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.