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!

Little Things

I saw something traumatic in the park today, so it's a good thing everything else today has been great. Examples:

The kids were good this morning. I let D play with my hair because he has never pulled it before. He was making some weird noises and stroking something across my head. Then Ang explained that he was pretending to shave my head because they had their heads shaved last week. Haha! He also repeated “okay” when I just randomly said it, which was really exciting! We also got him to say 'Ajutor!'

I was fanning myself this morning and then I realized that G must be hot, too. So I started fanning him. He looked confused at first and then put on this face of utter bliss and giggled. It was the cutest thing of my life.

N said a word really well today, so I opened my arms for a big hug. He yelled Nu! And shook his head. I looked really sad like I was going to cry and then he felt bad and rand up and kissed my hand.

We only have two weeks left. I can’t believe that! In two weeks, I’ll be gone. I’ll never see my kids again. I won’t even really know how they’re doing or where they go. I'm excited to go home, but I feel guilty about that because I'm leaving these kids here alone. They have workers, but they are there  to provide for their physical needs, not emotional needs. The next interns aren't even going to be coming for another month and a half! I hope the kids don't regress too much. I get to go home to my parents and they don't even have any and most never will.

I fell in love with 2 older kids at the hospital today. One of them, Danny, was 15 and got drug by a horse. He didn’t talk to us much at first, and then Kelsey let him play with her iphone and he would throw us mischievous looks every time he died in Temple run and say “I’m dead!” He was so funny.

And Peter was in the room, too. He got hit by lightning and liked to talk a lot. His hands were burned, so he couldn’t play with the iphone, but he watched Danny and talked to us. At one point I started fanning him because it was burning hot in the room. He thought it was the funniest thing on the planet. Then all 3 of us (Kelsey, Megan, and I) were fanning him and he just laughed like a king.

Some of the girls gave E in the hospital today a Mohawk. Chelsea and I were the last ones in the room and I was holding her and then 5 kids walked in to stare at us. I had to make awkward conversation with them in my crappy Romanian. It was rough, but E kept smiling up at me, so I got through it.

I got Scotty to smile a lot today by tickling him. He’s growing some teeth now and looks like a little redneck missing his teeth instead of gaining them. It’s great. His feet were peeling awfully today, so I put some lotion on them. They looked like the tectonic plates at the end of the world.

Where is Todd?

Yesterday when we went to the hospital, Todd (my favorite kids) was gone! I’m terrified that he’s ended up at one of the other orphanages. A lot of the other orphanages are horrible, like the stereotypical ones they show in movies in the states. (Ours is pretty great, though.) We have never been allowed in any of the other orphanages. But when kids from them end up in the hospital, we are able to see their behavior, and therefore surmise how they are treated where they live. Some go crazy with attention and climb all over you and some of them won’t let you touch them at all and smack your hand away or retract from your touch. They have RAD, and you can tell that they sit in their cribs all day everyday. Todd cannot go to one of these places, but I don’t know where he went. And there's nothing I can do about it. Bah! Hopefully he shows up in our orphanage. Sometimes the kids will disappear from the hospital for a while and then appear again later. We never really know where they go or anything.

Continuation:

The second day of the midsemester trip, we went to church in Bucharest. We got there early because we didn’t know how long it would take for us to get there. We were taking pictures in front of the sign when we first got there. A pair of elders walked by and looked really confused, but didn’t say anything to us. We went inside. Kelsey had burnt her arm on her hair dryer that morning (she was leaning over comically because she had to plug it into an outlet in a different room in the hostel since ours didn’t work) so we went in the kitchen for her to run it under cold water. I decided to look for some ice in the freezer. An elder walked in the room and looked extremely confused about who we were. Then Kelsey said “hello” in English. Then he was extra confused and said “hi.” Then I explained that I was leaning into the freezer in a random church building because I was looking for ice for Kelsey’s burn. “We don’t have any.” “I realize that now.” It was a great conversation.

Before and after sacrament meeting everyone came to ask us who we were and to kiss us on the cheeks and to practice their English. I've never felt more popular in my life. A nice English speaking Romanian translated for us into translators instead of just whispering behind us like the missionaries do in Iasi.

Kelsey had an awesome experience meeting a woman in the ward who her sister taught about the church 8 years ago when she was on her mission here. You’ll have to read Kelsey’s blog for that.

A kindly old lady in the ward who considers herself the mother of the missionaries in Bucharest invited us over for lunch. The four of us squished into her tiny apartment with 12 missionaries and her. The food was great and very traditional. It might be one of my favorite experiences in Romania not including the kids. It was just such traditional Romanian, and she was so kind to us! I loved it.

Kelsey and me after our lunch at Sora Grozo's

We met up with Jen in the park to watch a kids movie. Unfortunately that movie turned out to be Alvin and the Chipmunks, so we went to a different part of the park until it was over. We talked for a while and watched some really weird mimes that appeared to be trying to be anamatrons. I don’t know if this is usual for mimes or not since I’ve never seen one before. It was pretty cool, though.

Mime

Mime (Hamlet)

Then How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days came on the screen, so we sat and watched it, got bit by bugs, and wandered home. 

Also, for your entertainment, I present a toy that one of the girls at the hospital had a few days ago:  

Nearly Headless Nick (get it?!?)

Rewind

I've been asked by a few people to recount our midsemester trip, so I suppose I shall do that. I'm too lazy to do it all at once, though. And you don't want to read it all at once, so I'll just go back and write it a day at a time. We'll see if I stick to that.

The first day:

Kels and I got to the train station a few minutes earlier than the other girls Rachel and Cortlandt. They walked up to us and informed us that they had left the phone in the taxi, so they were going to go look and see if the taxi was still there, but we would probably never see it again. They did not find it. The trip was off to a great start. Then we got on the train.

It was night, so we had planned on getting a sleeper train to Bucharesti. Not so. We had been wondering why our tickets were so cheap. Kelsey accidentally got us seats on the 3^rd class part...Where the seats are completely upright, the people are loud, the air is freezing, and the lights are on all night. It was 11 at night when we got on and 7 in the morning when we got off.

We decided to go to the hostel (the YMCA) so that we could take a nap and leave our bags in our lockers there. We had a very confusing encounter with the only worker who was there since he did not speak any English. He seemed a bit frustrated with us, but what we wanted really wasn’t that confusing.

After our delightfully refreshing hour-long nap, we decided to go search for an orange store to buy a prepay phone for the week. We had a surprisingly hard time finding one and stopped at every single phone booth in the city to try to call Mario and my friend, Jen Good since I told her that we would call her to meet up. We finally found the big shopping district, which included an Orange Store, but it turned out that they did not offer prepay phones, so we wandered around a big piata and got overwhelmed by gypsies before getting lunch at a McDonalds with the most confusingly designed bathrooms I have ever seen. 

We then decided to do a walking tour on our own that was based on a map that one of the men at the hostel gave us. This included visits to the peasant museum (which was worth it just for the section with holiday masks that will give me nightmares for years to come), the village museum, and the triumph arch. At the village museum we got followed around by a little girl and her grandfather who was following her. We finally started talking to the little girl and then the grandfather was surprised that we spoke any Romanian since he had heard us speaking English, but then he told us all about his life as a book translator from Romanian to Spanish as well as Romanian to English. It was fascinating. Usually Romanians his age don’t speak English, but he was almost fluent. He was very disappointed that he wasn’t carrying one of his books around to give to us on the spot. 

Kelsey, Me, Rachel, Cortlandt

A lovely sample of the village museum

Kelsey is professional at doing "sneaky shots." This is the grandpa and little girl who were following us.

We ended up eating at Hard Rock Café. I had never been to one. It wasn’t actually very good. We finally found a phone booth that actually worked and didn’t smell too much like urine. We got a hold of Jen and decided to have her pick us up from the YMCA to go to some festival thing some of her friends had a booth at. It turned out to be a huge hippie festival. I’ve seen some Romanian hippies before, but this was something else!

Mural painting at the hippie fest.

More painting. Sometimes people just don't wear shirts.

People were bumping me as a tried to take a pic of this drumline at the hippie fest.

Top of the Morning

This morning might have been my favorite morning so far working in the orphanage. The professors are in town, so they came to visit our apartment for a little while this morning. Of course, the kids did not behave in their normal manner in front of the professors. Danny was way more ADHD than normal, running from toy to toy in a split second. The others were not too far off of the way they normally behave, but they were still confused by the 5 visitors (Aislynn, Mario, and a professor's husband were there, too).
But Angela and I came prepared with questions for the professors. They were very helpful with answering our questions about how to deal with certain misbehaviors and certain teaching styles. It was really helpful, since they only stayed for about half an hour, we were able to implement some of their recommendations already this morning. It will take some time, but I think that it will really improve the help we can provide for these kids and prevent them from hurting one another as well as other people.
The rest of the morning, the kids behaved well, too. Maybe it is because we were already doing what the professors told us to do. We also had our favorite workers at the apartment this morning. It was just a great day overall. The kids in the afternoon were great, too! One of them was a little out of control, but he just got home from a week in the hospital, so we couldn't censure him too much. I would be crazy if I were stuck in the hospital, too.
When we got home for lunch, I got to eat some leftover chili and 2 Cremosso yogurts (oops). I'm also e-mailing Dannon today to tell them that they need to sell Cremosso yogurt in the United States. It's the most delicious yogurt in the world. Mmmmmm....I really want to eat another one right now, too.
The chilli is left over from our big group dinner on Tuesday night. We made dinner for ourselves, the professors, Mario, and Robby. We made Kelsey's amazingly delicious Georgia chili recipe and got delightful Romanian bread and Podu Ros made gogosi (like donuts.) Basically it was fantastic even though we didn't get to eat it for an hour since the professors were late. We then had a long meeting with the professors. They were shocked that only 5 girls out of the 14 of us have our own beds. I don't know how this wasn't known at BYU. Some girls have had to share beds since the program got a second apartment and now we have 3. Really I think that BYU just needs to buy a house out here, or at least outright buy an apartment. I think it would be more fiscally responsible in the long run. The program has already been running for 13 years. I can't imagine it's going to end anytime soon.
We went to visit 2 monasteries with the professors. They are from the 13th century and have somehow survived all this time (with paint renovations and such.) They were beautiful. I'll have to put pictures of them up once the professor downloads them.

I Broke a World Record!

Friday was great at the apartment. It was Children’s Day in Romania, so the older kids got to go to a theater show. Angela and I just had *Danny and *Gary for the day. It was also the first day of Chris’ month long vacation, so it was just us while some other workers cooked in the kitchen. Chris being gone means we will no longer have anyone to translate or explain how things run to us. Luckily we had him for a while so we have a schedule set. Angela and I take turns taking each kid out of the room to work with him on the Brigance. They are much more willing to work when they are one on one. It also doesn’t hurt that we give them stickers when they are good (although I’m not sure if they quite grasp that correlation yet.) We’re working with Gary right now on not pulling other people’s hair. It’s not working. That child has a grip of iron. 

Anyway, on Friday, Gary and Danny were little angels almost the whole time! This is quite unusual. They absolutely love music, so we sang to them a bit. (Angela has a fantastic voice, though we will miss Chris’ guitar.) Danny hums Twinkle Twinkle Little Star all the time. He kept doing this thing on Friday where he would be standing across the room from me doing his little swaying dance, I would look up and beam at him, and he would suddenly smile and run over to me for a hug.

Friday at the hospital we found yet another child who I fell in love with. She doesn’t have a first name since she was abandoned at some center (I don’t understand how any of the kids have last names when they’re abandoned. She had a last name. I tried to ask Chris once, but he didn’t really understand my English.) So I took the liberty of dubbing her Cassie. She is a beautiful Aryan baby with blue eyes and a heart-melting smile and very gross poop. I told her that she can marry Scotty, the first baby who I held in the hospital. Speaking of Scotty, I’m worried about him, they moved him back to the ICU for some reason. Aaaaah!

Last night we joined in this lantern lighting festival near our apartment. We were trying to get into the Guinness book of World Records for the most floating lanterns and we made it (12,700)! 

all the girls

Aislynn, Camille, Kelsey, Chelsea, Me

Chameleon and Me

Pretty much I single handedly made history. I’m still a little in shock that nothing lit on fire, though. There were a lot of wires and trees where we lit them. Some of them were stuck on telephone poles burning for a while and one was on one of the Cultural Palace spires for a while. We only saw one that they had to use a fire extinguisher on, though.