I don't know just where I'm going

2008-04-21T00:41:00.000-07:00

i checked the weather for today. for cambodia it says that it is 95 degrees and feels like 109. blech.
before i left vientiane, i went to the national museum. unfortunately, the exhibits that were in english consisted of the stuff i wasn't much interested in. namely, fossils and ceramic pots. when i got to the more recent history it was all in french and lao. but, they did have some interesting pictures around the time of the vietnam war. each one included the label (the only thing in english) "the american imperialists and their puppets." it was one of the first hints i got that laos is actually still communist.
anyway. moving on. so i hopped a bus down to the four thousand islands in the south of laos, on the mekong river. the glorious thing about traveling alone is that you have absolutely no say as to who sits next to you. so it will probably be the tallest, broadest human being on earth who has no sense of personal space and thinks that your seat belongs to him. also, he will fall asleep on you, crushing you against the window. just a warning. it's a proven fact. careful on those buses people.
so, after a wonderful night of no sleep i hopped in a little wooden boat and was off to my island bungalow!

yes. my bungalow.

this particular island has no electricity yet. so basically what you do there is hang around in a hammock all day fanning yourself and reading. oh, and waiting to watch the sunset from said hammock.

my evening view.

just before sunset you can go out biking or walking and catch some of the local scenery, which consists mostly of buffalo and rice paddies.

buffalo in a rice paddy. 2 for 1.

paddy

again, a paddy.

but it really really is too hot. and there are no fans or a/c to escape to. so most people glue themselves to their hammocks and wait for the bakery man to bike by and deliver you cinnamon buns and donuts. and sometimes nature drops itself into the mix just to say hi.

it was in my room. the body was at least the size of my thumb.

i totally wimped out and had the man who ran the place take care of it for me. but i still had dreams about spiders on me all night. turns out it was just ants and mosquitos.
so after a few days of sweating and fretting over the spider and it's inevitable revenge i decided that i needed to get out of laos. though, i have to say i was sad to leave it. i mean, the people there are wonderful. they say hi. just to say hello. they don't even necessarily want anything from you. same is true in cambodia too. especially the kids. they all run around naked (just the little ones) and waving and giggling and running away when you wave back. in thailand you dont even see the kids...
anyway. so i changed my money to dollars for cambodia. it seems ridiculous, but having a wallet full of dollars overwhelmed me. well, i suppose $50 isnt exactly full. but it was strange to have my own money again. and it has changed since i left. i mean, where did all these colors come from on all our bills. it was pretty exciting to think that i would be dealing in a currency that i understood and wouldn't have to do any conversion math with every time i wanted to buy a coke. but at the same time it made me sad because it reminded me of just how close i am to going back to america.
moving on. so, yeah. they use dollars and local money here in cambodia. the atms will only give you dollars. even the locals use them. but there is no change, so far that you get local bills.
the bus to cambodia was undoubtedly the worst i have had since africa. it was a minivan with five more people than seats. i mean, there aren't exactly aisles or anything to accomodate the extras. so three people rode on the roof. for 15 hours.
the next day was the beginning of the cambodian new year. in the villages here and in the surrounding countries the new year lasts for three days and is just a big water fight. people throw water and talcum powder on each other in the streets. but apparently in phnom penh everyone leaves the city and those who stay don't want to get mussed. there, everything just shuts down and nothing happens. big disappointment. i mean, i ziplocked all my stuff for nothing! so while everyone was sleeping through the heat i rented a scooter and had the roads to myself for a day. i took myself to the khmer rouge sites. turned out to be a really intense day. first there was tuol sleng (also known as s-21), the prison in phnom penh. of everyone who went there, only 7 lived. it was an old high school. but now you walk through and see the cells and shackles. and there is still blood on the floor and splattered on the ceilings. and pictures. mug shots of their prisoners. including babies... so after that i went to the next logical place, the killing fields. it is where the khmer rouge brutally killed people and threw them in mass graves. the first thing you see there is a tower of over 8000 skulls. and as you walk through the place there is still clothing all over the place from the victims. i teared up a bit. i couldnt help it. a really intense day.
so the next day i needed a bit of levity. it came in the form of visiting the royal palace. there is a pagoda with an emerald buddha and a silver floor (though i found the floor unimpressive and disappointing). and there are beautiful buildings all over the grounds.

example of what one might consider a beautiful building

and there was a gift from napoleon as well.

what?

i mean come on napoleon! it looks like a terrible rusted shack that you might see at universal studios. no wonder they didnt like the french. it's a pretty lame gift.
having seen the sights of the capital i moved on to siem reap. it means "siamese defeated" and it is fairly close to thailand (siam). classy. but what they have here are the temples of angkor. they are almost 1000 years old and many of them have been taken back over by the jungle. i dont have much to say about them, but here are some pictures.

yes, those are trees growing through the temples. pretty cool, but one day was enough for me and my limited enthusiasm for antiquities.
and that brings us up to now! so, after somewhat too short of a time in cambodia i am off again for thailand. and you know what that means? it means i am booking a flight home this week. i'll be sure to let you know the details when i do.
ta!

2008-04-04T03:08:00.000-07:00

i suppose that since i am nearing the end of this trip, i am nearing the end of this blog. so i guess that means i should do a few last posts before i touch down in the states again, eh? since i last updated i travelled up to the north of thailand. without too much to do i decided to try my hand at riding a real motorcyle (not the wimpy little scooters. too easy). so i splurged and got a honda phantom.

my bike

after i drove around in circles inside the city for about an hour trying to figure out how the hell to get past the moat (yes, a real live water moat) and out into the world i headed up into the hills. part of the reason i couldnt find my way out of the city and into the hills is that the air quality in thailand rivals that of bangkok (good luck with that, atheletes). so i spent all day cruising around the hills because a) they are beautiful and b) they are about 10 degrees cooler than town.

rest stop

dork

i was hoping to get away from the tourist trap that seems to be most of thailand and see some more rural, real life type villages. and i thought i would succeed. i'd drive around for half an hour and not see any other tourists, then bam! "Hmong village" aka place where the tourists all go in big buses to buy overpriced fake souveniers. this is kind of why i decided against going on a trek. i hear that the hill tribes have been commercialized on and exploited as attractions. that, and i hate walking up mountains in the heat.
my motorcycle diaries fantasy over, it was time to head to laos. i travelled up to the area known as the golden triangle because it is where burma (myanmar, or whatever) thailand and laos all meet. the border up there basically consists of a river. so my border crossing was done by speedboat. from there it was a boat trip down the mekong river to get into some sort of civilization and out of the jungly mountains. now, you can take the speedboat, which distributes helmets when you get on board and flies down the river in six hours or you can take the slow boat which carries with it a much lower probability of death. as much as i hated the sound of a slow boat, i opted for it, as did most of my fellow travellers.

our boat looked like this, but with people, not bags of grain

from inside the boat

on a slow boat you have a lot of time to talk with your fellow passengers and, incidentally i have been running into them in every town since. really makes my trip seem unique... but it is fun to point them out as the "drunk ones" or the "old canadians" or "those girls whose names i forgot." and some of them ended up being really fun travel partners as well.
anyway. the slow boat went down the mekong for two days through great river landscapes. though i must say, when you are sitting on a board four inches wide for that long, the scenery becomes secondary and loses its charm. in retrospect though:

pak bang, the town we stopped in for the night

the boat took us to an old french colonial town on the river called luang prabang. one of the first things i noticed is how nice the people here are. i suppose they havent been destroyed by nasty travellers yet. anyway, back to our little colonial town. mostly what you do there is wander around looking at more temples and spending a lot of money. but it was a cute town.

stairs and stairs and stairs

temple, again

buddha, again

nothing special, just thought it was pretty

i went, along with a couple of my fellow boat travellers (jason and loraine) to another river town called vang vieng. it was mostly too hot to much of anything. but they have a booming tubing scene. so you throw yourself in a rubber innertube and the local kids give you a push (while hitching a ride for as long as they think they can get away with it) and you're off. along the way there are various bars and restaurants with rope swings and various sorts of sketchy things on the menus and if you stop they pull you in off the river with big bamboo poles.

jason and loraine

if you look closely, its me in a river. i have no idea who that guy is.

weatherwise, it is as hot as you may imagine from all those vietnam type movies. but it is also humid. so out of nowhere comes this downpour (i suppose you would call it a monsoon) but it is still hot. gross. i got caught in a huge monsoon with the bright idea that i would watch it from a hammock in a little bungalow. by the time it was all over, the bungalow was barely standing and i was huddled in with the bamboo, because at least it wouldn't break and become a wind propelled spear.
for now, i am writing from vientiane, the capital, but tonight i am off down south to a place called the four thousand islands. my plan is to beat the heat in the river while looking for those ugly pink river dolphins. then it is off to cambodia with me. perhaps i will write from there.

2008-03-06T22:09:00.000-08:00

i found myself inspired by what you might call an extreme amount of free time on my hands and wandered on down to the cafe to write a little bit to you guys. i have been in thailand for almost three weeks now and have really gotten to sink my teeth into it, so to speak.
i started out by doing a bit of the bangkok tour with andrea and tao, my companions from the airport bus.

we mostly walked around looking at temples until we thought that there was a distinct possibility that our feet might fall off.

after a sufficiency of temples, we gave in and took the quintessential form of thai transport: the tuk tuk. a tuk tuk is like a motorized rickshaw and they are everywhere in bangkok. we took our new favorite taxi to go shopping. it seems that the a number one thing to do in bangkok is shop; buying cheap, fake name brand clothing at ludicrously low prices. so, we hit all the markets in town. we hit tourist markets, so-called local markets, night markets and even flower markets. the flower market was one of my favorites with millions and millions of flowers for sale on the sidewalks. you could hardly walk, for dodging the orchids and jasmine.

on returning from the night market, we decided to hit china town for dinner. we didnt quite know where we were and we decided to ask a group of emergency workers how we might best walk there. what happened next was either due to boredom, lack of shared language or extreme generosity. most likely it was a bit of all three. but before we knew it we were loaded into the back of their pickup truck, zipping along through the bangkok traffic on our way to china town. they turned on their flashing lights, pulled over to the corner and loaded us out again, disappearing and leaving us on a row of restaurants that looked suspiciously like any china town i have ever been to. maybe china just looks like that? so while i am on the subject of food, i should say that i misspoke earlier when i said that shopping was the national pasttime. it is most definitely and for sure trumped by eating. the first thing i noticed (to my ashamed delight) was the abundance of 7-11s. for the first time in years i am back in the land of slurpees, which to be sure was going to be the first thing i had upon touching back down at home. now i just dont know what it will be. but besides the overwhelming presence of western food chains there is also just food everywhere. on every streed there is pad thai, noodle soup, curry and so on. just food stalls everywhere.

you can buy any kind of food on a stick here. pork, hotdogs, fish, fruit, squid...

and alongside those wonderful thai dishes you all might know and love there are also a few that i havent quite gotten up the nerve to try.

look very closely.

or how about these guys?

but seriously. the noodle soup here is dangerously spicy and delicious. and though we dont speak the same language, my breakfast soup lady and i have the special sort of "soup in the morning" bond that allows us to give each other a knowing nod and bow whenever we see each other.
moving on. no more food talk. so i did the intro bangkok tour and then headed down south to the islands for the infamous full moon party. the island i stayed on was, of course beautiful, but too westernized and expensive for my tastes. kind of like eternal spring break. so i was lame and divided my time between watching movies in the air conditioned sweetness of my room and exploring the island by scooter. they drive on the left here... but so far no major incidents. the full moon party (which strangely fell about three days after the actual full moon) involved taking a speed boat to another island and basically partying on the beach until sunrise. i was doubtful as to the prospects of my having much fun as a loner in the middle of a party where everyone seemed to be having their fair share of "buckets," a delightful cocktail of coke, red bull (the real thai version... ouch) and cheap local whiskey, served, you guessed it, in a bucket. like a child's play bucket. classy classy beverage. so i was standing there wondering how on earth i would make it till three o clock (am) when the speedboats started back to my island when two thai girls swooped down on me, slathered me with dayglo paint and insisted that i join their group because i looked like i needed to dance, apparently.

mai

ling

so i hung out with their group watching the fire dancers and the tens of thousands of people who were just trashing this beach in celebration of the full moon and nature.

party over, i headed up to the infamous bridge on the river kwai. the town itself was quite cute and i rented another scooter for exploring the surrounding jungle. the bridge was nothing too spectactular, but i walked back and forth across it several times trying to soak up the ambience and depth of it all. once i was saturated it was back to bangkok for one last rally. and that is where i am now. my return back to bangkok was full of shopping with andrea (italian boy from airport bus). he was headed back home and needed to find some souveniers. next we knew we were sitting in one of bangkok's tattoo parlours (of which there are hundreds). i will let you guys guess if i got one or not.

i started my stay here in a quaint little one room, very charming, really.

but deciding the luxury in which i found myself was too great, i traded in my bed in a room for a bunk bed in a room of 8 people. it was, after all, cheaper. and what greater glory is there for a traveler than to tell people about your perfectly terrible, but cheap lodgings complete with cold shower and shared bathroom. half of the fun is in convincing them that any rational person would be delighted in such a room. you simply dont need any more than that. and besides, who is spending any of their travel time in their room anyway? but secretly you hope that they will take pity and insist that you take their room at the hilton for just one night...

2008-02-19T01:30:00.000-08:00

and after a prolonged period of a serious lack of motivation to write anything, i'm finally back again. i suppose i will start with christmastime and work from there. jen's dad and one of her sisters were in town for the holidays, giving hilary and her family a much needed break from us. jen's dad whisked us away for a couple of nights to the lap of luxury at the stanley hotel in nairobi. there, we finalized the arrangements for the dodgiest rental car deal ever and rested up for our only african safari. unfortunately, the night before we took off, jen fell seriously ill with food poisoning, or something like it. regardless, we dragged her out of bed the next morning for our meeting with rufus, the car guy. he was late and with him he brought the smallest 4wd he could find. it was a rav4 junior on which almost nothing worked, but desparate to get started, we took it and were on our way. the first day (christmas eve) we decided to get just as far as the gate to the safari park and camp. now, when i say camp i mean plow the rav4 over stumps and small bushes, through some fields not necessarily meant for cars, find a hidden spot, light a campfire and sleep next to it sans tent. all the while, we were not entirely without weapons. we had a police baton, (which i promptly broke trying to beat some firewood apart) a masai stick that really could kill someone, an unsharpened machete which couldnt even cut down a sapling let alone kill someone and some pepper spray. at any approuching sound jen would clutch her spray, i my stick and her dad would bang the machete on a rock. needless to say, we survived the night (though with less than a restful night's sleep) and when we woke up it was christmas, tinsel and all. jen's dad had had the foresight to bring some christmas joy with us into the bush and decorate our little corner of africa for the occasion. we celebrated over campfire coffee and some gifts, packed up camp and were on the way, the tinsel now decorating our festive rav4. still not ready to hit the safari trail, we cruised around offroading for most of the day before deciding to hit a stream and wash up before setting up camp. however, there was one man who seemed to think that he owned all of the bush. he somehow stalked us from campsite to campsite threatening us unconvincingly with a spear and telling us not to camp there. we blew him off, took a quick river wash up and were on our way to find a decent site before it got dark. we found a spot that looked to have been previously inhabited by some elephants (there were broken down trees and large piles of what could only have been elephant poo) and decided that at least we would be hidden from the crazy man who owned all of kenya. we made it till about 4 in the morning until we were awakened by what seemed like a more serious animal noise than we had previously heard. we shined our flashlights around us and all we could see was what seemed like fifty sets of blinking green eyes. we weren't sure what they were, but they certainly seemed aware of us. we tried to out-cool each other for a while by staying out by what had previously been our campfire. but then the hyenas started whooping. we laughed nervously a bit, but then they came closer. and that is when we (more casually than was most likely necessary) strolled to the car to finish of the night. the next day we took off, less than refreshed to finally have our safari. we saw giraffes, birds, water buffalo, zebras, elephants and lions. one of the elephants decided that our car was too high risk to have anywhere near her baby, trumpeted (like you hear in nature shows) and chased us. really literally chased us for at least a half a minute. i dont think that rav4s are really made to withstand an elephant trampling, and the outcome if we had been caught could have been disasterous. towards dusk, our safari adventure over, we rolled out of the park to what the man at the gate said was a "very bad road." but we gave it a try anyway. what the man probably should have said was "there is no discernable road at all. it is only a giant mud field that will confuse you and get you lost. doom and gloom ahead. abandon hope all ye who enter here." it probably would have been more accurate. we skidded around in the mud flats for a bit trying to find anything that looked like a road to a city but gave up when it started to get dark. we pulled into what was our spot for the night and all got out to get ready for sleep. and that is when we heard the popping and snapping of elephants ripping down trees. a big bull elephant lumbered up around the corner and headed for the car. we all piled in as fast as we could and took off, fishtailing madly in the mud. around the corner was the rest of the elephant herd, surrounded by their howling hyena friends. this was not a good campsite. so we drove a great distance more (maybe 500 meters) and called it good enough. we blamed the mud for not even attempting to sleep outside again. instead we all sat in the car and distracted ourselves from possible impending doom by telling travel stories. the next morning we woke to find our elephant friend still wandering around looking for trouble and a river to cross that would have been ok had our car not been a tinker toy. becky (jens sister) and i patiently, and i think somewhat helpfully, sat in the car and waited while (still sick) jennifer and her dad tried to pile rocks on the way to make it through. with a crash and a bang and mud flying everywhere we made it across, and we thought, on our merry way. we thought that because we saw about three safari tours stopped to watch us cross the river. what they were actually watching was a couple of lionesses with about 8 little cubs. nice. so there we were wandering around with a pride of lions and not one of them gave us a little heads up. perhaps they were hoping to see a kill. as we contemplated the coldness of our fellow safari travelers we noticed that the car smelled strangely of gasoline. yes. our broken car was now more broken. it wasn't enough that the back door flew open periodically or that the windows didnt reliably roll up... now we may be stranded with no gas in the middle of a place where the other people traveling in it seemed to want to see us eaten by lions. awesome.
so we patched the hole as best we could with soap and limped our stupid car through the bush towards what we hoped was civilization, throwing balloons out the window to the local kids as we passed. and as soon as we made it to the paved road, our newest problem finally killed the car. not only had the gas been leaking but the transmission fluid as well. and that was the end of our glorious safari. we took a public bus to nairobi, demanded our money back and sent jen's dad and sister on their way.
simmering in the background to this story was, of course, the subplot of the kenya elections which just so happened to be held on the day we were limping our car from here to there. jens family got out with no problems and jen and i started to plan our exodus from nairobi. but no. the country erupted instead. and while we saw very little aside from abandoned streets and riot police, we had no way to get out. all the roads out were closed and we were essentially on lockdown in the city center. we were stuck there for about ten days. the city was running out of food, and they wouldnt sell it to foreigners, i have no idea why. so jenny and i sat in our little yellow hotel room and stared at each other, contemplating just how crazy we might go if we were stuck there much longer. we spent new years eve like that. but our clock was wrong and we forgot about the new year, so when the fireworks and shouting started we thought that the trouble had finally reached our part of town. it hadn't. we were just so lame as to miss midnight. as soon as the roads opened again, we were off. we ran, alongside the kenyan refugees, straight into kampala, uganda. we didnt realize that we would get stuck there for a month as well. but this time we were paralyzed by the sheer volume of foreigners around us at the hostel. as a treat we decided to stay at "backpackers" (a backpacker's hostel, duh) instead of a local place where we were guaranteed to be oddities and alone in our foreignness. the strange thing about traveling is that any friends you make are likely to be a fairly intense and quick friendship. people you have known for weeks become best buddies that you are convinced will be friends for life. i am fairly sure that this is what happened in uganda. we did almost no travel to speak of because hanging out everyday on our couches seemed so much more appealing at the time. and it is there, at backpackers that our africa trip split into our own respective trips, jenny on hers, and i on mine. it wasnt a bad split, but sometimes when you have been staring at the same person for the last 2 years in various hotel rooms, you just want a little change up. and so last week i travelled to rwanda to catch a plane. rwanda was nice, if not bland, and the genocide museum was just as wrenching as you might expect. but i have very little to say about rwanda as i was only there for 4 nights. it was just my jumping off point to get out of africa.
and i am, out of africa, that is. and you might ask where exactly i went. well, i decided to give traveling on my own a try, and where else might a cheap single traveler go but to bangkok?! and here i am. it's crazy developed. a huge urban sprawl so far. and it was a fairly huge shock after so long in the developing world. i am fairly sure that the rest of thailand will prove less so though. so, my new plan is thailand, laos, cambodia and vietnam. and as for traveling alone, i dont know how it is going yet as i was adopted by two other solo travelers right off the airport bus. an italian boy and a chinese girl. we make a fairly odd trio. so, now i will say goodbye and i am off to take a water bus down the river to a night market. if we make it, it should be cool. i hope everyone had a good new years and valentines and whatnot.

2007-12-14T03:52:00.000-08:00

and i'm back! i know it has been a long while since i posted, but there really hasn't been much of anything to write about. unless of course lounging by the pool to tan off the prison pallor of jordan piques your interest. so, we have, of course, been mostly in nairobi since just before thanksgiving. the house we are staying in is, well, to say that it was luxurious would be perhaps an understatement. hil and her parents have graciously let us stay for more time than any reasonable people might expect. especially reasonable people who show up looking and smelling like they have been living in bus stations and acting as though they have never seen food before. ever. our accommodations mean we get (at least) three meals a day (we routinely clean out the leftovers in the refrigerator like vacuums), real beds without fleas, and very few bus rides. i think we are getting soft.
thanksgiving was great. i made pumpkin pies and the three of us made the turkey. i think it was a first for all of us. despite our lack of experience it actually turned out to be pretty delicious.

the dinner was massive and considering our on the road diet an amazing treat. A few of hil's friends came over to celebrate with us. all in all it was a cozy little get together and intro to some of the expats here.
our days are mostly spent lazing around, but there have been a few highlights. we accompanied hil to one of her masters' classes at a local university. all of her classmates, and her professor are african, but their jaws dropped and a flash of confusion and something like horror at being stuck in a room with two lunatics crossed their eyes when we explained to them what we were trying to do. after opening it for questions all they could think to really ask was "why?"
another fun way to pass the time is to head on over to the golf course for a walk, which of course involves giving the resident monkeys the right of way.

and finally, you can go down to kibera and go second hand shopping. kibera is the largest slum in all of africa. 750,000 people live there in a mass of sheet metal shacks. (if you have seen the constant gardener, it is that one). but this may have been one of the best places we have been to here, as it is the only one where nobody gave a damn at all about our existence. most places in africa people call out to you with whatever their word for foreigner or white person is (just in case you forgot), but in kibera nobody cared to talk to us unless we were buying from them.

This last week we went down to mombasa. it is on the southern coast of kenya on the indian ocean. the bus ride down was a mere 7 hours and everyone on board had their own seat! it was glorious. a predetermined amount of personal space? unheard of. when we got to our little beach cottage it was dark and we had no idea what kind of lodgings we had. but in the morning when we wandered down towards the sound of the ocean we found that we were staying on a perfect white sand beach that was practically deserted.

at any given time it was more than likely that we were the only people within sight on the beach. this gave us plenty of opportunity to lay in the sand or swim in the bathwater-warm ocean without worrying about people seeing just how badly worn our swimsuits were. our only other company on the beach itself were tiny white crabs that scuttled down into their holes when they heard us coming. up by our lodging, however, we had visitors of another sort.

our place was right next to a monkey reserve. we even had occasion to see two pink assed baboons. but their teeth are huge so we crossed the road and gave them their space.
our cabin had a kitchen, and everyday fruit and fish mongers would come up to us and sell us whatever was fresh that day. and of course the ever present smell of fish brought us yet again, more animal visitors.

on the return trip from the beach we decided to take the train. when the train was first built it ran from mombasa to uganda (it no longer runs to uganda) and was nick named the "lunatic express." being the lunatics that we are, we convinced hil (fairly much against her wishes) to take third class due to its being the absolute cheapest option. 18 hours later we stumbled out of the train (which was pretty much like all the other stupidly uncomfortable and slow public transportation that we take), ankles swollen and ready for a shower and a nap. thanks to hil and her family this was immediately possible. however, the train trip was not so bad. along the way we saw zebras, wildabeest, some sort of antelope and again more baboons. like a mini safari from the most uncomfortable vehicle possible. and as we pulled into towns along the way all the children ran out to wave at the passing train. it was pretty amusing to see the absolute shock on their faces when they saw the three of us waving back out of the cattle class. most everyone had tried to dissuade us from taking anything less than second class, but we figured that if kenyans can do it, there should be no reason that we couldn't.

so that is the update on life in kenya. the stars are all wrong in the sky. the equatorial sun burns like wildfire, christmas comes in summer, and it quite often rains all night. and that is about it. i hope that you all enjoyed thanksgiving and are gearing up for a merry christmas!

2007-11-19T06:17:00.000-08:00

ok. this one is going to be a long one. so grab something cold to drink and settle in for the long haul.
the last time i updated we were in khartoum, sudan. the remainder of our visit with our new friends was fun, including attending a fashion show put on by one of their students. that's right, a fashion show, in sudan. getting our visas to ethiopia went smoothly and we left as soon as we got them. our first stop was to be kassala, near the eritrean border. we woke up around dawn and headed out to the road, deciding to try our hand at hitchhiking. we struggled over the construction of a sign for about 20 minutes, to the great amusement of the gas station attendants nearby. we finally got our destination scribbled in arabic on cardboard with a ball point pen and set out to waving down cars. after about half an hour, a nice old man in a truck hauling who-knows-what stopped for us. so we rode in the cab with him, sharing peanuts back and forth (which, aside from oil seems to be sudan's only crop) and watching the scenery fly by. he took us about 3 hours and dropped us off at our turn. thrilled with the great success of our morning we treated ourselves to a coke, spilled them, and went back to flagging down trucks. however, while we were working at it, the bus to where we wanted to go came by and the large-ish crowd of onlookers quickly ushered us on to it. the bus, in a previous life, had been a truck of some sort, and the bus body that had been attached seemed just a touch long for the wheel base.

the end result of this was that jenny and i, who were riding crammed in the very back of the bus were catapulted inches off our seats every time we went over a bump; which in sudan seems to be every few seconds. the ride went well enough for about five hours, with the obligatory police check points every hour or so. but then some "secret police" who fancied themselves important noticed the foreign girls on the bus. they got us off the bus and started to talk to us about how the paperwork in our passports was wrong. we tried to tell them that perhaps this was due to the fact that they were looking at visas to egypt and argentina upside down, but they would have none of it and kept talking to us about "another piece of paper" (read: money). we played stupid and refused to bring up the matter of a bribe and the whole bus sat and waited for us. we got increasingly angry as they asked us useless questions about where we were from and whether we were democrats or republicans, and our fellow passengers got more and more fed up with having to wait for the stupid foreigners. eventually it came down to all the passengers standing outside watching us scream in bad arabic at the men who were threatening us with pulling our luggage off the bus and telling us that we had to ride somewhere with them in their car. we screamed no about ten times and grabbed our passports (which actually had about seven separate stamps from sudan and were fine) from their hands and stormed back to the bus. as a final goodbye they gave jenny a hard shove from behind as she walked away, much like any normal, mature adult might do. we got back on the bus, one of us crying for dramatic purposes, and the other explaining how hard it is to travel when everyone hates you. our fellow passengers rallied telling us that they loved us and hiding us whenever we went past a police stop. a couple of hours later we got to kassala where we were instantly told we must register with the police. having a bit of a chip on our shoulders from our last encounter we were reluctant, but they forced us to. it was legitimate and we went and found a hotel room to collapse into, swearing to leave as early as possible the next day. however, just as we had settled in there was a knock on the door. it was the hotel manager telling us that we had to, yes, register with the police. again, we objected, but it was no good. he dragged us across town to register with another policeman, with another registry book. we stormed back to our hotel and locked ourselves in, swearing that we would cut off one of our toes before we would miss the bus the following morning. and so we set off bright and early to secure seats on the bus. everyone in the bus station was really helpful. in fact, they helped us find our way to yet another required police registration, this one not ever even finding our sudanese visas and writing our information over the top of some scribbles on a cigarette carton...
and we were off. we rode various buses and mini buses all day in our desperation to get out of sudan, registering all along the way with every police stop we came across. all in all we registered 9 times in sudan, and 8 of them were in our final two day exodus. we got to the border at night, kicking ourselves for not being able to cross as soon as possible, but an ethiopian man told us that the border didnt close and we walked across it in the dark. so for halloween, we were time travellers. ethiopia just celebrated the year 2000 in september. and there we were in ethiopia, fresh faced and 18, looking forward to college, talking about how dumb the y2k scare was and being slightly disappointed that that prince song was finally out of date. the border town had no electricity and was run by generators. we were led through immigration and customs with a flashlight. customs consisted of two women with a flashlight sitting on a hill who didnt even make us take off our backpacks. we settled in to our dirt-floored hotel rooms and discovered that apparently in ethiopia, chamber pots are still a thing. we went outside to wander the town and were delighted to find that it was the anti-sudan. every other building was a bar and women in short sleeves ran rampant throughout the town. another nice feature was that everything was really, really cheap. draft beer ran about sixteen us cents and you could get lunch for about fifty cents. we hung around the border town for a day to get ready for more buses and explore the village.

we went on a walk out of the main part of town and as we went amassed a group of children who were all chanting "you, you!" and when we emerged back into town we had enough of them following us to start our own soccer team.
the next morning we got on the bus at 5 am to go to gondar, a town about 700 k away. even though we were the first people to get on the bus, and there was a plentitude of two person seats we were seated in a three person seat. we were also horrified to find that not all seats were the same distance from the seat ahead of them and ours seemed to be the smallest available. so we were crammed in a seat where our knees pushed the metal back of the seat ahead of us with an extra person who smelled strongly of body odor and ethiopian food. i should tell you a bit about the seats. they are metal benches with a thin layer of padding with seatbacks at a 90% angle and headrests consisting of a metal bar. so we rattled along on this bus on a dirt road gathering various bruises for about 10 hours until we reached gondar, a small mountain town in the west of ethiopia. off the bus all we could think of was finding someplace to stay as soon as possible. we checked into the first cheap hotel we found. the room was missing a lock but they promised it would be replaced.

turns out, the hotel was a brothel and the lock never would be replaced. so we compromised with them. we didnt complain about the various types of contraceptives we found under our mattresses, or the fleas that were biting us in our sleep and locked our entire wing of the hotel. they objected, but after enough of our screaming relented, still unwillingly. within a couple of days we had checked out and moved on to stay with a belgian couple living there and working with a local ngo. their ngo worked with local street boys, who were everywhere. they had a small orphanage and worked to get the boys some employable skills. we stayed for a few days, visiting their jobs and meeting their friends before moving on to Addis Ababa, the capitol. the trip to addis was a breeze. we took a minibus where everyone had their own seats. the road was paved and it only took 10 hours. it would have taken 5, but the road closed down for five hours for roadwork. also, we had the added benefit of catching a glimpse of some giant porcupines. they looked to be the size of a dog with quills at least a foot long or more. in addis we got our kenyan visas and basically just rested up for the trip to nairobi.

the trip turned out to be punishing, at best. five days of bus travel. getting to the border of ethiopia was not so bad because all of the roads were paved. also, by that point we were smart enough to choose our own, roomy (ish) two person seats. although, the seats are only about a person and a half wide. the bus to the border seemed only to be fueled only by the constant use of qat (a leaf that they chew that seems to have some sort of stimulant properties).

at the border we checked out of ethiopia that night because immigration did not open the next day until the bus had already left. the next morning we crossed the border before kenyan immigration opened, reserved our seats and went back to get our entry stamp. we sat on the bus at 8 am and watched as everybody yelled and screamed and got kicked off the bus and snuck back on for two hours. the commotion seemed mostly to be about seat numbers, which were written nonsensically on the backs of the bench seats. around ten, the convoy (all vehicles from the border have to travel in a convoy) took off, for all intents leaving the bus behind. but we eventually got our start down the dirt road. the bus ride that followed was the closest i think i have ever been to actual hell. the bus rattled down the road, the inside a swirl of dust and noise and smell. it was a 900k trip that took us until 1:00 pm the following day (28 hours). no stops for sleep. the bus broke down at some point and we all got off in the middle of the night so that they could pound on it by the light of their cell phones. this is when we learned that apparently white people glow in the dark just enough to attract all the giant beetles to come beat themselves against your face. just minutes before we went clinically insane we rolled into nairobi. and here we are. recovering with a peace corps friend and her parents. we get hot showers (none of the hotels we had in the past 2 weeks had water) and there are absolutely no buses involved. also, i hear that we will be having a big american style thanksgiving, mashed potatoes and all. we will be here at least through christmas. phew... so there you have it. the update of the last month and our trip from sudan to kenya. mr. ament - i know you waited a really long time for this one. i hope it satisfied.

2007-10-27T12:06:00.000-07:00

And here we are in bright and sunny sudan. we left aswan monday morning and caught a train to the port on lake nasser. on the way we met up with some more westerners who were bound for sudan with us. so our group of six found our way onto our tiny ferry boat and down into second class, which consisted of a room full of slightly padded, narrow benches, and got to know each other a little. our new travel buddies were: carlos - an italian guy who quit his job to backpack around. he's been at it for two years and wants to go for two more. curtis - a canadian who trades in silver and gold to finance his cheap travel. leslie and eowin - an irish lad and an american girl who randomly met while traveling and decided to join up and go down to rwanda. so now we were six strong. we sat and watched for several hours as the boat was loaded by hand. it would seem to me that the entire undersection of the ferry was filled to overflowing with hostess twinkies and tiger tails. and for the next 24 hours we alternated chatting with terrible sleep and passed around sections of a sensationalist version of joan kennedy's biography. and in a mere day, we had chugged our way up the nile and into sudan. we changed money (which is crazy strong for a cheap traveller - 2 per american dollar) and set off to find a hotel. our stop for the night was wadi halfa, a desert outpost that exists solely to usher passengers from the train to the ferry or from the ferry to the train. it is dry and hot and constantly dusty.
our hotel ended up being a room (sort of) with a dirt floor and beds made mostly of woven string. we took "showers" from a bucket, ate some overpriced fish and lamented the presence of only non-alcoholic beer. cokes from glass bottles worked well enough for washing the grit out of our mouths. the rest of tuesday night was spent steadying our nerves and filtering tons of water for the train ride the next day that was said to last anywhere from 18 to 50 hours. we showed up at the train station the next morning (it had been closed the night before) and tried to spring for some second class tickets. turns out, both first, second and third classes were booked solid. no seats. so we showed back up and bording time to find that a semi riot was going on at every door with people trying to get on for standing room. we wandered up and down the train, looking for a lighter crowd. instead we found, at the very back of the train, an old ratty car with no seats or lights that smelled strongly of fish. we set our new american girl friend to flirting with the policeman outside and we were ushered around back where no one else could see, shoved inside the train car and told to "shut our mouths." we crouched in the dark for what seemed like ages, until the train finally lurched forward and we were off, stowed away like tramps with about 7 other sudanese men.
a few stops later a policeman got on and got a $10 bribe from each of us. we were mad, but what else could we do? get off in the middle of the desert and walk to the capital? so, we rode through the night in our fish car until we were woken up and kicked off the car so that it could be loaded full of twinkies and tiger tails (which is apparently the national food of sudan). we snuck up into third class and found some newly vacated seats for the remaining two thirds of our trip. we filled our time by dangling our legs from the door and watching the desert slowly drag by and trying to sleep on the hard wooden benches. however, even the company of our new travel companions could not keep us entertained for the next ten hours. and when we stopped for 2 hours at a rest stop that was another 10 to 12 hours from the capital, all six of us gave up hope for remaining at all sane and benadryl'd ourselves to sleep, some on benches, some in the inches of dust that had accumulated on the floor. and voila! a mere 33 hours after we had borded the train, we were in khartoum and only slightly close to being certifiably insane! by this point it was friday morning and we had been fairly consistently travelling since monday night. we pounded down hotel doors until we found the cheapest we could and collapsed onto our cots. what you might not expect about sudan is that it is insanely expensive. also, none of the atm's here take foreign cards. so, even though the people here are, for the most part, great people, our next move seems to be hauling ass out of here for the next country on the trip. to cushion the financial blow of sudan, we found a great couple who are letting us crash in their guest room while we are in khartoum. the man is irish and his wife is a kiwi. they are teaching english here and we think that we just may have found the most generous people in the world. and now we are killing time waiting for our ethiopian visas. only this time we are only waiting a couple of hours instead of a couple of months. so the next time you all hear from us we will be sweating our tails off not in sudan, but ethiopia.
ps. i tried to give you pictures, but all the internet in khartoum hates me.

2007-10-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

hi again kids. today my story starts way back on september 23rd, when we originally applied for our visas to sudan. we went to the sudanese embassy and were told to go to the american embassy to get letters of recommendation. of course, the american embassy refused, saying that we should have gotten our visas in america and that they hadnt given such letters since 1997. our explanation that we had not seen american soil in over 2 years fell on deaf ears and we were shoo'd out of their oh-so-nice waiting room to make room for some other poor saps who wouldnt really be helped that day.
so off we went to the sudanese embassy. we turned our applications in, in a crush of other people and were told to wait 5 minutes. 7 hours later they told us to come back in 2 weeks to see how our applications were doing in khartoum. the whole time people stared at us as if we were a sideshow act and asked us repeatedly if we REALLY were going to sudan for "tourism".
in the meantime we decided to go to luxor for a change of pace (and to be honest a change in expenses). we wandered down to the train station around 8 for the 10 o clock night bus. this is one of the only buses that foreigners are allowed to take here. so jenny walked up to the ticket man and asked for two second class tickets to luxor. the man refused, saying that there were only first class tickets. instantly following this he sold 2 second class tickets to the man over her shoulder. when she insisted on second class the man told her there were no tickets at all and turned his back on her, holding up the entire line just to prove his point. one helpful soul saw all of this and tried to buy our tickets for us, but only succeeded in getting the ticket man to refuse to sell him a ticket as well. we waited and watched as our train left us in the station. our new friend tried several more times to secure us tickets on the trains to follow and was finally kicked out of the ticket office by the man on account of us being foreigners. around midnight we took our complaint to the tourist police who took our money, walked around the station for an hour with it and then returned the money saying they could do nothing to help us. in a final fit of desperation we just hopped on the train that was on the platform. we were directed to first class because there were no more second class seats. however, just as we had settled into our luxury accommodations a hoard of foreigners in a tour group got on and told us that we were in their seats. so we were bumped to the ground of the "smoking car" (aka the space between train cars). so we sat on the floor while the men who were getting their nighttime ramadan nicotine fix marveled over the strange foreigners on the ground and ashed in our "seats". eventually the ticket man came around and asked whether we wanted to pay for first or second class tickets for our fine lodging. we asked if we could pay for third, but he was not amused.
Luxor was hot, and there is not much to tell. our biggest adventure was sneaking into the roof pool of the absurdly expensive semi luxury hotel.
after a week or so in luxor we headed back to cairo for more waiting. we went back to the embassy and were ushered behind the scenes to talk to the head man in charge. once we got back there we could see that all of the computers at the stations at which people were so busily working weren't even plugged in. our hopes of ever getting a visa were somewhat dashed and we started planning just exactly how we might sneak in to sudan. back behind the scenes we patiently waited our turn while the biggest jerk in the world yelled and screamed at the embassy. he was a canadian and had gotten his visa that day but was angry that there was handwritten information on it and that it had cost so much. apparently he had never seen a visa before and was really angry that he'd had to wait 4 whole hours for his visa. the big boss, apparently overwhelmed by the assholeness of this man, gave us his number and told us to call on sunday.
and back to the hotel for more waiting.
one night during our seemingly endless stay in our hostel, we decided to take ourselves out to a bellydancing club for a treat. initially we expected it to be some touristy sort of place, but we bargained down the cover charge and hoped for the best. once inside we saw, through a haze of shisha smoke, that we were not only the only foreigners there, but except for one woman and her children (?!) we were the only girls there. the rest were egyptian businessmen, mostly of the middle aged sort. and the venue was a mostly empty old dancehall with a tiny stage and about ten fold out tables. what followed ended up seeming more like a strip club than anything else. occasionally one of the men would get on stage and dance with a girl with a handful of small change. and whenever he was particularly struck by the moment he would throw the bills, one by one, so that they rained down over the girl's head. the effect was somewhat like one of those gameshows where the contestants stand in a plastic box while money swirls around them in a windstorm. and the short old man who was singing into a microphone turned up to the maximum amount of echo would shuffle around the dancing girl and pick up all the tip money. as the night got later the girls got, well, bustier and the amount of dancing on tables increased. all the while, the woman with her children in tow would encourage her own 20 something daughter to get up on stage and shake it for the whole club to see. almost like an audition. the effect was a little creepy and david lynch wouldnt have had to change much to use it in a movie.
so. fast forward past more waiting and cheap food to thursday. we decided to call the embassy man just to remind him of our existence. he told us to come down to the embassy. so we shook off the sleep and hustled down there. one hour, eight stamps and two signatures later, to our shock and surprise, he handed us our passports, complete with sudanese visas. he had bypassed khartoum and just given us the visas because jenn had told him that her father was meeting us there and was getting angry with us. a month of waiting and all we had ever needed was this guy's signature. so, we ran out of the embassy clutching our more precious than gold visas before anyone could change their minds, packed our bags and hightailed it to the train station.
realizing that we were destined for the floor we just settled into our between car seats straight away. and by our seats i mean an empty closet and a luggage rack. only this time, we were ushered by four police into the sleeper car without paying a penny more, because girls apparently should not have to sleep on the floor. however, as they escorted us through the entire train, a policeman on each side and all our bags with us, i am sure that it looked like the poor, dirty foreign girls were being arrested as stowaways.
and that brings us to now. we are in aswan, tickets in hand. our boat for sudan leaves tomorrow and should take about a day. i just hope there is no luggage rack this time.

2007-09-27T08:07:00.000-07:00

yesterday we went to the pyramids. we decided to sleep in the desert next to them. so we set off early afternoon, sleeping bags and water in tow. when we got there we found that the pyramids had closed at three for ramadan, but we figured that you can't really close the pyramids, right? i mean, there is an entire desert surrounding them, and Egypt couldn't possibly have fenced it all. so, we took off walking, dodging over-zealous offers for camels and taxis as we went. we followed the wall through several small villages next to the pyramids.

Apparently the foreign tourists never make it quite that far from the beaten path and we were almost instantly surrounded by hoardes of small children chanting "hello!" and seeing just how close they could come to the alien foreigners without being caught. we followed the wall to the sphinx where we were told, yet again, that it was closed but for a minor sum of money (more than what we spend everyday on our hotel and food) they could take us out to the desert for one whole hour! We declined again, this time somewhat more forcefully and continued on our way. the wall eventually turned into an open gate and seeing no police around we turned in and continued on our merry way. the gate, as it turns out, was the entrance to an islamic cemetary. we wandered through it looking for cracks in the wall or various other shortcomings. the high point of our cemetary visit found us hoisting a dead tree against the wall to climb over it. eventually we decided that we didnt want to be responsible for accidentally breaking open a grave with our tree and that the wall really did have to end at some point and left the graveyard. some time and another village later we found ourselves in what looked to be some sort of dump, complete with a dead horse. immediately following the dump we finally found ourselves in the desert, but there was still a wall. some more "helpful" souls told us that the desert was closed, but of course they would be happy to take us out into it with their camels for a mere bit of money. Jenny yelled at them and told them that the desert couldnt possibly be closed and to just leave us alone. and as they rode oh-so-slowly away from us laughing about the crazy foreigners in flip flops wandering into the desert alone we found our rabbit hole in the fence. and into the desert surrounding the pyramids we slipped. however, we were still a couple of miles from the actual pyramids. we set off into the desert in the dark telling the people we met along the way that we were there to see the stars. in retrospect, it was a ridiculous lie because in cairo you can only ever see ten or so stars at night, even in the desert. we finally settled on a tall bluff where we could see all seven pyramids and set up camp. we were just in time for our own private viewing of the light show at the pyramids.

so we slept there, alone in the desert with a perfect view of the pyramids.

our plan to wake up early enough to hide was foiled by the cold and wind of the early morning desert and when we finally got up at 8 we saw three camels on the horizon making their way to us. it turns out that it was 3 tourist police officers coming to see how we had gotten so far out in the desert 15 minutes after the pyramids opened and why we had sleeping bags with us. we played dumb and told them that we had paid a ridiculous sum of money to be taken into the desert on camels in time for the sunrise, which was terrible. we pretended only to speak english and laughed and petted their camels, all the while expecting to be arrested or fined for breaking the rules. eventually, the captain showed up, in his awesome sunglasses and asked us the same questions we had already answered. he asked for a "tip" but upon finding that we had no dollars and the equivalent of about $0.80 on us refused the tip as a joke and sent us on our way to hike to the pyramids.

and that is just what we did. we walked into the pyramid complex for free, took the obligatory pictures and marvelled at their hugeness and walked out the main entrance, no questions asked. well, they did of course ask us if we wanted a taxi or a lovely camel.

2007-09-21T13:15:00.000-07:00

after a somewhat drawn out and terrible exodus from dahab we are on the move again. we decided that slinging booze to abusive expats in egypt was not what we had in mind for our trip, and we quit. however, our bosses "forgot" to pay us for an extra three days and left town. in the end we paid ourselves from the register and went swimming (which we had not had the energy to do even once while we were working). our last few days in town were what i might call... well, stupid. the oldest, ugliest, meanest dog in dahab decided that we owned it and wouldnt leave us. i have to admit that i really liked that dog. anytime anyone approached us it growled and barked and chased them away. and at night she slept outside our door to keep away any intruders. noone else in dahab liked her at all. so, i guess she really was ours.
our last night in dahab we were out with an australian named paul. i mentioned that i might shave my head for africa. he suggested that i do it that night. i got swept up in the excitement of it and now i have the shortest, craziest, most uneven hair of my life. if paul hadnt done such a terribly bad job of it i might look military. once the trauma wears off i might post pictures.
after i cut off my hair i really had to leave dahab. we knew way too many people there, and a lot of them really expected that we would stay permanently. so we took the 8 pm bus to cairo. sadly, our dog tried to follow us when we jumped in the back of a pick up and got hit by a car. we had tried to chase her away, but she just wouldnt go. our pickup didnt stop, but i assume that the dog died. and there you have it. dahab ended horribly and left us sad for days. we also had an 8 hour bus ride to really overthink our poor dog. but we made it to cairo around 4 am and somehow managed to get a hotel.
so that is the short version of our 3 week experiment in dahab. there were of course, highlights. for example, it is ramadan and we got to have our first ramadan breakfast prepared and cleaned up entierly by men. well, not entirely. we made lemonade but they hated it because there was too much lemon and not enough sugar. in any case, it was a big change from ramadan in jordan.
and though it was short and poorly written, thats all i have for now. tomorrow brings pyramids and the sudanese embassy for round 2. i can hardly wait.

Dahab, it doesnt really look like hell, does it?

Our poor doggy, may she rest in peace

2007-09-01T04:06:00.000-07:00

so, since last time i wrote jen and i have made a somewhat crucial decision. while walking along the beach front we saw a help wanted sign. we walked in and inquired and were told to come back at 8. at 8 we showed up and were told very appologetically that the boss wasnt coming that night but they would call him to see when he would be in. the phone call wet something like "hey, there are 2 american girls here who want to work..... half hour? ok." and we were told to hang out for half an hour. when he got there he called us in his office and within 20 minutes said we couuld start that night or the next day. easy as that. basically , he is desperate for foreign workers who have a basic sense of how food service works. egyptian service is generally very poor and much of the clientelle here is foreign. so now we are his new bartender and waitress or any combination of the two. fastest i have gotten a job... ever. so now we can at least break even during our stay here and spend ramadan at the beach instead of travelling god knows where and pretending to fast. also living at the beach for free for a while just sounds good. the beginning of our job idea didnt come with the help wanted sign. it started with a local man who calls himself andy... he offered us job and then made us sit with him for way, way too many hours without telling us much about these "jobs". we figured that he was just trying to get us to spend time with him and got the other jobs instead.
so, for the next little while we will be calling dahab home. it is a pretty little backpacker resort town where we can swim in the mornings, in swimsuits (yes, real swimsuits with our arms and legs hanging out for everyone to see). and then when we get out of the ocean, the showers also run with salt water. i am hoping that all the sea water will turn us gorgeous like in blue lagoon. but i somehow doubt it very much. at the very least, it is the opposite of our lives in jordan and we can people watch all day.
work so far consists of long hours of nothing and boredom filled only with the constant thud of terrible trance music punctuated by the foreigners who live here coming in after work and want to know who the new girls are. they assure us that we will want to stay forevr, but i am positive we wont. even making good money couldnt keep me here forever. but our manager thinks we are lightning fast learners and i think we have this job as long as we want it. to tell the truth i would be very sad if he thought we were too slow to pick up bartending...
we have an egyptian phone number now. i think from america it is 011.20.165309642. do with it what you will.
since we have been here i cut my hair. actually we both did. we waded out knee deep in the ocean and cut it ourselves. everyone who saw us thought we were nuts. and in retrospect i cant really think of any good reason to cut hair in a place where you cant stand still except that we didnt want to bother with cleaning it all up.
oh, and since internet time is somewhat dear these days, thanks for putting up with my lack of using spell check.
and with that, i am off to work. i'll see you all in the funny papers.

2007-08-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

and because life is suddenly eventful again, i expect that these posts will all be a bit long-winded. so, the great african adventure has officially begun. i'll start by telling you all (all 3 of you) about our exodus from jordan. once i closed my service and was free of peace corps, jenny and i moved ourselves and our loads and loads of crap to the cheapest part of amman. we immediately flung everything we had out of our bags and onto the floor to reorganize over the coming 4 days. these 4 days involved a lot of packing, unpacking, throwing away and packing again in an effort to lighten our loads. as of yet, we have still failed in our attempts to make our bags reasonable. meanwhile, my time in amman involved a visit to the hospital as well as massive daily doses of benadryl because everynight at our hostel i was eaten alive by bugs that apparently found no one else in the entire place appealing. even my face wasnt spared and my eye swelled almost shut and gave me an unfortunate resemblence to everyone's favorite pugilist (rocky of course). the bites have not yet entirely gone away, but at least i no longer look contagious. i somehow feel as though this was only a warm up to the insect misadventures to come in africa.
we applied, while still in amman, for visas through sudan. this led us to delaying our departure to egypt for a day and sitting all day Sunday at the sudanese embassy. the first half of the day was spent in creaky plastic chairs saying nothing. however, as i stood there in my short sleeves (the horror!) i was approached by a jordanian man who turned out to be from my village. jordan is too, too small. when the group of sudanese men waiting for work permits heard us speaking arabic they came to talk to us to see why exactly these girls were living in jordan. one man even bought us sandwiches and pepsis because we had been sitting there all day. they all told us that sudan is much more beautiful than jordan and that we should stay as long as possible. 6 months, they said, would be sufficient to see all the good stuff. in the end, we were told that khartoum was processing our applications and we could most likely pick them up in cairo. we got this news around 4 pm and decided that we needed to get south as soon as possible. we made a mad dash to wadi musa, and the following morning opted to take a taxi to the port in aqaba to catch that day's slow boat to egypt. basically, we'd had enough of jordan and wanted out.
when we got to the prot there was a big scramble because we thought we were about to miss the boat. also there was some confusion about our passports and why we had been in jordan for 2 years and did not have ids (pc took them). and we went back and forth for what seemed like an eternity on the issue. in retrospect, it seems like they just wanted to find out what we had been doing in jordan and take up a lot of our time. we bought our tickets and got on the bus to the boat. the driver called out for the slow boat passengers to get off the bus and we scrambled off, luggage in two. however, all the other foreigners stayed on the bus, having opted to pay minimally more for the fast boat. we boarded the slow boat with all the jordanians and egyptians at about noon. in the time we had before our departure we explored the boat. this time turned out to be about 3.5 hours. as we picked our way through the men sleeping in the aisles we figured out that the slow boat had been, in its glory days, a dutch ferry and had various signs along the halls with words that had too many vowels or consonants in a row to make much sense to us. the boat took about four hours to get to egypt. that night we took a taxi to dahab which is a cheap little beach resort on the sinai peninsula. we are hanging around, burning our skin in the sun and swimming in an attempt to get the jordan palor off our skin. we will be here for a while. i expect that my next post may have a phone number for you all and maybe some pics. but for now i will leave you with a picture of jenny in our jaunty little sea hut. with no bugs.

2007-08-18T23:46:00.000-07:00

ok. so i lied to you all. the last was obviously not my last post from jordan. so, perhaps i will just stop speculating at all, so as to save myself from being wrong. which i hate. so, you may notice that i changed my page. i guess this is to make me less bored with it. but i think it also signifies a change. duh. so from every post (after this one which obviously still has to do with jordan) i will be telling yarns from our (me and jenny) fabulous world tour. and depending on the quality of internet i can find there i will try to pepper my words with some pictures. and finally, to be totally crass. you may notice that i have a link to paypal on here. that is only for those of you who have some sort of crazy disposable income and want to help us on our way. no pressure.
so, on to telling you about my last days of peace corps. my last week has been a blur of last visits and jordanian food and goodbyes. and yes, crying. i dont fancy myself to have been much of a cryer in the states. but here in jordan i have turned into tammy faye of sorts. i cry at everything. so my biggest goodbye was from my counterpart and my center. she told me not to come to work thursday, but instead to just show up at five for a surprise. the surprise was a bus with about 15 of my friends down to wadi rum. for those of you who dont know what wadi rum is, it is the big red desert that lawrence of arabia wandered through in his advance to aqaba. so we showed up and had coffee and tea in the desert. climbed some rocks. sang and danced and ululated. the most surreal part of it all was the bedouin dj in the desert. it was a real party. i could be totally wrong here, but i think the only "going away" most jordanian girls are used to is when a girl gets married. so all night they called me the bride and sang me bridal songs which go a little something like "andi is leaving the girls. stay a little while longer, don't go". they also bobby pinned a bunch of tissue to my head as a veil and played wedding with me. so, i got my jordanian wedding, sans groom. it was a great night and a really nice going away party. from what i hear, it was the best that any volunteer here got. but that is not unexpected from my counterpart. she always did extra for me. the side effect of my party was that i absolutely lost my voice. making it difficult to say my goodbyes. so now i am in amman, wrapping it up and able to put my experiences in the past tense. and i am anxiously waiting to hear if my poor poor previously drilled tooth needs a root canal. a root canal in jordan is not high on my list of goals. anyway, i am off for a final medical poking and prodding. and the next time i write i will have a partner in crime in AFRICA!!!

2007-08-14T01:30:00.000-07:00

Well kids, I think this is my last blog from Jordan. I may be lying about that. But then again I may not. I am at T minus 4 days till I leave my village. I’ll hang around amman for a few days or a week and then it is off to Africa. Our general plan for right now is that we will take a boat from aqaba to Egypt. Then we plan to laze around on the beach and sleep in hammocks for an undetermined amount of time. You know, to get the Jordan off. We will travel freely throughout Egypt, dodging the overly pushy salesmen as we go. Will any of you be there to randomly meet up with? Anyway, it is after Egypt that we face our big problem. Where do we go without flying? Libya is out. Especially considering that the route would be libya, chad, central African republic and the DRC. Somehow, as adventurous as that would be, it lacks appeal. So our current options, as I see them, are to petition the Sudanese embassy to give us a transit visa so we can cross it, or to take a boat to yemen and then a boat to Djibouti. If all else fails, I guess we will take a plane, but we really don’t want to. So there you have it. Our initial plans, scant as they may be. If any of you have any suggestions, we are happy to hear them. Also, I will be keeping up this blog to update you all on my status in Africa, let you know that I am indeed still with you and give you pictures so you can see our transition into what will mostly likely be crazy. You can think of it as eccentric if you find crazy too strong a word.
So, on to wrapping up my life in Jordan. This last month has been a whirlwind of trips to amman for doctors and dentists and paperwork. I have been poked and prodded every which way. However, the most horrifying experience as of late was my visit to the dentist. I don’t know if I told you all about last years dentist visit. She drilled a cavity with not enough novocaine, and walked away to make a 20 minute phone call before filling it. fun stuff. This year I tried a different dentist. He started by asking me a couple of questions that I have gotten from doctors plenty of times, but never a dentist. Awkward. He found three cavities and threatened to pull a wisdom tooth. Again, there was not enough novocaine. But he told me I was tough, he wasn’t going to give me anymore and I just had to bear it. for three teeth. And he proceeded to hold me down by the forehead and drill away, happy as you please. He overfilled them and then had to drill down the filling so I could close my mouth. And somewhere in the process I got a minor burn on my lip. And as for the cleaning that followed the drilling (??) it consisted of grinding away at my precious pearly whites with that damned polishing tool. As my fellow volunteer put it, this dentist basically sandblasted our mouths clean. As I sat there, shaking from the ordeal I had just been through, he told me he just wanted one more thing. He wanted to check under my gums. Under?!? I considered, for a brief second, bolting. Dental bib and all. But my hesitation was my downfall. He proceeded to take his sharpest pokey tool and lift up each and every one of my gums. All the while he commented on how great and clean I keep my teeth and how he couldn’t find a single thing under there. But I could not tell him that maybe since I was so clean he could stop prying up my poor gums, because his fist seemed firmly lodged in my mouth. So that is the joy of dental work in Jordan. I doubt that I will ever again be able to visit the dentist (a previously benign task) without healthy doses of laughing gas.
So, like I said, I am at my last 4 days in the village. This week has been a whirlwind of packing and lunches and dinners and visits and last minute work at the center. My problem is, I don’t have enough meals to go around. I feel weary from all the chicken, rice and tea. Also, I tend to shriek a little bit at the back of my mouth when the tea comes out. All I can think of is sugar. Sugar and my poor poor teeth. My other big problem is this: how do you pack for a year of travel, when you don’t know where you are going. Could be 3 countries, could be 30. could be overland, could be boats or submarines involved. I just don’t know.
I guess I should say something about Jordan. Isn’t that what you do when you leave a place? It has been both awesome and slightly devastating, all at once. I will miss all my friends and feeling slightly competent in a second language. what I will not miss is being the obvious foreigner that also has to act like a local. But here I go, launching myself out of what has become comfortable and familiar and into a land where I am again a little baby. I basically will not know anything about what I am doing once I leave Egypt. Scary.
So, now I am going to wrap this up so I can go home, stare unproductively at piles of stuff I may or may not need, take a nap and go to lunch.

2007-07-27T04:51:00.000-07:00

Here I am, closing in on my final days of service. I feel a lot of pressure to give you witty and exciting updates from my life here. but really it would be a lot like you guys making some story of mass appeal from your day to day lives there. For example, I could tell a story about how I went to the store and bought some eggs. Or maybe a diet pepsi. It has really gotten to the point where perhaps going to safeway and staring down the aisles and aisles of everything I would ever need and more may be the most exciting story I have to tell. It certainly might have been the most interesting thing I did this week. but I will still try to amaze and amuse with my stories of life in the east.
We got our new group of volunteers. 2 have already gone home. In fact, as I type this I have three girls from the new group visiting my site. The most exciting thing I could think to do with them was make pancakes and go to the internet. but it seems that my evil plan is working and making them think I am at least decently cool. They seem a little more relaxed about the two years to come after talking to me. Yet I would venture a guess that they are horrified at what is to come in terms of hair and clothes. I am kind of like the ghost of Jordan future. It really is a bit intimidating how clean and well, clean they all are. And of course the gossip machine of Jordan is in full swing around here as we all meet and assess one another.
See? It literally isn’t anything to write home about. So, if there are any last minute topics that you would like me to say a little something about here, better get them to me quick!

2007-07-09T01:04:00.000-07:00

Well kids, it looks like I live at one of the seven wonders of the world. The night that the results were announced I was in Wadi Musa (the town outside Petra) and it was a madhouse with people waiting for the results. There were dance lines in the street and music blaring from every storefront. Cars painted like Jordanian flags with pictures of the king and ten guys hanging out the windows cruised around honking and yelling and occasionally running into each other due to the paint on all the windows. But there were no hurt feelings cuz this was the night of the big announcement. I cant imagine how sad it would have been if that party was cut short by a loss. Hopefully this will give jordan’s tourism a little boost. Also, while people are here they can see just how the cinematic genius of American Beauty was made. Think of that scene with that beautiful plastic bag just dancing on the wind. But this is even better because it is 20 or 30 plastic bags flying through the air doing their tornado dance of joy. And more is always better. And, the people can even feel like they are part of that joy dance when a bag comes and slaps them in the face and stays until the wind brushes it away again. Magical.
I hope you all had a great fourth of july. I went to a party at the embassy on the fifth. Apparently the big wigs have a special party on the fourth itself. It was fun. there was swimming and a cover band and dodgeball. However, the fireworks were conspicuously absent. The best part about the embassy party last year were the big, huge American fireworks. Jordanian fireworks are a bit like the kind you might buy in a shack on the side of the road. Pretty to look at, but not quite as impressive as you might like. But this year there were no fireworks. Apparently last year those big bad fireworks came dangerously close to burning things down.
The day after the party was our yearly softball game with the Japanese volunteers. I think we had an unfair advantage and won. But they were really the big winners. They were so nice and happy and fun the whole time. And we were, well, less so. Not to say that we were total crab asses, but they just seemed like such nice people. Apparently video was taken of the game and will at some point be available here: http://www.ammansoftball.blogspot.com
I am taking a big risk by posting that. Who knows what kind of stupid thing I might be shown doing. But at least I know it wont be me wearing a left handed glove. It was fun, but I am horrified by how out of shape I am. A little bit of batting and running and I am still sore days later.
The rest of my life these days is taken up by English classes, packing my house and people threatening to come to exercise classes. I don’t know that I could move to save my life right now…
So, that is the update for now, or at least all I have in me to give. I hope you are all staying out of the summer heat (or cold as the case may be for a select few of you). Put me in your thoughts on Friday. Steel Magnolias is on and I have already stocked up on tissues for it.

2007-06-25T01:56:00.001-07:00

i think this time i will just upload a few random pics. lets see how it works

Women's Mosque

Women in my village

Safeway? In Jordan?

Mosque in Egypt. It says Remember Allah (God).

Ummm... Extract?

My favorite tourist trap in Aqaba.

Jerusalem. The old city.

My new hair. On the beach in Tel Aviv. And my new kicks too...

Wadi Rum. Real desert.

Hope you enjoyed! It's summer so that means the flys have returned. i'm off to hide from them.

2007-06-17T06:18:00.000-07:00

I’d like to start by saying happy fathers day dad and Nolan!!!
Well, it’s official. August 21st is my last day with Peace Corps. And I have so much paperwork to get through before then. Plus various pokings and proddings of my final medical clearance. And I will get to do a final language assessment test to see where I really am with my Arabic. But I am looking forward to it. Two years is a long time, and I am ready to pick up and move around a little. I have just about ten weeks left, which is approximately the amount of time I was in training. And while that felt like an eternity (I remember at the time thinking that I would trade my right thumb to get out of it), I think that this will fly by and I will be packing up to head south before I know it.
Granted, I have not made a ton of friends here in my village, but I have a few very close friends. The closest of these is my counterpart. She has helped me navigate my way through Jordan. I couldn’t have done it without here. And to be honest, she is something to be envied by the other volunteers. She has bent over backwards to help me achieve my goals at work, while many other counterparts just step back and wait for the magic to happen. She has been like a sister, and during the few conversations we have had about my immanent departure our “allergies” have kicked in and the talks have been moved on to lighter topics such as the color of some dress on tv and whether or not those diet pills actually work.
We had our Close of Service conference not too long ago. It was peace corps’ time to tell us exactly what we have to get done in our final weeks (weeks!) of service. We had a lot to get through, most importantly talking about our feelings. Well, my feelings were “where did all my friends go?” I looked around the room at the remaining half (yes only half of us stayed) of us and I realized that I had not chosen the table I was at for any reason other than necessity. Everyone else I came to care about in pc had gone home early, for one reason or another. And it made the conference not joyful, as I am sure that peace corps anticipated it might be, but sad and a little empty. And since I didn’t want to offend the 12 people in the room that I don’t feel close to, I just didn’t say much of anything. I just couldn’t help feeling that this past two years would have been so much more fun had the others hung around. So, these next few weeks will entail saying goodbye to my few remaining friends. For a year. I don’t know if it will be hard. I have watched my friend group dwindle, and now it is going to be a group of 2. me and my travel partner.
And then off to our adventure. Before I go, I will let you all know our tentative (and oh how very tentative they are) plans. It involves at least 10 african countries 6 south American countries and just about all of central America. I used to be so excited about this trip. It sounded like such a fun adventure. And then I met one too many who rolled their eyes and made me sound like I am crazy for even trying. I think the only crazy part is trying to make 5,000 dollars last through a year and 20 countries. Anyway, I have gotten tired of having people think I am crazy, so I don’t particularly like to talk about it anymore. For example, we just got a new country director and when he asked my post peace corps plans everyone kind of pshawed. I was embarrassed for even having the idea. I thought that somehow telling him my plans would make him think I am a nut.
But. I have decided that my plan is way cooler than going home and getting some crappy entry level job at some place I hate. So, I am going to pack up my antimalarials and hope for the best. I’ll try to keep y’all posted on the last bits of my service and the first bits of my travel.
And for those of you who are curious about who dan is….

2007-06-02T07:18:00.000-07:00

for those of you following the exploits of mr. o'brien. today is his birthday. he officially turned old. and despite a recent devastating loss of the snake title, he seems to be taking it in stride.

2007-05-21T08:16:00.000-07:00

And after somewhat of a long sabbatical, I am back. Back from recent peace corps traumas, back from months of vacation and guests. Back to my own little slice of Jordan, whatever that might be to weather out my last 3 or 4 months. First trip was in march. I was off to Geneva where they lost my bag. The poor lady at the baggage claim could not understand what a seemingly homeless girl was doing in the airport. I told her I didn’t know where I was staying, didn’t have a phone and didn’t own any other clothes in the whole world so she really needed to find my bag. I still don’t think she understood that if my bag had not been found I would have been wearing the outfit I had on for the next 4 months. But the bag was found and off I went to paris. I liked paris much more than Geneva. Even the red light district there was clean and the police men tipped their caps politely to the working girls. But paris was dirty and a little rude and felt like a real city. We found a great underground bar that had been a 17th century torture chamber. Since I had been before and already seen all the tourist sites and museums, I mostly took pleasure in just strolling around the city in short sleeves. But I would say that the highlight of that trip was that everywhere I went, people just assumed I was from there. In turkey, Geneva and france people asked for directions and nobody stared at the obvious foreigner. I hadn’t realized how intrusive it feels to always be stared at.
When I got back the girls I had babysat in Berkeley were here with their mom waiting for me. I showed them the sites and we went on a 2 day camel trek in wadi rum (think Lawrence of Arabia). One day would have been sufficient. The second day saddle sore was murder, and the freezing cold rain in the middle of the ride only enhanced the extreme joy of it all. There is nothing romantic about riding camels in the desert. Should you ever choose to run off and join a tribe of Bedouin, buy a jeep and leave the camels to the tourists.
After my guests departed it was off to cairo to meet up with my dad. We spent a week seeing the sites. Pyramids, sphinx, museums etc. One night we went to see a light show at the pyramids. Spectacularly cheesy. I loved it. it was a monologue from the point of view of the sphinx accompanied by epic music and lasers and lights on the pyramids. Good stuff. We saw cairo, which is way more crowded and hectic than Manhattan - cars and people speeding every which way at all times of the day. I befriended our driver, Mohammed, who had a voice like Shaggy (the rapper, not the cartoon) and he took us to Alexandria, the delta and his workshop. The last day we were there we went and ate lunch at his friend’s house. We were apparently the first Americans to visit his house and he was really happy to have us. My Arabic got us through quite a bit in Egypt, although the Egyptian accent is much different than the Jordanian accent and at times there was a lot of talking in circles. From the land of papyrus and essence (expensive perfume) it was off to the land of, well, dirt and rocks I guess. back to good ol’ Jordan. Here I got to show dad a little piece of my current life. My small house, coworkers and the locals who are overly excited to help out their little foreigner’s dad so she can show off in front of him. This included whirlwind deals on terrible rental cars, hotel rooms at 1/6th the normal price and meals all around town. And unfortunately he also got to come with me to a 3 day youth camp. I’m not sure if having translators made up for him having to sit through drama skits done by Jordanian 10th graders. But overall his trip went well… and more importantly didn’t involve camels.
From dropping my dad off at the airport it was off across the border to Jerusalem. We rode across the border up north, near Syria, in a bus. On the Palestinian side, or Israeli depending on how you want to say it, we had a lot of trouble getting through customs. They wanted to know why we were visiting, what kind of visit it was, and just exactly why we spoke Arabic. It wasn’t exactly a warm welcome. We visited Jerusalem and the old city, and all the requisite religious sites. And we also spend a lot of time wandering in circles with our backpacks on looking for cheap places to stay. Everything there cost about a thousand shekels. And everything was even more expensive than normal due to the overwhelming presence of a ton of American birthright tourists. It was strange to be in the old city though. There were Muslims, Jews and Christians all milling about together in seeming peace. Then again, just south of that truce were all the standard problems of Gaza. I got a lot of texts from people in my village while I was there, all worried for my safety. I have a small circle here who consider themselves to be my Jordanian family since I am all alone here, and they expect me to do all the things you might do with your parents, like check in when you arrive safely from vacation.
So now I am back. It is getting to be hot and my exercise classes have started yet again (I actually turned purple in my class today from the heat). I should be able to update the two of you that still read this at least two or three more times before I run off to Africa.
In other news, Dan O’Brien, while devastated by Alison’s loss, is still rad. Hamdullah.

2007-03-17T01:44:00.000-07:00

First of all I want to say a big congratulations to my big sister Jennifer and her husband on the arrival of little baby Nolan!! And also, a happy belated birthday Jenn.
Isn’t this supposed to be the land of God? Imagine all those pictures you have seen of a blond haired, blue eyed jesus. And in the background there is the sun just streaming in well defined rays through thick clouds onto the sand mountains. It is kind of like that. I mean, except for the jesus part. I am the only one in my village that looks anything like that (minus the beard) and I am fairly sure that I am not jesus. But in my village the sun really does come streaming through the clouds onto the valley of Moses (think Petra) and if it catches you in a moment of reverie you might expect choirs of angels and the voice of God to come booming out of the sky. But God doesn’t ever talk. Unless of course he is a donkey or a 5 year old screaming “andi, andi, what’s your name!?!?!?!” But it sure is purty to look at… and just as I was getting used to seeing that everyday, winter swooped in for one last stand. I had already put away all my winter stuff (and by put away I mean I shoved them under my bed).
So, news. Not too much. Valentine’s day was just like any other except that I broke down and actually wore the bright pink turtleneck that one of my villagers gave me for Christmas. With all my big work for my health project out of the way I’ve gotten to stay in my village for more than a week consecutively without going anywhere for meetings or planning or buying. It’s great. My villagers are all demanding to know where I have been. They all thought I had run off and gotten married or returned to America without saying goodbye. But I have to say, it is such a relief to be back in my own little house. When I first came to Jordan I was a bit traumatized to be alone in my house so much. But now it is the big weekends and trips to amman that traumatize me. And being around English speakers seriously damages my Arabic skills.
My birthday came and went, and was vastly superior to my birthday last year. And all my friends remembered! It was great. I went to amman and went dancing and the dj actually stopped the music for the dance floor to all sing me happy birthday. And as an extra birthday treat away went the techno and on came the hip hop. Good stuff.
As for work. I have internet at work now (after more than a few road bumps). So I am likely to be online at very strange hours. My counterpart thinks I live at work now.
I am doing 2 exercise classes every day. They are really popular. I have a waitlist of at least 15 women and my counterpart says that people call her about it every day. It is kind of a strange dynamic for an exercise class. One day they will call me Hezbollah for making them do squats, and the next day they bring in coffee and chocolates to share with the class. But no matter how popular the class is, they doubt my methods because, well, I am not the skinniest girl around. So when I try to tell them about healthy eating, they instead decide that not eating is a better plan. So the other morning a woman came to class and in the middle of it sat down and started crying. So I got her a cold cloth and laid her on the ground and asked her what was wrong. Well, the day before she had skipped lunch and dinner and that morning she had skipped breakfast. So I told her that she was probably dizzy because her blood sugar was too low and tried to get her to drink some juice. Instead she went to the hospital. And indeed they said it was her blood sugar and gave her some glucose. But, it scared me. And fortunately it scared everyone else in my classes out of trying to starve themselves skinny.
And finally, in just a couple weeks I am leaving Jordan for the first time since I got here! I have a fabulous month of stuff coming up. Going to Geneva to meet a friend, hosting the two girls I used to babysit in Berkeley and their mom, going to cairo with my dad and hosting him here. It is a much, much, much needed break. I am hoping to come back refreshed for my last 6 month stretch. I guess it is about time to start planning that epic Africa trip. Any suggestions for what to do to get south from Egypt?
oh, and because he is one of the only people who reads this, and he thinks i should talk about how great he is.... *ahem* dan obrien is great. really neat. and he is a chowhound for bacon.

2007-02-08T00:10:00.000-08:00

Well well well well well… I suppose it’s time to get back to my long neglected blog. I should be careful. Too many long periods of time without an update and people will stop reading. But honestly, this has been the first chance I have had to sit down and think like a semi-sane person in quite some time.
First, the bits and pieces. This last month has found me on a good many busses, and almost inevitably something strange happens on every ride that lasts more than half an hour. For example, on one bus ride from Amman a man stood up and started to proselytize for a good 40 minutes. He talked until his voice gave out. I sat giggling with a friend and texting another who was several rows behind us. You see, he was a boy, and even though we were the only three foreigners on the bus and we had showed up to the bus station in the same taxi we had to pretend that we had no idea he even existed. Everyone else on the bus rolled their eyes and tried to ignore him.
Bus ride #2 to amman found me on a bus with 2 other foreigners on it. I gathered from the conversation that one was british and one Scandinavian. The Scandinavian was named Robin, and decidedly un-amused by the Jordanian behind him who insisted on calling him robin hood. The fun thing about having been here so long is that I can understand what is going on around me. These two, however had no idea. So when the bus stopped in the middle of nowhere for 5 minutes to wait for a girl who had called the driver they looked like they understood it about as much as if they had been dropped on the moon. And when we left without her, only to stop five miles down the road and pick her up from a taxi they gave up trying and put their hats over their faces and went to sleep.
And this morning. I got to listen to a tape all the way to Amman condemning smoking, pills, alcohol and hashish. The speaker was saying not to get lured into the world of Michael Jackson and Bob Marley by these vices. He seemed to have a particularly large problem with Bob Marley.
And in other bits and pieces I found my new favorite place to hang out when I am out of my site. It is a hotel lounge that has live music every night. And this live music comes in the form of a Polish woman and her guitar. She amazes the crowd with such hits as Hotel California and The Gambler. My personal favorite was when she sang that James Blunt song “you’re beautiful” and her Polish companion (a very pale man in his sixties) would sing, or rather scream along with her from the audience. I found myself almost hypnotized thinking about what on earth would bring this woman and her guitar to work this gig… in Jordan.
In bigger news, I finished the first of my two big Peace Corps projects. My project partner Andrew, and I hosted a first aid training session that lasted for 5 days. We had roughly 45 youth show up. I won’t bore you with too many of the specifics. But it went something like this: up at seven every day, two 3-4 hour lectures per day, testing every day. It was pretty intense. Every day ended around 10:30 or 11 for the participants, and anywhere between 1 and 4 am for me and my fellow volunteers and translators. It went fairly smoothly, but wore us all out. There was a bit of a bugaboo with funding and we had to have an accountant from the higher council for youth follow us around and make all our purchases. But at least it happened at all, right?
I taught first aid for trauma, and because it was the least hands on of our material I gained the reputation as the “bad cop”. Apparently none of the participants had any experience with a girl who has the right to fail you on a test or chide for bad behavior. and my frequent references to the possibility of death or permanent disfigurement didn’t help to soften my image. All the participants were afraid of me, especially the boys. I’ve been told before that when I am in a teaching position I come across as a bit of a hard ass, but never before have I actually seen terror in someone’s eyes when they were put alone in a room with me.
On the other hand, Andrew got to teach all the fun interactive stuff that used dummys and talked about sensitive material. He said he had 2 “a-ha” sort of moments with the kids. The first was when he was teaching the Heimlich maneuver for infants with the girl’s class. He said that it seemed to click with all of the girls that they would one day have babies, and that when that day came they would be prepared should their kids put anything chokeable in their mouths. The second was in a discussion about HIV/AIDS. The youth centers here host lectures about AIDS, but they mostly revolve around the evil things you have to do to get it. Andrew was open and honest and answered their question about the virus and sickness itself and got a sort of amazing reaction. These participants had no idea what AIDS really was and that there was a difference between having the virus and having full-blown AIDS. And unexpectedly, their questions revolved around what you could expect to happen to an HIV positive person rather than talk of sex and dirty needles. A topic we never thought we would get to broach in Jordan.
One of the strangest parts of the camp was getting to use a translator. In all my life in the village I have sounded like my head is as empty as a balloon and that all I know how to talk about is clothes and food. But for once, my counterpart got to see me think semi-coherently about a huge range of subjects. It was nice to let them know that I am not as “slow” as my Arabic makes me sound. But it was strange to have to formulate sentences one-half at a time. And my counterpart’s feedback for me was “I am so happy for you! At first I was scared when you were going to teach, but your face didn’t even get red. Not even in front of the boys.” I suppose I couldn’t have hoped for more resounding praise.
She also told me that now that I have neared the finish of my service and successfully completed at least one big project I am free to get engaged like my predecessors at site. She even has a volunteer all picked out for me and gave him her blessing as discreetly as she knew how. This involved telling him, on a bus full of people with me standing three feet away, that she had told me she would kill me if I got married and left early, but it is ok if I just get engaged now. I suppose in the minds of my friends in the village 25 is just too old to be unmarried, and I should settle down ASAP.
Well, I guess I should wrap up. When I go too long without writing my thoughts just get all jumbled and long-winded. Hope you are all reasonably well and staying warm.

2007-01-02T02:57:00.000-08:00

Snow? In Jordan? Yes. As I typed this I was sitting inside my house looking out the door at six inches of snow in my front yard. My pipes were frozen and I had no water. And the electricity had just come on after a brief six hours without. But the electricity was of little concern. The only thing I use it for is the water heater (see above), the tv (which has no reception because there is snow on the dish) and the refrigerator. Nothing is going to go bad in this weather. Worst case scenario I could stick it in the snow. The 26th was a beautiful sunny day and I thought that people were just kidding when they said that snow was coming. And blam!! I wake up the 27th to a snow day. It snowed all day. And there was such a large drift of snow on my gate that I couldn’t open it. so, I was literally snowed in to my house and yard. All the people in my village were very concerned about the crazy girl that lives alone with no family. You see, when it snows in the village, everything shuts down. No one leaves the village. No stores open. Nothing actually functions. So they all wanted to call and have their children jump the fence to make sure I had gas for my heater and enough food and water, and most importantly was still alive. I look like a little dragon when I sleep because of the steam that comes out of my nose when I breathe. It wasn’t so bad. Snow can even make a dirt and rock desert look clean. And it was just a couple days late for a white Christmas. Christmas was unimpressive. I stayed in my house mostly. I did get a couple of gifts from villagers, which was nice. It was nice to be remembered. I have finally gotten to a place in my village where they are totally not threatened by my not being muslim and the attempts at conversion are genuinely because they don’t want me to go to hell. They tell me I look better with my head uncovered. And remember Christian holidays. Of course I have a hard time getting all the bible stories right. And they ask to see my cross necklace that they think all Christians wear. I tell them that I left mine in America.
In other news, I’m famous in Jordan. Well, not actually famous. Recently, there was a new worldwide peace corps director appointed. And a couple of months ago he came to Morocco and Jordan as sort of a kick off visit. He was only here for less than a week, I think and could only see one or two volunteers working. But seeing as how I am just so conveniently close to Petra, a visit to my center was fit nicely in between being received by the king and a visit to Petra. My center is tiny and the whole thing felt just a touch overwhelming. We knew about 60 or more girls were coming for the visit. And we knew the director would have some sort of entourage as well. They wanted to observe us doing some sort of normal activity at our jobs, so I just decided to do my normal English class. My English class right now is about 70 5th and 6th grade girls. I had told them that a guest was coming and taught them to stand up and say nice to meet you. The director’s entourage ended up being about 13 strong. And every time someone walked in the room my poor girls all got up and looked frantically at me to see if it was indeed said person who it would be “nice to meet”. The girls weren’t the only ones on edge. Up until they had all shown up my center ladies were hurrying here and there making sure everything was just so. And asking me if I was nervous. I said I wasn’t. it was just an English class like every day. But then when the country director, his wife, the regional director, my country director, a PR person and a woman with a camera who wanted me to wear a microphone all came walking into my center I thought that I just might have a stroke. My cool, calm, collectedness vanished and I was left red faced and stuttering. I don’t really remember what I said, but someone does, because I was on film with a special microphone. Whee. I do remember that somehow I ended up telling them about my whole life in music and marching band. That must have made some sort of lasting impression. My English lesson plan was to teach body parts. And end with a grand finale of teaching the girls to sing head shoulders knees and toes. It went over well enough for me and my girls being ever aware of the presence of a large group of Americans in suits. Something I have found since being here is that Americans are really really tall. So they make an impressive group. And as I taught my girls head shoulders knees and toes I was suddenly possessed with some sort of demon that made me think it would be a good idea to get all these important people to come sing and dance for my girls. So I suggested the idea to the girls in Arabic and then sprung it on my guests. They were all excellent sports and came and played along. I heaved a sigh of relief thinking that it was over and I had breezed through the whole thing. But no. It was time for my close up. I am sure that I wouldn’t have worn such a ridiculous outfit if I had really thought about the possibility of camera time. Also, I may have waited to dye my hair an unnatural shade of red. I am not even sure that whatever came out of my mouth in response to her questions wasn’t complete gibberish. But, I did my best. And then she told me to get a group of my girls and walk away from and toward the camera without looking at it and “being totally candid” with my girls. The girls obliged, but thought that we were doing just about the craziest thing in the world. And the photo shoot really did mark the end of the visit. I think I went home and collapsed in a heap. But back to the fame. A few days later I picked up the Jordan Times and what is there but a picture of me and all the important visitors at my center pointing at our noses. I don’t know how they got their hands an that gem of a picture, but they could have gone with something semi-dignified, couldn’t they?
So, that is the brief update on my life. I will try to write sooner next time. Happy New Year!

2006-12-08T02:20:00.000-08:00

To my Uncle Ray, may you rest in peace. And to all of those he left behind, you are all constantly in my thoughts and the prayers of my community.

2006-11-06T07:40:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-11-01T00:59:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-10-15T00:12:00.000-07:00

Well hello there faithful readers! I’m finally back. I’ve had a bit of a busy couple of months and even with that I have had almost no desire to write about the day to day details. But here I am. Let’s hope I can come up with something good, eh?
Operation smile came back to Jordan. It is the project where doctors give free operations for cleft palates and hare lips. This year there were about 75 jordanian kids involved and about 45 kids and families from Iraq. Our job was to help coordinate and entertain the Iraqi families. This time, however, the only political conversations I had were with other peace corps volunteers. The weather was great, the playing was awesome and pictures were snapped every which way. I, as always, failed to get my camera out and take any. But there are about a hundred pictures of me floating around Iraq now.
At the end of operation smile there was a party, as there is every year. We got invited to the after party, but when we showed up we couldn’t get in. seriously. As if this stupid little club was studio 54 or something! I suppose our rag tag little group of volunteers didn’t look quite cool enough in our village clothes. But seriously, I haven’t been rejected like that since I was 20! Ive gotten into better clubs in my pj’s… so there we stood in a well off section of Jordan. No busses or taxis to be found anywhere. So we decided to go to the same stupid bar we go to everytime. At least they would let us in, and there would be something to dance to. I think the high point of that night must have been the 20 minute walk of shame from the cool club.
The week after operation smile my mom and sister came to visit! We spent most of it in my village. Exhausting. Everyone in my village was clamoring for a visit, and I did the best I could to get it all in. that meant all day everyday involved some sort of food or drink and more than a little translation work on my part. We got fed all sorts of good Jordanian food and drank liters of tea. Our visit to petra seemed a bit like a circus event. My mom and sister both have blond hair and because of that we stood out. And then when I spoke Arabic we were immediately ushered into every Bedouin gift stall to drink tea and chat with them. I got at least three invitations to eat at their homes. Maybe I should run back to petra sometime this month.
Our trip to petra included a mule ride a donkey ride a camel ride a horse buggy ride and a horse ride. I don’t like riding large animals. The camel was the worst. When you get on a camel they have to stand up. And they are very tall animals. First, they stand on their back legs which pitches you forward and leaves you wondering if you can maybe catch the camel by the neck to break your fall when you come crashing forward out of the saddle. Then the camel kind of struggles up onto all fours. It is about the most awkward riding experience you could have. My camel was pissed the whole time as well. kept grunting and growling. My saddle started to slide off the back of the camel, meaning that I had to go through the mounting and dismounting of the angry camel twice. Good times. And our camel driver? He was about five. My mom’s camel got tied to the little five year old’s donkey and off we went. He did a good job, I guess.
After the village came the dead sea. We stayed at the Marriott, which is about the nicest hotel I have been in for years. We bobbed up and down in the dead sea and I think all three of us got it in our eyes. Imagine adding about 2 cups of water to about a pound of salt and then pouring it in your eyes. I think it feels about like getting dead sea water in your eyes.
We are smack dab in the middle of Ramadan. Actually, it is almost over by now. We had a pre Ramadan weigh-in at work… standard. My first night of Ramadan I broke fast with my neighbors. The night included one of the married couples calling each other “baby” a whole lot and doing things like offering to feed each other in an attempt to fully horrify the seven year old boy that was with us. He was disgusted and everyone else thought it was hilarious. I thought it was an odd type of joke to find here. and the children spent the rest of the night laughing about how someone had farted at the mosque during prayer. The adults seemed less entertained about that one. I think it may be the first fart joke I have heard here.
Oh, here’s a fun day I had. I woke up and put on a nice new white skirt that my mom left with me and went to work. Initially everyone thought that it was just the prettiest thing they ever saw. Then they told me to go stand in the light so they could see it better. Their exact words? “Andi, you may as well be standing there in your underwear. We can see your legs through that!” I, of course was embarrassed and said I was going to run home and change. But not so fast. No no. there was a package for me to open, and my clothes could apparently wait. There is a guy who thinks that if he sends me enough packages at work I will eventually consent to marry him. Last time it came straight to me, but this time I was lucky enough to have three giggling ladies watch me open the mystery package. It had a love letter (in English, luckily – I don’t even think I want to write what he said. Let’s just say he wanted to reassure me that he was chaste and I had nothing to worry about) and lots of jewelry. It also had 2 cds which they insisted I put in the computer straight away. I wanted to melt into my shoes. My ladies were all giggling and calling their friends and telling them about my new boyfriend and how I may marry a Jordanian. I don’t think I can accurately describe the horror I was feeling. And I put in the cds and found more love letters and music. Love songs of course. Complete with the wedding march. I guess he did his research about Americans. So yes. I died a thousand times of embarrassment.
Alright. well. I guess that is all the news from here. im not feeling particulary inspired. I’m off to do laundry, go to work, not eat and thank my lucky stars that no one here thinks I am a catholic…

2006-08-21T03:30:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-08-13T01:44:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-08-10T03:03:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-07-27T07:03:00.000-07:00

At the ripe old age of 24, I have my first grey hair. I told the girl that found it that it was from her making me crazy. I may not be that far off. I just got back from a 4 day field trip with 40 girls in my center. I slept in the same room as the girls, guaranteeing that I would not sleep more than four hours per night. I was in a great mood by the time I got back. But there was something sort of comforting about all 40 of them crowding around to talk to me at once. I felt like I had made a connection with them as they all fought each other for my attention. Warms the cockles of my heart. Here is what I knew going into this camp: where it was and that I was going. Much as I pleaded and begged for the schedule and what might be expected of me beforehand, I got nothing. I had no clue the entire time. A perfect example is when we were finishing lunch and I asked what was next. And by next I meant in the next fifteen minutes. I was informed that I had an hour and a half long workshop with the girls. About anything I wanted. They could provide me with a piece of paper if I needed it. SURPRISE!! It was great. I guess they don’t realize that I don’t actually speak Arabic and might need a little more time to come up with a topic and something to say. But, I was confident that I could do a better job than the blowhard from the army who showed up and wouldn’t take his sunglasses off indoors, because he looked cooler that way. So I came up with a workshop… an hour and a half long one. And then I waited. And waited. And waited. And an hour later was informed that I had a half hour in which to do said workshop. Great. So, I blew up at the supervisors and told them that I needed time to plan things and execute them. And that I was tired of being made to look stupid because I am perpetually clueless as to what is going on. They then reminded me that the girls needed fifteen minutes to get ready for our trip. So I gave them what I could of my workshop in 15 minutes and went off to sulk alone. But I cant ever hide from them, so I went on the trip as well.
That night I overheard someone say that the girls should let me sleep before one am, otherwise I was likely to start a war. I think that sort of sums up my trip. But I think to get a really good idea of what it was like you should sit in a hot room for five or six hours and try to focus on a book on tape, in Swahili.
There were a couple of high points. The best is when my coworker told me that she supposed the men in that town were so tall because they were proportionate to other parts of their anatomy, if you catch my drift. I told her that in America we thought that it wasn’t so much height, as shoe size.
And that is what I was doing this week as the world burns down around me over here… stay cool y’all

2006-07-16T02:29:00.000-07:00

Today on the news there was a Lebanese man holding a small child’s body. It was grey from the ash and dirt and rockets. It had no arms. It had nothing below the ribcage. And though it had a perfectly clear face, the back of it’s head was missing. What the fuck, Israel?!?
How this is appropriate retaliation for the abduction of two soldiers escapes me. In fact it certainly seems like collective punishment to me. everyday i feel more and more like i am living next to a napoleonistic little warmonger of a country. I found myself being asked to defend Israeli foreign policy. And I found myself being asked to support American foreign policy for supporting Israel. And I refused. I couldn’t. as I think about most of the surrounding countries here, all I see are problems. And those problems didn’t just pop up by themselves. A woman said to me, “we just want to know what we (arabs) did wrong to make you hate us.”
‘Nuff said.

2006-06-23T03:39:00.000-07:00

In general, I would say that I have mellowed out considerably since coming to Jordan. But every once in a while i just have one of those incredibly impatient days. And it may go a little something like this:
At the beginning of our story i find out that i have a package waiting for me. Yay! Good stuff. So i go to my normally lifeless center and find it teeming with girls because school is out. When i finally shoo them all away from the sewing machine (for fear that they will sew themselves together into one big clump) i mention that i need to go to the post office. My boss says great! Have a good time. But my coworker who lives in the town where i am going says there are no busses for another hour. So i sit and stare into space for a good productive hour and leave with my coworker. It is during the crawl to the “bus stop” or rather the “preferred spot in the middle of the road, which is different for everyone,” that i find out that there was indeed another bus, she just didn’t like the driver. So now i am later than i would ideally like to be, as it is quickly approaching noon and i said i would be at the p.o. in the morning. No problem, i have time. But then my coworker asks me to lunch. I start sweating bullets (but i was probably already sweating because i am in the desert). I don’t know how i will get myself out of this one. Because i dislike going to lunch when i still have to go to work in the afternoon. It just makes me nervous. So I explain to her that I cannot because I have to go to work again. And she assures me that I will be back on time, which I know to be as impossible as meeting JFK next week in Petra. It just wont happen. She scoffs and says that only not good people make me late to work. She promises. And with really no other option I reluctantly accept. You see, lunch is still a lot of work sometimes, especially when you are not in the mood. And all I really wanted to do was get my package, go to some second hand stores and go home. Lunch is good. Better than I thought. but then it comes, as it always does when I am visiting. Just sleep here! everyone wants me to spend the night at their house. I explain in every way that I have work, and I have a bed, and I don’t want to spend the next 20 hours at their house, much as I may love them. And so they agree to get me to the bus station. And because I shouldn’t walk or take a taxi alone this involves waking up their brother so he can escort me. And of course he has to shake off the sleep with some tea or coffee or something else that would obviously have to take some time to prepare. But I finally made it to the bus station. Climb on the bus with less than an hour left to get to work. And then we sit. The bus will generally sit and wait to fill up. However, this time we sat and waited for much longer than necessary. It is at that point, where you are crammed on a hot sweaty bus with fifteen minutes left to get to work (and the trip takes half an hour) and people are just cramming in the aisle, and the bus has been full for at least half an hour that you start to feel as though you may start laughing or crying and never stop. It is the worst kind of frustration. And of course this would be when you get the three most important phone calls you have had in quite some time. Months maybe. And you cant even take them because you are on a bus that was made for 20 people, and there are at least 30 other people on that bus with you. And all this is made even better when you make it to work half an hour late and find no girls. Making all my trouble ultimately worthwhile…
So, that was my adventure last week. my package had peanut butter and jello and ramen and mac and cheese. The customs men laughed. And my coworker suggested that maybe my dad just didn’t know how fat I really was and thought I had gotten skinny. Yup. Good times. Neat fun. but I don’t care because now I have jello.
I think I have been in Jordan too long consecutively. I don’t think I ever went this long in the states without some kind of vacation. To another state at least. And I think I am getting a little stir crazy. Amman isn’t really doing it for me right now. So, I am planning a vacation to celebrate the end of the summer! Maybe Beirut. Not sure yet. Something fairly close to Jordan. And if anyone wants to come meet me somewhere near here, just drop a line. People ask me why I don’t go visit the states. I guess the short answer is that I spent 23 years there and really know what it looks like and that I want to see other things while I am here.
Anyway. That is the news I guess. mostly mellow, with occasional frustration and a high probability of impending burnout. Ha. Kind of like a weather report.

2006-06-14T09:17:00.000-07:00

So I guess the question on everyone’s mind is how Jordanians are reacting to Zarqawi’s death. I mean, as you may or may not know, he was Jordanian himself. I suppose that the answer to that is, there are lots of ways that Jordanians are reacting. Meaning, Jordan isn’t a place where everyone is of one mind about iraq and the war and the insurgency, let alone the US’s role in it. I will tell you the three main opinions I have heard. One: Zarqawi was a bad man and it is good he is out of the picture. There have been rallies to celebrate this. And of course within this camp of thought there are people who would have rather seen him arrested and tried. But come now, let’s not get nitpicky…
Two: he isn’t dead, the CIA has him. Just like they have Bin Laden.
Three: Zarqawi was a good man fighting western oppression. His death should not go unmourned. In other words… a martyr.
And the commonality between all of these opinions is that it doesn’t really matter a whole lot that he is gone. Al Qaida (which by the way means base, or foundation in Arabic. Fun fact) will just find someone else to take his place. And after that one is gone will come another. They see it all as sort of an exercise in futility.
As I think I mentioned previously there is a volunteer in Zarqawi’s hometown. I haven’t yet spoken to him about it, but I would be really interested to hear how people in his village are talking about this and see if there is any difference.
It’s a crazy time of year here for me. If y’all think back to a year ago and what I was doing (if you can remember that far back). I was caught up in a flurry of going away parties, and everything I did was my last. Last movie, last dinner at such and such, last fill in the blank here… and I was packing. Narrowing life down to just two bags. I was saying all my goodbyes. So that means, that for a whole new group of people they are now wondering what it will mean to be living in Jordan for 2 years. They are leaving apartments, cars, friends and loved ones. They are wondering who is going to take them to the airport, and who is going to meet them when they land. We are going to have a bunch of new people to add to our somewhat limited and ever shrinking pool of friends here come july. And our good friends who have the good fortune of finishing service will be gone by September. So, it will be a whole new dynamic. That, and summer is here with its crazy amount of activities at work. So I don’t expect to have much time to stop and take a breath until august.

2006-06-11T03:46:00.000-07:00

Well, the Queen Rania interview on Oprah just came to Jordan (for those of you who don’t know, she is the queen of Jordan). All I can say is wow. Sorry for all of those of you who saw that and thought that I was living in a place that is almost just like America. I have a couple of things to say. First of all, there were three women who were featured as “a day in the life of a Jordanian woman”. Couldn’t be farther from my own reality here. I mean, first of all, all three of them were working mothers, living in amman, and speaking fluent English. Not your typical Jordanian woman. I mean, one of the families even ordered dominoes delivery once a week. Amman is a totally different world from most of the rest of Jordan. Amman and aqaba are the only two places you can find fast food. That said, there are tons of places in those two cities: dominoes, kfc, burger king, popeyes, mcdonalds, cinnabon, starbucks, pizza hut… but don’t think that that is normal Jordanian life.
A day in the life of a typical woman in my village goes more like this: wake up to feed the family and send them off, tidy the house and cook a huge lunch, clean up after lunch, rest for a bit (sort of like a siesta, but not quite), maybe go out and visit in the evening with the rest of her family, cook a light dinner and clean up after it. This has tons of tea, coffee and tv interspersed in it, and of course prayer. And often times at night she hangs out in the house alone while her husband visits his friends. A vast oversimplification on my part. But I just feel that the oprah show really missed it when they described “average Jordanian life”. I would say that most women in jordan don’t have significant jobs outside the house, don’t go to the giant supermarket and worry about what American cereal to buy for the kids, don’t get in a big SUV to drive themselves around, and don’t let their daughters wear low cut shirts and backless dresses. Village life is much more conservative than that. The Christians here don’t cover their heads, and they will dress less conservatively. But that is about it.
As for the scarf issue. I want to be very careful about how I say this. Yes, it is a choice. Unlike Saudi it is not dictated by law that a woman must wear a veil. But I have found that there are two extremes in discussing this issue. There are those that say that the scarf is absolutely a choice by the women who wear them. And there are those who say that the scarf represents oppression and is forced upon women. Neither are exactly true. For some women the veil is a choice. For others it is a choice in name only. I mean, I don’t exactly believe that I am the only uncovered girl in my village because every single other woman wants to wear the veil. There are great social, cultural and familial pressures on a lot of girls to wear it. I do know women who used to go without and decided to cover later in life, and yes in those cases it was a personal choice that had to do with faith. However, those cases are mostly in amman. I was speaking to a woman in my village about living in a small town here. and we weren’t specifically talking about headscarfs, but she said that living in a small town is hard because everybody always knows everything that you do. It does apply to the veil. If you are the gossip of the town if you choose not to cover that is a lot of pressure. You are less likely to marry into a good family and less accepted in the village. Talk here can have big consequences.
The veil is a difficult issue to really explain. For example, 50 years ago, the majority of arab women did not cover. Or if not a majority a great deal more than now. So why the change? I don’t necessarily think that it is a sign of an increasingly conservative society so much as a response to increasing cultural influence from the west. The veil is a sign of Islamic culture, and I personally think that the increase in women covering is a rejection of western imperialism and globalization and a sort of clinging to their own culture. But the question then becomes, who is making that decision? It isn’t necessarily always the woman, but in rural villages often the pressure comes from families and patriarchs. The pressure may not even be blatantly stated. How can I put this in a familiar context? Well, I don’t know if I really can. But let me think on it. As a matter of fact, I think this whole blog deserved a little more attention than I have put into it and I am disappointed in what I did come up with. But it is hard for me to write about it in the context of living it. It has become the status quo for me lately. I think that it will be easier for me to tell you all about such things once I have a chance to step out of the local culture here.
So I will step away from that for a bit. It was all sort of a reaction to how disappointed I was by the queens interview and the portrayal of Jordan. It just wasn’t my reality.
Last week something crazy happened. My counterpart and her husband got in a car wreck. However, it wasn’t your run of the mill wreck. Apparently it was set up. They were driving back from a nearby village at night. There was a blockade of rocks set up across the road and they saw it too late and ran into it. And suddenly, there was a large group of men. According to the story, they were thieves and intended to rob them. And they most likely would have had another car not shown up at that moment. I personally hadn’t heard anything like this before. It is kind of the buzz of the town right now. Apparently very out of the ordinary.
So, that is all I have for this week I guess. Maybe next time I will try to spice it up a little.

2006-06-05T02:36:00.000-07:00

The other day I was sitting at work and we were watching a morning show. I wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on around me. I have developed an amazing ability to tune out everything that is happening. I get to the point where I don’t even hear what people are saying. And every once in a while I check back in to nod or agree. Although I don’t think I developed that skill only here. I can think of some instances at home where that was the case as well. but, that isn’t what I was going to tell you guys. There was a chef on this morning show. Chef Ramzi. He was making turkey sandwiches. Listen carefully. It is a complicated recipe. Two pieces of sliced white bread with a more than generous application of mayonnaise. One piece of turkey. More mayonnaise. Swiss cheese. And top it off with your second slice of white bread. Then, and this is the tricky part, cut off the crust. Seriously it took him at least fifteen minutes to make this delicacy. I think I could have a cooking show here.
In other news, my counterpart wants to have an Arabic dancing class at the center. I think it is mostly to teach me how. Honestly, I don’t know how, but everyone here can belly dance. Except me. They can shimmy every part of their bodies. And two different parts at once. Their hips and their shoulders can be doing totally different things at the same time and somehow look totally coordinated. I know that I will never ever be able to move like that. But inevitably at every female function I attend they ask me to dance. And by female function I actually mean any time there is music playing and men aren’t around. This means that even my exercise class isn’t exempt. And it isn’t uncommon for one girl to dance and everybody else to watch. So, when it is my turn to dance they all stop and watch me. And when other girls dance, they tend to dance at me. They look me straight in the eyes and wont look away and start shimmying. I usually end up at a loss for words, or any other reaction. I am not exactly sure what I should do when they dance for me. Do I look them in the eyes? Do I look away? Do I say something? So I sit and worry about just how interested my face looks and if I am blushing or what. I don’t know if you have had the experience of being expressly danced for, but it is actually kinda unsettling. Especially when you have no idea what should be done in just such a circumstance and people are watching you watch. But I think they think that if they have my full attention I may somehow learn it passively. Also, the women here love to make me ululate. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it is when the women make that high pitched noise with their tongues. Like la la la la la loooo!! Apparently I am ok at it, especially for a foreigner. On field trips they usually want me to do it first thing in the morning. But as a general rule, 7 am is too early for me to start screaming. So, when ten rolls around they all look at me rather conspiratorily and say “andi…. Do you know what time it is? Its TEN!!!” that is my cue. I guess ten am is the perfect time for wailing to start, and what better way to kick it off than with me? But since I spend so much of my time here silent, my throat takes a while to warm up, so the first few generally sound all cracked like a pubescent boy. I can assure you it is really an attractive noise. But as I may have already said, summer is wedding season, so I can be assured to be doing it on a weekly basis now. Good practice.
Speaking of weddings, that is my big news for the week. I went to my friends wedding here (you know, the volunteer who married a Jordanian girl?). it was great! By far the best wedding I have attended in Jordan (I know I said that in my last blog about a different wedding, but this one was truly the best. Maybe part of it had to do with knowing the couple?). It was held in a church in amman. But first, there was something called a jaha. The male volunteers attended. It is the tradition in which the man and his family go to ask for permission to marry the bride (although, by the time the jaha rolls around, this is pretty much decided on. But it is all part of the tradition). From what I hear the jaha was awesome. And the us embassador showed up on the groom’s behalf to vouch for him. Then came the church ceremony. It was a roman catholic ceremony (although the service was held in Arabic and a little English – no latin). The groom’s family had come from the states to attend – parents, siblings, even grandparents. Having just flown in from the states the day before the wedding, they were understandably fatigued. So much so that the grooms brother passed out during the wedding. But he stepped out and caught a breath of fresh air, and everything continued fine. Then we had a couple hours after the ceremony for a break. We used it to prepare for the reception. The reception was held at the Sheraton hotel. In amman you can generally wear anything to a wedding reception (some went sleeveless, some had short dresses). The reception was full of dancing and the groom had specifically said that if you came, you had to dance, so the dance floor was always full. there was no toasting and no speeches. But it was a great night. The reception went till after one am. The best part about it was that both the bride and groom looked so happy and calm. There was no stress about them at all. Usually the brides here look very serious and somewhat terrified. But both of them were just glowing and obviously very happy and excited. I think that is what specifically made the wedding so great. And we all left very happy for the newlyweds. Two days later was the village party. Because the groom had spent two years living in a small village, he wanted to celebrate the wedding there as well. this village is about five miles from my own. So, a bunch of volunteers came all the way down from the north for it. We all wore our Jordanian clothes. The men wore thobes (the long white robes that you are used to seeing) and schmags (the red and white checked head coverings). The women wore habayas (the long black womens robes) or women’s thobes (long black embroidered dresses) but none of us covered our hair. Even the groom’s family wore Jordanian clothing. We all looked pretty good, I think. And the bride wore a woman’s thobe with white and yellow embroidery. She was from amman, and I heard that this is the first time she had bought a thobe or worn one. And it was the first time she had been to an event like this in a village as well. amman is like a whole different world from the villages here. the village wedding was a standard village wedding, except in the sense that it was coed. That was pretty amazing. But the women sat and watched while the men danced and sang. So, the village wedding was a whole bunch of sitting. But still it was better than your average village wedding. At least there were Americans that I could talk to about something other than how pretty the wedding was. Also, there was a couple from texas there. I didn’t talk to the husband at all, but I talked a bit to the wife. She was born in Denver and had moved to Nashville. But now she and her husband live in Jordan eight months of the year. She was a fascinating woman. So it was pretty interesting to get to meet her and hear her story as well. I don’t exactly know what her connection was that she was in the village for the wedding. In the village weddings go pretty late, one or two am. But I opted to go home around midnight. Now the bride and groom are off to their honeymoon and then it is back to the states for grad school.
So that was my week. Hope that you all are well.

2006-05-25T02:25:00.000-07:00

I hosted my first visitor! My friend Cristella from the Berkeley Free Clinic came to visit me. She came in on a boat from Egypt. And who knew that I have connections at the port here? I had been waiting for longer than I thought I would have to, and apparently my face was starting to look a little panicked. The army guy at the door asked me if I had just come in and I told him that I actually lived here and was waiting to pick someone up. He asked where I lived and when I told him he said that it just happened to be his hometown. So he whisked me inside past security, told me to find my friend and bring her to the front of the line. So that was picking her up. She had been traveling for the last three months – morocco, India, Egypt and Jordan. All by herself. It is amazing. Makes me hold out hope for my post peace corps travel plans.
We had a great time together, although our late night talking made all my neighbors ask me if I had recently gotten engaged. Apparently girls only stay up till 2 giggling if they are going to get married…
We spent most of our time in my village. I got to take her to 2 days of a wedding as well. it was the best wedding I have been to. The men and the women had their parties in 2 separate houses, so the women really got to cut loose. Off came the headscarfs, on came the music and everyone went nuts! We all danced for hours. And they made me dance. They wouldn’t let me just sit and watch. It was pretty fun. The second night of the wedding we all piled into various cars and drove to wadi musa to pick up the bride. Everyone was singing and honking and sort of playing leapfrog with their cars. Then at the brides house all the women got out and went to fetch her. They all circled around her clapping and singing (some crying) as if to sort of psych her up for it. Then we got in our cars again and drove clapping and singing to ma’an (another town). There we ate and danced with the bride. And again I couldn’t sit on the sidelines. I didn’t even know the bride or groom, but their families wanted me to dance and so I did. it was much better than the weddings where the women all sit quietly and talk about what a great party it is.
So that is the short version of her stay.
Yesterday my center had a lecture about AIDS. From what I could tell it was less than useful. He was talking about enzymes and treatment options. Not that that is necessarily useless information, but I don’t think that it really helps the 17 and up crowd. He offered to do the lecture half in English so that I could understand what he was saying. I declined. It sounds bad, but the whole time I was just thinking of how great a workshop you could really put on. That is, if it weren’t for the rigid definitions of what is and is not appropriate here. And I still haven’t figured out why he talked about the internet and mobile phones for a half an hour at the beginning of the lecture.
I was telling a friend in an email that I feel like I am losing the will to blog. Part of that comes from the fact that I am falling into a fairly steady routine. I wake up and work on the grants I am trying to write. Maybe go hang out at work and do it. Later I go to work and give English classes and exercise classes. That’s about it. I do have other stuff going on, but that is the bulk of my life right now. So, that’s not much to talk about. The other part of is that I never really hear from the majority of folks at home. I don’t know what is going on in your lives. I don’t know what you want to hear about mine. Its like I am writing this for myself. And I know what is going on in my life. And that is what I have a journal for. Please write. It makes me feel like people still remember me. And even if I suck at returning those emails I eventually will get around to it.
I put up just a couple new pictures. One of them is at an amusement park. I wasn’t expecting to go to one, and on a field trip we just showed up at it. It was kind of like a state fair. It was strange. When I got on the rollercoaster there was a picture of king abdulla waving, as if to say goodbye. And next to it a sticker that just said “irony”. Strange. On that same trip a girl from my center bought some face soap that had a wonderful example of translation gone wrong. Or maybe someone just had a sense of humor. The bottle said “30 seconds dispels horniness”. She told me that the Arabic version just said it made your face smooth. I almost fell out of the bus laughing. And of course I didn’t tell her what the English actually meant.
So. Like I said. I am having a hard time writing this. Summer is rolling around quickly. Maybe the myriad of activities my center will be involved in will inspire me to write y’all. Till then…

2006-05-02T03:28:00.000-07:00

Well, the bad news is that I lost my favorite hoodie. I lost it in the shuffle between busses. But I take some small comfort in knowing that somewhere in Jordan, someone is wearing a needle exchange sweatshirt and maybe not even knowing it. There is so much to tell since I last wrote.
Last week I was helping my counterpart make mansef for 25 guests who were showing up for lunch. When I showed up at her house there were a few kids outside playing with a kid. And by kids playing with a kid I mean children tormenting a baby goat. For a brief moment I thought (with horror) that this was our mansef goat. But apparently the little guy just got lost. So for a couple days we had a pet goat. We fed it milk with a bottle. I actually don’t know where he went, but I hope he found his mom again.
I just recently came back from operation smile (I talked about it in the last blog). We had about 100 kids and their families from iraq to get operations. Unfortunately the weather was kinda bad so we couldn’t take the kids outside and entertain them. We tapped all my resources for indoor childrens games. A lot of the kids were very shy. I wondered what the reaction they normally receive is. It certainly couldn’t be a group of Americans who want to pick them up and kiss them and roughhouse with them. I found myself mostly gravitating towards baby duty. I would wander around and find babies and take them so that mom or dad could eat or have a moment’s peace. I was surprised just how many dads there were there. I would say that a majority of the parents were the dads. Probably due to the dangerous bus ride in from iraq.
I had a blast with the kids, but I found the whole experience to be bittersweet. Several times as I was playing hide and seek or holding a sleeping baby I couldn’t help but think of what they were going back to. Most of them were shia and going back to the south of iraq. And on the bus ride in apparently their bus was stopped by insurgents. They were threatened and eventually let go with the caveat that the insurgents would be looking for them when they came back through. I had what was most likely the hardest conversation I have ever had in my life with one of the fathers. He told me that life under sadaam had been hell. But that hell was traded for another now. He literally used the word bloodbath. He was mostly talking about the people that are coming in to fight from other countries. Extremists. And he told me that he thought that there was a good chance that he and his baby girl would be killed on the return trip. What do you say to that? I felt that anything I could have said would have been trite and meaningless. I mean, I almost always have something to say, but I just couldn’t. and I was sitting there holding his baby. All I could think was, don’t cry here, andi. I asked him what he thought could be done to make it better, and he said nothing. It would never end. The complete lack of hope in his voice, and the tears in his eyes… I won’t lie, it really made me feel sad and angry and helpless all at once. I had to give myself a break and compose myself in the hotel room. So far as I know, alternate arrangements were made and the families were flown home to avoid whatever their fate may have been if they had taken busses.
In rereading that I am struck by how heavy it really is. And to be honest I don’t know where to go from there. Anything I would say or any story I would tell would seem out of place and inappropriate. So for now I will go and try to reabsorb what really happened last week. But I am ok. You either process your experiences or you pack up and go home. And real life is what I was after, right?

2006-04-16T05:20:00.000-07:00

For those of you who celebrate it, happy easter. Pagan eggs and all.
Well, last thursday night was a last dinner for one of the volunteers in the south. There are really only 3 of us down here. So, all three of us went into wadi to give him a sending off. It was really sad. And it seemed so strange that I had grown so close to him over just seven months. I don’t think I ever considered myself good friends with someone after seven months in the states. But everything social happens at an accelerated pace here. After one or two significant social interactions you consider yourself friends. Unless of course you actually dislike the person, which does happen. But disliking someone is one thing, and avoiding them another. Avoiding anyone here turns out to be too much work, and really not worth it. And considering that I see most of the other volunteers no more than once every three months, it is really not that tough. That is the other thing. How can you really consider someone your friend when you see them so rarely, and the rest is made up of text messages and the occasional phonecall? But it happens somehow. But back to the going away. It was really sad to see him go. He has been here since I got here and sort of showed me the ropes. And now he is done with his service. Saying goodbye is pretty hard. Because you know there is a really good chance you may never see that person again (even if you swear you will). Kind of like those really close friends you had in high school, but eventually fall out of touch with. And it is different when someone completes their service than when they terminate early. Because the early terminators needed it, and at least you could see that. The people at the end seem to just be getting into it. Like it is cut short. And then it was two. That is, until the next round of volunteers gets here. By the time the new volunteers get here my other friend in the south will also be done, so it will just be me. And a whole bunch of new people to get to know all over again. But we have a few months before that happens.
Anyway…
Anyone ever washed all their clothes by hand? It is a great way to spend an afternoon. i do all my laundry by hand. I put scalding hot water and powdered detergent in my bathtub. I agitate my clothes by hand and kind of scrub them together because I don’t have a scrubbing board or anything (because most people here have little washing machines). It is amazing how clean it doesn’t get them. But because there is a lot of dust in the air the water gets super dirty anyway. And if the soap doesn’t clean the clothes it at least fades them well. We will just say that my black pants are sort of a dark grey now. In the winter the extra bonus is that they take days to dry (in the summer it takes about 15 or 20 minutes). And the unmentionables take even longer because who would ever dream of hanging them where them might be seen. After a sufficiency of raw dishpan hands I even miss the late night Laundromat run.
But I had a treat last Friday. My counterpart let me use her vacuum and her washing machine. And made me lunch as well. So I got to see how woefully inadequate my attempts at cleaning my clothes have actually been. And for the first time in six or so months I feel like I have a few clothes that actually are clean. Yeah, my life is nothing but excitement.
Fat American. I think that should be my name here. The women here are obsessed with how much I weigh. I had yet another public weighing. And I overheard a woman saying that this was the first time in her life she had ever seen a fat foreigner. I think she didn’t know I could understand her. But more likely she didn’t care. It seems like calling someone fat here isn’t considered as rude as it might be in the states. and they all still seem to want exercise classes from me… But such is life.
This coming week is going to be exciting for me! Wednesday and Thursday my center is taking a field trip to the north of Jordan. A place called ajloun. Then on Saturday we are going to dana, which is a nature reserve, I think. Then on Saturday one of my friends from the clinic is coming to visit! I cant wait. My first visitor. And most exciting of all, next week I will be participating in something called operation smile. The bring a bunch of kids from iraq who have cleft palates and hare lips into Jordan where they receive free corrective operations. Our job is to keep the families and kids comfortable and entertained. I am hoping that it will feel like I have actually accomplished something good. And I will be sure to tell you all about it. Well, take care and stay dry. And there should be a few more pics up now.

2006-04-05T03:07:00.000-07:00

My oh my. It has been forever since I last wrote.
Well, I have had my first trip with my center now. It was interesting. It was a two day trip to aqaba. We left early in the morning on a Friday. When we got to aqaba there was some triathlon going on. So there we were downtown and here comes a herd of women in swimsuits on bikes. And all the guys were lined up to watch. But it was surprising in the way that it would be surprising to see a bunch of women running and biking naked in the states. I am just so unused to seeing women wearing so little in public here. Even an uncovered head catches my head when I am in my village. So we ate our falafel sandwiches and the ladies sort of clucked their tongues in disappoval. Because aqaba is a port town, it is all duty free. That means that the big activity there is shopping. So, we let the girls loose in the market and I went shopping with my coworkers. I assume that most of you reading this know that I hate, actually loathe shopping for clothes. And it is even better when you are dragging around a crying baby. It was really great. I think the best way to describe the shopping district of aqaba is to compare it to china town in most big cities in the US. A bunch of stores with the same cheap plastic crap at every one. So we ran a marathon shopping trip all the while avoiding the triathlon crowds. I didn’t buy anything. I just couldn’t work up the energy to be interested in finding any clothes. I would have rather jabbed a sharp stick in my eye at that point. So I took the baby and commiserated with him while everyone else shopped. My coworkers and I went to the public beach for a while and rolled our pants all the way up to our ankles and waded and drank coffee. And then something really crazy happened. There were two men and a woman sitting at the table next to us. And one of the guys looked at my coworker and said, hey let us see your baby. And she did! Just handed him right over to these perfect strangers. And the baby was fine with it. People here aren’t as super protective of their babies as in the states. Babies are always being passed around because there is the expectation that all people know how to handle them. And they do. Even grown men go gaga for babies here. The hostile we were staying in was next door to a field with a track. And I decided that it would be a good idea to run. The girls came out and cheered for every lap I finished. But after I was done everyone talked about how crazy it was, and why is her face so red? And the bus trip back was exciting as well. Anywhere a girls center goes, a drum comes with. So the trip back was full of drumming and singing and dancing. And if I cant dance Arabic style standing still, I certainly cannot do it on a moving bus.
I decided to take a personal trip to aqaba to meet with my friends for a weekend. And it just so happened that my friend in the next village was taking a day trip down with her special ed kids that very weekend. So I decided to help chaperone for the day and just stay in aqaba when they went home. Her center is mostly comprised of normal functioning deaf kids and from what I could tell middle to severe special ed cases. And all of her kids were the sweetest kids I have met in Jordan. I had a great time. We took them swimming in the ocean, in pants of course. And when we were done in the ocean we got back on the bus, which of course wouldn’t start. So what did we do? Me and my friend and all the special ed kids leapt out of the bus to push start it. And the kids really were excited about it. But I would say that pushing the short bus with those kids really will stick with me for a while.
Then it was time for me to get a hotel for us all. I don’t know why, but apparently it has been decided that I am a really great bargainer, and so I got sent to get us the rooms. And we had some really specific qualifications for me to fill. We wanted an ocean facing balcony, bathrooms in the room and we wanted it all for 5 jd a night. Well, I got most of that except the balconies faced the other way. In itself not a great story. But when I returned from aqaba I went to a friends site to paint a giant mural of a world map. Great. So the next day I wake up covered in something that looks like a cross between chicken pox and shingles. Really everywhere. Even my earlobes. So we force ourselves to finish her map (which took 72 hours by our calculations) and then move on to my site to paint an even bigger one. But when I woke up and my eye was swelling closed I decided perhaps it was time to seek some medical advice. And when my counterpart saw me she insisted I go to the doctor and not come back until I was all better. Her telling of the story went something like this: “your face looked like this (as she grimaced and winked one eye shut). And it made me cry. My husband asked me why I was crying and I said “I just saw andi’s face.””
It was a great version of the story. So yes, I decided to go to amman. And a mere four and a half hours later I was there. I got a corticosteroid shot and a strong antihistamine shot and a prescription of antihistamines. So, in discussing my unknown ailment with other volunteers I came to the realization that I was in fact covered in bug bites. To be more specific, bed bug bites from our wonderful hotel in aqaba. Really even now I cringe to write that. Gross. So I got the worst of the bites since I am so tasty, apparently.
And that meant that I got to go to my six month training with all the other volunteers I never see and Jordanians I have never met looking somewhat like I have mild leprosy. although i am not even sure leprosy can be mild... And Jordanians are not sensitive to embarrassment really. I have heard more times than I can count “whats wrong with her?” “what happened to your face?”. And because I cannot muster up the courage to tell them what it really is, I say it is an allergy. To something. But I don’t know what. I suppose it works.
Our training was good. It made me realize just how great my coworkers and site really are. I have a lot of support and freedom that some of the other volunteers just don’t have. And it was good to see so many people. Plus there was breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I mean, I normally wouldn’t get excited about that, but in my house I generally eat a lot of bread and laughing cow cheese. It just never seems worth it to cook. And I generally burn something or undercook it. But I think I have been in my village for too long now. I was really anxious to be around so many people at once and was happy to be back in my house by myself.
So, that is the short version of my life during the last month. Hope all is well at home. Miss y’all.

2006-03-09T02:23:00.000-08:00

Happy birthday to me! Well, the twenty-seventh was my first birthday abroad. One down two to go! It was the first year that I haven’t shared my birthday with anyone. As some of you know, I was born on my sister’s birthday party. And that was the start of my sharing birthdays. And then when I met my best friend I discovered that his birthday was the day before mine. And what kind of party doesn’t last past midnight? You start on his birthday and end on mine! Perfect. But this year I didn’t even really tell anyone it was my birthday. So I spent my birthday as usual, at work in my center. The highlight of the day was that there was a workshop about terrorism that night. So I went with twenty or so girls to the local youth hostile and took pictures while they learned about terrorism and how to avoid it. We ate dinner together at the hostile and then got on a bus back to the village. Throughout the day I just sort of pretended everything was for my birthday. Like the flags around town for the hostage that I told you about? Those were for my birthday party. And the dinner we ate together was my birthday dinner. And the party on the bus ride back, well that was my birthday party. And for dessert I bought a gross little Debbie type cake. Lit my lighter, sang happy birthday and blew it out. That was my birthday.
So the day after my birthday (which happened to be fat Tuesday), my friends found out that it had been my birthday. They told me that I was a jerk for not telling and then took me out for pizza and ice cream in wadi musa. And I even got presents! Bandanas to remind me of the small town I grew up in. one had skulls on it. Really classy stuff. But it was a really fun night. At one point I was asking where we could find some mardi gras beads. And my friend mused that the only place you could definitely find beads was at a mosque. You see, there are prayer beads here very similar to rosaries. Each bead is supposed to symbolize one of the hundred different names of god. So it was a tasteless joke, but hilarious at the time. And the following day, my counterpart told me she had waited for me to come by because she had remembered my birthday. She gave me a picture frame and a candle for my house. And a musical card that played happy birthday. So that was the follow up to my birthday.
Our hostage finally came home to taibeh. He had been in amman for medical testing. But now he is home. The afternoon that he arrived, we closed the center for the afternoon and went to watch. Everyone kind of milled around saying “his car is going to come from up there”, and I do mean everyone in town. So we walked from house to house watching the road above. People were out in fields and on their roofs and in the school yard. And then music started from the loudspeakers set up for the party and guns started going off and there were fireworks in the middle of the day. And then an entourage of at least 40 cars crammed with people all waving flags and honking came winding down the mountain with a police escort. I have to admit that I got a little choked up about it. And it was surprising because I am past that super emotional stage. I felt that American politics were to blame for his being abducted in the first place and I somehow represented that. And now he was finally home. Later that night was a party for the whole town. I went with my counterpart. Walking to the party had this feeling of excitement and that this is the sort of crazy experience you join the peace corps to have. You know, in a foreign place, but happy and with people you know and the air just buzzing. And it was a beautiful clear night. The mountains and boulders were lit by the moon, and the landscape just looked so unlike anything in the us. And there was music and the sound of people singing. And it is times like this that I wish I were more coherent and articulate so that I could tell you how it really felt. But any attempt I make is bound to be pathetic.
The party itself was sort of a letdown because of the whole gender thing. The men dance and sing and hang out and the women sort of hide on a rooftop and watch it all. But all my girls from the center were besides themselves to see me socially and introduce me to their mothers. And the whole party culminated for me in a boy about my age standing all of about five feet away from me and unloading a gun in the air rapid-fire. Unexpectedly. And then he handed the gun off to the younger boys. And that was my bedtime. I walked home the long way so as not to go the direction of all the shooting.
I think that is all my news. I am going on a trip to aqaba with my center. I get to give them a p.e. class. It should be fun. I will let you know how it goes. oh, and i posted some new pics of the party for our hostages homecoming.

2006-02-25T03:14:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you just have to take off your sunglasses and look around. Everything looks a little better when it isn’t grey. And I think my mood lately is helping. I felt surprisingly relieved to be back in my own house and working with my own girls after the camp in aqaba. And I think it was the first time I have really used the word home instead of saying something like back at site. I felt just a little more at ease in my own skin. And I even spent a few days visiting people. I know that doesn’t sound like that big a deal, but for me to go sit with people I don’t know all that well and don’t really share a language with for hours at a time is a pretty big deal. In fact, socialization has been my biggest road block here.
Well folks, the hostage from my village has been released, safe and sound. I think I told y’all about the man. He has two wives here and one wife in iraq and was kidnapped while he was there. They were demanding that Jordan release the women who was arrested after the amman bombings. Anyway, I don’t know what happened that he was released, but he was. I was out for a walk Tuesday night and I heard a bunch of gunfire. I think I may have already explained that violent crime in Jordan is actually very low. So gunshots usually mean that someone is celebrating something. So I knew that something good was happening. And by the time I got to my house there were fireworks all over town. And my ducan (corner store) man told me that Mahmoud Seidat (the hostage) was being returned. So now all the houses in the village have party flags up, as well as white flags. I am not really sure exactly what the white flags mean, but people have been driving around waving them. My taxi driver suggested that I go to the return party. But, I never met the man or his family and I thought that the random American stopping by to say congratulations might not really be appreciated. He is coming back to the village today.
Here is a funny story. Or at least I found it amusing. I was sitting in my center flipping through an Arabic magazine and I got to a page that had a big blow up of two giant roosters. Apparently there is a farm in Baghdad that has this cockfighting show. And it isn’t the kind with razor blades and stuff like that. Anyway, these two chickens – one is named saddam and one is named bush, and they are the stars of the show. Anything beyond that I didn’t really understand.
For valentine’s day I threw a party in my center. The girls seem to like valentine’s day. So I bought them chocolates and we made some tang (really popular here). We played music and drums and danced and sang and just kind of went crazy. It was fun. But then my center closed for a while. Snow days. We had hail and fog and mudslides. And the wind sounded like my whole village was going to be washed off the mountain. I suppose we were just having a late winter. But now the weather has turned to spring. And my center is getting ready to start taking trips and having activities.
A week or so ago I was drinking tea with my counterpart and she told me that she thought my hair didn’t look good because it was 2 different colors. I agreed and told her that I was going to get my hair cut soon. So the next morning the power was out in the village and we couldn’t open the center. She told me to come with her. And down the road we went. We ended up in a salon and a girl from Syria cut my hair. All of it. So I have a boy cut now. Most people hate it because even though most women cover they like really long hair here. I think they mostly think I am crazy.
A few weeks ago my counterpart and I closed the center early and had a little adventure. She wanted to buy some new clothes for her husband and surprise him. So she called him and said she was helping me go to the post office, just in case we ran into him. So we got in a service (like a cab) that usually goes to Saudi. But the driver was friends with my counterpart and so he gave us a lift so we didn’t have to wait for the bus. Our first stop was the jewelry store. My counterpart was selling a ring to pay for the clothes. Now you have to understand that this town is one of the more conservative in Jordan. They think nothing of protesting their own government. They had protests when the government raised the price of bread. Anyway, my counterpart was talking to the guy at the counter (apparently they knew each other) and she introduced me to him and told him I was American. There was another lady in the store and when she heard that I was an American I got the look of death from her. I mean it was a really icy stare. When I stay in my own village it is easy to forget that some people in jordan kinda hate me for my americanness. But when I go out of town where people don’t know me, sometimes it really gets obvious. Anyway, we sold the jewelry and bought some clothes for her husband. It was fun. And then we went back to the bus station. But there weren’t any busses for a while. So we crammed in a car with some other folks from taibeh. And we rocketed back home. And everyone was kind of cringing and holding on for dear life. Usually Jordanians drive so crazy and noone even blinks, so this was a really special ride. And that was my little trip to ma’an.
And in the latest cartoon news, the hotel in town took down the Danish flag. It has five or six world flags up, but now the Danish one is no more. I am not sure what fate it met. Probably just got put in a closet somewhere.
Ok kids. That’s all for now. Lets hope that the next week or so brings me some inspiration for a really great post next time. I updated the photos in my ofoto account and I will put a link under the links portion of this blog. Hope all is well at home.

2006-02-19T04:43:00.000-08:00

ok. so i posted some pics on ofoto.com
username: andigirard@gmail.com
password: photos
i only have a few on there now, but i will let you know when i add more.
and i will make a real post sometime soon, but not now.

2006-02-09T02:35:00.000-08:00

Happy superbowl y’all! It feels like it has been three months since I last posted. I’ve been a pretty busy gal. Busy, but not necessarily productive. I was looking over some of my past entries and I realize that it sounds like I eat a whole lot of ice cream! It really isn’t as much as it seems. Anyway, I have kind of been on the go since last Thursday (the 26th). All last week I was at a camp that hosted three boys centers and one girls center (none of which were mine). I was invited by the volunteers that were putting it on to observe and hopefully do the same thing next year. Every summer in Jordan there are summer camps all over the country. But unfortunately the kids just kind of sit around and don’t do anything. There is really very little planned for them to do. Well this workshop was meant to give the kids the chance to learn to facilitate workshops for their peers at these camps this summer. The focus was drama and team building. The drama tried to focus on bringing up discussions about problems in Jordanian life, such as gender, wasta (connections), unemployment, etc. And by team building I mean things like trust falls and group problem solving. You know, the kind of stuff one might expect to see in a work retreat in the states. But the kids here really don’t have any exposure to stuff like that, and it actually fits into the m.o. of the higher council for youth here. So they flew in a ropes course guy from the states and we had translators and all that. Pretty cool overall.
So last Wednesday we found out at the last minute that the counterparts (managers of the center that work with the volunteers) had moved the camp from the valley to aqaba. That sort of stuff really happens all the time here. So, last Thursday I woke up at 4 to catch a bus to amman to meet up with everyone. And I made the bus stop to pick up another volunteer on the way. It is pretty nice. I teach exercise to the wife of the amman bus driver so all I have to do is call her up and say I want a bus the next morning. Sometimes he will even come to my house. So I can reserve seats and stuff just like a Jordanian! Anyway, we got there early. And my friend decided she really really wanted some American coffee. So we went out to starbucks. It is in the part of town that is like stepping into America for a bit. It is by the embassy and some malls and a lot of important people’s houses. So as we dragged our raggedy asses in, carrying a weeks worth of luggage and hoping just for a cup of black coffee, a blond woman breezed in past us and asked for a venti skim caramel latte… oh and some candy for her kids. Paid 5 jd, gave us a sideways glance and breezed back out to her green range rover. Yes kids, that woman exists here too. She is all over the world. And yes, I know I have very little to say since I was in a starbucks. But sometimes you just need something reminiscent of home.
So Friday we had hoped to leave to go to aqaba by 2. but my friends counterpart was really hung up on getting a calendar made before we left for the workshop. And the ability of most Jordanians to use a computer is very limited. So my friend was basically working the mouse while her counterpart hunted and pecked. Hours later we got the bus there and loaded and went to pick up the boys. At which point all the girls were ordered to go to the back of the bus. We went and crammed together under a teetering pile of luggage. Every center had brought a few extra people, so we didn’t fit on the bus. But they didn’t give up until everyone had piled off and on to the bus several times. At this time they decided the problem was all the damned Americans on the bus. So we hopped off the bus and called a cab. By cab I mean a little five person van with a covered bed. So we crammed all ten of us in and off we went to aqaba. We were rather crammed together, but when you can go literally weeks with no physical human contact you don’t mind these things so much. Feels kinda cozy. And we sang to pass the time. And I actually don’t think that anything I can say here can really give you an idea of the complete absurdity of it all. Especially when we stopped for a break in the middle of the desert. No lights around us, no cars, no people, and some of the brightest stars you have ever seen in your life. I think we were somewhere outside the dead sea.
So we got to the camp site / youth hostile around ten at night. This is when we found out the volunteers had no place to stay. After negotiating for about an hour we gave up and got on the bus to go into the actual city of aqaba. We stayed at a little cheap hotel which only had 2 rooms for us, and overcharged us. So we got 2 or three hours of sleep, all 2 to a twin bed. And then we were up and ready to start the camp!
It started out really well with a skit by us and discussion with the boys and girls. Yes, it was a coed camp. But these girls are from a really liberal city called salt. It used to be the capital back in the day. Some of them were uncovered, and I even saw one in short sleeves. My town is really nothing like that. Anyway, after that we went to start the segregated workshops. About ten minutes into our session, one of the male counterparts came in and demanded three girls to go make lunch. Ashley (the girl leading the workshop) said it wasn’t possible. But he wasn’t going to give up so we compromised by sending the extra volunteers (me and two others) to work in the kitchen. And this guy wouldn’t give up. He wanted to tell us that we were cutting everything wrong and how to do it. We told him he could do it, but I guess he didn’t really think that getting the onions cut to his specs was worth it. I also told him that if he brought me some tape I would be happy to tape them back together for him. I guess that didn’t work for him either. We eventually found out that if we just sang in English he would leave us alone. But through the course of the week I got to really like the ladies that worked in the kitchen. They were fun and we talked and they would randomly shove food into our mouths to taste. But I cant say that the blanket expectation that the girls take care of kitchen work didn’t make me see red. But at the end of the whole camp one of the boys came up to me to say thank you, and that really kind of made everything a little bit better. But having actual discussions with boys and girls about the state of gender relations here made me sad. The boys think that things are as they should be, and the girls for the most part openly agree. There really is the idea that men and women are biologically different and destined to different roles in life. One old woman at the camp said it best “women clean and men work and that is it.”
And I had some really fascinating conversations with our translators as well. These are Jordanians with extensive experience with Americans and America, so they are unlikely to believe that we really are our village personas. I even told one of them my real views about god and religion, I haven’t told any other Jordanians that. And she took it like a champ. It didn’t seem to bother her at all. And we talked about things like religion, gender, politics, family, marriage, how people feel about the royals here. Everything. Some of the best conversations I have had here. So those are the highlights of my week at camp.
The kings birthday was last week. He turned 44. so I went to a big party with my center. It was really fun. It was one of those days where I was just really sad all day. But then we went to the party and my spirits rose considerably. While we were in the center waiting to leave, one of the girls got herself trapped in the bathroom. So there we were with our nice clothes on and a pickaxe, pulling down the bathroom door. I tried really hard not to laugh, but it was fairly amusing to me. I am sure the girl in the bathroom felt differently. I also attended a birthday celebration in aqaba. I really can understand now how people get trampled to death in crowds. Yeah, it was just about that bad.
In personal news, I have had two marriage proposals this last month. The first runs the boys youth center in wadi and called my counterpart to ask her permission to marry me. She said she thought I was probably too busy and not interested, but she kids me about it all the time. The other was my schwarma guy. He asked another volunteer if he thought that I might be interested. He also said no. oh, and one of the older girls at the center has recently informed me of her decision to marry my dad. She is 23. I said no.
The other big news here is the Danish newspaper depictions of mohammed. For those of you that don’t know about it, a Danish newspaper asked its readers to send in their own depictions of the prophet mohammed. And some of them were offensive. If I understand it correctly this happened last year, but then a british paper republished them. So they have been seen in the middle east and people are pissed. Just the other day when I was at the internet there was a demonstration outside. It was a pretty small crowd of men out in the street shouting stuff I didn’t understand. But from the stuff I have been seeing on tv other demonstrations are pretty intense. Lots of Danish flags burning around here. And now there is a Jordanian boycott of Danish goods. So no more butter or cheese for me. I wont say the cheese was good, but it was better than most of your Jordanian cheeses. But people are really mad. In my village they said that if the water was Danish they would go without. But I think they were halfway kidding. They were more curious to see if I had seen the cartoons and what was in them. And that is the news from here. Oh, and in aqaba I bought my first schmag (the red and white head scarves for men). But I bought a multicolored one. I am really into it. Fun to play with. I am gonna buy a bunch more. And when you all come to visit I will show you how to tie them! Hey, gotta entertain yourself somehow… ok. This turned out to be pretty massive. If you waded your way through the whole thing, thanks! And I am attempting to upload a few pics this time. Hope it works. Im done now. peace.

2006-01-19T02:08:00.000-08:00

damn! i suppose it has been a while eh? well, lets see... what has happened that might be of interest. well, we had a -2c morning here (about 28 deg f) according to my counterpart. a lot of royalty in the region have died this month: the king of dubai, the king of kuwait, and the son of the prince of bahrain. not too big a reaction in my community. only noticable difference for me was that all my english speaking dubai stations got taken over by the koran for a week. i watched the dubai funeral at my center. king abdulla was right up front at the burial. but in a sea of white dish dashes (those long robes that men wear)he was wearing a suit. im not sure if there is any significance, but he certainly stood out. he did, however have the requisite red and white schmag (head scarf for men). during the prayer over the late king's body, a cell phone went off in the crowd. nokia ring. how innappropriate. i couldnt help thinking of the daily show bit about cell phones: (sung to the tune of the nokia ring) "youre annoying stupid douchebag, turn your phone off now" i think it applies.
the other big news i am sure you are all aware of is the ariel sharon situation. i was expecting a big reaction but so far there hasnt been one. i did hear one woman say "god willing... god is generous." im not really sure how to interperet that one though.
there was a big holiday recently that i may have previously mentioned. it is an islamic holiday called eide al adha (eve of the sacrifice). it basically commemorates abraham (i think that was the one...). if you will recall, god asked him to sacrifice his son. and abraham, like any good father and servant of god was happy to comply. he even told satan to bugger off after said prince of darkness tried to convince him otherwise. well, so touched was god that he sent a sheep to be sacrificed in lieu of abrahams son. praise be. so, during eide al adha, every family should kill a sheep. in the spirit of islam, a good portion of all that mean is given away to the poor, which i actually think is great. mmmm..... meat. so, i celebrated by going to petra (so as to avoid actually seeing the carnage). i was not entirely successful though. a friend in a neighboring village showed me video fo the camel that was sacrificed in his village. so, your standard sacrifice goes something like this: 3 or 4 men wrestle the sheep or goat to the ground, slit its throat and pull the head back so it will bleed out quickly (i hear the spray goes 8 or so feet!). so, a camel takes 10 men. and you cant really wrestle a camel. they puncture the windpipe at the base of the neck, wait till the camel gets weak and do the whole neck slitting thing. and all the while the camel is making a heartbreaking, grunty, help-me sort of rumbly noise. it actually made me cry to watch it on video. really gruesome and sad. but the animals who are eaten here have good lives up to that point, which is more than i can say for animals in the states. kind of more like wild game... and this camel yielded over 200 kilos of meat. for those of you who dont know your metric stuff, that is roughly 440 lbs. and all of it was given away. my friend made what he described as a not very tasty curry with his. i skipped the meat fest and had an icecream fest at the movenpick instead. so that was my eide al adha.
the other big news in my life is that i am catsitting for a friend who is visiting the states. this cat is, well, insane. his favorite 2 games are: pull andis drawers out and scatter the contents, and attack andi while she is asleep. with climbing up the curtains coming in a close third. last night he knocked down and broke my satellite receiver. he had a little time out in the bathroom while i cursed and taped it back together. i hold out very little hope for my beloved house plant. and that, my friends, is all the news thats fit to print (can you imagine the junk that isnt?). and with that i am off to sweat to the arabic tunes...

2006-01-03T04:13:00.000-08:00

happy new year y'all!! i spent new years eve in nearby wadi musa. treated myself to ice cream at the movenpick. chocolate chocolate chip. i know... sounds like a ragin new years right? the interesting thing about my night is how tight security was. the movenpick is a luxury hotel right next door to petra, and is in the tourist part of town. the street was blocked by the police about a block up so that cars could not get to the hotels. then after we walked to the hotel we had to go through a sort of check point where we told the police why we were there and where we were from. then we had to have our bags searched and go through a metal detector. i think the extra security was there to protect the new years eve party that they were having. i peeked in on the party before leaving and it looked to me like a crown of 50+ year old britons bumpin it to hip hop. pity i had to miss it. and my rockin party consisted of ice cream and burning cds. again, excitement off the charts. the cab ride home also brought tons of police cars out patroling. high security night. and no ball drop. but far and away better than new year's last year.
i suppose the only other news is what i did for christmas. i went to amman 2 days before christmas. my friend and i left at about six am. when we got on the bus, to our surprise, it was full of foreigners. i think only two or three jordanians were riding with us. my friend thought she would be all sly and tell me in arabic about how she thought the guy sitting in front of us was cute. she assumed they didn't speak arabic because they were british and quite obviously travelling. then, not more than five minutes later, he turned to a jordanian and started speaking arabic. and quite frankly it was better than ours. at least the embarrassment wasnt mine. we helped them get to where they needed in the city by bus rather than paying a ton for a cab (and to give you and idea of what a lot is in a city cab here is - 3 or more jd. how on earth am i gonna pay for cabs at home?) then we went our separate ways. i met up with a couple volunteers that i hadnt seen since swearing in and we went cafe hopping and sort of caught up with each other. my big news to give was that a man from my village has been kidnapped in iraq. he was working there. he has two wives and thirteen kids here in town, and one wife and son in iraq. the kidnappers demanded the release of the woman who was the unsuccessful bomber in amman. beyond that, i dont have any news about him. the western media hasnt been covering it.
christmas eve, i went to the peace corps christmas party at the country director's house. my first real taste of christmas here. complete with small children singing christmas carols. a six year old american irl told me boys are stupid and she hates them. i told her that she was going to love jordan. and my christmas present? a flu shot! how exciting. i have always wanted one of those. christmas day was mostly spent on various busses. with a stop at safeway. did i mention there are safeways in the big cities here? kind of like a temporary step into america. very surreal. i almost died the first time i saw one. and leaving my friends was sad. it is always so exciting to see people, and then to leave is kind of a let down. especially when you have to ride for hours through the desert on a bus to do it. but looking forward to the next one kind of keeps you going.
the weather is still dry. and since jordan has no water to speak of, all the farmers around me are starting to get really anxious. they havent had this dry a winter since the seventies, apparently.
and now, i feel that i am out of things to say. so since i spend a lot of my free time making lists of various things, i will give you a taste of the craziness:
Things i miss:
- the daily show
- daily showers
- driving
- spicy food

things i dont miss:
- hangovers
- people who support bush

and with that, ive gotta split. hope something interesting pops up soon so i can let you all know about it. here's to the big jordanian guy next to me belting out my heart will go on (the song from titanic, they freakin love it here!) hope your new year's rocked.

2005-12-18T02:57:00.000-08:00

hooray for american coffee! i got some in a care package a couple weeks ago. the day after i got it i drank about a pot of it. started with a couple of cups in the morning. after five months of instant it tasted like heaven. that afternoon i made a cup for my counterpart and one for her husband. but, she wasnt home so rather than let it go to waste i drank it myself. i just about made myself sick. but at least i was rarin to go for housework.
so here comes christmas. to look around my village you would never know it. it is a holiday here because jesus is recognized as a prophet, but there is not a lot of pomp and circumstance around it. obviously you arent gonna see a giant santa in the middle of town. ludicrous. i suppose there are decorations in the big cities and christian areas, but here it is life as usual. it is better that way - you cant really miss what you arent constantly reminded of. it is also refreshing to be left out of that massive consumer frenzy that comes with the season. and i am not sure that a religious holiday taht is used to boost sales makes much sense here, as opposed to say, praying more.
ok, so space. i cant even believe i didnt think to say something about it. amman is arranged around the seven hills of the city. somewhat like rome. i suppose this is unsurprising due to the past presence of rome here. there is even a huge roman amphitheatre in the middle of town (in ruins of course). street planning in the city centers around seven circles (roundabouts). roundabouts seem rather predominant in the roads here, and districts relate to th ordinal placement of the cirles. streets come into them from all angles, so the city doesnt seem to follow a grid like a lot of cities in the us. there are key streets in the misx, but it seems kind of like city planning was an after thought. there is an old part of town which i suppose was there first and the streets sort of took shape secondarily. and from there, the city expanded outward. the newer part of town is dominated by a mall and a lot of really expensive houseing for bigwigs and foreign statespeople and the like. oh, and the american embassy too. amman is really big, but to me, and this could just be my view as an outsider, it doesnt feel cohesive as a city. it just feels like a really big, more liberal place where a lot of people live.
my own town is on a mountainside and its layout is dictated by the landscape of the area. the streets wrap around the mountainside, preventing any real order. there are also a lot of footpaths and goat trails that people use to get around. my city, and to an even greater extent the neigboring village have traditionally consisted of farmers and bedouins. and thus their development as villages is fairly recent - within the last 40 or so years. there are still little old women who walk around bent at the waist because they have spent most of their lives in bedouin tents. and tehre are still tents, but these days few of them are used nomadically. more often than not there is a small concrete structure next to the tent - a house or a shed or something, i am not too sure. so, towns here just kind of sprang up wherever people set down. i think this may have been a more predominant pattern in the sount, but i am not too well traveled within jordan yhet, so i could be totally wrong. but from my limited experience...
so far as "public space", i dont think there is an awful lot of it. my town has a public park but i think that is mostly due to its proximity to a big tourist spot. it looks like a lot of going out consists of groups of men on the sidewalks with hookahs (i found out, by the way, that to call it a sheesha is a big no no. it implies drugs. and hookah isnt preferred either. they call it argila or hubbly bubbly). a lot of public interaction happens at the mosque, which is a key point in any village here. they all have at least one, if not more. my village of 5000 people has at least four. so, the men gather at mosques, and all the rest in done through visiting homes or workplaces, leaving very little need for public space. also, public spaces tend to require water, which is a very scarce resource here. so, very few public parks. games and stuff tend to happen in the streets. as for zoning, in most villages there seems to be no differentiation between business and residential. most stores are underneath apartments. and storefronts are rather nondescript. you pretty much have to know what each store is. not a lot of advertising space. in the old part of amman this mix of business and residential exists, but the newer parts of town are very much western. i should say, that irbid, the big city in the north has the same general pattern of streets, but business and residential are really separate. i guess what i am trying to say is that every city is a bit different. and there are rich parts of town and poor parts of town. im not sure if i have figured it out entirely yet. it feel like in jordan as a whole, the poorest communities tend to be in the jordan valley because that is the least hospitable part of the country. hot like the blazes of hell. and in cities the newer parts of town tend to have all the money. like in my training village the people with money built on the top of the hill. and then there was a big hill to divide them. in my own town there are sort of three levels of town. here i think all the money is concentrated in the middle with the developed areas and the poorest people live far away from all the developmetn at the top of the hill. it is inconvenient to go so far uphill and as you go up you move towards more rural country. the money issue is one that i am keeping my eye on because i am hoping to maybe develop a secondary project that addresses poverty. one strong trend in my area is that bedouins seem to be the social group at highest risk for poverty. but moving back to space...
i have noticed that some of the way people use space here, especially indoors is largely for show. a couple examples: sidewalks - they exist, but people tend to walk in the streets instead. so why have them? i mean, sometimes when i walk with people i feel really awkward if i am not in the street with them. and bedrooms - in a lot of homes there area really nice bedrooms, but people are likely to keep them just for show and sleep on farshas (cushions) on the living room floor. and as for living rooms, i have often been shown the guest living room, usually fancier than the every day living room, but rarely have i used one. there seems to be something important about everything looking as it should be, but to me it seems like a waste of space. like that extra fancy sitting room with plastic on the couches, or a desk that no one needs, but is there because an office should have a desk.
so there ya have it, my take on my surroundings. let me know if i left out anything that you want to hear about in this area. this was a severely unplanned post. so i am out, have a good holiday y'all. oh and "jesusy christ-christ", fight the war on christmas. ha!

2005-12-06T02:56:00.000-08:00

sometimes life seems to give you a boost just when you need it most. when you feel likeyou cant spend another day of solitude with tv as your only aompanion you have a good day like i did the day before yesterday. i wont lie, i have a really hard time throwing myself into social situations, even with shared language. but sunday i had my first social visit since mid-ramadan. i ate lunch with a girl from my exercise class and her family. it was a blast! she let me help cook and i burnt the peanuts. i mean, i am not really used to frying peanuts and apparently there is about a milisecond between delightfully golden brown and "blackened", or severely blackened i should say. but everyone was gracious and said "some people like them that way" and choked them down anyway. it was a really relaxed lunch because it was just women and children. i have got to admit that the presence of men just adds a whole level of stress for me here. none of the internal monologue that says "do i roll up my sleeve like a shameless hussy or just drag my sleeve through everyones food? oh no, did my arm just show? are the soles of my feet pointed at him? oh god i just called him a girl... damned conjugation!" at least it helps keep my extended silences exciting for me. anyway, i just chased the kids and chatted. it was fun. there is something i really like about watching young girls act all sassy here. because i know that in just a few years they will "outgrow it". women are not all that spunky here, i think it is bad form. anyway, in the conversation i found out that my friend had been engaged and had broken it off because she wasnt in love with him. it really kind of shattered my perception of love and marriage here. i always thought that marriages were mostly arranged between families and that love was something that people grew into. i suppose i dont know that much because i am very hesitant to start that conversation. it has implications. like am i looking to get married here being the main one. the other is that then people become much more interested in what sort of love life i may have had in the states. i just prefer to avoid it mostly. anyway, the whole thing felt like a successful five hours of visiting.
then i came home and went to pay my rent. and again an invitation to sit and drink coffee. and we talked about everything. politics, birthdays, conceptions of jordan from afar and perceptions of america from afar, we even talked about aids. it was a really engaging conversation - in arabish. a little bit of both english and arabic. a good week.
the weather is unseasonably warm now. all of a sudden it turned into spring. the warm weather is harder, it makes me miss home more. and all the things i could be doing. everyone here is talking about global warming. i guess this is really unusual. and of course, to my great delight, the warmth means my good friends the mosquitos are back. so i chase them around for a bit before i plug in my mosquito poison thingy that will probably be very bad for me in the long run. but i just cant stand those bugs! perhaps i am lucky not to have gone to africa. i would be a malaria nightmare.
anyway, that about does it for my interest level today. maybe i will write some more later this week, assuming something really interesting happens. dont hold your breath.

2005-11-28T03:13:00.000-08:00

happy belated turkey day y'all! hope everyone gorged themselves on stuffing and mashed potatoes (which are, by the way, my personal favorites of the thanksgiving scene). i had spaghetti and garlic bread (made from flatbread). i splurged and used butter to make the bread. it had been literally months since i had eaten butter, so it made thanksgiving seem just as decadent as always. and since there was a snafu at the macy's parade, i got some news of it on the bbc. practically all that was missing was a football game. thanksgiving is a really easy holiday to explain here. everyone seemed pretty down with the concept of visiting family for dinner and "saying thanks to god". much easier than christmas which translates to "the birthday" and is often mistaken to mean my birthday.
last week i had an interesting trip to the post office in a neighboring village. this is the post office i have to go to in order to pay customs. i went with another volunteer who also had packages coming in. i showed up before my friend and didnt know how to get to the post office. her directions went a bit like "look for the tank and all the army guys. that is the post office". i dont want to make it seem like the reason for the tank is a military problem, that is just where they park for the day and hang out i guess. it is just odd that the landmark for my post office is the eternal presence of a jordanian tank. now, the customs man only comes in sometimes, so trips are generally prearranged. apparently until recently it was standard to show up at the post office, get an employee and your package and hop in a cab to go see the customs man at the hospital. show him your stuff, have him tell you how much to pay and sign you off, return to the post office and pay and you are done! easy as that. instead, now you call and find out when he is going to be there. so, he was supposed to be there at 8 am for us. we showed up at 7:30 and sat drinking tea untill 9:30 when he finally showed up. and, because it only makes sense, the man who got there at 9:15 rightfully went before us. and it was ok because he only had a huge box of vitamins from the states. no prob. so he and the customs man took off to the hospital to confirm that it was indeed vitamins. and we, like good girls, went back to our tea drinking, just slightly water logged from the five prior pots of tea. i should mention that we actually took some amusement from the whole vitamin incident. the way pharmacies work here is you walk in, ask for your preferred med, sans prescription, pay and leave. so the concern over vitamins was beyond us. 10:30 rolled around and it was finally our turn. my friend was receiving all her family christmas presents. they were wrapped, but there was a customs list so we stood and shook and rattled each trying to guess and translate what each one was. good times. and she can ptertend to be surprised when she opens them. so, my boots were rather anti-climactic aside from the amazement of the customs man that anyone would pay $20 for boots in the states (which is, according to me, how much doc martins cost in america). $20 is expensive for any clothes here. and that brings me to another charming jordanian tendency i may have neglected to mention: a burning need to know just how much everything you own costs. amazing how everything i own was a "gift" so i can claim not to know. but they want a rough estimate anyway.
it has been a tough week. we lost four volunteers from my training group. one of whom i was particularly close to. but jordan isnt for everybody. and after the bombings everyone had at least a brief moment of thinking we would be sent home. and after learning that you arent there is a whole process to go through to convince yourself all over again that you want to stay and there are still things here you want to accomplish. a difficult process if you are really unhappy here. one volunteer got a going away card from his center that read rather like a very bitter valentines day card. if i remember correctly it said " so tell me, when will it be over now? how many tears will it take to prove to you?". we were highly entertained, but still cannot figure out exactly what it was that was lost in translation. or maybe they really were just that bitter. anyway, "asian" you will be missed. who is going to convince me to take out of site leave now? enjoy the island.
wow, amazing how much i can say about, well, nothing really. life here is starting to seem routine. and because of this my posts may start to drag. i cant be sure. so if there is somthing that you would like to hear about let me know and i will do what i can because i worry that my blog may become terribly uninteresting as i settle in and winter comes. and with that i am off to english lessons!

2005-11-14T02:27:00.000-08:00

so i am sure you have all heard about the bombings in amman by now. i suppose that first i should say that i and all my fellow volunteers are well and safe. as are all the jordanians i know. i dont quite know how to react or what to say. the attack doesnt seem to have made a very big impact on my village. i am pretty far south of amman (280k actually) and there was a death in the village that same day, so maybe those have something to do with it.
my own experience of it goes a bit like this: i was dancing around my room, out of boredom i suppose and i got a silly idea in my head. i went to text it to someone (text messaging is a sort of lifeline between us here), but i texted it to the wrong person. i got a phone call from said person. he said he had been in the midst of a flurry of texts and that mine had seemed out of place, and oh by the way andi havent you heard about the bombs? off went the tunes, on came the bbc. they werent saying much so i got some idea of what was going on from al arabiya. then came the waiting and the wondering. what happens now? do we have to leave? if we evacuate, what do i take with me? if i go, do i want to take another assignment in another country? a tense night with no new information, and no attention span for anything but the news. thursday was a holiday out of respect and mourning which made a 4 day weekend because it coinsided with the late king husseins birthday holiday on sunday. as i sat alone in my apartment i started to think that i dont want to leave. i have just gotten started. i knew leaving was a possibility but i hated to think of it.
i will say this, it was unsettling to see footage on the news of a table that i know i sat at in the hyatt. dont worry, i dont stay at luxury hotels when i travel, but i was reading a paper. anyway, i knew it was the same table. but this time there were 2 unfinished drinks on it, the chairs were ruined and there was a puddle of blood on the floor next to it. it wasnt in the oh god it could have been me sense, but more that i sat at that table and now something really bad happened to someone else who was sitting there. it just made it feel real and close to home. maybe it sounds dramatic, but those are the thoughts that run through your head at 1 am when you are alone and waiting for someone to tell you what the hell is going on.
all said, i dont think i am in danger here. i feel that my community likes and respects me (at least enough to send their daughters to me every day). and the peace corps is all over security. really. if they thought i was in danger i would be sent home yesterday. the reaction in jordan has been strongly anti terrorist. those i have talked to are really concerned about the impact this will have on western views of islam. and i just want to say. this isnt islam. there is nothing in the koran that says you should slap on a bomb and blow up a (jordanian, and islamic) wedding. and i am afraid of the potential reaction to this . maybe it isnt even a blip on the american radar screen. i cant tell because i am here. anyway. thanks to all who emailed and called. it made me feel better. you are all in my thoughts. and i appologize for typos, i think my hands have frostbite now...

2005-11-09T02:41:00.000-08:00

i think my hairline is receding. youknow, i think this is really great because all this time i was wishing i could see how the male volunteers have it here. and now i can! i mean, it isnt the increased sense of freedom or anything that comes with it, but i would say baldness is usually reserved for the guys right? and beggars cant be choosers. but in all seriousness i dont think it is drastic enough to be a problem yet. just chalk it up to hard water and acid shampoo. and someone whose hair has been various shades of platinum blond and pink cant really complain too much about damaged hair right?
so, like i said, ramadan has come and gone as has eid. i ended up going to aqaba for a couple days. i had some trouble getting there, even though i am one of the closest volunteers to it. the problem is that on the day of eid, public transportation because kind of nonexistant. others had an even harder time than i did. but my counterpart snagged me a ride on the only bus going that way, which ended up being a male only bus. so i just stared out the window. but sometimes being a girl has its privilages, like being able to pass through a military check point with nary a glance your way. anyway, aqaba is basically a beach resort. it is hard to believe you are in jordan. it is a sea surrounded by mountains. i dont know what i was thinking when i packed, but i think it went something like this: " hmm, i am going to the beach... i guess it might be cool if i showed up wearing a beanie, gloves, long sleeves and wool! and i wont even think of packing a swim suit. cool!" great process andi... so suffice it to say the beach was much hotter than my now freezing little mountain town. good thing the volunteers who have been here for a year already knew what was up and i could bum some clothes from them. speaking of other volunteers... initially i almost didnt even go because i didnt really know them and i was nervous. but now i couldnt be happier that i went. there are some really cool people here, and you can have really great conversations and just kind of hang out. (especially when you consider the convrsations i am having here: 5 minute conversations in arabic because that is about as long as anyone wants to listen to you butcer their language, or flurries of text messaging that would take all of 2 minutes to actually say in english). but in the states my friends and i had pretty good ideas about where we all were coming from and what we all thought of the world in general. not so much here. if i thought all the other volunteers would all be like me i was way off. but lets just say i havent been willing to put in the "let's talk till 5 am" routine in some time. so yes, i am into the other volunters as well, and they terrify me less now. and they showed the newbies an awesome time. i spent a good deal of beach time there, which i havent done in years. also, we went out on a glass bottom boat. it was great. we spent all day out there cruising the red sea. from the red sea you can see egypt, jordan, and our neigbors to the west, whose resort town looks absurdly developed in luxury western-style hotels. we went snorkeling and swimming and at some point our driver hopped on another boat and got us some freshly caught tuna. he gutted it, cut it and seasoned it all on the boat. then we docked about 15 k. north of the saudi border (or so i was told) and barbequed the fish and some chicken on the beach. it was really really good, as i am sure you can imagine. all day in a boat on the sea. it rocked. i might even say it was the highlight of the trip. the great thing about aqaba is that there are other foreigners there and you can, to some extend let your hair down, so to speak. you blend in with the other tourists and stick out far less. not that i would want to live there, as that wouldnt be much of a peace corpsesque experience, but it makes a great trip. so now here i am back in my village, somewhat reafreshed and getting into the swing of things. i was inundated by about 30 girls in my center while i was there alone yesterday, and there has been considerable interest shown in my exercise classes starting back up, so i guess that is in the works for next week as well. and exercise will rock when it is freezing ass cold outside. better than summer is all i am sayin...

2005-10-30T03:19:00.000-08:00

well, my arabic handwriting skills are pretty sad. i wrote my first essay a couple weeks ago. 2 pages, all in arabic. it wasnt anything groundbreaking, pretty routine. my name is andi, i am from california, blah blah blah... it is mostly so i can learn how to read and write. arabic is really hard to learn. without exaggeration, there are at least 2 or 3 words for almost everything. also, there is formal arabic which is used on the news and in newspapers which i am not learning. unfortunately this is the only form of arabic for which there is a dictionary. i am learning spoken arabic, and the dialect is southern jordanian. written arabic is fun too because only long vowels are written, all short vowels are implied somehow. so yeah, arabic is tough. my english skills are also waning. i am so used to writing phonetically that i spelled hello "hellow" the other week. hmm.
so monday the 17th marked my 100th day in country! i guess the time is just flying by. i have settled into a kind of routine now that makes the time go faster. you know, the kind where the weekend comes before you even know it. not that my weekends are much different than my weeks.
ramadan is going swimmingly. i ate sheep brain the other day. they put it in front of me like it was a special thing, so i couldnt refuse. i was seated at the platter with the sheep's head. this is supposed to be a big honor. i guess all the especially tasty cuts of meat are on the head - like the brain and the cheeks... well, i cant say i am a big fan. it tastes slightly of liver but not as good and the texture is pretty much what you would imagine. so, not repulsive but not great either.
the simpsons have hit the middle east! only, for some reason it is called the shemshoons. it is dubbed in arabic. i havent really watched it yet, but it was on at someone's house at dinner long enough for me to figure out that here duff = juice. boy does homer love his juice! they have really been hyping the show a lot though. other big american tv news here, britany spears reality tv show is coming soon. yippee! at least we only export the best shows. oh, and if the naked chef is on while you are fasting, dont watch it. first, you dont need cooking tips because most of them wont apply here (at least not in the kitchen i have, or shall i say corner with a camp stove), and second it just makes the fast harder. i never noticed how much people eat on tv till now. but, so far as ramadan goes, the hard part is the first week and its over. in fact, ramadan itself is almost over. and my only cheating turns out not to be cheating at all. you see, this week i got strep throat. really a bundle of laughs. just as fun as you might imagine. called the doctor and she told me what antibiotic to buy. in jordan you basically just walk into a pharmacy and tell them what you want. no prescriptions needed. so i ate a bit to keep my stomach from getting upset from the pills. but when my counterpart found out i was sick she came over and brought me soup and told me that it is haram to fast when you are sick.
bakc to ramadan. last night was the big celebration that marked the final revalation of the koran. most people went to mosque until 12 or one in the morning. but, because there are a whole number of things that make it haram for a woman to enter a mosque at a certain time, and because my counterpart was thus prevented from going, i stayed home. she and i hung out and watched tv and chatted and drank tea. it was really nice, and we can do the big mosque celebration next year. by the way, my counterpart and her husband are super excited to host my family when they come. mom and dad, they keep asking when you will be here, so you can be sure to receive the royal treatment. anyway, at the end of this week is eide al fatar, which translates roughly to eve of the breakfast. it marks the end of ramadan and is a three day holiday. i get a few days off and i may finally check out some jordanian sights.
last week i helped my counterpart pick olives from the trees in the yard. then we cracked them open by pounding them with rocks. we have to soak them a bit in water but then she is going to show me how to marinate them. fun stuff. we marinate the green ones and send the black ones off to be made into oil.
it was really cold last week, and the days have been getting increasingly cold and windy. i even had my very first taste of jordanian rain. so picking olives had a fun, bundled up, late autumn harvest feel to it. plus it was just gerat to be outside doing something vaguely active. and the rain smelled awesome. because i live out in the country it had that clean dirt smell that rain in the countryside brings.
center life is fairly nonexistant. i go everyday but no one comes. so i play with my coworkers baby, who is four months old. hes a great baby! patient and never fussy. or i read. a lot. well, i suppose that just about wraps it up. next time i talk to you i will be back in the swing of "normal" life.

2005-10-10T04:26:00.000-07:00

man, im hungry. ramadan is amazing. it slows everything down. you go from one day where you are drinking tea and coffee just about every hour to nothing. just like that. bam. all day long you are without the caffiene, sugar, loads of food, and if you are a man the pack or two that you smoke daily. the first couple days are kind of rough. but it is worth it. people spend the days cooking and napping and watching tv. work days are shorter and less intense. and people pray much more often. you are on low power all day long, but then around five pm the sun starts to set. you know you only have about half an hour until you can eat. people start to pace a little and the koran is broadcast from all the loudspeakers at all the mosques. and your eyes barely leave the sky, for fear that the sun would set and you might miss it. it is like waiting for christmas. then all the mosques go slient. this is the most exciting time because you know it is almost time. then, as the sun sets you hear "Allahu Akbar" from the mosques which is the call to prayer, or at least the beginning of it. then you break the fast. but just with a little something because the call to prayer means the men have just two minutes to get to the mosque if they want to go, which they invariably do. so you eat a few dates or a sweet to tide you over. then the men come back from the mosque and everyone sits around and talks and eats and drinks tea and coffee and water. then comes the gatief which are little fried pockets of breat with either cheese or cinnamon and walnuts and coconut inside. they are expecially for ramadan. they are really tasty, but i hear that there have been volunteers who went crazy on the gatief and consequently their pants got too small. after that comes more visiting around town. and everyone is out moving around because they havent really had the energy to do it all day long. and everyone smacks their gum or smokes their cigarettes all over town. its fun. like thanksgiving or something but every day. it feels crazy to attach so much importance to food everyday but i have to say that this is the first time in a while that i have been happy to eat. so far breaking fast has been a treat, except the second day. this particular day all the food was set out for the initial break. dates and cold milk. sounded yummy and i was thirsty. so i grab my milk and take a big swig. what i was met with turned my stomach. it was leban, which is milk that has been turned into yogurt, but not exactly. it isnt thick like yogurt. you chug it. it is sour and honestly tastes a little off to me. i dont care for it when i am expecting it, but when you think it is milk and on an empty stomach... blech. but there is something really satisfying about eating when you are hungry. i cant even really describe it. it is so much better than eating for stress or because you are told you should. it tastes better.
locals wake up at three or four to have a little food to help them till breakfast, but i just stay up till twelve or so and have a little something before i sleep. people are surprised and excited that i am fasting, but would really rather i covered my hair while i do it. and convert to islam while i am at it. but i just insist that i am a christian (ha) and ask them how easy it would be for them to abandon their faith. or i say "en shah allah" which means god willing. the matter is usually dropped. god willing can be used when you are happy to do something or as a complete blow off. i have a lot of free time in ramadan, so i ahve been walking to the local garden and reading. the seventh day and i have been through four books already. anyway, i should go. maybe i can help cook today!

2005-10-03T02:22:00.000-07:00

bugs. lets talk about them. since my arrival in Jordan, i have had 2 memorable bug experiences. first, let me say that when your shoes sit outside all night, check them before you put them on! lets just say that if you dont look inside your shoe before you shove your foot in it, you may just find, oh i dont know, a big dead cockroach inside that you have unknowingly trampled to deat. eew. needless to say, my shoes sleep inside my house now. my other fun bug story is this. the other night was gorgeous here so i decided at about ten pm to go sit outside my house and watch the stars come up over the mountain. i like to watch the sky starting at sunset, because everything moves unbelievably fast. really, if you blink during sunset you might miss it. and the moon and stars come up over the mountain like gangbusters. it almost feels like you can literally watch the earth turning which is comforting in the sense that it makes me feel like my time here will fly by like nothing. anyway, i was outside, and of course the light wasnt on because that would ruin the night sky. so i sit for a good while in the dark and then go back inside. next day at around nine in the morning i go outside to go to work and i go to where i was sitting the night before because i had left my water bottle. and what is there to greet me but a giant scorpion. it was dead, and it looked to have been stepped on. now, i live behind a big wall and the only creatures behind that wall that are big enought to squish a scorpion are people, and i am the only particular person who goes to this area of the yard. so, i stepped on it without knoing it was there. in the dark. in flip flops. again, gross. so those are my fun bug stories. oh, and my new favorite bedtime game is hunt the mosquitos. endless hours of fun.
so, i have been at my site for two weeks now. in that time i have been tutoring 6th grade girls in english and giving 2 exercise classes a day for the women. if anyone wants to pass on some good indoor exercises, please do. i want to keep it interesting. but my exercise class will be grinding to a temporary halt in the next couple fo days, as ramadan is almost here. ramadan is the holy month for islam. its timing is based on the cycles of the moon, so it changes every year. noone really knows when ramadan is until the night before it starts. exciting stuff. it is considered haram (religiously forbidden)for anything to pass your lips in daylight hours: food, water, cigs, all of it. people fast and pray all day, and then at sunset have big feasts together. i myself intend to fast, and am not worried about the food so much as the water. but i can stay up drinking all night if i want to. water that is. aside from anticipating ramadan life in the village is fairly slow and quiet. i have been to 2 nights of a wedding here (weddings often last for three days), as well as 2 engagement parties. i have eaten mansef with my hands, and apparently my technique is like that of prince hassan. standard practice is to eat it with sort of a fist, and i tend to use my fingertips i guess. what can i say. i love it in my village! no rocks have been thrown yet either. a little boy came running up to my my first week. i braced for what i thought was the inevitable, but when he got to me and opened his had it was a chocolate for me! such a refreshing change. in my village i can go out walking alone, even in the evening, and talk to whomever i feel inclined. well, i guess conversation with men is limited to greetings only thus far, but at least i can make eye contact and say hello without people thinking me a harlot. i got an arabic tutor and i expect her to kick my but as a teacher. already i have homework, written in script. it wouldnt be so bad, i can read script, but this is handwritten. like trying to read cursive when all you know is newsprint. she is really nice though. it is funn, and only some of you will understand this, but she looks just like a reeves. you know david reeves' family? she could drop right into it, lookswise.
ooh, the other day on the road i passed a group of three camels. they were lose and kind of wandering by themselves. i think that is standard. anyway, one was black, one was brown and one was white. maybe next time i will take a picture. they looked as thought they were in the middle of a dispute or something. i think someone was about to get spit on.
i have been thinking about home a whole lot lately. i miss all you guys. but i think i can settle in where i am fairly nicely for a couple years. i am feeling pretty good about it all. lately i have been going through a spell of insomnia. maybe it is because my pillow is made of styrpfoam and hard as a rock, i dont know. anyway, when i cant sleep i turn on the tv and watch movies. this last week i watched back to the future three and bad girls. for those of you who dont know, there is a western movie set just outside my hometown. both of these movies were filmed there. i could totally recognize the place. i used to drive by it everyday. also, you know the kid in back to the future who says "hey mister, mister eastwood, heres your gun"? i went to school with that kid. it was kind of surreal to watch home from jordan. i mean, more so than to see pictures of sf, because those are expected. but my little home town?
before i go, congratulations laurie! you totally deserved it.
and with that i am off. i will let you all know how ramadan fasting goes. if anyone feels inclined to send letters, toss some pictures in too. i put some pictures from home up on my wall and i would love to have more. oh, and no worries about content, noone comes in my house, as it is a studio and, well, you guys know my housekeeping skills...

2005-09-14T22:08:00.000-07:00

i have been following the news about hurricane katrina. the limited news i got here was horrifying. my heart goes out to the people there. i almost wish i was at home so i could go do something to help. the news here has really fallen off though, so any updates you could send would be appreciated.
so, on my own end, there is a bunch of news since it has been so long since i wrote. last week we had our first big visit to Amman. i visited the red crescent (part of the international community of the red cross). afterward, we all met for a reception at the embassy. the embassy here is crazy. i suppose it is really what you might expect an embassy in the middle east to look like. i cant publish pictures of it, ever. because i cant take pictures of it, ever. so, yeah. it was basically mixing with a bunch of embassy and local ministry officials. for those of you who know how i feel about people, and large important seeming groups of them, you can imagine my nightmare. but, it was a fun weekend, like a vacation kind of.
today officially marks my end of training. i am just hours away from swearing in as a full volunteer and being whisked off to my permanent site! the training was somewhat like my training for the berkeley free clinic, but more intense and tied up in government type bureaucracy. phew! i took my final language exam and scored an intermediate mid, for those of you who know anything about language proficiency. it was enough to not be a problem. so soon i will be in my beautiful little village (yes!) but far away from my fellow trainees and our trainers (oh jebus). the stir crazy nights start about now. but it will really be great to be able to breathe and move around on my own without considering how my host family wants me to be at that exact second. dont get me wrong, they were great, but i am no good at being under someone elses roof. they gave me a goodbye weighing and were really pleased that i managed to gain some weight on my already sticklike frame...
so, here is the update on the strange tv experiences i have had here recently: last nights overabundance of viagara adds, watching farenheit 9/11 with arabic subtitles on al jazeera, and a new video. this one was a palestinian singer. the video was basically real news clips of palestine. funerals and men shooting guns and peace marches and bodies, and crying people. it was fully disturbing. also, last night i saw an al arabia commercial in which two cartoon men are sitting on a bench. one gets a text message, reads it gasps and runs away. the other one stays, but gets bombed... i guess he should have had al arabia news sent to him on his nokia... it was a pretty morbid commercial i thought.
i feel like there is more to say, but i am rushed. oh yeah! i can officially receive packages and all sorts of mail now because i have my own address!!! thats it for now, dont want to be late getting to my own swearing in!

2005-08-29T01:10:00.000-07:00

hi again! i always have a hard time starting these posts. the biggest news lately is that we have, as of now, lost two trainees. maybe it was for the best, but they will be missed. this place isnt for everyone. it is hard to find where you fit in here. especially in a homestay. i personally feel that i am not my own person right now. sort of jump when they say jump, go when they say go. when we all get to our own houses we will feel much more independent.
i guess i am going to have a tv in my new house, which means i will have access to arabic news as well as the bbc. when i came i was hoping to get away from stuff like that. but that just isnt life here. everyone (jordanians) thought i was crazy for not wanting a tv. so now the other volunteer who is leaving the site is leaving hers for me.
the houses here are interesting. they are all glass and concrete and stone. no wood to speak of. actually, i saw a stack of lumber the other day, and it looked so foreign. made me think of home. all the houses blend right into the land because there is limestone everywhere. most of the houses are made of limestone. any house that isnt beige sort of leaps out at you. the land also feels very old sometimes. like this place has been here forever, relatively untouched. there are ruins everywhere, from every stage of jordan's development as a country. there are stone fences everywhere, kind of like california's central valley. you know, the old stone corrals? apparently nothing is ever torn down. there is a cool castle near to jennifer, one of the other volunteers. i am hoping to check it out. it apparently is the oldest castle here and is full of secret passages and stuff. another of the volunteers is in ghura safi, which is right next to the dead sea. so i guess that makes her the lowest peace corps volunteer in the world. the problem is that it is really really hot there. but her site sounds really cool.
she and her counterparts are the only light skinned people living there. the black population in jordan is really discriminated against. the girls at her center were asking her why there were never black people on tv here, or even represented anywhere for that matter. so i guess she has a project, although it would be an overwhelming one. maybe i will talk more about race when i have more time.
one last note, i have my new address! i will be there as of september 15th. my address is:

Andrea Girard
P.O Box 139
Wadi Musa / Petra
71810
Jordan

i guess if the package is shoe box sized or smaller i can get it in my po box. if not it goes to a bigger post office a couple towns over. no big deal though, i think it is a 20 minute bus ride or something. and i will have a lot of time. dont get me wrong, i am not expecting you all to send packages, but if you write letters i will write back! i need the rancho's new address. i have a postcard i have been meaning to send, but i didnt have the address. but now it is too late so i will wait till the tenth. isnt that when you guys are moving?
also, matias: can i have your number? delfino was on the ipod the other day and i was going to send you a text message, but couldnt.

text messages are super cheap for me to send, so you guys may get one from time to time. ok. till next time.

2005-08-26T01:57:00.000-07:00

hey. i dont have time for a real post. some people have said they have had problems posting comments. i think i fixed that problem, so now noone has to sign in or register or any crap like that. i think you can just make your comment. sorry!

2005-08-24T03:00:00.000-07:00

i know i just posted, but i thought i would put this on here for those of you who may have missed it: the turkmenbashi (dictator of turkmenistan) has now banned recorded music. i think the decree is something like this: It banned sound recordings "at musical performances on state holidays, in broadcasts by Turkmen television channels, at all cultural events organised by state... in places of mass assembly and at weddings and celebrations organised by the public".
other wierd decrees by the bashi include: banned opera and ballet
forbade long hair or beards for young men
banned car radios
required video monitors in all public places
closed all hospitals, except in the capital, Ashgabat
renamed some calendar months after the president and his mother

so, i suppose any place i ended up was bound to be a bit out there. just thought it was interesting. alright. later kids...

2005-08-22T05:47:00.000-07:00

just back from my site visit! so i went to see my future home for a couple of days. went down on saturday. i successfully navigated my way through six busses to get there. my bus was boarded twice as we got further south. i think this was because of the bombings in aqaba. dont anyone at home worry. there hasnt been any fall out in the rest of jordan, and there is no talk of sending us back home to the states. anyway. the bus ride. just outside of amman, the landscape suddenly turned to desert. i mean real desert. i even saw a couple of mini sand dunes on the side of the road. i really mean small ones, but they looked just like in pictures, all wavy from the wind. then we started climbing up into the mountains. as we descended from the peaks, there was an amazing canyon. think of the grand canyon, but with less sharp lines because it is limestone. this is the canyon where petra is. it was breathtaking really. so we drove along this canyon until petra. i should mention that in amman, a group of seven argentinian backpackers got on the bus. it was the first time that i knew what it was like to see a group of obvious travellers. also, the bus driver jacked up their price by a jd. i knew how much it really cost, so i was able to negotiate my way into the fair price. anyway. they got off in petra. ok, so on to my site eh? turns out that the view just outside my door is this amazing canyon. my town is gorgeous. i am living in a small studio apartment. it has a bathtub and a sitdown toilet! this is very exciting, as we have all been using turkish squatters. it isnt so bad, but they have a tendency to smell a bit. not much you can do about it really. apparently it is great that my place is so small because in the winter it will get really cold and i will actually be able to heat a small space. my yard is shared with my counterpart. it has grapes, a lawn, a fig tree, apricots, peaches, apples. i also have rabbits and chickens. oh, and a lawn. a real take your shoes off and walk around in it sort of lawn. my counterpart doesnt sugar her coffee or her tea, too, so it is a nice break from the sugar. i cant believe that this is how i am living. the center i am working in is really active. the girls there elect a small council of girls to plan activities. my job looks like i am really going to have to work hard to be creative with it and come up with anything new to do. when i asked my counterpart what the girls wanted from me she said exercise. basically i came across the world to do aerobics classes. i think also what i am doing could be classified as public diplomacy? not exactly the world changing work i was looking for. it is ok though, although i dont know if i am excited about how easy the work is going to be. maybe it sounds spoiled, but i was really expecting to have to tough some stuff out and be seeing really difficult stuff every day. and it isnt that i am not. i dont think i will ever get used to seeing a fully veiled woman. i mean it is just shocking to see a woman all in black. gloves and not even a space for the eyes. some of them look through a veil.
so, back to my place. i live about thirty seconds from a public park. it has flowers and grass and even a playground. unlike the other towns i have been in in jordan so far, my streets are clean. jordan has a real litter problem from what i can see. but there was no garbage on my street. i get the feeling that my town has a bit of money trickling in from the close booming tourist area. it is ok though, because the tourists dont make it up to where i am, and the people of my town dont really speak english. not learning arabic was something i was really concerned about. there is a swanky hotel in my town at the bottom of the hill. it is an old rock city that has been preserved as a hotel. i suppose that brings in a bit of money for the town. further out from me is what looks to be a significant bedouin area. lots of camel hair tents, a couple camels, and lots of herds of sheep and goats. one of the male volunteers near to me speaks a bedouin dialect. i am hoping to learn a bit more about the bedouins. apparently if you go to a bedouin tent, you can stay for forty days without question. i wont, but i am sure that i might be able to visit with some of the local bedouin community. behind my house is a mountain, kind of. i guess i can also hike up to the top of it. my town seems very safe, people are out walking around and in the garden till late at night. last night, my counterpart and i watched the sun set over the canyon. then we watched the moon come up over the mountain. the sunsets here are the most beautiful i have ever seen. really bright reds and oranges. and the pace of life here is slow enough that you can sit and watch the sunsets over coffee with friends and neighbors. speaking of coffee, my host family has decided that americans drink coffe from big mugs, so they now serve me gigantic coffee cups of turkish coffee. it is tasty, but kind of like having four espressos with sugar.
one final interesting note. the guy named andy is living in or near zarka. this is the town where the infamous zarkowi comes from. although, his name just means "from zarka". anyway, the people in the town took him around visiting. apparently he has met zarkowi's brother... maybe they are just messing with him.
and finally, inappropriate american songs of the week: korn's rendition of another brick in the wall, venga boys we like to party, and yes, kanye west. cant believe it. also, i think i might have heard united states of electronica on a french satellite radio station. ok. gots to run!

2005-08-16T05:03:00.000-07:00

man, it has been a while since i posted. so much happens that i cant remember it when i sit down to type. a couple of weeks ago, was my first visit to amman. we went to a king hussein summer camp. most of it was just kind of hanging out, but there is a traffic safety center for kids and this day was learning how to act around cars. the car situation here is absurd. my typical ride in the car involves me and five to six others (all adults) crammed in a five person car. then you barrel down the road. there arent lines on the road and you kind of make your own rules. also, you honk nonstop. jordanians use their horns to warn that they are coming, turning, slowing down, speeding up, just to say hi, whatever. ive heard a couple that are pretty worn out. anyway, there isnt a lot of car safety here, so the camp was trying to teach the kids. we didnt really end up doing a lot. a fellow volunteer and myself ended up making a mural for them. it was a map of jordan that was filled in with the jordanian flag. there was a seatbelt around it and it said jordan first... your safety first (in arabic of course). cheeseball, yes, but it felt like the first thing i have really done here. someday, i will get around to posting some pics on here, and it will come too. oh, yeah. we were delayed getting to the camp because the kings royal army or something wanted us to go to their training center. so we went to the army camp to watch a video about how they train. it was wierd. then afterwards the volunteers sang a song to the army. basically the jist of the song is that jordans army is protecting the homeland, flag and abdulla. they laughed. im sure we sounded ridiculous. but my host family loves that i know the song and has me sing it all the time.
i had my mid training language test, and tested novice high, which is the level we need to get out of training. however, i still can't really communicate about much of anything significant. i did manage to use it to make my first successful bargain. i went out shopping, because i really needed to. clothes here wear out faster than you can imagine. anyway, i bargained three dinar off a pair of shoes. when i got back my trainer said that i had gotten a reasonable price. it was a small victory in my integration here. i can shop like a local... kind of.
i also found out where i am going to be living. my town is called taibeh. it is about 25k from petra, and an easy day trip to aqaba. i am down in the south of the country pretty much all by myself. most of the other volunteers are in the north. i felt a little sad. but my post is actually awesome. i went to a party to meet the other volunteers this weekend and met the girl that i am replacing. apparently i am the fourth peace corps worker at the center, and the last two have left early because they got married. maybe it is in the water. i wont drink it... anyway, it is on a mountain and gets incredibly cold in winter. but other volunteers will visit often because it is so close to such cool stuff. the center is the second best girls center in the country. i will be starting with exercise classes, but then ramadan hits and i will be mostly observing. i am going to do the fast and my counterpart/landlord/center director wants to take me to the mosque for the twenty seventh night, which has some significance that i dont recall right now. i will let you know later. the center sounds really well organized and my house sounds awesome. it is a small studio with fruit trees outside. i am going to visit it next weekend. when i pictured coming to the peace corps, i pictured hut living. but as another girl put it, this is more like corporate peace corps. the living standard is nicer, but there is a lot more social and emotional pressure. we will see how it pans out.
i figured out my first political cartoon the other day! it was a picture of sharon holding a bottle of oil, that was the west bank and giving a drop (gaza) out of a frying pan onto the ground. he was crying and the title said something like "does it hurt much?" but it was in arabic. pretty exciting to figure it out though.
i am out of time, but not things to say, i will think of more and write later. i got a phone though. my number is 962 0796202991. my mom said you may need to leave out the zero in front of the seven though. call whenever you want. i am ten hours ahead of cali, but will answer any time, cuz i have a wierd schedule. love you all and miss you! i will write again soon and let you know how gaza pull out looks from here.

2005-07-31T08:47:00.000-07:00

i saw an interesting music video yesterday. when people here arent out visiting or picnicing, they seem to be watching music videos. most of them are really low budget and have virtually no plot. the ones with a plot tend to be love stories. this was a different sort of love story. first i should mention that the singer is from iraq, which i figured out about halfway through it. it was a man and a woman in love. then came bombs and soldiers to keepthem apart. there were a good deal of images of american soldiers and tanks and the two lovers watching talking heads on the news because they couldnt go out and get to each other due to the war. in the end qa stray american bullet came through her window and killed her. i think that things like that make my host family uncomfortable when i am around. they dont really know if i am offended because they havent asked, and they dont understand that i really want exposure to that kind of stuff. i have tried my best to let them know that i dont like bush or the war, but the official conversation has yet to happen. anyway, this is the media we would never in a million years get in the states. just thought i would share that with you all.
there hasnt been a large reaction, or any that i can tell, to either the london bombings or the happenings in egypt. what does that look like stateside? i cant wait till i can really understand what al jazeera is saying, because that is the only news i get outside of the trips to the internet cafes, in which i get pretty limited time to surf. hmm... well on to the mundane...
the mosquitos here are out of control. i have bites everywhere. mostly on my feet and hands (even on the palms and the bottoms of my feet). you would also think that since i am covered head to toe, those would be the only places i would have them. no. those buggers bite through clothes too.
so far as village life, we have been doing practice sessions at a girl's center similar to where we will be working at our permanent sites. last week it was internet. we were trying to teach a bunch of young girls how to use email. they were about 12 years old, average, and had very little english or computer skills. we were told to use yahoo, an english based mail site. have you ever faced the prospect of explaining what a password is with body language? it was chaotic to say the least. this week was cooking. tuesday we tried chocolate chip cookies, which turned out reasonably well considering we had no recipe. we wanted to do rice crispies treats on thursday but they recommended we do pizza or tacos. we decided to make quesadillas - homemade tortillas and the like. well, it was semi disasterous. the stove didnt work and we ended up trying to fry them in the oven. not a pretty sight with tons of girls running around. the cheese here doesnt melt either. ah well. in the future stick to the simple things.
permanent site announcements and initial language assessments are next week. wish me luck. also, on thursday is my first real visit to amman! it should be fun. we are attending an al houssein summer camp for kids. i will write about it. the work here is definitely not what i expected, and i dont know exactly where i am going to fit in my health specialty. maybe basic hygiene like brushing teeth and stuff. there is so much sugar here. i am going to come back a caffeine and sugar junkie. i average about seven cups of super sugared tea, at least three turkish coffes, and 2 - 6 arabic coffees a day. and then they wonder how i can stay up with them till one am. till next time.

2005-07-24T08:48:00.000-07:00

Life in the village is fairly predictable so far. wake up and have breakfast and tea. breakfast is usually flat bread withy olive oil and zatar (a powdery mix of sesame seeds and thyme and some other spices), lebana (a thick sour yogurt the consistency of cream cheese) and maybe jam or something. then it is down to the school for language class. we take arabic from our lcf at a girls school. on the wall of our classroom is a map of jordan. it is interesting because the map includes the west bank as part of jordan. i will post a picture later. there are a good deal of jordanians who believe the west bank is part of jordan because of some unenforced un resolutions. above the map os a picture of king abdullah. his picture, as well as king husseins picture is everywhere: schools, street signs, peoples cars. everywhere. that and the jordanian flag. even more than small town usa has american flags. there are even tapestries of king abdullah everywhere that remind me somewhat of a velvet elvis. i think that this is all from an attempt to unify the people of jordan under a state. there was a campaign some years back called jordan first. jordan has many people that define themselves as part of some other group. bedouins identify as bedouins and palestinians as palestinians. above that is also the strong identification with religion. it has made a strong state hard to achieve here.
it is strange to think that i have been here so short a time. every day feels like a week because everything is so new and so much work. i never imagined that sitting and drinking tea could be so exhausting, but everything is something to be learned. in the middle of the day i usually get a bit worn out and grumpy, but after a nap i am excited again. the closest i can relate it to is being a baby all over again. by the time i get to irbid on sundays i am fatigued. it is fairly comforting to be around a group of americans, in a way i never would have predicted. the intensity level drops and everything gets easier. we spend our time in our villages building an identity that fits with the culture here. it is not necessarily who we have been in the states. but when we are with the rest of the group we are allowed to be who we are. we can have the conversations we are used to without judgements.
speaking of judgements. people here are very blunt. i cannot count how many times i have been told that i am fat. i was prepared for a lot, but i cannot say that i was ready for people to be so blatant about my rather reubenesque look. it gets hard to sit through lunch with someone saying how fat you really are, so eat more because you must eat a ton. thankfully my family doesnt talk about my weight. i was at the house of the principle of the girls center in my town and her husband kept talking about how skinny my friend was, and how much did i weigh - must be more than 200 pounds... i was shocked, to say the least. but i think i handled myself well. perhaps they dont realize just how insulting that is. but i suppose if people are going to be saying things like that to my face i will just have to grow a thicker hide about it. but, like i said, my homestay is a respite from this sort of commentary.
my family goes on picnics fairly often on friday (our day off) or on a weeknight. they are a blast. we (and by we i mean at least 15 people from the extended family) sit around under the scraggly oak trees and make tea over a campfire. then when it gets dark, the family turns on the emergency flashers and the radios in the cars. everyone dances and sings. it is a good time. yesterday, my family turned on 50 cent - in the club and wanted me and my friend to dance. then came sean paul. for those of you not familiar, these are hip hop songs with content that is not culture friendly here. then came some raver music. they wanted us to dance like americans, but 1) it is akward to dance with an audience and 2) i honestly dont know how to dance to these songs in a way that is appropriate here. one of the uncles told me a bit about islam and told me that he was going to get me an english copy of the koran to read. i dont think it can hurt. i have read the bible, so why not the koran. besides, i think it may give me a good point of reference for a lot of the culture here, since it is so laden with religion. the aunts told me that if i converted i could marry a "nice arab boy". i told them this wasnt on my agenda. they didnt believe it when i said i was too young, but when i said i hadnt met my destined partner they seemed to understand and left me alone. then everyone kind of stood up, packed up the cars and went home. when people are done hanging out, they just stand up and leave. there really is no goodbye hubub, because most likely they will see each other later that day or the next day. back at home we visited some more. i made my first batch of tea, to everyone's amusement. it is really really sweet here. anyway, i have to make it back to the hotel.

2005-07-17T08:12:00.000-07:00

i am back in irbid after my initial visit to my homestay family. irbid has the highest concentration of internet cafes per capita than any other place, so i should be able to have some good internet time over the next few weeks. i am living in a town called deir abi said right now. it is about an hour and a half north of the dead sea and less than 10 k from the border with israel. i can see israel and the west bank from my balcony on a clear day. this is where i will be spending the next two months while i wrap up my language training. my host family is wonderful so far. samir is the father, leyla the mother, raef the eldest son (23), raouf the youngest son (15), rasha the eldest daughter (20) and rana the youngest daughter (10). they all speak a little bit of english and are most enthusiastic about helping me to learn arabic. every hour that i am not asleep, i am trying frantically to learn arabic so that i can say more than "my name is andi, nice to meet you, i am happy". raef is attending med school in moldova and is just home temporarily, but i hear rumours of a big party and mansef (a traditional jordanian dish involving the sacrifice of a goat) when he graduates. they asked me to come back for it, and from what i have seen of jordanian parties so far it should be worth the trek from whatever village i end up in. rasha is studying to be a teacher. my host father is a librarian at a university, as far as i can gather. the family has been very respectful of me so far, and i have not had to face the difficult questions that other trainees have: are you christian or muslim, why arent you married, have you ever had a boyfriend, and have you ever had alcohol, to name just a few. i have already met a good deal of the extended family (i would estimate at least 25 people). i think that my host mother's brother wanted them to talk to me about bush and israel, but the family wont let them. i was almost hoping that they would ask so that i could get it out of the way. when they showed me israel and asked if i knew it, i was very careful to find out whether they meant heard of or liked. it is too early to mess up and make them think that i am a zionist or something like that. the house is big and fairly well insulated from the heat. outside there is a marble deck and a fountain, and the front yard is full of olive trees and grapes. it is more gorgeous than i could have hoped for. it is up a rather large hill from my language lesson which isnt all that fun in the heat. with only one shower a week i am hoping that i adapt to the heat rather before the hot months come. my host family seems very progressive from what i can tell, and they have already told me to consider them to be the jordanian branch of my family. there has been almost nonstop coffee and tea since my arrival, which is good because so far as i can tell the family doesnt go to bed before two am. apparently in the hot months everybody stays up late, and in the cold months they sleep early. last night we sat and drank tea and ate fruit and visited on the balcony, while listening to the music from a nearby wedding. everybody here visits family and friends for hours every day. they say it is their favorite past time. somebody pulled out a scale and all of the children gleefuly weighed themselves. then they told me to jump on. i refused, saying that in the us we did not like to discuss our weight, but they would not take no for an answer. everybody discussed my weight for a bit. i dont know really what they said, but apparently it wasnt enough because my host mother wont let me stop eating. the food is wonderful, but they just keep loading up my plate, and it is really a good deal more food than i need, or want really. it is nice to be in irbid and be able to self regulate for a couple of days. so far, this has been much better than expected. i think that i may have lucked out in my assignment. on of the trainees is 75 and this is her fourth round through the peace corps. one of her previous assignments was turkmenistan and she said that two volunteers had to be sent home because there was not enough food and they were literally starving. it sounds much bleaker than the admittedly privileged experience that i am having. that is not to say that it is all rosey. there is still the fact that i am living in a place where i dont know the customs or language and is highly gender segregated. people stare and shout and honk,and i seem to cause a general fuss wherever i go. but, in general i am having a wonderful time and have not had the down moments that other people have or that i was expecting.
a note of interest (maybe): today was my first ride on the public bus. it was generally uneventful except that rock your body, by justin timberlake came on. it was all that i could do not to laugh. we are not supposed to really make noise in public or draw attention to ourselves, for obvious reasons, and it is true. i dont want to be the screaming american. the ride cost 27 grush. a gersh is to the jordanian dinar what the penny is to the dollar, and the exchange rate is roughly 1.4 dinar to the american dollar.
also, so far as i can tell, our hotel in irbid is on manamana street. i could be misreading it, but regardless, the thought amuses me.
i will be in my village tuesdays through saturdays and back here in irbid sundays and mondays, so i should be able to check email and update this fairly regularly for the next nine weeks. hope all is well in the states. also, i am fairly disconnected from world events right now, so you should send me any interesting news.
ma 'salaam,
andi

2005-07-12T07:46:00.000-07:00

my first post from jordan. just to update you all. i flew into dc last week to meet my fellow trainees, had a whirlwind training and flew into jordan. at about 1 am, we flew over tel aviv. as we crossed the west bank, we could see the wall that israel is building from the plane. it was surreal. we got into amman (the capital) at about 1:40 in the morning. then we hopped on a bus to drive the hour and forty minutes north to irbid, our training site. we started lessons at 11:30 that same day. since then has been a whirlwind of culture and language training. i have almost picked up reading arabic script, and now i just need the rules and vocabulary. that perhaps sounds more optimistic than i am feeling about it. from looking at our language training manual, we have just ten weeks to learn a year's worth of material. the food is wonderful so far, and only one of the trainees has gotten terribly sick. i am, however, feeling a bit sore and fatigued from the typhoid vaccine i got today. hopefully it will subside before tomorrow. the gender segregation has not really hit me too hard just yet. i am starting to get used to the long skirts and shirts. one trainee said that the culture shock would hit the women here, and the men upon their return to the states. they are allowed to go anywhere, wear short sleeves, smoke, and go to cafes. the women, however are not allowed to do any of this. we will be cooking, cleaning and shopping. i think though, that between this and child rearing, the women may pick up the language much faster. many of the girls seem horrified at the undertaking, but i myself have decided that i will do it well and take whatever cultural experience i can from it. so far my only mistake has been to make friends with the guys, as i usually do. these friendships are a little easier than with most of the girls so far, but i suppose that when i am cut off from speaking to them it will get much easier to bond with my fellow female trainees. i have been shopping in town once, which was an experience all its own. i dislike shopping enough in the states, but this was far more intense than even i could imagine. once we entered the store (some of the girls had not brought appropriate clothing) clothes were furiously whipped around while girls tried them on and our language and culture facilitator (lcf) bargained to get us the best price. i ended up with a pair of slippers and was exhausted after only two hours. i am not yet accustomed to the time change, but i feel that tonight i may finally get a full night's rest. tomorrow is a big day. tomorrow i will meet the family that i will be living with for the next ten weeks and move into a smaller village. i will have to introduce myself using my very limited arabic as well as learn how to navigate public transportation to and from irbid. busses here run differently than in the states. i will be staying there and having language classes during the week and coming back to irbid to get back together with the group once a week. i appologize for the fractured feel of this post. i suppose i will get better at this as i get used to a public journal. hope all at home is well, and please send me mailing addresses. i would love to hear from you all.

2005-06-28T13:19:00.000-07:00

ok. i suppose it is time to start this bad dog up. i decided that since some people arent that into the mass email thing, i would make a blog. that way, you can read it if you care to, and if you dont, well, i suppose you wouldnt have even gotten this far. right now i should be packing up to go, but instead am sitting on my floor wasting time. sometimes you just get tired of throwing stuff away. anyway. hopefully i will have some sort of internet access in jordan so that i can update y'all on how life in the middle east is going. if anyone has suggestions of little gifts to take to my host family, or important things to take, be sure to let me know asap! also, here is my contact info for the time being:
if there is an emergency (a real one):
business hours: 1.800.424.8580 ext. 1470
after hours: 202.638.2574

mail!! (no packages during my first ten weeks. i'll let everyone know when i can get care packages. but send as many letters as you want!!):
Andrea Girard, PCT
c/o Peace Corps Jordan
P.O. Box 6338
Amman 11118
Jordan

You should probably address it to me as andrea instead of andi. i dont know if the peace corps can sort me by nickname.

alright, since nothing is interesting now, i will cut this short. no need to talk about nothing. i will post again in DC or Jordan.