet, and I got blisters, and my hiking boots were wet for more than a week. So, last night, I went to Mecca Mall to get a pair of shoes that I could hike in but that were meant to get wet. I knew just where I would find these shoes, and made a bee-line to Champions, where I explained what I was looking for. "Water shoes?" says the salesman, without even looking around. "No. We don't have anything like that." So I walked all around the entire Mecca Mall, went into every shop with shoes, and found nothing but ordinary trainers. So I thought, well, I don't know of anywhere else in Amman where I'm likely to find just what I'm looking for, so I'll go back to Champions and get a closer look. Guess what? I found a dozen styles of shoes meant for the water! And I found a pair that were perfect. No blisters!

On Hiking
So this is the biggest crowd I saw on Friday, today's incarnation of Tareef Cycling Club:

From Wadi al-Kerak

It was a perfect day for hiking, about 19C down below sea level, sunny, and green. The scenery is just beautiful, very green because of the crick we were stompin', sometimes with boxy, wind-scoured rock walls, sometimes with more curvaceous water-carved siqs that evoke the landscape of Petra. I saw several different species of frog in different shades of green and brown, and some freshwater crabs, and at one point a bird flew over head that looked very much like a North American blue heron from the bottom of the canyon.

It did seem, at times, to be the same as Wadi al-Ghwayr, but when we came to our lunch spot, with this gorgeous waterfall and palm trees, we agreed that it was much more spectacular. The company was pretty good, too. Stephanie brought her three German roommates along on the trip, Sina, Lena and Theresa, and they spoke a lot of German to each other and some with me. To my chagrin, however, when I tried at the beginning of the trip to translate Ammar's Arabic description of the trip into German for them, I failed miserably. Oh, sure, I could get the first sentence out in decent German. But after that I switched back to Arabic without even noticing, until finally Sina said, "In English! In English!" Embarrassing. I need a lot more German practice! Unfortunately, the girls are leaving soon, with the semester over, and I'll have to find new Germans to pester with my crazy, Arabized, Swiss-influenced German!

It was the perfect day, and perfect timing to get out of Amman. The closest we ever came to the issue of Palestine was watching the sun set over the Dead Sea and the West Bank. It looks so peaceful from Jordan's Dead Sea Highway!

From Wadi al-Kerak

Musical Manifestation of Solidarity

Amman, Jordan

In solidarity with Gaza, and in honor of the Palestinian martyrs, and in protest against the criminal Israeli war, and in rejection of the bias of the world regimes, a number of Jordanian artists and cultural activists are organizing a musical manifestation of solidarity at Al Balad Theatre, Jabal Amman, First circle, on Wednesday 7 January 2008 at 8:00 pm.

The event will include a piano performance by Tala Tutunji and Zeina Asfour, who will perform compositions by Tarek Younis. Omar Faqir, Tarek Jundi, Wissam Tubeleh and Fadi Ghawanmeh will also take part in this event which will include poetry readings in Arabic and English of poems by Mahmoud Darwish compiled and read by Serene Huleileh, Reem Abu Kishk, Amer al Khuffash, and Samar Dudin. Ayman Taisir will conclude the readings with poetry dedicated to Palestine. The event will be concluded by a visual presentation designed by Raed Asfour culminated by the virtual video presence of the late Palestinian poet laureate, Mahmoud Darwish.

We do not wish this event to be a simple artistic act of solidarity, but to come out with real solidarity by urging every participant to contribute, in whatever way he/she can, to support the perseverance of our people in Gaza.

Despite all the hours that Peace Corps spent ingraining in us the danger of approaching large groups of protesting Palestinians, my friend and I decided that this was one demonstration we could be a part of. I'm so glad we made that decision.

This ceremony (not just an event) was beautifully prepared and very moving. There was piano, violin, recorder and 'oud music, overlaid with poetry and a recitation of just some names of the more than 700 Palestinians who have lost their lives since Christmas.

Not surprisingly, we also saw many people we know.

Update

I've never heard of this musician before, but I applaud him:

I Love My New Job!

Marj al-Hamam, Jordan

After teaching at the Modern American School, I wasn't sure I ever wanted to teach again, but after just two days preparing for the opening of Bell Amman, I can hardly wait till we have students and I can start teaching the syllabi I'm writing!

At the start of our first training session this morning, the boss asked, "How did training go yesterday?" My co-teacher, John, was a good stoic Englishman and said nothing. Then she turned to me, and I just couldn't keep the grin off my face. "I love this job!" The boss looked surprised at my enthusiasm (there I am, being too American again!), so I explained:

When I interviewed at MAS, I was offered all the support I could need. When it came to actual training and teaching, almost every time I asked for help, I was told, "You're a good teacher. You'll figure it out." When I ask for help at Bell, I get twenty minutes of the boss's time, and only then does she say, "See? You're already a good teacher, and you didn't need my help after all!"

More Fun With Arabic

Speaking of yesterday's training, we did most of it together with the Customer Service hires, learning about the company and the services we provide. The whole Customer Service Dept are Jordanians, and they would chatter along to each other in Arabic, and from time to time their conversations would make me grin or laugh.

"Do you speak Arabic?" I was asked several times. I would just nod, not wanting to get into it, but one girl really made me laugh when she asked, "How many words do you know?" I shrugged, and said in Arabic, "In colloquial? Pretty much all of them." So then, of course, I had to demonstrate, and they all got quite a good laugh out of my peasant accent.

Desert, Yes, But Warm...?

Amman, Jordan

When I arrived in Jordan for the first time in early February of 2004, I had no sweaters, no winter coat, no sweatshirt. Over two feet of snow had fallen on southern Pennsylvania the night before I left for Peace Corps Orientation. It was cold when we left Washington, D.C., cold on our layover in Frankfurt, but for some reason I didn't think it would be cold in Jordan. After all, Jordan's a desert! (I still don't know why it never occurred to me, traveller and researcher extraordinaire, to check the CIA Factbook for the average winter temperatures in Jordan...!)

When I stepped out of customs at Queen Alia Airport in Amman, the first thing I saw were several tall men with black-and-white Hattas wrapped around their faces, just like the terrorists I'd seen on TV. It took me a few hours to figure out that they do that to stay warm!

Amman is cold. It gets at least a foot of snow a year. That winter of 2004, some villages in the mountains in Shobak got so much snow that food and heating gas had to be airlifted in.

Yesterday, we could see our breath inside our apartment. And I just kept thinking, I don't understand how people could think that the total blockade that has been imposed on the Gaza Strip since November could be fair. We're not talking about an embargo on luxury items. We're talking about basic necessities, as described by Harvard professor Sara Roy here.

Maybe you think Gaza is a nice warm desert. It is a desert, yes, but while spending my third winter in Jordan, having been to the Sinai in January 2006, I can tell you that it must be cold in Gaza tonight, and there's no electricity and no heating oil.

Bike for Gaza

...or, How Jordanian Youth Respond To Crisis

Amman, Jordan

From Bike For Gaza

I was only a very minor participant in the amazing recent campaign wonderfully described by Black Iris here and here. I dropped off just one bag of non-perishable foodstuffs, having been unemployed for a number of weeks and unable to contribute more. I knew from some of my friends in Tareef Cycling Club when and where they were loading on New Years, and it was just across the Airport Road from my apartment, but I grossly underestimated the Jordanian people and didn't think they would need my help. I regret this, despite lingering shreds of my Peace Corps training telling me to avoid politically sensitive gatherings, because I think Black Iris makes a great argument in support of what I've been telling a half-Jewish friend here in Jordan: for all the anger that there is here about what is happening in Gaza, it's not being directed at individuals, but at the Israeli leadership.

I also did my part today, and a little bit more, when I went on the Save Gaza bike trip with the Tareef Cycling Club this morning. I mean, let's be honest, I was going to go anyway, because Tareef goes cycling every Friday, and I'm fulfilling a promise to myself from several years ago to become a competent cyclist post-Peace Corps. But when I found out that Tareef would be donating all the usual 5 dinar fees to the Red Cross for the relief effort in Gaza, I was especially determined to go, and even to contribute more than the usual fee.

I went because, while Tareef's members are passionate about the Palestinian cause and they were eager, as I am, to make some contribution, that was not the sole purpose of today's ride. These guys and gals get together to go cycling. Some of them are members of the Jordanian national team, others are even less athletic than I am, and there is absolutely no censure. These are some of the easiest people to spend time with that I know in Jordan, because they are all very ambitious, successful people, but they don't take themselves very seriously. The girls are very stylish, even at the end of a long bike ride, because there's absolutely no avoiding it here, but they're not the Barbie dolls you usually see around town. I suspect that most of them are of above average wealth, but you'd never know it by looking at them. And they didn't disappoint today. There was some talk about Palestine, but there was no diatribe, no vitriol, no censure of other viewpoints. More than angry, the people on this trip were disappointed.

But mostly, we were just biking!

From Bike For Gaza

A Subdued New Year

Amman, Jordan

Happy New Year!

Despite that exclamation point, I didn't feel much like celebrating this year. It was going to be a quiet New Years anyway, with Megan in the Cayman Islands and Ryan snowboarding in Lebanon. Not only that, but I wasn't really in the mood to celebrate, having spent two days watching my Jewish and Arab friends vilify each other (though they don't know each other) on Facebook over what's happening in Gaza, which finally decided to boycott temporarily.

But one of the advantages of Facebook is their IM system, however primitive and problematic. Aktham IMed me to say that some of our mutual friends from Tareef Cycling Club were getting together across town, and he invited me to join them. I was reluctant, after dark, to stray more than a few feet from my space heater and get in a cab by myself (I'm still very much a village girl in Jordan, despite 6 months in the big city). But I finally convinced myself that being a hermit was not going to make me feel any better. I almost gave up when I had to wait quite some time in the cold for a cab, but of course that was the moment when a cab finally stopped for me.

We were meeting at an absolutely huge Gloria Jeans Cave in Medina al-Munawwara Street, the size of the Starbucks in the Union at Indiana University. I went right in and ordered a coffee with some nostalgia; Gloria Jeans at the Galleria Mall was a special treat in my high school years. It wasn't until I was waiting for my drink and looking around for Aktham and the others from Tareef that I realized, while I thought I could hear Tareef on the second floor, I didn't see a single other woman in the place. This is something I would have noticed right away in Irbid or Jerash, or even just this past summer in Amman, as sensitized as I became in Peace Corps to gender. Since living in Amman, though, I have lost a lot of sensitivity, and this was sort of a sucker punch, and on top of my rough two days.

From New Years Eve

But sure enough, I went upstairs and followed the sounds of the loudest group in the place, and as soon as I saw Anis's fine-boned face at a table that was half women, I knew everything would be fine.

And it was. The members of Tareef are very non-judgemental, and that's why I enjoy their company! While there were occassional mentions of Gaza, there were no politics at the table, and it was a real relief.

Even still, I couldn't stop myself from what the Palestinians must see as crocodile tears while I was explaining to Aktham why I was boycotting Facebook and didn't think it was a good idea to go on with them to a protest in the City Center. I mean, in principle, it would have been okay, as it was billed as a silent candlelight vigil, but this is the Palestinians, and like Greeks, Italians, Jews, Spaniards, and other Mediterranean peoples, they're loud! But, in an attempt to distract me and make me feel better, Aktham convinced me to go with some of the rest to get food across the street, and the Shawerma Wok puts on quite a show!

From New Years Eve

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.