Well its been a while but its two weeks left in the semester
and I have been BUSY!!! I will try to catch you all up on what I have been up
to these past few days.
I am pretty sure that CIEE- Amman has the best staff anyone
could ever ask for, and I'm not just saying that cause they now have the link
to my blog. The office staff is great
and so are the professors. I will do
another blog post eventually about my classes, inshallah, mumkin this weekend
but right now I want to talk about what all I have done with CIEE since my last
post.
BEDOUIN WEDDING
For starters I have an amazing Modern Standard Arabic
professor named Ahmed. If you are
friends with me on facebook you will have seen pictures of him and his
shenanigans in class. Well last week his
brother got married. Ahmed has been
talking about this wedding almost since we arrived in his class three months
ago. Finally the time came and he
mentioned that he wanted to bring us to the party. Of course we were all excited about it and he
said he would ask CIEE if it would be okay if we went, the party was in another
town and we still had travel restrictions placed on us. The next day he comes
into class with a really somber look on his face. He tells us that he spoke to CIEE and……..THEY
ARRANGED A BUS TO TAKE US TO THE PARTY!!!!
The day came for the part and we were all really
excited. The girls could wear shorter
dresses which was quite exciting but difficult navigating in Amman in Taxies
and food because the stares increased exponentially. Eventually we all boarded the bus that would
take us to the party.
The party was split in half, men and women. I wasn’t able to take pictures in my party
because the woman were all without hijab and that is haram outside of the
house. The women's party was held in the
house/tent. Basically they set up a
Bedouin tent that was connected to the house, similar to a sun porch but no one
could see in. We rounded the corner to
see two girls on their knees waiving their hair back and forth while the rest
of the ladies danced around them. Clothing was anything from full traditional
clothing with hijab to a ladies business suit to strapless short dresses to
sweat suits. I spent the whole night
dancing, and by dancing I mean jumping up and down and yelling.
We did learn a few traditional debqa dances, traditional
Jordanian dance, and some belly dancing.
I danced for like 3 hours straight before we went inside to eat mensaf,
the traditional Jordanian dish. Mensaf
is basically rice and chicken or lamb with liquidy yogurt pored over it. We sat on the floor and ate with my
hands. I love the rice, it is so
good! I was having difficulty with the
chicken and finding the meat on the bones and then one of the ladies next to me
started pulling the meat off the bones and placing it in a pile in front of
me. It was so sweet. I could tell that
Ahmad was proud that he could share his house and family with his
students.
It was finally time to go and non of us wanted to
leave. Even the ladies at the party
didn’t want us to leave and yelled at Ahmad when he told us we had to leave! He
tried to explain that we had class the next day and they told him that we
didn’t have classes and needed to stay at their house over night! It was so sweet. We eventually had to tell them goodbye and
load up and go home.
VOLUNTEERING IN IRAQ AL AMIR
I was recruited to spend four Saturdays working in a small
town outside of Amman to create a video about the community service project
that CIEE worked on this semester. We
basically overhauled an all boys elementary school.
The first week we painted the exterior walls. Each wall was a different color and pretty
muted colors so the red looked like pink but that is okay. The second week we painted the top half of
the class rooms. This was like a baby
blue water based paint. The third week
was the bottom half of the walls, mint green oil based paint. The fourth and final week was murals on the
outside walls. Other projects include- building concrete railings so the boys don’t
push each other off the stairs and break their arms, hands, legs, etc. (because
that was happening), fixing desks, tightening screws and what not.
Each week students got to sign up to go on the service trips
and only the first 20 or so got to go.
I, however, got to go every week to make the video so I got pretty close
to some of the kids, or at least I felt like we had a connection haha
On the last day we finished the murals and then had a few
gifts to give the school. The entire
school was there. They lined up in the
court yard and did their usual morning routine for us. This consisted of the singing of their
national anthem along with the raising of the Jordanian flag, a few other songs
and then an "attention getter" activity for the boys where commands
were called out like "arms out" "arms up" "arms
down" and they would have to do whatever command was given to them.
Next was our part.
CIEE bought a winter coat for each of the students in the school. They each came up one by one and got a
coat. The weather was pretty warm that
day but they all put on their coats by the end.
I had to help a few cause they kept trying to put it on upside down….
We also gave at
least one space heater per class room to the school to keep the boys warm
during the winter. Once they all had
their jackets they wanted to present us with a gift. Our gift was a coffee mug with a heart on
it. This will honestly be one of my most
treasured possessions from my time here.
It meant so much to me to see the little kids so happy in their school
and with their new coats. So precious.
The newly redecorated school was the host to a Jordan vs United States soccer game. It was CIEE vs. the boys in the school. In
the end Jordan toppled the US quite significantly but that is okay because afterward
the US team received cookies and cake!
Once our responsibilities were over we all ventured to a
"park" WITH A STREAM RUNNING THROUGH IT!!! (so exciting to hear
running water) and had a barbeque. It
was delicious.
I really enjoyed
getting to know the staff that arranged the volunteer experience and all the
people in the group that went with us on each trip. I also LOVED getting out of Amman and into
the country side. The land out there is unbelievably
gorgeous. I could spend all day out
there.
In Arabic there are
basically two languages. You have the
Modern Standard Arabic which is basically the Koran/Media Arabic and then each
country has their own colloquial Arabic.
While in Jordan I studied both of these sects of Arabic. My colloquial teacher's name is Aya.
In class the other
day we asked Aya about some of the foods in our book. She sat down and described them to us and
eventually invited us to her house to eat these things. She is so generous!
We all loaded up in
cabs after school one day and headed to her house. After some trouble finding her building we finally entered her house to
smell the most delicious food. I cant
remember what it is called but it is basically five layers of giant pita bread
soaked in olive oil with chopped onions in the middle topped with chicken.
After dinner we
moved to the living room and she had baked some kind of delicious deserts. I have no idea what they were but I loved
them. Aya had also prepared some hot tea
for us and some nargile. At first I wasn’t
going to try it because I always get made fun of when I try it but I decided
that it might be rude to refuse so I tried it again and I got pretty good at
it. Its so common in the culture that
Aya and her family have three nargiles in their house for whenever they have
company over.
One of the customs
in Arab culture is to offer Turkish coffee to people when it is time for the
night to end. Once Turkish coffee was
offered we all knew the drill. Drink it
and get out! Haha it was such a wonderful evening with lots of amazing hospitality. I left with a full stomach and a full
heart.
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