Madaba, Mt Nebo, Baptisms, and the Dead Sea

I am more than mildly ashamed of how long it's taken me to write a new blog post.  I hope that the nearly two months of silence will be a testament for how hard I worked on my academics for the last semester.  My program, as I previously mentioned, had us taking 5 courses rather than the usual 4, so I was quite busy.  Luckily, I was able to make use of tiny fragments of free time to have some solid adventuring before finals.  

The most obvious of these adventures was the trip Amideast took us on to Biblical sites and the Dead Sea.  Jordan's sweet little city of Madaba boasts a church dedicated to St. George.  Aside from lovely frescoed walls, the church boasts two artistic wonders.  The first of these is a giant mosaic in the floor of the church.  I'm not sure of all the details of the mosaic, but I do know that its quite old and- more importantly- that it is a map of the Holy Land at that time.  Unfortunately, the labels are done in Greek, so I can't read them, but here are some pictures: 

The walled city depicted in this once is most definitely Jerusalem:

This church is also known for a painting of Mary and the baby Jesus, which, according to local accounts, suddenly sprouted a third blue arm in a flash of light.  For many years, people brought gold to donate to the church by leaving it by this painting:

I have a tradition of lighting candles in the churches I visit.  I lit this one for all the people I love, so if you're reading this, I probably lit it for you:

We also saw an open-air museum of other mosaics (the Middle East LOVES mosaics).  I won't bother to upload any pictures because the time it takes for a single picture to upload on the internet out here is not worth it for that particular set of mosaics.  

After Madaba, we journeyed out to Mount Nebo.  According to the Torah, this is where Moses stood and saw the promised land.  Today, the same view looks out at Jericho, which is in the West Bank:

After our stop at Mt Nebo, we pressed onward to the Jordan River.  Specifically, we were headed to the baptisms site of Jesus of Nazareth.  I didn't find this experience to be particularly enthralling, as the site itself has been reconstructed to the point that it seems to have lost its historic flavor.  In any case, here's a photo:

More interesting to me was the Jordan River itself, which is pretty much just a sad little brown ribbon by the time it gets to Jordan:

Directly on the other side of the Jordan is Israel...  Seeing the IDF soldiers was more than enough to send me into a small spiral of culture shock:

At the Baptism site, a hoard of loud European tourists stripped down to their scanty underwear and plunged themselves into the Jordan.  I found this to be offensive, but the European tourists I encountered in both Jordan and Egypt were wholly disrespectful of modesty standards and local customs in that regard.

Finally, from the Baptism site, we headed to the Dead Sea for an afternoon of floating around and smearing ourselves in mud.  It was much-needed relaxation, and the minerals in the mud really do soften the skin.  We saw a gorgeous sunset before heading back to Amman for a long night of studying.  Here's a quick glance at the beautiful Dead Sea:

Al-Intikhabat (Elections in Jordan)

It's elections season in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.  In fact, the elections for Parliament are only 3 days away.  My Arabic isn't serviceable for intellectual conversations on the complexities of elections in a kingdom, but there are a few things I've been able to gather about the whole situation from my courses, conversations and from a field trip we took last week.  Everything I've written here is a matter of subjective observation and personal thought, nothing more.

Campaigning for the elections started all of a sudden.  One morning, I stepped out of my host family's house for my walk to school, and the streets were filled with banners and campaign posters.  It turns out, it is illegal to campaign until one month prior to elections.  Therefore, once campaigning begins, no one wastes a single minute.  While in the states, we have months of humiliations and petty triumphs between candidates, in Jordan, campaigning is crammed into one intense month of posters, banners, campaign tents and social networking.

At the end of my street, they've erected a huge campaign tent.  Every candidate has one, and they are the center of political outreach for a candidate.  I am neither Jordanian, nor a man, so I've never been inside of one of these, but I've heard that the candidates are often there in the evening, and that people in the area can get a free meal of mansaf, the national Jordanian dish, here many a night during campaign times.

Earlier this week, we went on a field trip to the nearby town of Faheis with Malek Twal, the second in command of the Jordanian Ministry of Political Development.  He showed us around the town, and arranged meetings for us with two cousins who are running against each other for representation in the Parliament.  Here's a picture of Malek Twal explaining elections to us in the campaign tent of the first candidate:

This first candidate welcomed us into his tent, served us cold water and hot tea, and sat with us to answer all of our questions.  He didn't speak much English, so his son (who was studying in the UK and had come home to help his father's campaign) acted as translator for us (although, I actually understood most of what he was saying!).  With a hopeful and idealistic attitude that felt very familiar, he spoke at length about his concern for human rights in Jordan, and his duties to his constituents should he win.  He specifically cited the importance of delivering human rights to prisoners, and made a point of talking about his personal involvement with the issue including many visits to former prisoners to discuss their experiences including food, hygiene and their treatment.  He also expressed strongly the need for freedom of expression in Jordan. This man seemed to have a genuine interest in the rights of the people, saying that once in office, his door would always be open to his constituents to come discuss their concerns.  While this could easily be an empty promise, Jordan is a very small country, and voting districts are tiny compared to the size of what we're used to in the states, so it is possible although probably quite time consuming to retain a personal connection between Parliament member and constituency.

This man reminded me of the hopeful liberals who always run for city council or state legislature at home.  He has big ideas, and is earnest in his campaigning, but he probably doesn't stand a chance against the wheeling and dealing of the "big boys."

The second candidate we visited was the total opposite.  We met him down the road a bit at his campaign headquarters instead of in his campaign tent.  He ushered us into his office, and then left us in there with Dr. Malek, while he answered phone calls and the questions of his staffers.  Once he finally came in and sat with us (he's on the left in the picture below), we didn't have time for many questions.

What I did gather from this visit was the total opposite of our last visit.  The main issue of this man's campaign was essentially "to make a more fair Parliament."  At first I thought, huh, that's an interesting and specific goal, maybe that's good.  But, then I realized it's not much of a campaign goal at all.  And then I looked at the offices around me which, in the words of one of my fellow students looked suspiciously like "mafia boss" offices.  I'm not saying they were, I probably wouldn't have the slightest idea if I stumbled into the middle of something like that.  More to the point, it looked like a lot of money comes in and out of that office, and I got the sense that the candidate didn't really need to work very hard to prove himself to anyone.

I don't know enough to make a real statement about it, but perhaps this man was one of the "big boys" I referenced earlier, who will use all his power to squish the idealistic candidate and his real concerns about the people.  It seems likely.  The downtown of Fuheis was plastered with his posters:

Next, we drove back through Amman, making a quick stop at a candidate's house.  I'm not really sure why we stopped there since we didn't go in, but it certainly left an impression.  This house is enormous.  I know that this does not represent all candidates, but it certainly says something:

Even though I guess it's possible to run without a personal fortune, I'm not sure there are really any political candidates in the world that can run purely on values and a good message.  During our trip, I heard that a person could spend at least $100,000 on a campaign, and that $5 million was a high but not unreasonable number.  It certainly says something about a potentially scary pitfall of representative democracy.  Of course, in theory, the best ideas should win, but in reality, sometimes money can buy you a lot of clever, flashy advertising or a lot of votes.  Speaking of which, I learned that the going rate for a person's vote is about 500 Jordanian Dinar, and that the government is fighting really hard to keep people from buying votes.  Mostly this involves tracking registrations.  For example, if you're registered to vote in Aqaba, and you and a busload of Aqaba people show up to vote in Irbid, it's a pretty strong indication of something fishy happening.  Certainly, it's not always so obvious, but regulating elections is a part of having free and fair elections.

Jordan certainly faces some serious challenges in its push for democratization. Structurally speaking, a kingdom with a democratically elected legislative body has to be able to demonstrate that the elected officials have real power.  At base, if an elected body is just a gesture of appeasement to those who demand democracy, then democracy cannot flourish.  However, I believe that is not the case here.  Rather, it seems that Jordan's powerful executive branch has a sincere interest in taking steps to make the Parliament a vestige of true democracy in the region.  After the dissolution of the last Parliament, these elections are crucial in determining whether Jordanians can trust this aspect of their system.  It seems that if this session goes as poorly as the last, it will be very challenging to prove the legitimacy of this body.

Socially speaking, the elections face enormous obstacles.  Campaigning here is based largely on an intricate, and ancient system of social relations.  Families are the units that make up larger extended families, which make up tribes, and beyond that, there are tribes within larger tribes (we don't have the vocabulary for all of this in English, but I assure you, in Arabic, there are words for each of these groups as well as the relationships between the people in them).  I won't go into the details of this system, but let me just emphasize that it is deeply, deeply ingrained and determine a lot of social relations. So, in terms of elections, campaigning is controlled by the power structures within families, extended families, tribes, and bigger tribes, as well as all the relationships between families, extended families, tribes and bigger tribes.  Many, but of course not all, votes are cast more with this system in mind than the issues a candidate might represent.  In fact, many candidates don't run on a platform at all, and almost nobody runs as a member of a party.  So campaign slogans are almost always general, hopeful, and promise something no one can disagree with.   Without discussion of issues, political negotiation, or open debate between candidates, voting really comes down to the social connections of the candidates.

One might even go so far as to say that there isn't enough politicking in the politics here.

Hitting the books

I realized this morning that I haven't really shared much about my actual life here, just the big events like seeing Petra, and going to Egypt.  Since, I have two papers to write this weekend, this is the best time to procrastinate on my school work by doing something semi-productive.

Since 80% of my awake time is spent on academics, I'll talk about that today. I am in class approximately 17 hours per week.  Four days a week, I have Modern Standard Arabic, or fusHa class for an hour and a quarter.  This is by far my favourite class.  After spending the summer at Middlebury immersed in Arabic, this class feels the most comfortable for me, and it's also the most exciting in some ways.  In terms of grammar, we are reaching the upper levels of intermediate learning.  But since language learning is very gradual, retrospect is the best lens for measuring progress.  I love everything about MSA.  My professor for this class is a young woman (my guess is that she's about 24) who speaks fluent, nearly accent-less English.

Three days a week, I have an hour long course on Jordanian dialect, or al-'amiyyeh al-ordunieh.  Even though I'd never studied any dialects of Arabic before coming to Jordan, I was placed in the Intermediate level because of my more advanced MSA level.  This class is centered on vocabulary building and most of the grammar is taught by comparison to MSA.  Luckily, Jordanian dialect is closer than some dialects to Classical Arabic.  My professor for this class looks strikingly similar to Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, but that's where the similarity ends. He has the most incredibly infectious laugh, and will laugh uproariously at even the most remotely funny thing.  Also, if anytime we guess the correct meaning of a new word or expression, he claps his hands and yells "ya salaam 'aleiki!" which literally means peace be upon you.  Positive reinforcement at its best.

Anyway, all the things I could say I love about Arabic classes would bore the hell out of anyone who reads this blog (if anyone does) so I'll keep my love to myself and move on.

I am also taking three "content" courses in English.  Each of these happens only once per week, but in a 3 hour block.  On Sundays, I have a course about ethnic and minority groups in the Middle East and North Africa.  Compared to the rest of my courses, the reading for this course is quite light, but part of understanding the region is understanding the complexity of the social make up.  It has been my general impression while being here that most Americans have absolutely no grasp of how deeply rooted these differences are.  

My favourite content course, which is called Contemporary Issues in the Arab World happens on Tuesday afternoons.  The class is a political science course, and we read about 100-150 pages per week for it.  It's very challenging, and the professor is a political advisor to the King Abdullah II, as well as a professor at the University of Jordan as well as a freelance academic. He's very discerning and detail-oriented, but encouraging as well (and he's taken a liking to me, which I find very likable in a person) .  For his course, I am working on a large research paper on how water issues effect the political relationships and economic development of the area (Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Israel-Palestine, and Lebanon).  Having spent my entire academic career before coming here between the pages of books, it is refreshing to be able to touch the subjects of my writing.  For example, this weekend, I will touch the Jordan river, which is one of the superstars of my research, and in a few weeks, I may have the opportunity to visit a few farms in the area to observe their irrigation systems.  Neither of these trips effects my real research, but it makes the project tangible.  

My last course of the week is about radical Islamic political movements, and is taught by a senile ex-diplomat.    Though he was surely once brilliant, he is now quite old and his class is unpredictable and stressful.  He took an immediate dislike to me on the first day of class, and has never given me a chance to change his mind.  In spite of this, I have learned in his course.  I won't regret it, I'm sure.  My project for him is about Ruhollah Khomeini and the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.  I did a big research project on the doctrine of the movement about a year ago, so I am looking forward to deepening my knowledge of the topic.  

It's challenging to find the enough time and energy to complete the necessary work for my courses, but coffee is everywhere, and falafel is cheap (about thirty American cents for a sandwich) so there's fuel enough to sustain me.  

In any case, it's now time for me to return to essay writing.  Today, I'm writing about the fall of the Maronites in Lebanon, and the rise of the 'Alawis in Syria.

Unrelated to academics, here is a picture of laundry drying on the roof of a house I see every morning during my walk to school:

wadi rum and petra

We've all been a little tired of Amman lately.  Or maybe it's just me and I get tired of seeing the same streets for too long, but I've been restless.  So, it couldn't have been better timing last week to take a trip down to southern Jordan to Wadi Rum and Petra.  

Wadi means "valley" in Arabic, but that's a bit of an understatement as to what this place really is... but of course, words don't really capture it.

We were taken around the desert by Bedouin in pickups and on camelback:

And we spent the night in a Bedouin camp under the stars.  The cooked dinner for us in a traditional way: underground, surrounded by coals.  It was delicious: chick and rice and carrots, plus salads and bread on the side.  Here they are pulling it out of the ground:

I slept outside along with most of the group.  It's been years since I've seen so many stars, and I saw more shooting stars that night than I've ever seen before.  It was beautiful... Too beautiful to sleep, really.

We woke up early the next morning and ate breakfast in an open tent against a cliff face.  Then we piled in the back of another pick up truck, climb into our bus, and headed north for Petra.

I never saw Indiana Jones growing up, so I'm really not sure where I first heard of Petra.  I think it was from National Geographic magazine, or maybe Smithsonian, but regardless of where I first saw pictures, ever since then I've wanted to see it.  Who wouldn't?  An ancient metropolis carved out of red sandstone in the styles of the Nabateans, Romans and Byzantines is about as romantic an image as can be imagined.  Of course, since deciding to study in Jordan instead of Egypt, I have been holding my breath for the moment when I first saw Petra.

This was the first ruin we saw.  It's an ancient tomb:

This is the Siq (long, narrow passageway):

  

and finally after trekking through layers of standstone and ancient carvings, I caught my first glimpse of the Treasury:

The Treasury is the most famous view of Petra, for obvious reasons:

After seeing the Treasury and completing our tour of the main areas, we had lunch in a shockingly delicious restaurant... They had a wide range of greens and vegetables, which I ate voraciously, as such things are not as common  as I would like in Arab culture.  

After lunch, we had two hours to wander about, so a friend and I explored some more tombs and took a slow stroll up to the exit.

My feet were pretty unhappy by the end of the trip.  Next time, maybe I'll invest in more camel rides.  

life here goes on as usual. I'm just starting to get genuinely comfortable with my life here:  study, eat, walk, class, eat, class, walk, study is how my days go most days, but I also fill out my days by spending time with other students from my program, hanging out with some new Jordanian friends, reading Anna Karenina, exploring, meeting with my tutor, and playing my mandolin.  It's a very sweet life.  This city is a fascinating array of faces and traditions, as well as modernity.  For example, I live in a very normal urban neighborhood, but about twice a week, I see this in the empty lot across from my family's apartment building:

My Arabic is improving steadily.  I think I fall more and more in love with it every day.  It's an amazingly complex and detailed language. I am starting to understand Jordanian dialect pretty well, and my Modern Standard Arabic continues to improve at a pleasant pace.

Quiet till it falls.

In the last few weeks in Amman, we've been volunteering once a week at a public elementary school.  In Amman (I'm not sure about the rest of the Middle East), anyone who can afford private elementary school sends their children there instead of to a public school.  The public schools are, for the most part, for the poorest segment.  The school we went to was in the northern part of the city, on the outskirts.  It's near a makheem, or refugee camp, so most of the students are Palestinian or of Palestinian descent.

 

 

It was certainly saddening in some ways to see how poor their school is, but I also got the impression that their teachers work hard to teach them well.  There are no pictures on the wall, and the building is old, and the recess hard is very small, but they were so excited to have guests, that we got swarmed when we took out our cameras to take pictures with them.  It can only be described as an adorable riot:

  

We also visited an 8th grade class and a 9th grade class.  Since I'm not top notch with kids large groups of kids, these classes were more interesting for me.  It's actually kind of amazing to see the difference between the 8th and 9th graders.  The 8th graders were generally really outgoing, eager to meet us and talk to us and make friends.  On the other hand, the 9th graders were much more formal and reserved. 

Last weekend, we went to Ajloun castle and the Roman ruins at Jerash to the north of Amman.  Ajloun castle was first.  It was originally built by the Arabs, but during the crusades, the Crusading armies controlled it.  I'm not sure about after that, but it was pretty neat.  And it was cool inside, which was excellent relief from the heat wave outside.

 

After Ajloun, we went to Jerash to visit the Roman ruins there.  According to our program director, after the Roman part of the city was abandoned, the Arabs who lived near Jerash thought that the Roman buildings were haunted, so they never built over them.  An earthquake damaged a lot of the buildings, but for the most part, they're incredibly intact.

This is a Roman manhole.  The water drained into the sewage system.  Honestly, seeing this blew my mind just as much as the buildings. 

 

Mosaic floors from the church:

And of course, bagpipe players?

Leyal al-Qahira

I've been waiting to write until I have time to write a long post about my trip to Egypt, but it looks like that's stopping me from writing about my semester, here so suffice it to say that the five day spent there were most excellent.  I saw the pyramids, spent a day at 'ayn al-sukhna, went to the souq in near the Hussein mosque, smoked sheesha on a cliff overlooking Cairo, and visited the Egyptian Museum.  Here are some pictures from my trip: