The Last Stretch

I had an amusing morning yesterday. First, I was walking across the street by Dawar Dah Lieh and two female cops stopped me. It took a little while for me to figure out what they wanted, but I finally realized that they were asking me where I had bought my pants and how much they cost. I told them that I got them in the Balad and they seemed to think that I actually meant the country instead of West Al Balad, but we finally cleared that up. I hope they get some. That would be awesome.

Then I was walking through the Balad on the way to the next service station and some guys were yelling and hitting each other with metal poles (the long stick ones with hooks that they use to hang things.) I think only a few hits were actually received, but the guy aggravating everyone almost seemed drunk except that it was morning and I’m in a Muslim country. So that was weird. Everyone was lined down the street watching, but I left once they started moving towards me.

Then I was walking in Ashrafiya on the way to work and I saw the worst make-up I have ever seen in my life. Women here sometimes wear a lot of whiter make-up that so that they will look more white because apparently that is more attractive. Some of them cake it on a lot, but it isn’t as bad as if a girl in the States did it because they don’t have a make-up line because they wear hijabs, but a lot of them you can still tell. Anyway, this lady was not even Arab dark, she was black and she was wearing make-up lighter than what I wear. I could see her hands and they were black. She looked like Tracy Jordan in his white woman make-up. Also, she looked like skeletor. It was distressing. 

Then I arrived at the orphanage and it was awkward because all the girls were in the main room with a bunch of middle-aged women. One woman was in the middle of the room and was talking to all of the girls and asking them questions like if they liked their teachers. They said no of course. Haha. A lot of the women came to ask me questions and offer me the candy they were giving the girls. I told them that I was from America and they told this teenage girl who was with them and she came over to talk to me because she speaks pretty decent English. She translated some of the things that the woman in the middle of the room was saying. A lot of the women there had weird looking hijabs, so I stared at them for a while and realized that they were probably niqabs that they had just put on top of their heads while they were just with girls. I asked the girl about them and she misunderstood me and said that Allah only requires that they cover everything but their faces and hands. Some women just do more, but Allah does not require that of all women. So that was interesting.

It was a pretty conservative group because about 5 of them wore niqabs and they were all wearing black and a few were wearing some white. Only the girl I talked to and her little sister were wearing colors. But it was crazy cool to see niqabed women without their niqabs. I wonder if they walk by each other in the street and have no idea who one another is and just keep walking even though they're BFFs

On a Daily Basis

Services: For those who do not know what a service is(pronounced sirvees), it is like a taxi, but is much cheaper because the driver won’t leave until the car is full. Because we are in a Muslim country, there are very specific rules that you have to follow in services in regards to where what gender sits. Basically, the rule of thumb is that a person of one gender should never be sitting in between two people of the opposite gender. Sometimes this gets complicated because people will arrive at the service at different times, so you have to reshuffle. Also, people get out and in at different places along the way, not necessarily at the service stations, so you also have to reshuffle for that. I always try to be careful about not  touching whatever man is sitting next to me (though it depends on which service station I’m at, there are generally more men than women). So I basically end up squished against the door every morning. It’s actually pretty comical looking. I’ve started asking for the front seat whenever three men get in the car, though. Really I shouldn’t have to ask, though. A decent male passenger or a decent driver will offer it if there is only one woman in the car unless it is an old man in the front seat.

Emily actually made a diagram of where you can and cannot sit in the service, I shall post it here when I get my hands on it.

So to detail my days here… Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, I go to the orphanage for 9 to 14 year old girls and hang out with them for a while by myself. They don’t wake up til about 10:30, so I don’t have to get there early. It takes me about an hour to get there. First, I have to walk to the service station, then we drive to the Ballad (the city center), then I have to walk to the other end of the Ballad to catch another service, then we drive to the top of a hill to a neighborhood called Ashrafiya, then I walk from the service station to the orphanage while boys and young men yell things at me like “F*** you” and “Woooooow.”

Somehow I got a sunburn on my shoulders from going to and from the orphanage the other day, which was weird.

On Mondays and Wednesdays, I go to the battered women’s shelter with Stefanie. We leave around 8:30 to get there at 9:30. We walk to a service station, wait til the car is full, then head to Ragadan (it’s like a huge parking lot full of services and there are people selling things all around the perimeter), then we catch a service to Dar Al Wefaq. Then we do a variety of things: we either work on mosaics, teach English, or one of us might be invited to go on check-up visits with girls who used to live in the shelter to see how they are doing. Then, after we leave, we head to Qasid (the language institute) to use the internet until class at 4:30 (actually Stefanie’s is at 5:00 because she is all smart and stuff.) My class is Jordanian amiiya and lasts 2 and a half hours. Thankfully my teacher is really awesome.

A Jordanian Experience

On my flight from Frankfurt to Amman, the guy sitting next to me and I talked for most of the flight. He was telling me about himself and what to expect in Jordan. He’s getting his PhD in Chicago, but was going to visit his family for two weeks and invited me and my friends to eat with them. So yesterday Mahmoud and his dad picked up me and two of the other girls from the internship, Shanelle and Ashley, around 6. (I was surprised how easily they found it since it took some other guys 45 minutes last time, although they were Americans, so…)

His house was in a part of town we had never been to, so that was cool. We didn’t really know what to expect, but we thought that his family would all speak English, or at least his siblings if his parents didn’t. We were wrong. It was a whole family affair and only Mahmoud and one of his brothers spoke English and a few of the others spoke English as well as we spoke Arabic, so not very well.  (Shanelle, Ashley, and I are the people in the group who speak the least Arabic, which is why we were free and not at the lecture the others were at. My roommates, Chatt and Emily were originally supposed to go with me.) But Ashley stepped up her game and was speaking Arabic pretty well. They loved her! 

Things we knew beforehand: it takes a long time to leave and Arab’s home because they keep talking to you, they are very gracious hosts, they will feed you more than you can handle.

I expected that we would sit around for a long time after we ate, but really we sat around for a few hours before they even started cooking (and some of the men were going out and buying ingredients and stuff throughout  this time) and then it was another hour or so before we ate the main meal. It was sooooo good. Mahmoud and his dad grilled steak and lamb in some kind of sauce and spices. And with it we had grilled vegetables and some kind of really flat bread (not flat bread, just bread that was flat, like paper thin.) And the most delicious pita I have ever encountered. As soon as my plate started emptying, one of the sisters would pile more food on my plate. I was actually pretty okay with that because I wanted to eat a lot because it was so delicious and I would have looked like a fatty in the States. She seemed to be done piling stuff on my plate when I felt about done, but then she recalled these pastry things with spinach in them that her mom had made and started piling them on my plate. Then I started eating really slowly so she couldn’t put more on. When she seemed to finally give up on me, I was pretty stuffed. We were wondering when we should leave because it was 11 something, an hour past our curfew, though Chatt knew where we were, so it was fine. Because it was so late, Emily texted me and said “Haha. You guys got Arabed!”

Then we were informed that the men had gone to get dessert. Smash told me I had to be the one to say that we had to leave at some point because one of the girls had texted her that Jordanians keep being hosts until you leave. But I’m pretty sure they were planning on having dessert the whole time and we couldn’t leave when they had gone to buy it for us. So they brought dessert, two dessert items that we had told them we really like in Jordan (kunafah and this other stuff that is like cheesy baklava, which sounds gross, but is delicious) and this other things that looked like a birds nest, but had a somewhat similar taste to the other two. It was a lot to handle after we had stuffed ourselves on the main meal, but I made it! Then the sister put two more things on my plate even though I said no. I could only take one more bite. Then they started talking about watermelon and asked if we like it. We are true Americans, so we said of course!

Kunafa, a Jordanian dessert

Then someone who had been in the kitchen brought out a watermelon and started cutting it. Then Smash freaked out at me and was like “we need to leave at some point!” Since there was panic in her voice, I told Mahmoud that we should probably leave soon. He said after the watermelon. Someone brought a plate of watermelon to our table then we realized that the large plate was just for Ashley, so we pretended to be confused and all started eating off it, hoping we wouldn’t each get one since we were so full. It was to no avail. Thankfully I ended up with the plate that they had both eaten off of because I was in the middle. Muahaha. Though it was amazing watermelon, I couldn’t handle it. No one has ever done a marathon this hard. Ashley said maybe people who have actually run marathons, but I don’t believe her.

I thought I could always put more food in my belly, but I couldn’t finish the watermelon. I have never felt more stuffed. It was like two Thanksgivings combined. I can’t believe I’m still alive. Actually, it was only twelve hours ago, and I can’t believe that I’m hungry right now; I thought I would never eat again.

I can’t wait to do it again.

*On a side note, Emily just told Chatt that she is a broken person because she has never seen Lion King.*

Racism and Handstands

I wrote this like a week ago, but finally have the internet to post it:

So last night we had an interesting cab driver. He was from Palestine and said that all Israelis and their children should be killed. He wasn’t even actually from Palestine it turned out. His parents were from there. We also had a guy without a cab try to charge us 5 dinar to drive us home. That’s almost 5 times as much as a taxi from that area would cost. We laughed at him and walked away. 

We also had some guy come up and talk to us who apparently lived in Arizona for 17 years and then got deported because he "did something bad." When I told him I was from Missouri he told me about when he drove through St. Louis and stopped to get gas, but then saw a bunch of black people and was too afraid to get out of the car. He got back on the freeway and ran out of gas. I thought it was pretty ironic since so many people in the States are racist towards Arabs and here this Arab is scared of people with darker skin than him. Ugh, people.

Young boys in the streets here will cat call us (literally because they make hissing noises that people use for cats to come closer) and yell things and stuff. But every once and a while they try to impress us instead of yell at us. My favorite example of this is when we were wandering around the Amman Citadel and a boy who was probably around 14 wordlessly did a handstand right in front of us and walked away. I would have given him my phone number.

I had a google hangout with my parents today, so that was exciting. They made me jealous of all the Panera bread they had at their house for our church. Dad went fishing and caught one, so his life is significantly more exciting than mine. I’m not even being sarcastic right now. We’ve been getting bored since we still haven’t started work.

Our facilitator, Chatt, is starting to form dreads in her hair, which I’m excited about. I’m really jealous, but I don’t think they would work in my hair. Chatt could pull them off so well. They’re already looking pretty good. She’s nervous about it, but I assured her that since she still has to go to grad school before she begins her career, she’ll be fine. Especially because she is planning on going to grad school in Italy. What a Bad A.

We had a meeting with Sarah at the ministry yesterday, so hopefully we’ll be starting our jobs soon. My job switched back to the original plan of the battered women’s shelter instead of the juvenile shelter. Apparently it’s really fantastic and they won some award for helping so many women. That means the security should also be really good, so that's good.

First post in Amman

The other day we went to the Amman citadel, which was really cool. I've also gone downtown. We tried to go to a lecture by this famous woman who writes about women's rights in the middle east (Shereen El Feki), but we didn't know until 5 minutes beforehand and then we couldn't find it because stuff here isn't marked very well.  There are a surprising number of things that remind me of Romania like some stores, the amount of harassment foreign girls get, similar buildings and sidewalks, etc. I've mostly been exploring the neighborhood the past few days. 

We can't flush the toilet paper, so we have to put it in a little trashcan by the toilet and we can't use much water because we have a limited amount each week. Once it's gone, it's gone. So we also can't shower a ton. The food here is delicious. I mostly eat pita bread and hummus, which are two of my favorite things, so that's fine with me. Church is interesting. It's on Fridays, which I LOVE. The Arabic branch is really small. We also went to sacrament in the English ward. This little girl in the ward already loves me and even though I was sharing a hymnbook with my friend, she had me share her tiny pocket one so I could barely see the words. And  she made me play a weird game of tic tac toe, there were way too many squares. It was like a 4 by 4 or something.

My roommates are awesome!  I have had very interesting discussions with girls in the group the past couple nights. Also, everyone has fantastic movie and tv taste. Emily and Alex have both watched The IT Crowd! My apartment consists of me, Emily, and Chat. The other girls apartment is Alex, Smash, Stephanie, and Shanel. The boys are Logan, Paul, and Marc. (And Matt, but he lives in a different apartment because he's married and therefore has a wife and baby with him.)

Boys cat call a lot at us, but none have touched us yet, though we had some follow us for a bit, so that's great. We have to have the boys walk us home at night now because there are so many shabaab. We don't want an skanky image, so we're not allowed to have boys in our apartment at all, so we usually meet at their apartment or make them wait outside.

We start work on Monday or something and we're meeting with the Minister sometime on Sunday or Monday. Or maybe one of her inferiors we shall see. I'm excited, but nervous because I speak the least Arabic in the group and the little Arabic I learned was Egyptian, which is a lot more different from Jordanian than I thought it would be.

Amman, I dont have my computer with me, so I might have stolen this from Shanelle's FB

It has been demanded...

...that I blog during my semester in Jordan, so I figure I may as well get back in the habit now since I've been slacking off so much lately. I leave two weeks from yesterday for Amman, Jordan, though I don't actually get there until the 10th. So that's going to be a fun time traveling by myself, but my fabulous facilitator will pick me up from the airport in Amman in the wee hours of the morning. Oh, and I'll actually meet up with another girl on the internship, Stephanie in Frankfurt, so that will be great!

A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to go to a pediatric psychology conference in New Orleans. Our group consisted of me, another undergrad, three grad students, and our professor. I think we were the biggest group there. We got a grant to go, so all we had to pay for was a few meals and, of course, dessert in the form of beignets. However, to get the cheaper flights, we had to leave Provo at 4 in the morning! We met up at 3:45 for our 6 o'clock flight. It was survivable.

The food in NO was seriously amazing. I would go there again just for the food. I tried gumbo, jumbalaya, gator (it was in sausage form), beignets, humongous, shelled BBQ shrimp, and the famous NO pecan pie. I don't know why that's a thing, but it is. Beignets are French and we were in the French Quarter, so that was quite fitting.

I guess the conference was pretty cool, too. We went to a bunch of different poster sessions during the three days we were there. (And we each presented in one). There were some pretty cool presentations too. We heard about how pediatric psych applies to the medical field today, the different psychological issues that kids with chronic illnesses face along with their families, how health projects in different countries are going, etc. We also got to pick a professor at the conference to eat lunch with on Saturday with a handful of other students. This was especially beneficial for the grad students who might want to intern with that professor or work with them on research, but it was also great for us undergrads to figure out where we want to go to school. I ate with a woman who teaches in Novia Scotia. I had not even considered leaving the states for grad school, but that could be pretty cool.

The weekend we went just happened to be the Jazz festival (or maybe they planned the conference that way on purpose.) So Friday afternoon we went to that. We just wandered from stage to stage to listen to different musicians. We even got Dr. Jensen to dance! But the video is on Mark's phone and I have not yet seen it. :( 

All 5 of us students went for a short run Friday morning, which was amusing. There were a few other runners out in the area, but not a group of 5 that took up the whole sidewalk. We slowed poor Mark down, but I think he wanted to protect us in scary New Orleans. We went down by the river walk and saw them setting up for the Jazz fest. It was really pretty. I wanted to take a ferry ride, but the breaks we had between sessions at the conference were only an hour or two long and most of the ferry rides were 3 or 4 hours I think. They were probably expensive, too.

We did have a humorous occurrence when a man asked Kara and I if we wanted to try out. We saw that it was a strip club, so Kara said "nah, we're good." "I know you are. That's why I want you to try out." We just kept walking. I think it made Dr. J concerned for our safety. He didn't want us wandering around by ourselves. If it weren't for things like that (and hurricanes), I would think NO would be a pretty awesome place to live. Actually I'm sure other areas would be really cool to live in as long as you weren't in the French Quarter, which is where we were the whole time since our hotel was basically in it.

Sanita, me, & Kara in front of Sanita's poster I think

The whole group!

At the Jazz festival!

The waiter puts a bib on for you before you eat the BBQ shrimp. That's service!

Tina and I trying on Mardi Gras masks

We did get stuck in Dallas on the way home after our flight got delayed, but we eventually got home at 2 or 3 in the morning. But our 72 hour adventure was definitely worth it. Thanks to Dr. J. for letting us go and getting us the grant and making all the travel arrangements and putting up with us for the weekend!

More masks!