Up to Date

Okay everyone, my first official blog… guess I should let everyone know what Amman is like and what I have been doing the last couple days.

SLEEP: Let’s start with the time zone/jet lag factor. Jordan is 8 hours ahead of Minnesota (central time). I have been doing okay with sleep, better than I thought. I got in Tuesday night at 9pm and stayed up talking/getting things put away until about 1am. I woke up at about 6am. After work I decided to take a nap, thinking I would sleep a hour… over 3 hours later I woke up. The next morning I woke up at 430am from the call to prayer (we will discuss later). This morning was best yet, I was so tired I went to sleep at 930pm and woke up at 530am. And since that was 8 hours, I’m hoping I am on track!

WORK: For the last two days I have gone to the place where I will be working. The place is called YWMA and is a school for the mentally challenged. We get picked up by the school bus (all teachers/students get picked up by the busses) and we ride its for almost an hour to school. There is two parts to the school, a regular school and a vocational school. I will probably be placed in the vocational school where older students go to learn life skills but mostly do either weaving (rugs/baskets), ceramics, or woodshop. We will also teach an English class once a week as well as go on house visits once a week. School for students starts this Sunday (remember workweek is Sunday-Thursday). The last two days we haven’t had much to do, the teachers are organizing their classrooms a little but mostly they just chat in Arabic (a lot about food we think) while we mostly sit in silence for a couple hours. To end, we are ready for the students to come to be busy!

LIVING/ROOMMATES/GROUPMATES: I have 2 roommates and 2 groupmates (I made that word up just now for them). We are in a nice 3 bedroom flat. We have a living room (with TV), good size kitchen, dining room, and 2 bathrooms. We are defiantly not suffering. I live with Audry & Jamie, both from Ohio, Stephanie & Eduardo live a floor down in a similar place. We will each take turns making dinner (5 nights out of the week) and the other 2 nights is leftovers or on own. We travel together and also formed our own running club… actually probably the ONLY people, for sure women, running. And rumor has it we will try to run the Dead Sea Marathon in April!

OTHER: So a couple things that are interesting about Jordan right now. 1. The “call to prayer.” Everyday starting at 430am the call to prayer goes off on loudspeakers throughout the city coming from different masques. Naturally, this usually wakes me up, its very different. It also sounds at different times throughout the day but the 430 one is most noticeable to me. Here is a clip of what this sounds like… (not my video)



The last thing is that we are in Ramadan right now. This makes eating and drinking for us a little more difficult because 1. No one else is doing it, 2. No food places are serving, and 3. If we do eat we need to do it in private. I have been starving at the school the last 2 days and yesterday snuck into the bathroom, stuffed a granola bar in my mouth, and chugged some water… still so hungry!

Today is Friday, so it’s the weekend for us. We are going to go on a short run and then travel to Mt. Nebo.