lucky for you im skipping work

so today is palm sunday (i think) and so schools in the ministry of education are required to give their christian workers the day off. of course i decided to take them up on this nice little break from school, which in effect gave me a 5 day weekend. i was in amman these last few days for a training with peace corps so i haven't been to work in awhile. lucky for you all, however, i am currently feeling a little guilty about slacking off work to do nothing so i figured i'd get in here and write a lil somethin.

nothing really interesting or different has been going on around here. i can't remember what my last entries were all about but i have been a little...down lately. not seriously depressed, or anything like that, more like irritated. cranky. and you all know how cranky i can get. so i have come to the realization that this comes from the fact that i am getting too busy. all the talk among the other pcvs is about visiting. its almost like a point system with some unattainable goal. "i visited 8 families this week" "14 families called to invite me for dinner on sunday" "i visited for 19 hours yesterday." now i just don't see the point of this. i personally need my own space. i have always been that way. i don't need to say i have 37 bestest best friends or 1,723 friends on facebook; i think all the talk of visiting had me thinking about it too much and forgetting this basic fact about myself. so now i am in the process of cutting back on my visiting and tutoring english because i need a little bit of time by myself in my house. the trick now is actually making that happen.

i think in the beginning i was so content with my me time/visiting time ratio because there was no one trying to force me to visit more. people must have just thought i was this crazy american that didn't want to go visiting anywhere (kinda true). but now that people have seen me coming back from other people's houses, and hear other families bragging about how the american has visited them twice, they are becoming more insistent that i come visit them. and a refusal of an invitation is much ruder than pretending that you don't know that you should be visiting. so this is going to be a very tricky, and probably really slow, process of decreasing my visit time. but i'm already happier now that i have identified the reason i've been cranky and have a bit of a plan of how to fix it.

in an unrelated note, watched the 'hurt locker' and it was great. you probably don't need me to tell you that being that it apparently won oscars and stuff, but just sayin. also it was filmed in the jordan! i also read a book called 'who speaks for islam' and it was not great. as in really bad and i only wanted to mention it to give it a whatever is the opposite of recommendation (condemnation?). if you need to be convinced that muslims are actually human beings who live in families and not pods or something, then go for it and i would appreciate it if you let me know so we can have a little talk. but really i was excited to read it because it is basically a collection of surveys from millions and millions of muslims in different countries, and i was eager to see the differences between what is jordanian culture and what is muslim culture. i certainly couldn't get that out of it and...yeah i just think it was a generally useless and poorly written book.

since i can't stand knocking a book like that and not offering something in its place i'll go ahead and recommend 'professor and the madman.' it's about the creation of the oxford english dictionary. maybe it was just a lack of common sense that kept me from realizing that something like that would be freaking hard. i can not understand how people got on without computers. anyway a sizable chunk of the dictionary was submitted by an american officer in a mental institution in england. he was completely insane with paranoia and hallucinations; and yet he was a total bookie with lots of free time so he was able to make enough entries to be the major outside contributor. the creation of the book itself and the time it took (70 something years if i remember correctly) along with how the idea of a dictionary was arrived at is also really interesting.

well that's all i've got for you folks. enjoy the day!

living the life

This is what happens if I refuse to come out and play:

And what I have to look forward to if I do:

once you open the door...

today i had seven jordanian girls in my living room. i am not entirely sure why they came, who they were, where they live, or if they plan to return. i'm not even sure that i let all of them in myself. guess they just thought they would come by and check out the american's house; everyone else was doing it. we discussed how dirty my house is, and how haram it is not to have a TV. then they just up and left. i feel used.

i'm back baby

sorry for the petulance in that last post. bygones. thanks for all of you that responded, i'll try to get on keeping up with the posts.

so i have not had internet for the last 2 1/2 to 3 weeks. i took my new jordanian outlook to broken things: eh, oh well things break, maybe i'll call a neighbor later to come fix it. when none of my neighbors knew what was up i just waited to go in and pay my bill for the month that i barely had internet for, and asked if they could come fix it. turns out all i had to do was change a setting on my computer. oh well. things have been great; i've been keeping busy at my center making projects, and have been meeting a lot of new families in the neighborhood. more later, i'm in the middle of an ally mcbeal marathon that was so rudely interrupted by the joys of internet.

where have i been? ...jordan

so so so, i have not had internet, for no reason that can be determined exactly or that the internet company is particularly worried about, for the past week so i haven't been able to update. i say this as if any of you out there care, which i am beginning to think you do not. i have a little hit counter thing on the bottom of my page, but i'm thinking it's just my mom checking it 20 times a day. if you are reading, enjoying, hating, bored by, morally against, my blog go ahead and leave a comment every once in a while so i feel affirmed in my efforts. fudtalee (welcome, come on in). actually i believe i read in miss manners or somewhere that the proper way to acknowledge a blog entry is to send a package. i'm just saying. anyway on to the gripping life stories.

the weirdest thing that i have experienced up to this point happened in this past week. it is the best example i have ever heard of to show the extent of jordanian hospitality. the extent being pretty much unlimited and, from an american point of view, often unbelievably invasive. but i love it. so what happened was: i was doing my laundry on saturday. my new friend's family called me to invite me over for lunch. as nice as free food is, i was just not in the mood to run out right then because i was cleaning my house and was just feeling kind of lazy so i told them that i had just finished doing laundry (true) and that all of my pants were fe mai (wet, in Stephanie Arabic, and not entirely true) so i couldn't go out. they said that was okay, they understood. about five minutes later my doorbell rings. standing there is a six year old boy holding a pair of black pants. fudtalee (here, take it) he says. what are these i ask. he says i dunno, my mother says to give them to you, then you should come with me. so i put on the pants and went out for a walk with the family. what else could i do? my presence is so valued that pants are delivered to me to make sure i don't miss out.

tomorrow the kids from my center are going into Mafraq (the city we are outside of) to do a field day with two other PCVs centers. my kids and the kids from another special ed center will be doing different games and activities and the girls from my friend's youth center will be running the activities. we hope that by having her girls run it they will have some exposure to kids with special needs, have a better outlook in regards to them, and, thinking optimistically, will be nice to the kids with special needs they have now met if they are out walking around the community.

i had a bunch of things that i wanted to write about, but of course i have forgotten at this point. which is probably a good thing for all of you since they must not have been interesting enough to remember.

buuuut what is definitely an interesting thing (inshallah (hopefully)) is that i get to meet vice president Joe Biden on friday! i am going into amman to the embassy for a lil meet and greet then photo op. hopefully we all really get to meet him. either way i'm excited to catch a peek. figures that i would live in DC for years and never see anyone important, then go halfway around the world and be introduced to a big deal dude.

big things

so lesson learned from the last post: just because my eyes are open does not mean i am awake; blogging is not a good way to pass the time when i can't sleep in the wee hours of the morning. sorry for the rambles and general lack of coherent sentences.

moving on.

i haven't updated in a bit because i have actually been busy. imagine that. not only have i been busy but i also have some big news so if i don't get to lazy to finish it this should be a nice action-packed entry. shocking i know.

first thing, good things. i spent five days in amman working with operation smile. if you don't know, op smile is an organization that gives free surgeries to children to repair facial deformities. mostly they work on cleft palates and lips, but they also correct other problems such as birthmarks, scars, burns and the like. i knew very little about the organization, other than the movie Smile Pinki (which i highly recommend), but was excited to get a chance to hang out with some kids. i can't think of a much better job than just needing to play with kids, which is basically all i had to do. operation smile in jordan not only serves jordanians, but also palestinians and iraqis (though this mission did not involve any iraqi kids, rumor is that they are establishing a post in iraq as well). apparently peace corps has been partnered with op smile jordan for a number of years now and we are basically in charge of the palestinian group. what this means is that we go to the border to get the palestinians and bring them to the hotel in amman, jordan. we are then the liaisons between the hospital and the op smile team there and the patients. on this mission there were 32 patients, they each came with one family member (in theory, in practice many came with both parents, and maybe some siblings, also many of them had family in jordan that then came to visit and possibly stay in the hotel with them), and we were charged with making sure they were fed, got to the hospital on time, and mostly with keeping the kids entertained.

it was a lot of fun, there were kids from just a few months to 16 years old. of course we all had favorites. mine was a little guy named Anwar with a cleft lip and a head that was way too big for his body. he was 2 and he tended to just topple over backwards if he was sitting, and to stand up he would put his head all the way to the floor and use it for leverage. i think he reminded me of my little brother adam who, and my family will all remember this, also had a ridiculously large head and the same huge mess of curly hair. i was there for the first five days of the mission which is mostly screening (unfortunately some patients got sent home without surgeries), which is mostly downtime and playing. the day that i was leaving the first wave of patients that had gotten their surgeries were coming back to the hotel. i got to see a few of them and i hope that next time i get to participate in a mission i can be there for the end when everyone has gotten their surgeries. it would be nice to see what it is like after everyone has finally gotten what they have been waiting god knows how long for. the first day we went to the hospital the tension, anxiety, anticipation, all of it, was palpable in the bus and i would like to see the payoff of all that worry. anyway it was a great time with a great organization and i was very fortunate to be a part of it.

now for some bad news: the teacher at my center has been replaced. i can't remember right now how much i had written about my teacher, but i really liked her. i still like her, she's not dead or anything, but i had really enjoyed working with her. she was not extremely skilled at dealing with the kids and didn't know very much about special education, but she was very eager to learn and was always open and excited about new projects. i had big plans for her and knew that after 2 years of being pushed a little she would be a really amazing teacher. she no long works at the center.

apparently, and i have yet to figure out if this is solely the policy of my center's director/principal, or if it comes from higher up, my center has a policy that no teacher works there for more than 3 months. which is just completely ridiculous obviously. this is horrible for the kids, and horrible for the center. it also makes me completely irrelevant and useless. if there is one word that we as peace corps volunteers should be saying in our sleep it is 'sustainability.' the goal of everything we do is to make sure that it can and hopefully will continue to be done and function well after we are gone. as special ed volunteers this means giving a teacher enough tools that they can run the classroom successfully without us. considering that it will take the kids at least a month to get used to the new teacher each time, that means that i will have approximately a month and a half to work with the teacher and the kids before that teacher leaves. which is ridiculous and not going to be productive in any way. i called my boss at peace corps to tell them about this 'policy' and they said they will get back to me...we'll see what happens. i'm worried because of course i have grown really attached to my kids at the center and, right now, i feel like peace corps will assign me somewhere else, somehow, if they really intend to change teachers every few months. i'll keep you updated on that.

on a much better note, had my first visitor in my house today. though others have been in my house before i am calling this my first official visit because it is the first time i served someone tea. i know i've told you all about the importance of tea on visits, and not to brag but she told me that it was very good tea. 'she' being a thirteen-year-old from the next street who i met while walking around the neighborhood. (side story: when i come back from the city of mafraq, i take a bus, and this bus drives all around mansheya when it returns. when you want to get off the bus, you tap your coins on the window and the bus stops. it will stop as many times as people tap, and people will tap less than 10 feet from the last stop so sometimes there are many many stops. however you can only get off on the streets where it decides to go. unlike the states, there is no set route for the bus; each bus driver is different and each day they may take a different route. so as of late i have been staying on the bus longer and longer, past places i know, hoping that it will circle around and at some point get closer to my house because at this point i get off two hills before my house. anyway this means that sometimes i realize that it is only going to continue to go farther away and just have to get off. so i tap in the middle of nowhere and walk new routes home.) on one of my big walks i ran into this girl and she walked me home. she speaks very good english and is in eighth grade. we had a great little talk on everything from religion to america and the virtues of spaghetti to obama (there is just as much debate here about whether or not he is a muslim, and just as much coverage of his every move: apparently in one interview he was shown slapping and killing a fly which was much discussed and not approved of). she is a very intelligent and feisty girl and i'm excited to talk to her more. i gave her an application to a leadership camp peace corps holds every summer for young women in jordan and i hope she gets in. also she is very worried about me living all by myself (who isn't) and after seeing the state of my bare cupboards in my kitchen promises to start bringing over plates of food. i hope she does, i'm getting sick of msg-flavored rice (my staple) and potatoes.

i just watched 'everything is illuminated'. don't. read the book instead. that's almost always true but it is especially true here.

i wish i had some sort of spiffy send-off. but i don't. i want it to be 'jane you ignorant slut,' but i guess that's not really an ending. maybe i'll just let it drag on. if i just never stop talking i'll never have to figure out an ending. that would certainly be easier. though i think, in the long run, not so pleasant for you, the reader out there in cyberspace. and really all i wanted was a pleasant way to end it....sigh