Hey everyone! This week has been going great!!! So much stuff has been going on, it has hard to keep track of it all and sort it out to the right day. All the days tend to mesh together now, but life is good and everything is really fun, so no complaints.
I guess I should start first with last Saturday. I visited the city of Madaba again because it is just awesome. The mosaics, the fact it is 1/3 Christian, the mosaics, the cheaper prices, the mosaics, getting out of the city, you get it. I did make some really great new friends on my trip out there. I made friends with a guy named Nidal (in the picture) who runs a small souvenir shop a couple hundred yards downhill from the Church of St. George (famous for all of its mosaics, especially the ancient map of the Holy Land still used by archaeologists to date things today). We stopped to talk with him and found out he had the cheapest souvenirs of anyone I have ever talked with in Jordan. The secret was that everything was handmade by him or his wife or other family. They can get away with selling it really cheap because they don’t pay much at all for it. He is extremely talented at doing colored sand art after learning how to do it while serving in the army. He then went on to sell his sand art all throughout the Middle East and beyond and made lots and lots of money for his intricate designs. After spending about 20 years traveling the world and selling his trade and working as an engineer, he came back to settle down in the city he grew up in – Madaba. He married and had a daughter (and some other children as well but they weren’t working with him that day). He decided to set up a shop in Madaba that his wife could run while he was away and he could run on the weekends to add to his family’s livelihood. He still also runs a shop in Amman, the airport, and ships his art around the world as he receives requests. Anyway, at this shop there is a bunch of jewelry, dolls, and sand art. His wife and daughter make the dolls, the dolls’ clothes, and he does the sand art. The dolls are exquisite – some are handcrafted entirely and some have a Barbie-like base that she accessorizes and then makes the clothes for. Because they are a conservative family, all the dolls are extremely modest, and that is a fact that I appreciated. The sand art is the real attraction though. They are exquisite and he sells them for only a $1.50 - $3 a pop. He can make a desert scene with mountains and camels and individual names in about 5 minutes while carrying out an involved conversation. It was quite impressive. He dumps in one color as a base and then just swirls a bunch of different colors as he adds more to fill up the bottle. He has a special tool that he used to make the camels so that the legs and body and head are the right proportions. It has some kind of super glue in it so that the camels will never lose their form. He then continues swirling and adding more sand until it reaches the top. He then compacts it down two or three time while adding more until he is satisfied. Then, he pours this extremely strong glue on top and mixes the top sand with it until it become rock solid like a brick. Then it is finished. I watched him make it for about an hour. He said that if I ever come back that I can learn how to make the basic design in about four hours. He recommended that I take this talent home and make them in Arizona (because there is a lot of sand there as well) and sell them. He has had “apprentices” such as this many times before. They now sell all over Jordan as well as Malaysia, China, Kuwait, Canada, and India. He was excited about the prospect of having one pupil in America, so I will have to see if I can make time to get back there. It is quite a drive though.
Sorry, I didn’t have time this week to do my daily blog on people that I wanted to do, so now you will just have to deal with a mix of both. However, I am putting in pictures so hopefully that makes it all better, at least a little bit.
I met another friend as well in Madaba. He is a Christian, tourist shop owner whose sons seem to own all the other stores around his and they have a monopoly around the main mosaics that are tourist attractions so I think that he is doing quite fine. I talked with him with a girl named Jan from my program for about an hour while we looked at all the souvenirs. I ended up getting lots of Christmas presents for people and because we talked with him, he slashed the prices way down. I was able to get 45 JD worth of stuff for 33 after further bargaining, which is really pretty good. He was a lot of fun to talk to and made sure to stay in Arabic the whole time at our request. He was excited to tell us about the history of Madaba and how Christians are treated here in Jordan. He had no complaints, he loves living here and feels free to worship and live as he pleases. I learned this week that 10% of the Parliament is required to be Christians despite Christians only being 6% of the population. He felt that Christians were adequately represented and their concerns were taken care of in Jordan.
This past week we discussed the politics and government of Jordan in issues class, it was quite interesting. We talked about the Parliament, the king, demonstrations, political parties, etc. We even talked about the Secret Police. Apparently, most of the taxi drivers and a lot of the people other places are part of them and they monitor everything that people say. They can then turn you in and that’s history. People don’t really ever backtalk the government and now I know why. That did come as kind of a shock this week, but I guess it makes sense.
This week I also tried paintballing for the first time. I have never gone before, I am not quite sure why. I went with my roommate Spencer and his friend Deen. They have a special outdoor arena out by the airport where we each paid 15 JD for equipment, paintballs, and to rent the place out for an hour. It was set up like an extreme army training course or something – lots of tunnels, things to duck and dodge around, cargo nets leading up to a giant tower (that was complete suicide trying to climb up). It was a ton of fun and I would really to like to go again sometime. I do have one good welt on my foot. Deen was great a shooting my foot for some reason, so my converse have yellow splatters on them now. It adds character, right? Everything else was covered up by thick pants and coats and a face mask that they lent us, so I was good to go and none of my other clothes have fun paint splatters on them. Just the shoes. I also went with Deen and Spencer and Julia downtown the day before paintballing to see climb all over the Roman Amphitheater and see the view of Amman from the top as well as eat at Hashem’s and have sugarcane juice. Sugarcane juice was a brand new experience that is for sure, sweet and delicious, almost too sickly sweet to be honest. Hashem’s was just as good with exquisite hummus and beans and falafel. So good. It was also fun to get to know Deen. He was really nice, he is an Iraqi refugee who fled to Syria and then just recently had to flee the war there to here. He is still trying to pick up the pieces of his life and put them back together. It is hard, refugees are treated like second class citizens here. It is hard for them to find any welcome whatsoever and it is illegal for them to have a job. But Deen is doing what he can and is making the best of it. He is very optimistic about the future and thinks things will still work out somehow.
I also went down to volunteer at a garden /community center this week that caters to the mentally handicapped. Every that goes there has to be over 18 years old. There is a lot of great infrastructure here for handicapped individuals all the way from birth to graduation, but once they turn 18, there is nothing. The family is on its own to take care of them. This garden was set up by an American women who married an Arab man at the age of 18 (she is now about 60). She wanted to find an opportunity to offer support to the families who have the struggle of taking care of handicapped adults. They have a small building for classes and activities as well as a sand lot for sports and a garden. They work under the philosophy that gardening is good therapy and I have to say it seems to work. Also the sports and the games seem to help a lot. All the people that came that day were amazing and so happy. They enjoyed everything that we did with them and were so happy. We even got in some Arabic practice with those who could speak. The center also tries to run off of the produce that it sells as well as selling sticks in bundles called “fire starters” in the fall from its trees. We also helped to pick up sticks from around the garden, cut them up, and bundle them up so that they can sell them in the near future. It was a lot of fun and I plan on going every Tuesday and making this part of my weekly schedule.
I didn’t get to volunteer at the orphanage this week, they were too busy preparing for a giant bazaar they throw on with all the embassies in Jordan. I am going to volunteer at that tomorrow so look forward to stories of what is there.
This week, we had the midterm. And boy did that keep me up at night wondering what to study or do for it. Our professor Dil, said he wasn’t interested in us cramming and in fact instructed us not to. He asked us just to come to class and take the test, he wanted to know where we were honestly at in our Arabic learning. It was so hard for me not to just study all week ferociously for the only midterm I will have this semester. But I managed to keep it down to just going over lots of vocab words and some of the harder news articles that we have had. The midterm itself wasn’t too bad, although the format was really different. There was 10 sections, but we did each section by itself (or in pairs) and only had five minutes to get it done. There was translation sections, listening sections, transliteration sections, and grammar sections. We were given 15 additional minutes at the end to go over everything and fix what we did wrong in red pen (so I don’t know if we get points for it or not) but it was an interesting midterm and nothing to get stressed about. I feel more confident that I have actually learned things this semester and not just struggled the whole time.
Today was a new adventure as well. I have been selected to spend the rest of each Friday going to church up in Al-Husan which is about an hour bus ride north of Amman. The branch up there is much smaller but I really enjoyed the experience. I got a lot more out of it (it was all in Arabic) and was able to make some comments and pray in Arabic because there wasn’t too many people. It was a lot of fun. I also felt the Spirit so strongly, Heavenly Father truly knows His children, wherever they may be. Even here in Jordan when the branch only has about 13 people plus 5 students from BYU, God still loves them and provides a way for them to worship and blesses them for their obedience. It was an amazing thing to have strengthen my testimony and to see their faith and perseverance in doing what is right. I am looking forward to going there each week from now on, it is going to be awesome!
Anyway, I was really distracted while writing this because there were a lot of people at my apartment watching movies and playing games and just having fun. I tried to write what happened this week so I hope you enjoyed this.
Ok, if you want to see pictures, you will just have to look them up on Instagram or Facebook, our internet is not working to upload them right now. Sorry.
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