Well I guess the biggest news is the Sadaam verdict. Honestly, I have to say it makes me feel a little sick to my stomach to watch people cheering over a death sentence. Especially when it is a bunch of people at a republican rally listening to our president proclaim another man’s eventual death as a victory. I discussed it a bit with my good friend here. She asked me what my reaction was and I told her honestly that regardless of his guilt or innocence I am against a death penalty. In any case. I just don’t believe that killing makes anything more right than life imprisonment. Her opinion was that a death sentence should only come from god. And she also thought that if we were going to get picky about world leaders killing people, sadaam’s numbers weren’t anything close to say, Bush’s or Israel’s or even the US dropping nuclear weapons over Japan. It isn’t so much that she was against a guilty verdict, it was just that she thought that there were plenty of other war criminals in the world and that those governments who ousted sadaam in the first place were packed full of them. And where were their trials and deaths by hanging? I’m not saying she wanted people dead, she wanted sadaam to receive life in prison and she wants other world leaders whose numbers of people killed (directly or indirectly) are in the tens or even hundreds of thousands to be held equally accountable. There are also people here who feel that the whole thing is a travesty. No matter what the network news says about people in the middle east celebrating about the verdict or sadaam’s removal from power, it is a highly divisive issue here. understandable. Yeah, he was a dictator, but he wasn’t killing hundreds of his people per week as the current violence is doing. When I last did operation smile, one of the fathers heard on the day that he was to return to iraq that his childhood friend had been killed accidentally by the American military. That was really hard to see. And people here see things like that on the news every day. I don’t really know where I am going with this. I guess I am just saying that when measuring the pros and cons of this whole iraq mess it is impossible for me to see how anyone can support it. but I guess you all probably knew, or hoped that I felt that way. So that is my initial exposure to the local reaction about the verdict.

In the newspaper today I read about an honor killing in Amman. A 17 year old girl got married a month ago. Apparently her husband “asked her to engage in abnormal sexual activities with him and offered her to one of his friends.” She ran away. She was found and given to her family. When she told her father what had happened he and her brother beat her with a stick. Then the father “asked his son to tie [her] with an electric cord and connect it to an electric socket; they electrocuted her until they made sure she was dead.” I usually try to stay positive when I write here. And even now I hesitate to write about something so negative. I don’t want to give the impression that this sort of thing happens all the time or that people here condone it. It goes directly against Islam. And honestly, there are more than enough negative ideas about the middle east and Arabs. But still, it is the 16th honor killing in Jordan this year. Sometimes I can easily forget that this society has the potential to be so oppressive. And then something like this catches my attention. But please don’t misunderstand my motives for including it. I just write about my life and the things on my mind. What was so surprising was that it got such a small write up in the paper. It took up 500 words or less.

And again, I am at a loss to follow those subjects with anything light hearted. Just seems lame. Next time.

Hope you all had a safe and awesomely fun halloween. i, did not.
On one of the last days of ramadan, I caught a cab to work. I was going to be late and the cab was free for some reason. The driver asked me if I was fasting and I said yes. Standard answer. He asked if I was muslim and I said no. he laughed and lit a cigarette. Some people here cheat for Ramadan too. It is funny because in our villages we all say we are fasting. In fact, a friend of mine said he learned what the true meaning of Ramadan was when he sat in his house chain smoking until he threw up before going to work. We put so much effort into our lies. And then a local person throws all convention out the window. Ya haram.
The end of Ramadan is marked by eid al fiter. Everyone buys new clothes and eats sweets and drinks coffee and tea. Me, I dyed my hair bright red. I couldn’t really afford new clothes, so I thought new hair would suffice. And everyone in the village thinks my hair is crazy anyway. Turns out they liked it well enough. Said it was better than before. And then I went down to Aqaba. A group of us rented an apartment there for three days and did a whole lot of nothin. We did manage to roust ourselves one day for a trip to the sea. We went on a glass bottom boat with a guy named max (same driver as last year). He is the Jordanian version of a beach bum, I am pretty sure. I think of all the jobs to have in Jordan, driving a boat must be a pretty cool one. Out on the water all day. Stop for lunch and grill some fish on the beach while all your beach bum friends wander up and talk to you. Plus he seemed pretty willing to throw all Jordanian norms of social behavior out the window. Calling all his friends, well, calling them dirty names and then shouting things like “don’t be shy your mother was not.” So that was max the boat driver. The rest of the trip really was fairly uneventful, as a vacation should be. We were happy enough to be breaking the rules of proper social living in Jordan – namely clothing, gender and other social restrictions that I am sure you can all imagine. I’m sure if we had somehow stumbled upon some ribs we would have felt that it was our duty to barbeque them right then and there to break that taboo as well. and as all vacations here, it ended with me desperate to get home and just sleep. My trips away from the village are always so exhausting.
So now I am back in my village and winter is coming fast. The past two days have been chilly and overcast and it seems like we are only a couple of days from some rain. Oh boy. I guess it is time for me to break down and fill my gas can for my sad little heater that doesn’t really work…
The newest batch of volunteers are at their sites and we are starting to meet them. Of course it is just a new group for me to sit with and try to make nice while overanalyzing everything I say. But I hear through the grapevine that so far I have made an ok impression with them. Even if ok is neutral, it’s ok with me. The sad thing is that except for a very few, we won’t really get the chance to know them or hang out with them much while we are here. most of us won’t even pass the stage of considering ourselves acquaintances.
I guess I will finish this post by telling you about the newest, most boring and at the same time most disturbing hobby of mine: watching the pentagon channel. That’s right, the pentagon has a channel. It is all about the American military. Very low budget. I can’t really understand who is supposed to be watching it. all the “news anchors” and correspondents are uniformed soldiers from various branches of the military. For example, the other night I learned about a soldier named Johnny. “Johnny likes to build things. In California he built bridges. In iraq he is building invisible bridges.” It was a piece about winning the hearts and minds, so to speak. And in the story about a visiting delegation from the Korean military the insight given to us was that “the sea is the sea. And that’s what makes us all sailors.” I don’t think I could have said it better myself.