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We left Wadi Musa, and drove up to Amman for a meeting or 3, and to pick up our 3 Jordanian volunteers (from the El Hassan Youth Award - the Jordanian equivalent of the Duke of Edinburgh Award) who were coming to Safawi with us. We were in Amman for no more than 2 hours, and the journey to Safawi was ... err ... hot. It took no more than half an hour in the bus for a 1.5litre bottle of cold water out of a chiller cabinet to become the temperature of a neglected mug of tea.
Safawi is a trucker town on the road to Baghdad, and it is not pretty. We were staying in a former military base (H5), which now houses the HQ of an organisation called the BRDC - Badia Research and Development Centre. Badia is a word which I think means the desert areas of Jordan. Essentially, the BRDC do wildlife and sustainability. The buildings in H5 were built by the Brits in the 40s, and before we were told this, we could tell. They looked English. Sheme they dind't live up to English standards in terms of plumbing (some water in the pipes would have been nice), temperature regulation (only one room had working AC - luckily it was mine) and cockroach infestations (i.e. we were have preferred not to have one. My English-Arabic dictionary, which I have always disliked, finally found itself a purpose in life. Or, more accurately, death.).
We spent 5 days based in Safawi, divided into 3 groups. My group stayed in Safawi every day, teaching at the IT centre and the women's charity, while the other two groups travelled every day to two villages about an hour away - Deir AlKahf and Umm IlQuttein, and taught there. Each group had one of the Jordanian volunteers - mine had Amer, who was very useful to have around and a lot of fun, the other two were Xena and Mohammed, and I heard similar reports of their teaching prowess.
I can't speak for the Deir ElKahf and Umm ElQuttein groups, but in Safawi we divided our time as follows: in the mornings, we taught the women from the women's charity and the girls from the village. As we were foreign, there appeared to be no problem with boys teaching girls and vice versa, and I doubt I will ever get my head around this, but the women preferred to be taught by women only, in a separate building at the other end of the village. In the afternoons, we taught boys from the village, and then we finished with an hour or so of directed conversation with a handful of adult men. Who had apparently specifically requested to be taught by girls, but Kasia and I put our feet down and demanded assistance from Ben, Mark and Amer. In the end, the men were fine and utterly un-creepy.
The teaching was a delight. Well, with the girls, women and men, anyway. The boys were a bit more of a handful. They were very sweet, just badly behaved. We managed to make friends by the end of the week, though. I will do a separate entry some time when I don't have a cold about the serious incident we had over teaching the women. Watch out for it.
One evening in the BRDC, Xena, Zena (confusing!), Kasia and I went to the common room, shut the door and drew the curtains, put on some music, and Xena tried to teach us some belly dancing. Bit by bit, a few more of the others turned up, but we always made sure we were discreet and quiet. At some point Alex went outside and fell over, at which point the guy in charge of our group saw him and asked where he was going, or where he was coming from, or something. I am not in any way blaming Alex, it was unfortunate that it was Alex who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but whatever question he asked, Alex's answer made it clear that the rest of us were in the common room doing something quite fun. He stormed in and told us we were not allowed to play music, play games or have fun. It was not a place for messing around, he said. Alex swore that you couldn't hear the music or our voices from outside, and you couldn't see through the windows because we'd shut the curtains. It wasn't exactly a religious centre, which would have made things different. So we were cross. Oh well.
While we were in Safawi, the temperature one day reached 55 degrees celcius. That's kind of warm. And seriously unpleasant.
The wife of one of the men we taught was expcting a baby any second, and he said that if the baby was born while we were there, we would be invited to his house to celebrate in traditional style with the family. The baby was not born while we were there, but Miteb invited us over anyway. We had very sweet tea with walnut pieces floating in it, and Kasia and I were invited through a closed door to meet the women - his wife, mother, 3 sisters, and 2 small children. We were given a very sweet sherbert drink which was bright yellow, and had an interesting conversation with them.
We finished in Safawi, and drove to Madaba, via Zarqa (or was it Irbid? I never found out) to drop off Amer and Mohammed. The journey should have taken about 3 hours, but we had the world's most incompetent military escort, who had not thought to bring a map with them or check that they knew where they were going, and it took 7 hours. Seven hours. SEVEN HOURS. Jess finally snapped at the last stop-to-ask-for-directions, and I will never forget the screech of "YALLAAAAA!!!!" from the bus as the rest of us stood around awkwardly wondering how best to get them to just keep driving. Surprisingly, Jess's outburst produced no reaction.
In Madaba, we were once again sleeping on a roof with no water and only one toilet between us, but this one was privately owned by the head of the El Hassan Youth Award. Madaba was pleasant and interesting, but I'm afraid by this stage I had suddenly realised how exhausted I was and had absolutely had enough of not having water, so was fairly champing at the bit to just get back to Amman and back to the nice clean Shepherd Hotel which had flushing toilets, and water in the showers and taps, and air conditioning. That said, I did manage to enjoy Madaba quite a lot. Xena (whose family live in Madaba - I swear she's related to everyone in the town - everyone we met knew her and was related to her) and her brother pretty much acted as our guides, and they invited us to their family farm for dinner one night, which was really special.
We were advised against sleeping on the roof the night all the school kids got their exam results, as the traditional mode of celebration is to fire a gun straight up into the air several times ... and then the bullets fall somewhere else. Apparently people are injured and even killed by falling bullets every year. About half the group slept indoors that night. I like to boast that I was part of the braver half, and slept outside despite the risks. I'd rather die with a good story than just quietly fizzle out one day. To the best of my knowledge, no bullets landed on our roof.
After 3 nights in Madaba, which I would highly recommend to anyone going to Jordan, we took taxis back to Amman - about 40 minutes. The hotel let us straight into our rooms and we took full advantage of the plumbing. Unfortunately, a few of us had to spend the whole of the next day in meetings and the world's most horrible internet cafe sorting out the enormous mess caused by some idiotic chauvinists, but aside from that we had lots of fun in Amman.
On our last night, we went to a restaurant close to the hotel, which had a rooftop seating area with an excellent view across to the citadel. We heard to call to sunset prayer, and then a few minutes after that we heard an enormous bang, and we all jumped out of our seats. Looking around to see what had caused the bang, we saw smoke coming from the citadel, and then there was another bang, this time with a huge flash, in the same place. Then we worked out that they were firing blanks from a canon, to mark the beginning of Ramadan. They did this seven times, and then there were fireworks all over the city all evening.
It seems I have reached the end of the trip. I'm sure there are plenty of stories and anecdotes I've forgotten. If you're unfortunate enough to be spending much time around me any time soon, you'll hear about some of them. Watch out for the post some time in thenot-too-distant future about the idiots in Safawi. For now, Ramadan Karim, m3isalaama.
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