So this is likely my last post on this particular journey. I leave Jordan tonight - heading back to Canada with two stuffed suitcases and a cat - planning to arrive back in Toronto sometime midday on the 16th.
For the last several months I have been reading Herodotus' "The Histories" - written in 500 BC about travels through the part of the world I have been inhabiting for the last 12 + months. In parallel, I have been reading Ryszard Kapuscinski's final book "Travels with Herodotus", a beautiful meditation on the life of a foreign correspondent - written 2500 years after Herodotus created the template for that profession. This passage at the end of Kapuscinski's book particularly struck me the other day: "We do not know what draws a human being out into the world. Is it curiousity? A hunger for experience? An addiction to wonderment? The man who ceases to be astonished is hollow, possessed of an extinguished heart. If he believes that everything has already happened, that he has seen it all, then something most precious has died within him - the delight in life."
I think that I became addicted to wonderment living here. Every single day offered up an amazing moment, something crazy or incomprehensible. Last weekend, on one of my last adventures into the countryside and down to the dead sea, my travelling companions and I found ourselves lost on a winding country road. We were stopped often by herds of passing sheep and goats - who get precedence on the roads - and then came across some bedouin ditch diggers who had created a foot wide gap in the road that couldn't be passed. We three travellers - gringos all - got out of the car to investigate. We received the immediate invitation for tea from the guys from their billy can by the side of the toad. They were named Mahmoud, Mahmoud, Ahmad and Ahmad. They started to fill the hole in again with boulders so we could pass. They talked to us about farming. We stood with them in the sunshine, drinking tea and chatting in halting arabic about olive trees and sesame plants and the outlook for rain this winter. It was a timeless moment. I'll miss that incredible friendliness and the chance encounters and the endless opportunities for a glass of sweet tea everywhere you go.
I will certainly miss the people I have encountered here - my awesome female friends who are conquering the middle east one day at a time whether in Iraq or Egypt or Jordan.
I will miss my excellent work colleagues and the feeling of making a difference against the odds. Just yesterday I stopped by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs where I worked during my first 6 months here. Lo and behold I found out that the plans I had been working on through December to June had become applicable law! They are actually implementing the policy... and they're actually doing it based on the recommendations I provided. It blew me away. I had no idea! I was astonished at the accomplishment of all my ministry and municipal colleagues - I felt a twinge of pride at helping to bring them to that point.
And I will miss the people who I consider neighbours and who have offered me so much assistance during my time here: my building's caretaker who is a labourer from rural Egypt... my housekeeper, from Ethiopia, who takes care of my apartment and my laundry. These are incredible warm, generous people to whom life, by luck of a passport, has dealt a tougher hand than my own.
I am curious to see what will strike me most about returning to Canada... what will shock me? What will seem completely normal? Hey... maybe there will be one more blog post to report back on that.
