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.