So, I hear my last post left something to be desired. Like details. I was still trying to work them out. So, the money I am asking for is going to fund a six-day camp for 50 Jordanian youth. My project partner and I have recently found out that the chances of getting a grant to cover this camp are little to none (our funding source generally does not like to award grants to camp programs). However, we feel that the topic of our camp is an important and useful one. Our vision for the camp is to teach 25 girls and 25 boys basic first aid and cpr skills. We need to fund CPR training dummies, basic first aid supplies (gauze, bandaids, tape, etc.), camp facilities, translators, transportation and food. Our centers will be donating some money, but certainly they don’t have large enough budgets to cover the whole thing. So, as of now, my request for money (yes, my project partner is asking his connections at home too) is purely hypothetical. We really want to do this project (our focus is supposed to be health, and the English lessons we are teaching somehow fall far short of this). We are in the process of writing an Arabic language health and emergency response manual for the kids who attend the camp. And we hope to expand the project to include secondary, smaller scale workshops after the camp is done. So if any of you are interested, please let me know. And certainly if you want to see the grant (yes, now useless) that we have written let me know. I feel a little sleazy to ask y’all for money. So please, please, please don’t feel pressured. And for those of you who do wish to donate to our cause, send me an email (andigirard@gmail.com). I will email you back when we have decided whether the project is viable and when we have figured out our budget. Thanks for your patience and support!

Enough of that. Hopefully you will never again see me ask for money on this.

So, I live behind a locked gate. However, my counterpart has gone for the week and one of the doors was left unlocked. Fine. I feel safe and don’t need all my gates locked all the time. But the other day I had just showered and it was hot, so I was running around my house in nothing but a towel. Also, usually fine. However, this would happen to be the one day that someone would come to my house. I hear a knock at my door and as I look up I see two people peering in the windows of my house. Damn! They saw me. And they just kept knocking, and knocking. So I opened the door in my towel. Because surely that way they would see that I was a bit busy at the moment. Nope. These girls gave me exactly five minutes to get dressed, because lunch was waiting for me. So I got dragged on a long, uphill walk in the heat to a lunch I hadn’t even been warned about. This was the first time I had been to this particular house. I don’t even know the names of the girls who came to fetch me. And so I sat down to lunch with eight girls I didn’t know. Faced the usual round of questions. They made me eat about a whole chicken before they would start eating. God I love visiting here.
Also, yesterday I got asked if I was Lebanese. I don’t get it….

Lame I know, but that is my story for the week.

ok guys. i hate to do this. i am closing in on the final year of my service and i am feeling the push for finishing up my projects. i am considering submitting one of my grants to a program that accepts outside donations as the funding source of the grant. but before i do that i need to know if it is viable. so, if any of you kind folks out there with a little extra cash to spare felt like you wanted to donate to a project of mine (this is just a hypothetical at this point) can you let me know? just drop me a line to let me know that you would and about how much. i feel sleazy asking, but i just am scoping out my options. also, please please please dont think that i expect it from any of you. consider it a straw poll. thanks tons. i will give you something worth while to read next time. thanks!

Things I learned about Arabic this week (that have a high probability of being false):
Tequila comes from the Arabic word for heavy. And tally ho comes from the Arabic phrase that means “come here.”
I was mistaken for a refugee this week. As a general rule, Peace Corps volunteers look a bit ragged when we go to Amman. The people in Amman are generally very clean looking and well dressed. Even fashionable. The women wear nice clothes that women in the states might even wear. And then we come in, long clothes, too big for us, washed by hand (maybe weeks prior) and probably not ironed. Most likely we haven’t showered in at least a day or two, if not longer. And for those of us coming from the south, we have been riding buses since the crack of dawn (4:30 am to be precise) and look it. So, my friend and I dragged ourselves into a coffee shop, bags in tow. There seem to be two camps on the bag issue in peace corps – one giant bag, or many small bags. Those in the small bag camp generally end up resorting to plastic grocery bags along with their real luggage. So we sit down with all our stuff – big and small plastic bags, and ask if we can eat lunch at 10 am. The look of disappointment on our faces must have been too much because the man brought us two cookies fresh out of the oven. And then when we asked again at 10:45 if the kitchen was open he said no, but he could open it early for us. When he came to freshen our coffee, he sat down and asked us if we had just come from Lebanon. Because we were speaking Arabic, and looked a little like we had been through hell, he assumed we were students from Lebanon. Sad.
Its been busy lately. Had a couple camps with my center. 4 days each, 40 girls each. I don’t even think I can talk about it. All I can say is that the highlights were few and far between. For example, wandering around Amman with some girls from my center at night. That was fun. a girl busting into my room that I didn’t even know (from a different center than my own) to rummage through my luggage and wake me up and stand about a foot from my face and interrogate me about why I don’t cover… not so much a good time.
So that was eight days of my life. And in my one day break between the two camps I hosted a trainee from the next group of volunteers. I don’t know if I convinced her I was normal or if she left thinking that she is going to turn crazy and antisocial and awkward. And then after the second camp I had a four day training with peace corps about project design. I am working on a health project with a male volunteer and my own counterpart couldn’t come to the training. So it was just me and my “man team” as a peace corps supervisor referred to them. I think that sitting at a table trying to make my opinions seem valid at a table of three men was one of the less pleasant things I could have done, but I think I did eventually manage to convince them that I was, in fact, not retarded. I did manage to get in a fight with one of the Jordanian men there (not on my project, thankfully). He was trying to tell me that nepotism doesn’t exist in Jordan (I think he got his job through connections) and that Jordan’s big problem is really free trade. I was like, whatever guy, how the hell are we supposed to fix that with a grant of $5,000 or less?
The new trainees find out their sites this week. thinking back on training, it felt like an eternity had passed in that month that it took to find out. And here in my village it flew by. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t make it through peace corps if it was two years like training. I wouldn’t go back to that for anything. So, to the j10s, congratulations, you’re practically through training. Then the rough part is over.
And to everyone else. I don’t know. I feel like this must be pretty disappointing as a commentary on life in the middle east. But this is what it is. Life is normal everyday stuff for the most part. And the politics. Well they have been more centered on Israel and the us, but not like you might expect. And I am sure you know all the same details as I do, maybe more if you have oodles of internet time. I guess I have just seen more pictures of the dead. For those of you who are worried, yes I am safe. And no, I would not be here if I weren’t. promise. So, off I go to my grant writing and large groups of girls. Stay happy.