the road to damascus?

Moving On

2010-12-15T18:55:00.000+02:00

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.

Animals

2010-11-29T19:17:00.001+02:00

My return date to Canada is mid-December and I have been spending an inordinate amount of time lately trying to sort out how to get my little foundling kitten to Canada with me. To date this has required airport approvals in both Amman and Montreal, Jordanian rubber stamps from the Ministry of Agriculture, health certificates, pet passports. I won't even begin to explain the intricate differences between the cat carrying cases accepted by Royal Jordanian vs. Air Canada and the impossibility of securing a Canadian approved case in Amman. Suffice it to say, this is not a seamless, user-friendly experience. Getting her to Toronto is my biggest nightmare at this point.

Having a pet here has been a learning experience. First, it has given me an insight into east-west cultural differences around having an animal in the house. Many of my female guests shriek or wince when they see my little Habibti. The men tend to be more stoic. In some way cats are viewed here as Torontonians view racoons. Fluffy wild animals that eat scraps. If I were to walk into a house in the Annex and encounter a pet raccoon, I might too express some surprise.

Except there is a much more reciprocal arrangement with the cats here than with truly wild animals. Many people like cats - they leave them food and they often adopt them as outdoor creatures hanging out in the yard. The butchers and restauranteurs leave out leftovers. One of the cooks at the shwarma stand up the street has adopted a particular ginger Tom Cat. The cat hangs out on the sidewalk late every afternoon watching out for the cars and mean passers-by who try to kick him ... the guy in the shwarma place eventually has a smoke break and brings a lump of meat for the cat. This cat is wild in every other way, but likes this one guy. They have a relationship. I have witnessed this kind of connection in Damascus and Beirut and Jerusalem - across the middle east. Consequently the cities are full of cats and kittens - sleeping on rooftops, jumping out of dumpsters, chilling on the sidewalks, hiding out in abandoned buildings.

Cats are not the only animals you see, of course. There are also donkeys, sheep, goats and camels in grand quantities. I love the donkeys, in particular, and want to save each and every one of them from the impossibly hard labour they are subjected to. I have been seeing lots of baby donkeys lately, though I haven't yet investigated the challenges of bringing a donkey to Canada - I am not quite that crazy (yet).

Not surprisingly, along with seeing a lot of animals you also see a lot of cruelty to animals. Or indifference to animal suffering. That, too, is part of the scenery. It is usual to see overcrowded pet stores - birds are very common - where animals live in filthy conditions. Or hundreds of little chicks, newly hatched, stuffed into a cardboard box and dyed flourescent pinks, greens, blues; these little birds are taken home to small children who play with them as toys and invariably kill them in a couple of hours.

A year later, I am still not quite used to it. As I was wandering down the street in a neighbourhood across town today, in search of a particular store that (purportedly) sold cat carriers, I came across a kitten who was clearly quite ill and very hungry and suffering from some kids teasing it. I went to the nearest food store - it happened to be a KFC - to get some chicken, got rid of the kids and fed the little creature This is always a dilemma. Often I am too preoccupied to stop. Today this little one got to me.

So, the second learning experience has been meeting people who are involved in treating animals. Shortly after I met my cat - who was an injured, half blind kitten living under a parked car in front of my house - I encountered an excellent group here called the Humane Centre for Animal Welfare who are like a humane society. These are seriously nice people. They have a neutre/spay program, they rescue abandoned animals. They also treat the working animals of bedouin tribes and do a lot of outreach and education programs about how the health of their flocks is critical to their own livelihoods. The centre is out on the edge of town where a lot of bedouin still graze their animals. So it is not uncommon to arrive with your cat for a booster shot and have camels and donkeys and horses also in line for treatment. Amazing.

Shortly after feeding the little kitten this afternoon, I found the pet store I was looking for and met the owner. It turns out that he rescues parrots. He buys them from bad pet markets where they are often abused - hit, starved - and brings them back to health. He had a beautiful African Grey parrot who he had found two years ago. These particular birds can live a long time and have amazing cognitive abilities. This one had a vocabulary of 50 words - knew how to ask for his dinner, knew the man's name, sang songs. That moment - standing in the store, talking to this man, meeting the parrot - gave me a little bit of hope.

The Christian Thing

2010-11-10T22:34:00.000+02:00

I have been on a lot of hikes lately: to Pella in the northern Jordan valley which overlooks the river Jordan and its incredibly fertile flood plain where fruit and vegetables never stop growing (the most delicious peaches I have ever eaten are in season 8 months of the year! Take that Niagara!). There are remnants of human settlements that date back 5000 - 8000 years, including Byzantine, Roman, Greek and Canaanite ruins, and evidence of nomadic hunters wandering through back to the early stone age - hundreds of thousands of years ago.

I was also in Machaerus, the stunning palace ruin of King Herod, whose kingdom included a strip of land along the east bank of the Jordan River and Dead Sea. This palace - one of several of Herod's - is perched on a high hill top, protected by precipitous cliffs, overlooking the Dead Sea and the west bank beyond. Here John the Baptist was held in a dungeon for saying the wrong thing about Herod's son's wife and eventually lost his head as a result.

When you are in these places you cannot help thinking about the sequence of things: when did the Greek empire fade? When did the Roman empire start to extend its reach and hold sway over these lands? And when did Jesus come along and shake things up? You find yourself in conversations you never imagined having: Like, for example: Hmmm, I wonder if Jesus ever walked here? Did he ever take the eastern route from Galillee down to Jerusalem? It would have made sense. Walking up the hill from the Sea of Galilee to Umm Qais (Gadara), then heading 20km over to Pella, then Jerash, Amman (known as Philadelphia at the time), Madaba and then a hop over the Jordan river and a day's walk to Jerusalem. These were all bustling cities about day's walk from each other with populations who might have been interested in hearing his message. He was obviously good at PR.

Whether Jesus took that route of not, the Byzantines thought that he did, so there are pilgrimage churches dating from the 2nd - 6th centuries all along the east bank of the Jordan river coming down from the Golan Heights. In many cases the walls and foundations are still there, as are the elaborate tiled mosaic floors, which have weathered 1800 years of use. It stops me cold when I think about the passage of time and the people who built these original structures. They were only a couple of generations removed from Jesus Christ himself, and may even have heard stories from their parents who heard stories from their grandparents, right back to the "year zero" as we know it in the western calendar.

It is interesting for me to be confronted by all these thoughts of Christ as a person. All of my colleagues here simply assume I am Christian. Because I have to be something. It is not an option not to have a religious identity. There are only 2 types of cemeteries in this country - Muslim or Christian - and you have to be one of them because if you die, you have to be buried. And that's the law. And they know I am not Jewish. And when I am asked what I am - which happens all the time - I say that "I guess I am Christian". Because I know I am not Muslim - and they know that too.

But I am not sure if anyone could have a more secular, scientific, rationalist upbringing than my own: I was born in a post-war planned town full of Cambridge-educated British nuclear scientists fully focused on creating the new modernity. If ever there was a place where God was dead ... or rendered irrelevant... Deep River would be it. In Canada, I would never call myself a Christian. So, of course it is fascinating to now live in the holy land and think more about these questions of faith and belief and religious or ethnic identity. And about how these physical places have become a metaphor for guiding people all over the planet in their spiritual lives.

Thinking about these questions of belief and place have been further complicated by an interesting culture clash that I witness every day between work and home.

At work, I have a number of colleagues who are Christian. They are generally Greek or Syrian orthodox and their families have been Christian ever since there was a Christ to believe in. Their religious identities pre-date the coming of Islam by a good 400 years or so. If you google their last names you see that at some point in the last few centuries, someone in their broader family or tribe (eg with the same last name) has been a Patriarch or a Bishop in Aleppo or Damascus or Beirut in one of the splinter factions of the Orthodox or Maronite Catholic Church.

This is just my observation - no research or backing for this - but I would say for many of these colleagues their Christianity is less about religious belief or observance, and more about an ethnic identity. Some young men, in particular - who definitely don't go to church on Sunday mornings and are not remotely devout - cleave to this identity and are fond of tattooing christian imagery on their bodies - the cross, images of Christ, bleeding hearts. I was on a dive boat with a group of Maronite Christians from Beirut several months ago and the fellows were all tattooed. One young man had a huge tat that covered his upper thighs and full torso that read something like "onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war." In English. One of my young colleagues has a big tat of Jesus on his shoulder. These are the same guys who are going clubbing every night and are enjoying alcohol to the fullest, in defiance of the majority rules. It is all a part of their definition of being Christian.

So I contrast this to the situation I find around me in my apartment building. I happen to live surrounded by neighbours who are evangelical christians - mostly from the United States, but also from Australia and the Netherlands. Most of them are here studying intensive arabic at a purpose-built language school that was created in order to teach proselytizers how to bring the "word of God" to this part of the world. One of these neighbours has been here for 14 years. He is originally from Missouri, I think, but now lives here in Amman and, when I asked him what his job was, he told me that he spends his time in the homes of Iraqi refugee families "helping them clear up their misunderstandings about the bible". So that is what he does all day.

I find this both deeply disturbing and richly layered with irony. That someone feels compelled to bring the 'word of God' to a culture where it is the norm to pray 5 times a day, and there is someone singing from a minaret daily like clockwork to remind us all that 'God is Great', is simply absurd to me. To propose that their brand of evangelical christianity - that is about 5 minutes old in the scheme of human history - is somehow more worthy of attention than the churches that have been here since the beginning of the Christian era is also suspect. I acknowledge that my reaction is visceral, knee-jerk, but I just don't like the gall, the imposition, the idea that their faith or belief system is somehow more valuable than the those of the people who live here.

Plus - unlike the tattooed guys - this group doesn't go clubbing or go drinking and they are much too earnest and much less fun. Believe me, there is nothing more achingly dull than an afternoon barbecue with a group of evangelical christians in the holy land!

I am not sure what to make of all these observations. I am still sorting through them. I am actually not sure there is a conclusion to be made, except to say that the internal contradictions between historical fact, physical place, and spiritual belief within this very fluid and wide open notion of "being a Christian" is totally fascinating. All the more so when I imagine that I have trod on the same footpath which that guy called Jesus Christ walked about 2000 years ago.

the election issue

2010-10-23T22:17:00.000+03:00

This post is dedicated to my friends and family in Toronto, where the municipal election campaign is coming down to the wire. Having followed these elections from afar - particularly the mayoral race - with an ever-increasing sense of morbid fascination and dismay, my heart goes out to the residents there who have some difficult choices to make on Monday.

Not that this is any consolation, but I am also surrounded by wacky electioneering here in Jordan. About two weeks after I arrived here last December, parliament (which by many accounts was more than somewhat dysfunctional) was dissolved and the appointed cabinet was sent off to rewrite the election law to render better results next time around. So I guess that happened without any fanfare and suddenly 11 months later, approximately two weeks ago, a parliamentary election campaign opened with a bang.

In the course of two days, the streets of the city were taken over by campaign posters. And every day more appear. There are handwritten banners across all the streets, taking over the parks and circles. There are printed posters plastering the sides of buildings, tacked to every possible street sign. White canvas tents filled with plastic garden chairs have taken over the vacant lots all around town and out into the countryside where candidate meetings seem to be going on every night. I guess petitioners come and make requests and candidates make promises. And then maybe some roast lamb on a bed of rice is served on huge trays for all comers. I am not sure about that last part - but keen to find out. I am trying to convince my friend Robert to check out a meeting with me one evening, where we will unquestionably stick out of the crowd.

Like in places such as Hungary or Lebanon or New Zealand, the Jordanian parliament has seats reserved for minorities - circassians and chechens - and also for women. So it is interesting to see some (small!) diversity in the posters. I have also noticed one candidate who is posing in traditional bedouin garb in some posters - kefiyeh, dishdash - and western jacket and tie in others. Others are almost uniformly in western business attire.

We will get the full day off work on election day - November 8th, I think - though I am not sure whether that helps or harms voter turnout. I would think the desire to head out of town for the day off will be strong. We'll see. In the meantime, I am enjoying parsing the script on the posters and trying to figure out if there are any actual election issues.

I can't vote here and I also won't be able to exercise my vote in Toronto, so I can only hope that my compatriots make wise choices in exercising their right! Good luck. May the worst man not win.

Surprise!

2010-10-13T19:32:00.000+03:00

It is a year ago this week that I first came to Jordan on a 'recon' trip to check out the potential assignment here. That has made me a little nostalgic or reflective. As I look back through the posts on this blog, I have been thinking about what I have learned.

One thing that really strikes me is that a lot of this blog is devoted to the element of surprise that perpetually lurks around every corner in this part of the world. In the last 48 hours alone: finding myself in an unanticipated downpour while a full rainbow framed the Roman ruins across the valley; the stairs on the way to work this morning completely collapsed and fallen in as a result of the heavy rainfall -- an amazing thing to see; this afternoon I was followed home from work at the end of the day by 15 adolescent schoolboys calling and singing all around me at the same time as a senior official was calling me out of the blue to intervene on his behalf on a matter I have nothing to do with. This is both completely normal and completely bizarre. Living here, I realize, has restored my capacity for wonder. I am thankful for that - appropriate for the Thanksgiving season.

But nothing has surprised me lately as much as an event I attended last Friday afternoon. A horse beauty pageant.

Who knew such things existed? It was held at the picturesque Royal Stables - outdoors in a lovely wooded valley - and there were actual princesses and upper crust Emiratis and Saudis in attendance. There was also a fantastically tony panel of posh European judges sitting seriously over score sheets. Secretly, I suspect that the judges were all younger sisters or second cousins of minor European noble families... Younger brother of a belgian prince, a disgraced cousin of the Thun & Taxis family... that kind of thing...fodder for Hello! magazine. Who else becomes a judge at a horse beauty pageant?

In case you are picturing a show jumping or dressage competition in your head, think again. This was all about the pure beauty of Arabian horses - not performing tricks with humans - just being horses in their naked glory. There they were, free of bridles or saddles, romping around a big paddock. It was a little bit like the film "Best in Show" about dog shows, only bigger and less orchestrated.

Of course, I became fascinated by the award categories and the criteria by which the horses were being judged. There were competitions for "best female head" and "best male head". There were age categories - Stallions born 2000 or before... Stallions born between 2001 - 2003... who were run around the ring on a loose halter with a human alongside. And there was my favourite category: the "Liberty" class where a horse was let loose and encouraged/goaded into running around for 5 minutes. For me it was the show-stopper - like the Evening Gown competition in Miss Universe. I learned by studying the competition booklet, that these horses are judged on the beauty of their: head and neck; body and top line; legs; movement. No requirement to answer a skill-testing question.

Here's the thing: as surprising as this event was to me, I came away with a whole new appreciation for horse beauty. My god, these horses were gorgeous. I can understand why a person would become obsessed, start a stable, spend her time trying to breed this beauty. Seeing these creatures run around tapped into some kind of really deep-seated definition of strength and freedom and mythology. A field full of Pegasuses.

I had sort of hoped I might meet a very handsome, unmarried, (Oxford-educated) Emir or Sheikh. But that didn't happen this time. Have to wait for the next Equestrian Foundation event...

Field Trip

2010-10-02T19:08:00.000+03:00

It has been a few weeks since I have managed to post anything. A combination of things have kept me away. Busy at work finalizing the first draft of a plan for the city of Amman. An Eid trip out to the amazing eastern desert with its endless tracts of sand covered with black basalt boulders stretching as far as the eye can see toward Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia. (There are amazing Roman fortresses out in the middle of the desert, built from the black volcanic boulders, that demarcate the edge of their empire. It is amazing to imagine how they inhabited the landscape 2 millenia ago. Those Romans were tough.) After that, a weekend at the dead sea to relax. And then another weekend spent camping in the Dana biosphere reserve with a dear friend who was visiting from Vienna. In short, life is good.

Despite long hours spent in the office during the work week, working on all the last minute things that go into releasing a government document - fact-checking, proofreading, briefings - I did get out of the office last week to do some field verification. My favourite part of the job.

This time a colleague and I were verifying the mapping of agricultural lands in the city of Amman. For reasons too complicated to explain, the mapping of agricultural lands is a tricky business and the lands themselves - which are scarce in this arid land - are constantly under development pressure. I realized, in fact, that a lot of land I would have dismissed as sand year ago I can now identify as arable. My eye has been trained to see farmland where I once would have seen desert.

Of course, as always, we came across wonderful and strange sights. In addition to the endlessly fascinating (to me, anyway) bedouin tents and flocks of goats, camels and sheep camped out at the edge of the city, we saw new things as well. In the middle of a completely rural landscape, in the heart of fertile olive groves, we stumbled upon a vast, newly built, utterly deserted social housing project that is a the result of a government housing initiative. Completely isolated from any services, you cannot help wondering how and where the inhabitants will buy groceries, access employment, take their kids to school. Another stark example of bad public policy at work.

Later, driving through a village at the south end of the city, our driver, Mansour, announced to us that we were passing his family's shop and that right behind it, there was a gold souq - would we like to see it? Sure, we said - not quite certain what to expect. Some cheap gold for sale? So he drove us down a couple of dusty narrow laneways and past the requisite group of guys fixing a car, to pull up beside a Roman ruin, columns and intricate scrollwork intact, giant limestone foundation blocks still in place. There were chickens scratching around and kids playing in the dirt. Turns out this was a Roman gold treasury - hence 'gold souq' - and the village has built up around it, just taking the ruin for granted as a part of the landscape. My colleague had never heard of the site before - it was entirely new to her. I went back to the office and double-checked... yes, we had identified this on the major antiquity map. So that is a step in the right direction. Now, perhaps, someone will pay attention to the site?

And so it goes.

Time keeps sliding by here. It is October 2nd and the weather still feels like midsummer - 30 degree days and 20 degree lovely starry nights. Except for the dust. Mad dust storms, completely out of season, have been sweeping the city. One came through this afternoon - something that looks suspiciously like a storm cloud, sudden wind, all at once zero visibility with sand swirling everywhere. 30 minutes later it's gone. This time, mercifully, I had the foresight to close my windows!

The Holy Month

2010-09-09T13:10:00.001+03:00

We are almost through the whole holy month of Ramadan. Today is probably the day, but for sure sometime this weekend the end will be announced. Still to be determined. In any case, the whole city is inching closer by the minute to the big Eid celebration that marks the end to the month-long fast. My neighbourhood is about to get very loud.

It was my first time spending Ramadan in a predominantly muslim country and, in retrospect, it is amazing to me how little I knew about this major religious festival that 20% of the world's population observes. It was humbling being a total outsider. Back in the home country, I am surprised by people who know nothing about Christmas traditions. How can a person live their life without ever knowing about Christmas trees, say? I was that person here. I knew nothing about Ramadan, shockingly ignorant. The sum total of my knowledge prior to coming here was that people don't eat during the daylight hours.

Well it is true that people who are observing the fast don't eat from about 4:00am - when a "pre-call" to prayer from the neighbourhood mosque alerts people that they better eat now or wait til later - until after the evening call, around 7:15pm. They also don't drink any liquids during the day - which was tough this year, when Ramadan coincided with the worst heat wave in recent history. And no cigarettes or sex during the day. And so on. So, kind of a full body - full conscience cleanse each and every day for a month.

Because it is an officially observed, state sanctioned festival there are quite a few legal rules that go along with the observance. Needless to say all the liquor stores are closed for a full month - absolutely no selling of alcohol. You cannot eat or drink outdoors. That means no restaurant patios, no snacking or sipping drinks on your balcony at home during daylight hours, no quick sip from a water bottle in your back pack if you are walking down a hot dusty street and feeling dehydrated. In the workplace in city hall, the big drinking water dispensers were all emptied and removed on the first day of Ramadan and the kitchen was shut tight as a drum. In addition to legal issues around ingesting food or drink in a public office, it is also considered deeply offensive to those who are fasting, so there are strong social pressures to maintain solidarity with your coworkers.

There are a few workarounds, of course. There are special 'tourist licenses' that some businesses can get so they can continue to serve food and drink during the course of the fasting hours. (With their shutters very, very closed to outside view). And at work, the non-fasters could lock themselves in empty offices to have a snack or a drink that they brought in from home. I have to say, though, that not being able to drink my 6 glasses of water a day at my desk meant I was really dehydrated and limp at the end of a work day. And not being able to drink my quota of coffee in the mornings had very, very negative side effects for my colleagues in the first weeks. And I wasn't even fasting.

Now with all of those rules - which I had started to learn about in the weeks and months before the fast began - I had a picture in my mind of a very solemn month. This is probably because I connect religious fasting with the Christian observance of Lent with its emphasis on penance and reflection on Christ's pain and suffering. So I had been imagining a month of self- denial and quiet reflection. Boy was I wrong.

The first indication that I didn't quite get what I was in for, happened on the first night of the festival back in mid-August. The actual start date - like the end date now - was shrouded in a bit of mystery - would it be Tuesday? Would it be Wednesday? It all depended on when the powers that be saw the moon. The night they did see it - boom - Ramadan was announced with incredibly loud cannon fire from the citadel hill, followed by mass fireworks from rooftops and balconies, and children spontaneously running out into the street chanting 'Ramadan, Ramadan!' It was joyful. The coloured, blinking decorative ramadan lights came on in windows all over the city. The extremely nostalgic, affective Coca-Cola Ramadan ads came on TV - kinda like the old "i'd like to teach the world to sing" Christmas one that they used to do. People were filled with a charitable, celebratory spirit. The whole city got loud and stayed loud til 4am.

And so it was every night after that. At about 10pm, after the evening 'iftar' meal which breaks the fast, the streets filled up. Music, singing, card games. The cafe across the street from my house had a live band and bingo game every night on the terrace til about 3am. People had social obligations at midnight... 1 am.... 2am. Meanwhile, the more observant were spending a lot of time in the mosque in the evenings for the reading of verses of the koran. Over the course of the month, all of the verses must be read, and many mosques broadcast the work in progress, which adds to the general noise level.

All of this night time activity means that people are exhausted at work in the day time. Myself included - it was hard to sleep in all the noise. And many businesses totally flip their hours - closed during the day, open at night. Some people stay up all night after iftar to eat their second meal in the wee hours of the morning at 3am/ 3:30am and then catch a few winks before getting to work at 9am or 10am. Now, at the end of the month, the noise level has died down considerably. Largely, I think, because people are too exhausted and dehydrated to keep up the merriment.

So at this point - today? tomorrow? - I will find out what the Eid festival is all about. I am imagining more music, dancing, eating, drinking in public and even more chanting and fireworks. But who knows. I will probably be surprised. Actually, to get a bit of a break, I am heading out to the stark eastern desert tomorrow morning for a couple of days to see Umm Al Jimal, an ancient, abandoned Roman town carved from black basalt rock. Perhaps there I will encounter the quiet and solemnity I have been imagining?

my walk home

2010-09-05T22:59:00.000+03:00

I love my daily walk to and from the office. It never fails to be interesting. The morning walk is quick - over the crest of the Jebel Amman hill and down two flights of precipitously steep stairs through a partially demolished informal refugee settlement - takes about 10 minutes. Lots of cats finding a place to settle for the day and neighbours taking care of morning tasks.

The evening walk, circling around the bottom of the Jebel Amman hill through the city's old 'souk' and up a gentler hill and kinder set of stairs, takes more like 30 minutes. Usually longer if I stop to watch things or shop in the covered food market.

Here are a few quick pics from today's walk home.

The first part of my walk home through the old town takes me through the awning fabric part of town. Shop after shop with big open doors and filled with giant bolts of striped and plain awning fabrics. Men on the sidewalk sitting at foot-pedalled industrial sewing machines, surrounded by masses of fabric tumbling in folds around them. Today one of the shops was using the sidewalk as a cutting board, with the ever-present guys on the side offering advice. Love the brilliant blue sheen of the plastic fabric - wonder what it will be used for.

Later, up the hill, I come by the cats - a regular encounter around 6pm. Two middle-aged men who live in a very tumbledown house perched at the edge of a cliff where they keep pigeons and geraniums have adopted a neighbourhood colony of feral cats. They buy cheap ends from the butcher and feed the cats every evening. This is not a cuddly relationship - no gentle stroking or tame purring going on. It is all about a bucket full of meat and a lot of hungry cats. But the humans and cats in this story seem to need each other anyway and none of them mind me hanging around watching, taking a few pictures.

So that was today's walk. Every night there is something worth stopping to watch.

I have been slow on posting these days - I attribute it to heat and dehydration - but another one coming soon about the Holy Month of Ramadan, soon to come to a close.

summer vacation

2010-08-22T18:45:00.001+03:00

I am back in Amman after a lovely vacation in the long summer light and cool shade of northern Europe. Back in Europe, the weather was perfect. Here in Amman, the plane landed in the early evening in 43C/110F degree heat and - atypically - no breeze. It's stifling. My cold water taps are running hot as the sun bakes the water cistern on the roof. I am bathed in sweat and the feeling of clothes on skin is close to intolerable. Small wonder Adam and Eve - living just next door by the Euphrates River - ran around naked.

So, in addition to being a nice summer vacation, my trip was a wonderful break from all this heat - calm, cool, green. I spent time in Amsterdam with some friends where we enjoyed bikes, book stores, great food and excellent wine consumed in gardens and on beautiful, leafy, breezy terraces. To the amusement and puzzlement of my friends, my whole first day in Amsterdam was spent staring at and commenting on trees - their size, greenness, amazing variety and incredible beauty. In retrospect, I was experiencing a little bit of cultural dislocation...

Amsterdam was then followed by some glorious days on the island of Vlieland in the North Sea, two hours by ferry from the mainland.

Much of Vlieland is a nature preserve/ bird sanctuary with wild dunes and amazing, pristine white sand beaches and big surf. It is car-free - with the exception of service vehicles - and the one little village of Oost-Vlieland is straight out of a Dutch picture postcard with a long main street lined by 17th century brick houses, happy Fries horses grazing in green fields, and a big harbour filled with traditional sailing barges. Basically: my definition of paradise.

(The only thing slightly off-putting on Vlieland: the blondeness! I started keeping track of the blonde to brunette ratio in public places - restaurants, shops, etc. - usually around 3 - 4 blondes for every dark-haired person. And let's not even talk about the blue eyes to brown eyes ratio - even more extreme! It made me realize I was experiencing a way of life enjoyed by a minutely marginal subset of this global population. Which in its own way felt like fascinating cultural anthropology: observing leisure behaviours in the traditional summer habitat of the northern european.)

As always happens when I am there, Amsterdam got me thinking about cities and the ingredients that make great places. It's all going on there - interesting streets, wonderful parks, great architecture that is always changing, ever new - without uprooting the old - and that amazing transportation network - cycling heaven. I made a special request of my friend to spend at least one day seeing art - not something I do very often in Amman. Originally we had planned to go to Rotterdam to do that - since many of the major galleries and museums in Amsterdam are closed for renovations - but in the end we stayed put and toured some smaller spaces and interesting corners of the city.

We took off on our bikes at 10am and spent the day roaming around the city. We saw some nice work and that was a pleasure. But here's what this tour mostly helped me realize: the city of Amsterdam has really figured out how to reuse and recycle its urban spaces. And fast. And in an incredibly creative, fearless and (compared to Toronto, anyway) non-fussy way.

We went to the FOAM, the Photograph Museum of Amsterdam, and, later, to the Huis Marseille, a private photography museum. These are both located in lovely historic 16th or 17th Century Canal houses that have been converted into art galleries. There is nothing particularly novel about historic houses being turned into galleries in this way - these two just happen to be superbly located and beautifully done.

We then rode over to the new Central Public Library of Amsterdam - a beautiful contemporary building that is central to the revitalization of the city's eastern docklands (sound familiar, Toronto?). which are transforming incredibly rapidly and in such an exhilarating, interesting way. Change happens fast here. But what makes it work is that everywhere you turn there is a strong emphasis on beautiful public spaces and design detail and pedestrian and cycling infrastructure that leaves me feeling a mixture of envy and pity for poor Toronto.

The biggest revelation of the day for me, though, was a trip to the Noord neighbourhood - a quick hop on the ferry across the river. This part of town is seeing a lot of change - a formerly industrial neighbourhood of large factories slowly turning into residential enclaves or light industry. A similar tale to other de-industrializing cities in Western Europe and North America.

Here's what I saw that I loved: a willingness on the part of officialdom to turn this part of town over to young people, and often creative people - architects, artists, designers, skateboarders, whoever - to shape the neighbourhood.

In part this is being done by providing incredibly cheap housing in refurbished shipping containers. In part through handing over an abandoned - and vast - former shipbuilding factory - a giant hangar, really - over to a group of artists who have rebuilt the interior, serviced it, plumbed it and turned what was fallow space into a network of studios. Plus a skate park, filled with teenagers, who are using the space in another cool way. Great things are brewing

I like that this transformation from factory to studio space is not overly controlled or dictated from above. There doesn't appear to be an obsession with health and safety regulations. I like that it is a space built by the people who need it and use it and they care about it, because it is all about protecting their livelihoods. They are creative people and risk takers who are establishing the neighbourhood. I like that it is creating a whole scene that other people want to be a part of.

It makes me think a lot about how a city goes about creating new neighbourhoods from brownfields. Maybe its not by spending lots of money on a waterfront park or a stadium, say, but by attracting and handing control over to smart, risk-taking, young people. The kind of people that other people want to be around.

After our day out on the town, we rode back home to my friend's place - a converted 19th century schoolhouse that has been turned into art studios and a daycare and co-op apartments - and there we had a nice glass of wine on the roof terrace. A day well spent.

As another aside: when I was in Amsterdam, I was interviewed on the topic of cities and the environment by Radio Netherlands Worldwide for their weekly radio program "Earth Beat". If you are interested in hearing my voice (which personally makes me cringe!) here's the link below. Click on the most recent episode entitled "Cities That Work":

http://www.rnw.nl/english/radioprogramme/earthbeat

Life Goes On

2010-08-08T23:26:00.000+03:00

It is 9pm and the stars are out. After a searing hot day in the mid forties, the temperature is hovering around a pleasant thirty degrees celcius and a lovely breeze is blowing. Without question, the early evening is the best time of day here. A friend just got back to Amman after a month-long summer holiday in Scotland and Provence. I asked her if she missed anything when she was away. "The colour of the sky at dusk," she said, "and the incredible calm that happens in the evening amidst all the chaos."

I am sitting on the patio of Books@ - a neighbourhood cafe-bookstore that has a breath-taking location on a hillside overlooking East Amman. Like every night this month, there's an endless spectacle of wedding fireworks from the nearby hilltops. The rush has been on for weddings the last couple of weeks - i think to get them out of the way before Ramadan begins this coming Wednesday. Or at least that is the only explanation I have for the non-stop nightly round of drums and gunshots and honking and fireworks. Tonight's displays have been particularly impressive. Meanwhile, people on the patio are lounging around on sofas or sitting at tables drinking tea or smoking argileh pipes. Or drinking beer - also something that won't be seen once Ramadan begins. The atmosphere is very relaxed; taking it easy is a pastime that people have honed to a fine art here. I am learning to get better at it myself. The heat definitely helps.

And this is where I encounter the eternal paradox, the circle that I cannot square in my head: how can a place so serene exist amidst so much turmoil? This past week saw an upswing in violence in Iraq with more rockets in Baghdad and a serious bombing in Basra. Several friends here whose work for the UN focuses on reconstruction in Iraq say the situation is definitely worsening - a couple of them just got back from (55 degree heat!) Baghdad and were very pessimistic about the situation. Meanwhile, last Tuesday, a serious border skirmish occurred between Israel and Lebanon - the first since 2006 - with 3 or 4 deaths and a lot of sabre-rattling from Hezbollah in the aftermath. Also last Tuesday, missiles shot from an unknown location in the Sinai desert targeting Eilat in Israel landed off course in the south of this country, in Aqaba. The story is similar to a news item from last April that I posted about. Only this time a person - a taxi driver - was killed and several more injured. The wife of a close colleague was in Aqaba for work that day (he is a very close colleague. He sits 18 inches away from me... and can hear me chew my lunch every day... poor dear) . The rocket landed on a taxi right outside the Intercontinental Hotel where she was staying. She could see the aftermath out the window.

And again, just like in April when this happened before, none of these events really raised eyebrows or generated conversation. I think a group of us chatted in an off hand way for about 5 minutes during a work break about the rocket landing in Aqaba and whether my colleague's wife was OK. Just a mild curiousity. We all just assumed that she was fine and there was nothing to worry about. Then we went back to work, reviewing excel spread sheets and pouring over aerial maps. I try and compare this reaction to what would have happened in the office in Toronto if one of my colleagues' spouses had been away on business and looked out the window of the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa, say, to see a taxi flattened by a scud missile and dead and injured people lying around. I venture to say that a lot of chatter - maybe even some tears of concern - would have been generated.

So it is all a bit strange. My general experience is that the reaction to gossip and minor events here is much more amplified that I am used to. Small slights often get blown out of proportion. But when it comes to things that would constitute 'big' or 'newsworthy' events in Canada - bombings, landslides, city-wide blackouts - they tend to get shrugged off as nothing more than the minor annoyances of everyday life. I even have to admit I kind of like the nonchalance.

But it still doesn't quite make sense to me. And I have to wonder, relaxing on the patio, whether I am continuing to play the role of the Sissy Spacek character in the film Missing. Am I witnessing some kind of distintegration? In it but not of it. I guess that's the eternal mystery of being here.

friends, neighbours

2010-07-30T19:35:00.000+03:00

One of things that I love about living abroad - both now in Amman and elsewhere in the past - is how it forces me to confront myself and consider what I value on a daily - maybe hourly - basis.

This is a fairly banal observation, especially for those readers who have spent time living overseas. But coming to terms with different ways of being, finding out what parts of your lifestyle you can compromise on (vegetarian diet, clothing choice) and what things are fundamentally important to your quality of life (strong coffee, walking, tolerance) allows you to learn about your own limits and peculiarities and biases, every moment of every day. Insights that may require hours of determined journal-writing or piles of junky magazine self-help quizzes back home (Are you destined to succeed? What kind of female are you?) emerge self-evidently without having to think deliberately about them. It is something akin to introspection, only active and exhilirating. And exhausting. Your brain is working overtime, constantly processing all this new information - which translates into very sound sleep at night and vivid dreams - an added bonus.

At a certain point, after a few months, the state of wonderment decreases as you get used to a new normal - the fact that your colleague has two wives, or that giant cockroaches are living in your kitchen drains - but the potential for being truly surprised never really goes away. It is all a part of the full-body learning experience of living in a very foreign place

I knew all this before I came, but living it is another thing altogether. I was fully prepared to be surrounded - and even, in happy circumstances, embraced - by people with very different world views and backgrounds and opinions than my own. I was ready for that and excited by the prospect. What I absolutely didn't expect was that I would encounter someone exactly like me, with whom I have everything in common. And that has been its own amazing surprise and learning experience.

Paul, until yesterday, was my neighbour and colleague. He lives in Tucson, Arizona where he studies architecture, but has been spending time in Amman this summer working at the Institute where I work. Yesterday he left town for more adventures in London and Paris and New York before he heads back to Tucson. I will miss him. We saw a lot of each other. His (former) front door is about 12 feet from mine and his desk at work was about 20 feet away. For about 6 weeks straight we shared the same schedule: 8:10am walk to work; work all day; 5:30pm walk home and often in the evenings something social. Along the way, through the course of our time together, we covered a lot of ground - topographical and conversational.

It is fairly unremarkable to me that through our conversations it emerged that we share similar political views - liberal, green, socially progressive. Given our workplace, it is also not surprising that we have a a shared interest in buildings, housing, transportation. We are both cyclists and downtown city dwellers with a penchant for transitional urban neighbourhoods. It is even understandable to me that despite being from opposite ends of the same continent, and with a gap in age and a difference in gender, we share the same cultural references with an astounding overlap in the music we listen to, books we read, movies, blogs, websites, news items that we jointly draw upon. These are the external, contextual things that contribute to who we are, I guess, as a certain type of liberal, intellectual North American. Other preferences that we shared were endless: like a love of cats, or the sound of cottonwood trees rustling in the wind, or the slant of sunlight on Jebel Lwebdieh in the late afternoon. The list goes on and on.

But what was really a learning experience for me was seeing Paul's approach to the world - his way of breaking down a question and figuring out answers and his openness to the people and experiences around him. I learned a lot. Also about a certain north american logic. I realized that I bring it with me everwhere I go and it is the frame through which I interpret the world and connect with people. I guess I never really realized before how much I belong to my own culture. Or that I am "type" of person.

A couple of days before he left, Paul and I talked about the fact that we have so much in common, despite our obvious gender, age and geographic differences. He attributes it to growing up in the sticks with professional parents - something we have in common - and bicycles. I tend to agree with him.

I asked his permission to write this. I hope he doesn't mind what I have written. I will miss him and see this city a bit differently now as a result of his influence. Happy travels, friend!

not a drop to drink

2010-07-16T23:49:00.021+03:00

Summer has hit. The thermometer has been hovering around 38 degrees C (101 F) in breezy, high-altitude Amman and a balmy 45 degrees C (113 F) in Aqaba, a bit further south. Friends in Baghdad are are reporting 50 degrees C. Despite high temperatures, I am finding the heat surprisingly easy to handle - zero humidity and just fine in the shade. With a nice cross breeze running through my un-air-conditioned apartment, it is actually more comfortable than my place in Toronto on a hot summer night (sorry, Briana).

It is the searing radiant heat of the sun at midday that is a whole new experience. A visitor recently commented that "the sun seems closer to the earth here... is that possible?". The image of a steak sizzling on a barbeque grill plagues my mind's eye when I think about exposed flesh in this weather. Not that there is much exposed flesh to be seen - at least among women. Dress codes remain in place no matter the temperature - which means it is loosely a policy of ankle to wrist to neck coverage out in public. I threw caution to the wind this week after returning from a meeting out of the office and - somewhat overcome by the baking midday heat - I took off my cardigan, revealing my bare arms in the office. Risque behaviour on my part?

This weather has me thinking about water. Partly because I am being very careful to drink a lot of it. Partly because the summer water shortages are on their way I am told and I try to imagine what it would be like to live in this heat without access to a reliable water supply. I am not sure I am looking forward to finding out. Water delivery - which currently happens once a week - can slow down in August I hear, or get rationed. But, to be frank, I am not sure I personally need to worry with my above average income. It is the many, many other residents of this city whose access to water is severely compromised that I wonder about.

A friend recently sent me a note wanting to know more about water in the region. He wrote: "... I noticed that the Dead Sea seems to be in two sections... Is this drying up? Or has it always been salt flats? This raised more questions in my mind... a post on water politics/culture would be interesting.... You mentioned in one post how on the infrastructure side 40% of water is lost through leakage, which suggests that waste is universal. But then, how can that be!!? In an area so dry why do they put up with leaks? On the water use side, surely people don't take 15 minute showers, leave the taps running to get the coolest/hottest water? Who goes without water? How costly is water?"

So, here I go, trying to say a few insightful things about a very complicated topic:

Water is scarce. The Dead Sea is drying up and by good estimates will be gone in 25 years at the present rate of evaporation. Most of the water in the Jordan river - which runs as a mere trickle now into the Dead Sea at the north end - is either diverted for agriculture in Israel or Jordan - or is collected in water treatment plants for drinking water in arid Amman. Similarly the streams that run through the deep, dramatic canyons on the east side of the Dead Sea - where I have been hiking over the last two weekends: they used to be tributaries, but now when these streams reach the flats just before the Dead Sea, they are piped and channeled to a water treatment plant, and then pumped a kilometer up hill to the thirsty city.

A sample conversation: I am talking to the director of planning of a major city in the North about the impacts of scattered sprawl development on the water supply especially with the enormous growth in population expected in the coming years. I point out that this city is surrounded by the most fertile, rain-fed agricultural lands in the whole kingdom and sitting on an underground aquifer. We talk about why it is important to conserve those agricultural lands, and maintain the natural heritage cover to allow for water re-absorption, maintain soil permeability, minimize the need for irrigation. She stares at me blankly. I ask her: "Where will the water come from to keep this city alive if you don't protect those resources?" She tells me: "Industry is the problem. they use too much water. If it becomes a big problem, we will close them down. And for people? Well, for people, for drinking, God will provide. He always has."

This fills me with a sense of dread and fear. Currently annual per capita water distribution in Jordan stands at 150 cubic metres per person, well below the international water poverty line of 1,000 cubic metres. With rapid population growth, no one I have talked to has a sense of how this will look in 15 years - let alone 50.

I recently read in the newspaper that the price of water is going up. This is politically tricky as so many people on limited incomes have scarce access to water. The story reported that the hike in the prices of water is part of a three-year plan to address the government's budget deficit. It has nothing to do with pricing the resource to reflect its full cost. The story also notes that "an average of 42 per cent of the water pumped to the public is wasted - the figure varies from place to place - 35% wastage in Amman; 22% in Aqaba, 65% in some regions." The Minister responsible says that the water loss is due to illegal trespassing - people stealing from the water grid. My colleagues also blame bad pipes that are very frequently above ground and easily subject to breakage and leakage. Why does this happen? Why aren't there more water conservation, water capture, grey water recycling, water infrastructure improvement projects at the small and micro-scale? This is a mystery that I think about daily. Part of it is a lack of organizational know-how at the municipal and national scale; part of it is the structure of the industry; part of it is a sheer lack of access to capital.

Instead big infrastructure projects dominate: a giant red-dead sea channel that will generate hydro electric power and purportedly restore water levels in the dead sea (notwithstanding the inter-basin transfer!) is in the feasibility study stage with world bank money. A very large pipeline is being built from Aqaba to Amman to tap the last large underground aquifer in the country.

People do talk about water a lot. Which part of town has good water pressure; why it is best to live lower down in an apartment building - ground floor best, water pressure highest; where the best swimming pools and spas are. They share tips about getting the hot water from the boiler on the roof to the shower faster - flush the toilet at the same time as running the shower; do the dishes right before you have the shower and the hot water will be on stream. Otherwise you are running the shower for 15 minutes before you can even get in.

These are probably the conversations of the urban affluent. I honestly have no clue how the water supply works in poorer East Amman, even less what it is like in bedouin communities in the desert or for the Egyptian farm labourers who live in tents in the Jordan valley. Driving through the southern desert the last few weekends, I have seen water tanker trucks parked beside the bedouin goat-hair tents, the sheep and goats lying in the shade the truck affords - the only shade around - the camels hanging around farther afield.

These trucks - often the only motorized vehicles in the vicinity - must serve the needs of the whole travelling unit, I figure - the humans, the livestock, washing, drinking needs. They must be the supply for a long haul - a week? two? a month? - and I am guessing that they are driven along to the next campsite when the herds move. I cannot imagine how much that water must cost. And now that the summer heat is here, that much more expensive.

Paying Rent

2010-07-05T23:27:00.000+03:00

It is the beginning of another month - my eighth one here - and that means it is time to pay the rent. I look forward to this event, all the more so because it is a tricky feat to accomplish. First, I live in a cash economy - no cheques - so I have to accumulate the right amount of cold hard cash over the course of the month. This means taking it out in the allowable small increments from the bank machine - when it happens to be working - and remembering to store up 50 dinar bills over the course of the month, like a squirrel preparing for winter. Second, I need to be in the building at the right time - when the owner is here and the office door is open. The office hours are unpredictable - non-existent, actually - and I need to watch out or else weeks will go by and I will suddenly wake up to the fact that I owe 2 months back rent plus utilities.

So around the beginning of the month, when I see that office light on, I dash up to my apartment, grab the envelope full of cash, head back downstairs and walk through a dark hallway filled with old broken furniture and other detritus into the back office of Abu Mohammed.

Abu Mohammed is the building owner. His name is Mahmoud and the "Abu" title literally means "Father of" which is both a mark of respect and an indication that he has a son named Mohammed. He is a large man, in his mid 60s, who looks like he has done his share of heavy manual labour. In contrast to his appearance, he has a gentle voice and an elaborately polite manner, bordering on deferential. He conveys a certain simplicity. He is the opposite of the polished, expensively dressed people I deal with in my day job, those with perfect English and excellent degrees from foreign universities. Sitting behind the scratched wooden desk in his dusty, cramped office, you could easily think that this is a hard-working labourer who had the good fortune to build an apartment building in a part of town that has now become popular. And here he is now reaping the benefits.

But things are not what they seem. The lesson I learn approximately 2 times every day in this country.

In fact, this lovely unpreposessing man has a major contracting business with an expertise in energy projects and is involved throughout the Gulf and east Africa. The apartment building is a little tiny side project that he keeps going for no discernable reason except as a place to store old furniture - and a good little investment. When I get that chance once a month, I like to sit with him in his office, and have a chat to hear the latest news about contracting jobs in the middle east. They are mysterious and amazing. Yesterday, he reported that he was just back from 30 days away - 20 days in Abu Dhabi, 10 days in Sudan where has managed to secure financing from a Swiss Bank with a big pile of Emirate money to build a solar energy project in Sudan. This is in partnership with a Chinese state company who are bringing in the technology. "I will have a labour of thousands of people, Miss Hannah. It is a very big project for me." All the paperwork is signed - he showed me - which is why he had to go to Sudan - to chase down some signatures.

We talked about what it is like to work in Sudan. "Hot" is one word. "Miss Hannah - it is 60 degrees in the sun and so dusty and dirty. The roads are just from sand, no asphalt, dust everywhere."

This constellation of Abu Dhabi - Chinese - Sudanese interests - with a little Swiss Bank thrown in on the side - fascinates me, of course. All the more so since I am currently reading the (very good) book "What is the What?" by Dave Eggers about refugee children in Sudan. Place names like Darfur come to mind. Do people do business in this place? It seems so. I try and ask him political questions - what does he think about the outcome of the recent election in Sudan? Are people discussing the separation of Southern Sudan from the North? - that sort of thing - but he never takes the bait and remains unfailingly polite. I remain fascinated and somewhat uncomfortable.

As we chat, his nephew sits on the side, like a character from Charles Dickens, making elaborate notes in a giant ledger book where all of the apartment transactions are duly recorded. And various renters and other petitioners come and go to pay money or just pay respects.

After 15 or 20 minutes, my time is up, and - honestly - he has better things to do than satisfy the curiousity of nosy Canadian. But he is deferential and gracious and we part with many repeated "go in peace" salutations until rent time comes around next month and I hear more about building big infrastructure projects in hot, distant lands.

The Great Outdoors

2010-06-26T17:53:00.000+03:00

I have been getting out of the city quite a bit on weekends lately, so thought I would share a few photos and notes about my various travels. I was also out on my first bike ride in the countryside yesterday - which was amazing. First time on a bike since February. What a joy. But that I will save for another post.

As-Salt

Just to the west of Amman, Salt is an Ottoman era town that thrived in the 19th Century with strong trading links to Nablus in the West Bank. This town has one of the most intact historic downtowns in the Country, built from beautiful, local, honey-coloured limestone. It is purportedly the home of sultana raisins, and there are lovely terraced olive and grape groves that ring the steep hills surrounding the town.

The old pedestrian souk is still happening with household goods and food and live chickens and tandoor bread ovens and clothing stalls all doing a busy trade. I walked up to the top of one of the hills ringing the town and found an old Ottoman era Turkish cemetery, still well-tended, and a bright shiny mosque.

I did stick out like a sore thumb in Salt on a saturday morning - not in hijab, unaccompanied by children or a man. It was the first place I have been actively followed by young kids and teenagers calling out to me, wanting to talk, the insistent "hello, hello where you from" - a weird combination of exceedingly friendly and faintly menacing.

Three hours and two very steep climbs in high heat saw me happy to get back to Amman and its urbane charms and relative anonymity. The brightness of the sun gives all my photos from that day a bleached-out look. Looking at them, I yearn for shade.

Dana Nature Reserve and Kerak Castle

A couple of weekends later, I went on a little overnight camping excursion to the Dana Nature Reserve about 2 hours south of Amman with a friend and his mother, who was visiting from Mumbai.

Before heading into the campsite, we stopped by the original village of Dana nestled into a rocky hillside, overlooking a deep gorge leading down to the Dead Sea. There has been some kind of human habitation in the village and gorge below since the iron age - closer to the sea is the oldest discovered copper mining site in the world.

The village itself dates to the Ottoman empire - probably 400 years old - and is hewn from local limestone. It was abandoned in the 1970s, but is now growing again as part of an eco-tourism initiative run by the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), which has seen the village become a destination for hiking, bird-watching and wildlife research, at the same time as creating jobs for local residents. (As an aside, the RSCN is an amazing operation and Ontario could learn a lot from them about how to integrate environmental protection, eco-tourism and local economic development more effectively!)

Our campsite, also run by the RSCN, was about 10 km from the village and perched at the edge of the gorge, as well. The heat and stillness and white canvas tents surrounded by sand and scrub grass made it feel a little like the high savanna in Africa. From here, we watched the sun set, sat around in a bedouin tent drinking mint tea, looked out at the amazing night sky and all went to sleep early in our tents.

The next morning at 7am, I went for a hike by myself in the cooler morning air for dramatic views and lots of birds and a couple of brilliant blue lizards. My friend who was out on a hike much earlier than I was lucky enough, in the dawn light, to see 3 groups of oryx - an antelope native to the region that is threatened with extinction from over-hunting. A reintroduction program at Dana is seeing populations growing here - a success story. (Not to mention that "oryx" is an excellent scrabble word!).

On the drive back from Dana, we stopped by the Kerak fortress built on a high peak by Christian crusaders in the 12th century. More fantastic views and gorgeous bleached limestone walls and, unlike our other stops, piles of old stone missiles from catapults of years gone by.

I cannot get over how easy it is to access amazing natural and historic sites in this country. Everything is easily within reach and designed to make you feel welcome. Also something we could learn to do better back in the homeland.

"you made a mistake"

2010-06-14T22:41:00.000+03:00

As usual, I was running a bit late this morning. So instead of walking to my new office location (yes!... another office... this time at City Hall... the third one so far in the time I have been here), I walked out in front of the apartment to hail a cab. The ride to this new office costs about 75 cents anyway, which makes it hard for other options to compete. Not that there even are other transportation options.

So I am standing there in the bright morning sunshine, and a yellow car with a triangular light thing on the roof is coming down the hill towards me, so I hail it. And the driver stops. He is about 50 years old, grizzled, overweight, a smoker. In short a typical cabbie. "Where to" he calls out the window (in arabic). I name the destination: City Hall. He says "get in." I do.

The typical conversation ensues: "Where you from?" "Canada". "Canada Very Nice. You work at the embassy?" he asks. "No, at City Hall." Our topics are exhausted and we lapse into silence.

About 3 minutes later, half way to the destination, he tells me: "You made a mistake."

Me: "What mistake?"

Him: "I am not a cab driver. I am a driving instructor. This is a learn-to-drive car. Not a taxi. Different colour yellow."

Sure enough, I check the dashboard and there's no meter there. And this is not a cab. And this nice man, seeing my waving on the side of the road, just decided to drive me to my destination because I am a hopeless foreigner in need of assistance.

So I am profusely apologetic and very grateful for the fact that he is going out of his way and thank him very, very much for his trouble.

And in his grizzled, smoking, driver guy way, he shrugs it off without anything approximating a smile and just says, "No problem.... Go in peace."

Something like this happens to me approximately 3 times a week. Like Blanche Dubois in a Streetcar Named Desire it appears that I do, indeed, depend on the kindness of strangers.

world cup fever

2010-06-10T20:08:00.000+03:00

On my way home:

The check out boys, who are my pals, in the Haboob grocery store, are split on who will win - one says Argentina, another is Italy all the way. The young Iraqi guy who bags the groceries - maybe 14 years old, a refugee here - feels for me. He says: "You Canada. Me Iraq. We both bad." He smiles in solidarity.

Closer to home, a server comes rushing out of a coffee shop, kissing the mexican flag. "Ana Mexico" (I am Mexico) he calls to me. I reply: "Ana Espania". He's happy for me.

There are flags everywhere along Rainbow Street, leading to my building. They fly from the coffee shop patios, are taped to lamp posts, and stick out of car windows. So far, I have noticed Italy quite a bit, and, most of all, Brazil. Jordan didn't make the cut, of course, but that doesn't seem to matter.

Fun.

Aqaba

2010-06-07T23:40:00.001+03:00

Tales of feral cats are going to have to wait another week while I report on my weekend trip to Aqaba.

A four-hour bus trip through a desert bathed in late afternoon sun delivered me there last Thursday. Aqaba is one of those places that has been on my "to see" list since I got here. There's a great sequence in the film Lawrence of Arabia where the Arab Legion takes the city from the Ottomans in a daring attack from the mountains. The name has always stuck in my head as an exotic destination where heroes and brigands collide. And it was now or never to go. I couldn't wait any longer: once July hits, that part of the country starts hitting temperatures in the 40s (I guess that would be 100s for you Fahrenheit readers), and as it was, June is getting late. Stepping off the air-conditioned bus from Amman was like walking into a Russian steam bath in a fur coat.

Of course, as these things go, the town is nothing like the picture in my mind. And as it turns out, David Lean filmed the whole "Lawrence of Arabia" sequence in Spain, because the real place didn't capture his imagination. But it was nonetheless interesting. This is true bedouin country, a real desert town, very conservative like its near neighbour Saudi Arabia and quite different in feel from the urban north. Camels were tethered to trees or being led around town by people in from the desert. The streets on Friday, the holy day, were utterly deserted. The radiant heat of the sun was bone-shattering - no one was out walking or sitting outside for leisure - certainly no unaccompanied women. It felt like whatever local life happens there, is confined to families, behind closed gates, in covered interior courtyards probably with lovely fountains and shady vines. As a tourist you have no access to that.

And overlaid on top of this conservative desert town is a burgeoning tourism industry taking advantage of the stunningly beautiful Red Sea. This involves many high-end European hotels, where bikinis are worn and alcoholic drinks are enjoyed (including by yours truly) and few people leave the confines of the private beach and pool. On top of that there is a smattering of local desert excursion companies and boat and diving tours that make their living off the visitors who venture out of the hotels or are looking for an entirely different experience.

And this was the second reason I was in Aqaba: to go snorkeling along the beautiful, unspoiled, incredibly intricate coral reefs that edge the coast south of town and all along Saudi coast.

Friends from Amman set me up with a local diving company - which was terrific. The boat trip was a fantastic day-long adventure, with two stops for swimming, snorkeling or diving. The water was teeming with sea life. It was my first time snorkeling in such a rich marine environment (I think the last time was when I was 10 years old in the Ottawa River where I saw mostly clams and mud). Huge, long electric blue pipefish, a couple of small blue marlin with the distinctive pointy bills, bright orange jewelfish, lots of yellow and black "finding nemo" fish. Intoxicating. At one point, I almost floated away into the endless blue drifting along behind a huge school of flashing silver sea bream.

On board the boat was another adventure altogether. There was a large group that had come from Beirut, all members together of a diving club there. It was their first time at the Red Sea, and their first time in Jordan. They were terrifically good looking to a person - men and women alike - charming, warm, outgoing, and with a gracious social ease tinged with a sense of superiority. This, I am told, is a hallmark of wealthy Maronite Christian Beirutis. It was interesting chatting with them - on the one hand, as native arabic speakers, they have direct access to the whole arab world - the Gulf, Egypt, wherever - but in some ways this conservative, bedouin Aqaba where the ladies on the public beach go swimming in full black hijab, was as foreign to them as it was to me - even more so.

From the boat we could see all the neighbouring countries - Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and, at the head of the channel, one of Israel's most strategic ports, Eilat.

And this was the other big observation sitting there on the hotel beach: while local folks lead their lives and bring their camels into town, and tourists sunbathe and frolic on this sunshine coast, the big tankers also move up and down the Gulf of Aqaba moving goods from Asia into the Middle East. Big commerce continues among these uneasy neighbours and the world goes on.

deeply disappointing

2010-06-01T21:17:00.001+03:00

From the beginning, I told myself that this blog would be about day to day life and sometimes work and I would steer away from the big geo-politics in this fraught region. But rules are made to be broken, so this week I am going to venture into the political realm to express my dissatisfaction with the Canadian government regarding its position on the Israeli military offensive (in international waters!) against the flotilla traveling to Gaza.

I compare this:

"Canada stood alone before a United Nations human rights council yesterday, the only one among 47 nations to oppose a motion condemning the Israeli military offensive in Gaza." (The Toronto Star)...

to this:

"U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the violence. The European Union's foreign affairs chief, Catherine Ashton, said the bloc was deeply concerned and she called on Israel to carry out an inquiry. British Foreign Secretary William Hague deplored the killings and called for an end to the Gaza blockade. Greece, Egypt, Sweden, Spain and Denmark summoned Israel's ambassadors demanding explanations for the violence, with Spain and France condemning what they called the disproportionate use of force. Greece suspended a military exercise with Israel and postponed a visit by Israel's air force chief. Germany called for an immediate investigation but was careful not to directly place blame, and said it was seeking information on six German citizens believed to have been aboard the ships.
(Associated Press)...

...and I am dismayed. The EU cannot be called radical. The UN Secretary General is not an off-the-cuff individual. Countries like Sweden, France, Denmark, the United Kingdom are all credible. And all of these (and many more!) have expressed measured, critical responses to this event.

So, I wonder: Why not Canada? When did we lose all proportion on this issue? How did we find ourselves in this situation? It is just plain bad... not to mention embarrassing!

So ... there you go. Unfortunately, this international incident means you will have to wait until next week for the post I am going to write about the wee, partially blind, feral (but very tame) cat who has moved out of the mean streets of Jebel Amman and into my apartment. And the excellent team at "The Humane Center for Animal Welfare" - a lovely group of people working here in Amman - who have treated all her ailments.

In the meantime, here's a picture of Smudgie aka Habibti aka The Smudge to pique your interest:

Independence Day

2010-05-25T17:27:00.000+03:00

Today is Independence Day in Jordan - you know, like the USA's July 4th or France's July 14th or even Canada's July 1st. (Which isn't really independence day, is it? It's the anniversary of the passage of the British North America Act. Why does it seem quintessentially Canadian to celebrate an administrative success?)

Anyway, May 25th is the date in 1946 when the region known as Transjordan that operated under a British mandate became legally independent from the UK and changed its name to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Unlike other countries where I have lived - where this kind of a date is solidly cemented in popular culture - it wasn't until last Wednesday that an e-mail message went out to the staff team to let us know that today - Tuesday - was going to be off work.

It is understandable to me that I didn't know this was a holiday - living in my foreigner bubble daze. What is interesting to me is that my colleagues also didn't really seem to know until the last minute that there would be a day off. And, as it turns out, the scheduling was a bit of a bother and messed up a final deadline we have been working towards. And people are upset about that. And other people are upset that the first group is upset. And so it goes. The agitation certainly could have been avoided if only we had known earlier that a national holiday had been scheduled and we would have planned for it. Which seems like a ridiculous thing to observe, but there you have it: a cultural insight.

I guess this low-key recognition of the date accounts for the extremely low-key way it is being celebrated. Or rather not celebrated. It is sunny and hot today and the town is completely quiet, like a regular Friday weekend day. The only thing I have seen out of the ordinary was a lone convoy of stretch limos around noon. They were followed by a couple of pick up trucks and taxi drivers honking their horns and flying those car flags you see after a soccer team wins. Maybe 10 cars in total. My hometown of Deep River, population 4,000, puts on a bigger celebration for Canada Day. Maybe the celebrations start up after dark? I will wait and see. (Fireworks, by the way, are a regular occurrence these days. Big displays every Thursday and Friday night, accompanied by lots of gunfire from the tops of the hills that circle the old downtown. Wedding season!)

bugs

2010-05-23T00:02:00.001+03:00

It turns out that May is mosquito season here in Amman. These creatures are smaller, fiercer and faster-moving than their North American cousins and they have ruined several nights of sleep for me so far. (Is there anything worse in the darkness than that high-pitched doppler effect sound of a mosquito flying by your ear, followed by a sudden silence?)

It doesn't really do to think about what mosquitoes are doing here in Amman. At a kilometre above sea level on a high, dry, waterless plateau, it is not like there are low-lying marshes and stagnant pools dotting the landscape. Pondering this question too much leads me to wonder about the water cisterns that inhabit the roofs of Amman's buildings. These are filled weekly by water trucks and meet residents' washing, cooking, and drinking needs. They certainly don't look very reassuring, and I'm not sure how well sealed they are. I figure that they probably constitute the only source of standing water in the vicinity, and I don't much relish the thought of mosquito larvae swimming around in them. It does make me glad I get my drinking water delivered, though.

A couple of weeks ago I commented to my various colleagues about the attack of the killer mosquitoes. They all had the same answer, delivered in a kind of tone that conveyed a "but, of course, only an idiot wouldn't know about this" message. Here's the answer: "well, you have to buy an electronic mosquito killer ... you can pick one up at the Safeway."

Now, coming from the Ottawa Valley, I have a proprietary feeling about mosquitoes and how you repel them. Skin so soft... citronella candles... deep woods off... cedar oil...you name it, I know it.

I like to think that Canadians take mosquitoes very seriously and have all the answers. So, I admit to being surprised that I have come to the middle eastern desert to discover a Japanese product called Fumakilla - VAPE MAT DEVICE - Electronic Mosquito Destroyer. It has a special semi conductor. It also comes *with pilot lamp* but *insecticidal refills* to be purchased separately. For the packaging alone and at less than $10, I was compelled to buy it today.

I am not sure yet if it works. I am going to give it a whirl though.

A whole different question is what I am going to do about the giant cockroaches that have started visiting my kitchen sink of an evening. Sigh. Life in a warm climate.

souks and more souks

2010-05-15T19:52:00.000+03:00

April was a grueling month at work, but finally all the deadlines have been met. So I was fortunate last week to have some dear friends visit from Toronto; it was the perfect time for a break and an adventure. They arrived last Saturday evening and and less than 12 hours later we were heading north to Syria.

Finally on the road to Damascus!

http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/road_to_damascus_experience/

I cannot claim that I had a revelatory moment or a personal conversion like the apostle Paul on the trip north. We travelled through Jordan's gritty, dusty industrial heartland of Zarqa, then skirted the edge of the arid Eastern desert - a landscape dotted with black basalt boulders, makeshift bedouin shelters, itinerant farm labourers, camels and goats. As we approached Damascus on the Syrian side of the border, to the west we saw snow-capped Mount Hermon, wreathed in haze, and a line of distant blue hills contrasting against the dusty yellow landscape. A lot of information to take in.

But, I can report that Damascus itself was a revelation. Breathtaking, fascinating, and incredibly warm - both the people and the temperature. Our local, Damascene cab driver became hopelessly lost after about 3 minutes crossing into the old city through 'Bab Touma' - one of the city's ancient gates. We realized quickly that the intricate network of alleyways (that predate the automobile by about 3 millenia) would be an adventure in themselves to explore. No need to plan much more than walking for days in Damascus.

And walk we did. Through the vine-covered streets of the Christian quarter, through the textile souk (where we were nearly lost for days in a complex warren of covered alleys that went for kilometers) and the medieval Bzourriya spice souk and the awe-inspiring 19th century Hamidiyya souk. And the awning fabric market and the vegetable market and the handicrafts market. We even went to a bicycle souk out of the old city - really just a turn-of-the-century french-inflected shopping street known as the souk al bicycletiyya lined with bike shops selling imported chinese and indian bikes and locally-made carpeted seat covers and hand-woven paniers.

We walked through the crowded, narrow streets behind the 7th century Ummayad mosque, where Shi'a pilgrims from Iran mixed with visitors from the Gulf and local merchants. While feeling ancient, the city is also an incredibly vibrant hub of 4 million inhabitants, all of them seemingly trading goods. How can you not want to buy something in such conditions? I picked up a couple of beautiful syrian silk scarves and a tribal carpet (jajim) from northern Iran. I am sure I didn't get a good price on anything. But I do now know 100% more about traditional weaving than I did before I went. (Which is to say I went from knowing virtually nothing to now having extremely scant knowledge).

It is also true what the guidebooks say: that there is a distinct contrast in the city between the teeming, busy, loud, fascinating public streets and squares and the private sphere. Off the narrow streets, behind high walls, are quiet, shaded courtyard gardens with orange trees, mosaics, fountains. We stayed in a lovely hotel that was a converted palace and we took the opportunity to wander through a few more, including the impressive Maktab Anbar.

Now I want to go back, of course. And to Aleppo in the North - an even older souk inside a walled old city. And next time, I will take better shoes.

scribes

2010-04-30T19:04:00.001+03:00

In general, my neighbourhood is slow to wake up in the mornings. The streets are still sleepy at 8:30am when I am walking up the hill to the office - I'll see maybe a shop owner or two sweeping the sidewalk or hauling deliveries and a few guys standing around and smoking in the morning sunshine in front of the autobody shop at the corner. (This appears to be the favourite neighbourhood hangout for men aged 45 - 60).

Stillness prevails, at least until I get to King Abdullah square where I hit 'Embassy Row'. A number of high-profile embassies and consulates - Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Turkey - all of which generate a lot of visa applicants in this part of the world - and an array of Jordanian government institutions are all located here. In one block you find the passport office, the Civic Registry, The Prime Minister's communications office, the Department of Statistics, the excellently named Museum of Political Life (which unfortunately is never open when I want to go in, so I am still in the dark as to its collection), and a host of many other institutions (some of them with inexplicable functions... see above).

Here the sidewalk tempo changes. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but it finally dawned on me that these people milling around are waiting for offices to open or appointments and trying to get their paperwork in order. They are from all walks of life. Young guys in jeans and aviator sunglasses and Guess knock-off T-shirts, black-clad women in face veils, men from the Gulf in spotless white kaftans and kefiyehs - these guys (always guys) are usually milling around the well-guarded entrance to the Saudi embassy - old bedouin couples, the women in traditional embroidered gowns, with tatooed faces, the men in red-checked headscarves with incredible sun-weathered skin.

A makeshift cottage industry has sprung up in response to the plethora of official buildings. Again it took me a long time to figure out who the guys were sitting at card tables on the sidewalks under folding patio umbrellas. Were they selling lottery tickets? Signing up people for cell phone service? They are there every morning. At some point in the middle of the afternoon, they fold up their tables and chairs and depart, leaving their mobile offices propped up against a nearby wall overnight. Some even have built more solid-looking stalls that look like part of a farmer's market and have, predictably, taken over the sidewalk.

I finally asked a taxi driver what these people had on offer, and he informed me that they were scribes. And fixers. I can't believe it didn't occur to me sooner. For a fee they fill in the forms of illiterate people. Or draft documents. Or they accompany foreign workers or rural peasants around the maze of government offices and sort out their paperwork. Now that I know what I am seeing, I get it. I just noticed yesterday that on one of the side streets, one entrepreneurial fellow has set up a little photo booth in case you need visa pictures. I have no idea how much they charge. There are so many of them, each one cannot possibly get that much business.

I do know that as a foreign worker myself, you can't get through the paperwork without a little bit of professional help. It is a sad truth that the nature of my stay here and my country of origin mean that I get a little more support than the folks who need the assistance of sidewalk scribes. But that is another post for another day.

I want to take more pictures of the different government offices and embassies - particularly the Iraqi embassy which is a lovely miniature reproduction of the Babylon Gate. But they are all heavily guarded by young men in camo holding semi-automatic weapons. And I am afraid that I appear highly suspect snapping photos of banal government buildings and embassies - who knows what I could be planning!

I also want to get more close ups of the scribes at work with their clients, but that too, is a bit too intrusive. So for now I am taking pictures during off hours and might work up the nerve to take some crowd shots in the coming weeks.

thinking about security

2010-04-22T20:37:00.002+03:00

I love the film Missing by Costa-Gavras. I saw it for the first time when I was in Grade 12 in a great big awe-inspiring cinema in Toronto, when I was visiting my friend Karen for March break. (It was either the Uptown or the University where I saw it - both now demolished, long since gone, and left only in memory.) Missing caught me at an impressionable age and I attribute that film, in part, to shaping my political tendencies. I rented it again last year after a 25 year break and despite the fact that Sissy Spacek is far, far younger than I remember and Jack Lemmon is still annoying, the movie holds up. If you don't know the film, it is about the Pinochet-led military coup in Chile in 1973 and the trials and tribulations of a young American couple who are living there at the time. I recommend it.

I was thinking about it today, when the news came through this afternoon that a Russian-made Grad missile had exploded in Aqaba, a city in the south of Jordan, and destroyed a warehouse. No one was hurt. A second missile landed nearby in the Red Sea, doing no damage. It is worth knowing that Aqaba is right next door to Eilat in Israel, and right across a narrow inlet of the Red Sea from Egypt. Interesting border country. The news reports explaining this have been changing every half hour since. Explanations over the course of the afternoon have included: The rockets were fired at Israel from the Sinai in Egypt ; the rockets were fired at Jordan from the Sinai; the rockets were mis-fired from Jordan and were targeting Eilat in Israel. Some reports say Hezbollah; some say Al Qaeda. Now the BBC has a quote saying "We are 100% sure that the rocket which hit a warehouse in Aqaba was not fired from Jordanian territory, but from beyond our borders." Here's the BBC link where the news keeps changing:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8636796.stm

This is not that big a deal and people at work absorbed it with passing curiosity, focused more on our looming deadlines next week. In fact, a couple of people in the office are heading off to Aqaba tonight to go scuba diving, and one colleague has a son in a basketball tournament there this weekend. They were mostly annoyed at the prospect of their travel being delayed by increased highway checkpoints.

What I find interesting is that this single incident has happened in a week full of equally interesting single incidents: scud missiles allegedly crossing the Syrian border into Lebanon to arm Hezbollah; concerns from friends of friends who live in Lebanon that violence is imminent between Hezbollah and Israel; a week full of revenge killings and instability among east bank tribes here in Jordan that caused one of the cities where we work to shut down any access for 3 days. These events may or may not be incidental - all leading to something bigger, or each completely random. Evidence of instability or simply the episodic moments of life in this part of the world.

And meanwhile, the biggest threat that I face in my daily existence is the possibility of being hit by a crazy car driver on my walk home from work and the likelihood of carpal tunnel syndrome from an improperly aligned office chair. Which is why I have been thinking about Missing. As an outsider, one has a daily life that is somehow removed from both the local and bigger geo-politics. You are a part of it, but you are not. So you think yourself immune. Without access to the local arab-language media, you are reliant on colleagues to relay the latest news. And in any case, some - lots - of the worrisome stuff never makes it into the printed word in any language. So, there you are, living your daily life with your daily concerns until somehow you find yourself right there, where it is happening. I am pretty sure nothing bad is happening here. I am watching events with increasing awareness and acuity. And mostly I am watching out for dangerous drivers when I cross the street!

(This post, by the way, should be no disincentive to people planning to visit !!)

knafeh

2010-04-17T22:41:00.000+03:00

I have been meaning to write about sweets for a while, since they are everywhere, everyday, all the time. Whatever calorie reduction has occurred in my diet as a result of alcohol-free socializing, it has been more than made up for in the constant intake of sugary drinks, tasty snacks and a wild array of sweets - from junky chocolate bars and twinkies to delicious stacks of honey-soaked pastries and chocolates filled with nuts and dates.

But there's one sweet treat here that generates more excitement and anticipation than all the others: knafeh. So it deserves some attention.

Knafeh gets ordered for the office or extended family or school class when some momentous occasion has transpired: graduation day, the birth of a baby, a milestone anniversary. When the wife of one of the guys on our team, Saddam, had a baby recently, knafeh was ordered. When the team submitted a final report after more than a year of hard work this past Tuesday, knafeh was ordered. Our little celebration was scheduled for 1:00pm and by 12:45, staff were milling around the meeting area, keenly awaiting the treat.

I had never seen it before moving here. I am told that knafeh originates in Nablus, in the west bank, but has spread throughout the arab levant - from Egypt to Lebanon. And it is hard to describe. It involves softened nabulsi sheep's cheese, wrapped in a crispy semolina pastry, soaked in a rose-scented sugary syrup and garnished with crushed pistachio nuts. It seems like something that only gets cooked in large quantities, so that might explain why it is so closely associated in people's minds with celebrations. I can tell you this: you eat a piece, you are full for the rest of the day. It serves as lunch and desert in one fell swoop.

Knafeh aside, I can't leave the topic of sweets without sharing a photo of a chocolate pudding brand that shows up occasionally in the corner store here. The picture speaks for itself.

more khamseen

2010-04-15T22:42:00.001+03:00

Another dust storm hit on Tuesday. From my office window I watched as the grey wall of sand advanced, consuming east Amman until the view was entirely obliterated. The dust blew all night, covering my balconies in a fine grit. By Wednesday, the weather was clear again. Here are two pictures, both taken at approximately the same time in the late afternoon - one on Tuesday, the second on Wednesday.

The Big One

2010-04-10T20:20:00.001+03:00

So, I finally made it to Petra.

The first time Petra entered into my consciousness was while watching an Indiana Jones movie sometime in the late 1980s. We are dashing through the desert on horseback with Harrison Ford and all at once we come upon an improbable temple hewn out of a towering cliff of pink rock. I remember thinking: "can it be real?" followed closely by "I want to go there!"

It turns out that I was not alone in this feeling. Petra is a massive tourist draw for the country of Jordan: UNESCO has listed it a world heritage site and it is one of the "7 new wonders of the world" along with the likes of the Great Wall of China and Machu Picchu. Like Niagara Falls and Piazza San Marco, Petra is one of those places that is more recognizable than its home country. While Amman is 3 hours away and bears little in common physically with Petra, it is nonetheless filled with post cards and wall hangings and, joy of joys, snow globes, depicting the iconic Treasury. Having lived for 5 years in Prague, where the Old Town Square and the Charles Bridge are in this same category of destination, I know this kind of place. As beautiful as they are, they are not real. They no longer belong anywhere, but have become some kind of occupied territory, laid claim to by international invaders, a world apart.

So while part of me has been looking forward, ever since I arrived, to meeting that 20-year old goal of seeing Petra, the cynical, wearied traveller part of me was expecting to be disappointed, especially after all the amazingly intimate moments I have enjoyed at sites like Umm Qais and Jerash over the past few months.

Here's the good news: the cynic was defeated. Petra is astonishing. For one thing, the site is mind-boggling in its vastness. It was a city of tens of thousands of people at one time, filled with monumental architecture as well as little caves and cubbyholes. And while thousands of tourists pour in daily and parts of it are very busy - especially near the Treasury site - it is also possible to find oneself completely alone, wandering through a narrow desert canyon and coming upon an ancient tomb, yours for the exploring.

For another thing, visiting the site is a cross between a living history lesson and pure back country hiking along narrow ledges and rocky outcroppings, with amazing views of the rift valley separating Jordan from Israel and Palestine. I was only there for one day and we must have hiked at least 10km - and it felt like I saw very little of the site. There is so much to take in.

I missed the chance to go back again last week with my friend who was visiting, but intend to return in early May. More photos then.

Water

2010-03-31T10:04:00.002+03:00

I haven't had much time this week with both work and a lovely visit from a friend from Canada keeping me occupied.

So just a few photos that are a part of the collection I am building on water and water infrastructure. Jordan is one of the most water constrained countries in the world. There's a growing population and less and less available water. One would think that this combination would be a strong incentive to conserve, reuse and capture water.

That is tough, though. The infrastructure is dilapidated and funds for investment in improving systems are limited. I am told that something like 40% of piped water is lost through leakage/old pipes.

So here are a few pictures of water sources and pipes. The tap below, wrapped in tape, is in the southern desert in Wadi Rum. It is a piped desert spring, attached to a single PVC hose that serves an entire bedouin community.

The hose propped on cement blocks is the water system on the roof of my office building in Amman and serves 6 floors.

Daily Errands

2010-03-21T22:06:00.001+02:00

Another weekend spent in the city with a lot of work to do. Above and beyond the reports we have due at the end of this month and next, we also had an office real estate move to attend to this weekend. Change is the only constant, it seems. The team has been shifted from the previous (leaky, temperamental) "new" building to make room for permanent ministry staff who need to be closer to the powers that be. Consequently, we have been shifted into an older, government-owned building that is half-vacant. Despite the chaos this move creates at a very busy time, this new location is fine with me. Our "new" old space turns out to be larger and lighter and quieter, with great views and - a real bonus - it's within walking distance of my current apartment in the centre of town. This is a picture of the view from my office.

The move means I will get back to my old pedestrian ways and be able to cut down on using taxis as my main form of transportation. I have been taking cabs to and from work for over a month - since I moved into my current apartment. A 15-minute ride every morning and evening was costing about $5 a day - not so different from Toronto transit fares, really.

But cost savings and convenience aside, I will actually miss my morning conversations with taxi drivers. For one, it has been a chance to practice my arabic - and I think I have perfected "left", "right", "straight ahead" and "stop here please". And while some of the drivers have been grumpy or stand-offish or simply focused on listening to the morning call-in show, I would say that every second driver had something he wanted to talk to me about: the weather... his sons... the cost of living in Canada...his hometown of Hebron...his grandfather's house in Bethlehem just up the street from the Church of the Nativity. (The drivers I have encountered are almost universally Palestinian). I understand one tenth of what they say and nod and say "aiwa" (yes) and "shukran" (thank you) a lot.

I relish these interactions with a working world inhabited by regular folks. Since moving away from the the consultants' apartment and its protective embrace where everything was taken care of, now I have had to do real person things like track down the landlord to pay him for rent and fuel oil; buy kitchenware; get the drinking water delivered and paid for. I even went to a tailor this weekend to get a pair of trousers hemmed. I am stretching my vocabulary and learning a lot by simply being.

Here's a few things I have learned: first, business people are incredibly trusting. I owed back money on fuel oil for over a month - I could never catch the building owner at the right time. When I finally connected with him and paid up, apologizing profusely, his response: "Miss Hannah, it is fine. You can pay many months late. No problem. I know that you are good and you will pay."

The water delivery guys, based on a single call of inquiry, were more than happy to drop off a giant jug of water to my apartment sight unseen, no payment in advance. The information "apartment #8 - Mahmoud Safarini building" was enough for them. They definitely didn't catch my name. They knew I was good for the money, clearly. "No problem...mish mushkilla".

The second thing: there are eyes on the street. The "tailor for ladies" I went to today to hem my pants knew what building I lived in. "You are new here. You live next door. You are welcome any time, madam." I like it. It feels like someone has my back. (He also took care of my trouser hem in a 3 hour turnaround time and charged me about $1.75 for a really nice job.)

Unlike at home, where going to the dry cleaner or the corner store is the stuff you get done in between actually living your life, each of these tasks is its own mini adventure that stretches me in some way. This is why I am glad I am living here in a day to day world and, while I will always be a foreigner, I am something more than a passing tourist.

Khamseen

2010-03-15T00:22:00.001+02:00

This weekend, I had to work a lot, so I didn't go very far afield. Except for a Friday night mini-excursion to Mount Nebo overlooking the Dead Sea - where Moses purportedly first caught a glimpse of the promised land and where he may (or may not) be buried - it was pretty much sitting at a desk and running errands in Amman the whole time. As for Mount Nebo: no photos. We could see nothing much at all - it was a dark night, no moon, clouds of haze wafting up from the dead sea. There were a few twinkling lights from the towns and resorts lining the Jordan side of the river and, on the West Bank, a faint spectral haze emanating from Jerusalem and Ramallah.

As a result, I was struggling a bit for a blog topic this week. I have a few ideas that have been brewing - a photo essay of water infrastructure, medical tourism, feral cats, friday in Amman - and couldn't really think about what to write. And then, quite unexpectedly, an entirely new thing happened today. A khamseen.

Here's what the world wide web tells me:

Khamsin, khamseen, chamsin or hamsin (Arabic: خمسين ), also known as khamaseen (Arabic: خماسين) refers to a dry, hot and dusty local wind blowing in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Similar winds in the area are sirocco and simoom.

In other words: a dust storm.

It was a grey morning, nothing really remarkable but noticeably hot and somehow stifling. Over the course of the day, sitting in the office, the sky turned a grey-orange colour, the way the light turns green in Canada just before a big thunderstorm. But I was too busy to really take notice. And too irritable, in any case. Then as I was heading home at 6pm with a colleague, you couldn't help but remark: the air was thick and dry and hard to breath like a smog inversion. At this point my colleague says: "it's a half khamaseenee... it's starting a bit early this year...".

In arabic, "khamsa" means 5 and khamseen is 50, which is the source of the wind's name. If you are like me, you immediately think of the sequence in The English Patient where Count Almasy tells Katherine about the different winds of the desert: "There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob—a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic. Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some winds that just sigh towards the sky. Night dust storms that come with the cold. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for ‘fifty,’ blooming for fifty days–the ninth plague of Egypt."

What is interesting - and didn't actually occur to me and my colleague until well into the evening - was how much the weather affected our mood. I had a sleepless night last night - just couldn't settle until well after 3am - and couldn't figure out why. And today everyone was irritable at the office. Shockingly so. Two of my most easy going colleagues were truly grumpy. And so was I, again for no good reason. It turns out that this is truly a notorious 'ill wind' - crime rates rise, tempers flare. Now that I know what is going on, I feel better. A bit. I do hope tomorrow dawns clear, though.

That being said, this wind did lead me to this lovely page on the BBC website about the winds of the world : http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/understanding/wind_world.shtml. Question: why are there so few named winds in North America? Comments anyone?

Wild flowers in Umm Qais

2010-03-09T22:39:00.001+02:00

We had torrential rains here 4 days in a row about a week ago. And I mean torrential - biblical proportions. The effects of this kind of rainfall are exacerbated in a city where storm water/sewer grates are few and far between - you see roads become rivers very quickly. The good news is that this winter's rainfall has now surpassed that of the last 10 years or more and people at work are all talking about how the aquifers have been recharged.... (Folks talk about such stuff in a country that is one of the most water-constrained in the world).

One of the wonderful outcomes of the winter rains and the spring warmth is wild flowers. If you head away from the southern desert, up north towards the Syrian border, where the land becomes more and more fertile, and the hills get higher, you start to see carpets of lush green - wild grasses, wild geranium, lamb's ears - and masses of blooming red poppies, anemones, purple clover, yellow and white daisies, wild dwarf irises.

This, people have been telling me since I arrived, is the time of year to visit Umm Qais. So a friend and I went this past weekend. A small town that overlooks the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights, squeezed into the far northwestern corner of Jordan where it meets the difficult borders of Israel and Syria, Umm Qais was formerly the Roman city of Gadara, which flourished from the 2nd century BC to the 3rd century AD. In the 19th Century, the Ottomans scavenged blocks from many of the temples and built a fort and a village, now also abandoned and impressive.

Under the Greek empire and the Romans, the town must have been formidable. It stretches in all directions, overgrown ruins, too expensive to excavate, transformed now into meadows and olive groves. There are the remains of 3 amphitheatres, each of them with a capacity of 3000+ people. Much of the city was built from black basalt rock - not your usual white limestone or marble - and the ruins - temples, roads, city gates, churches, mausoleums - have a lovely, silent, mysterious quality.

What makes it particularly special in spring is the amazing wild flowers. And what is special about the wild flowers is not only how beautiful they are to look at, but the scent of them. The fragrance of the fields of purple clover in the spring sunshine was incredible. The stillness was amazing. After walking for several hours, we picnicked in a field overlooking the Sea of Galilee, and listened to the birds and sound of sheep bleating, musing at how a place so politically fraught can also be so incredibly peaceful.

administrative note

2010-03-02T19:42:00.000+02:00

I have received a number of e-mails from people over the last while who have tried to post comments and have faced obstacles in the attempt. I think I have solved the problem by finally exploring the settings behind this blog. You no longer need to be a 'registered user' (whatever that means) to post a comment and you can simply post as an anonymous user. So all of you lovely people who revel in anonymity, please feel free to send your thoughts. I would love to hear from you! H

Weekend in Beirut

2010-02-28T20:14:00.002+02:00

I went to Beirut this weekend for a quick trip. The visit was prompted by one of my colleagues who is heading back to Canada this week; he had never been and expressed an interest in going. I was hoping for Damascus instead, but another fellow pressed for Beirut, and so it was. The three of us boarded a plane Thursday evening and one hour later we were there.

From the first moment, the trip was an unexpected joy - a cheap flight on Royal Jordanian , no visa requirements and no hassle at the Beirut airport (a happy surprise). One companion is an architect, the other a historic preservation expert and we made excellent travelling companions: same interests, same pace, same tastes. Our shared top priorities were: good coffee, good food, good wine, at least one good bar and lots of walking in the city.

We found it all, and then some. Beirut was a beautiful, beguiling place. We kept trying to pin down what we were seeing. Some comparisons included: Paris (amazing cafes, intellectuals and universal French chic); Marseilles (edgy port city, salty sea air and amazing seafood), Belgrade and Istanbul (grand city of the Ottoman empire filled with boulevards, ancient minarets and byzantine churches); Berlin (the scars of the war, the green line between north and south beirut, the underground culture), Montreal (the beautiful young people, the club and bar scene), all in the context of an arabic speaking, middle eastern city filled with funky 60s modern buildings.

We stayed in the neighbourhood of Gemmayzeh/Jmeyzeh (depending on how you choose to spell it...) on the edge of the former battleground that divided the city during the civil war. The evidence of bullet holes and shell damage still persist years after the end of the war. (Pictures below of bombed out buildings and cinder block facade repairs). Despite the scars, the neighbourhood is booming with restaurants, bars, art studios, local shops, and the like.

We walked everywhere: across the green line, through the revitalized and completely repaired downtown - with the most beautiful flower plantings I have ever seen anywhere - and into the Hamra district in South Beirut and along the sea wall "corniche" boardwalk looking out over the mediterranean. The food was absurdly good everywhere we went - from lunch counter experience (fresh flatbread and local cheese and olives) to slow food restaurant in the evening. We collectively had one of the best - if not THE best - meals of our lives in a wonderful restaurant called Bread. I intend to go back.

After walking the city for a day and a half, we hailed a cab on Saturday afternoon and headed north up the coast to see the port of Byblos - founded by the Phoenecians 7000 years ago. Layers of historical remnants remain - the original Phoenecian port and sea wall that created an amazingly sheltered harbour on the rough mediterannean coastline; greek temples; roman baths and colonades; early Christian churches; and later medieval ramparts topped off by a crenellated castle built by the crusaders in the 12th century.

We returned to Amman on a late flight, talking all the time about how we might be able to swing a 6-month assignment back in Lebanon. We landed at the airport at the same time as a flight from the Gulf - Dubai or Jeddah or Abu Dhabi - and realized that we hadn't seen a man in a keffiyeh (headscarf) and white dishdashah (long tunic) the whole time we were there. It came as a surprise and a reminder: we were gone from the mediterranean and back in the land of the bedouin.

NYT article about Amman

2010-02-24T20:15:00.000+02:00

The New York Times had an article today about pedestrian-friendly public spaces in Amman - for those who are interested:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/world/middleeast/24amman.html

The institute mentioned in the article is where I'm working and I now live very close to rainbow street mentioned in the article - my apartment is just around the corner from the place with the park benches shown in the photo on the first page.

(Thanks to Rick for sending the article!)

new digs, old buildings

2010-02-22T23:15:00.001+02:00

I moved on Saturday to the downtown Jebel Amman neighbourhood. These are a few pictures of the new apartment and its view.

The neighbourhood is great, the space is large, the floors are marble - which is very cool in warm weather - and the furniture is "habibi" style - ornate beyond your wildest dreams. I am particularly relishing sleeping in the "Louis XV" by way of The Brick bedroom suite.

As for the view and the neighbourhood, in the nighttime view above, the faint green-ish lights demarcate all the local mosques. My first night here, I sat out on my balcony and listened to the different calls to prayer echoing through the valley. Other worldly and beautiful. In the distance, the columns and dome that are on the top of the opposite hill - Jebel Hussein - is the citadel, a protected area that is a mixture of Roman and early Islamic ruins.

After moving my (meagre) stuff last weekend, I went on a site visit to the north with a consultant who is also working here. He was doing some surveying work. I was tagging along. After driving around the municipality, we meandered down a few dirt roads, and at the peak of an out- of-the-way hill, on the outskirts of a little village, we came across some old stone structures. Probably the original village, the buildings are many hundred years old or likely more. This cluster of buildings should probably be on a protected list, so we checked with our colleague working on historic preservation. She had never heard of the place.

The village's more recent settlers simply take the original buildings for granted, allowing them to slowly weather the passage of time. Now lacking roofs and with walls tumbling in, they serve a variety of purposes: sheep sheds, donkey stable, random storage. Here are a few more pictures:

bird song, wolf tracks

2010-02-16T22:46:00.000+02:00

I am back in Amman after a long flight which involved a lengthy delay in Istanbul. Wow, that is one busy airport. Living in North America, one tends to forget the role and scale of cities like Istanbul: a place that has served for centuries as a regional hub, the ancient seat of an empire, 5x more people than Toronto. The airport has a continuous stream of final boarding announcements to mysterious (to me, at any rate) destinations like Doha, Muscat, Tashkent, Tehran. Spending 6 hours there reminded me of Prague's Ruzyne airport in 1990, where the giant, clattering, digital departure board spelled out destinations like Ho Chi Minh City and Ekaterinberg and Donetsk. Names you never witnessed (at the time) in North American or Western European airports.

Back in Jordan, I have arrived to springtime. 20 degree temperatures, early flowering trees like apricots and almonds in blossom, and birdsong from first light. 2 days in, I am still waking up at the first call to prayer - at 4:30am or so. Unable to get back to sleep, I read my book, watch the sun rise and listen to the birds. As the jet lag eases, I expect I will start to sleep through the night. When I came last time, I knew I was on regular time when I started to sleep through that first call to prayer (thank you, God). A family of songbirds is doing their best to prevent that, however: they have nested in the building's airshaft and their chirps echo into the apartment's (three) vented bathrooms and throughout the apartment from the early morning onwards.

I came back to a full house here in Shmeisani. When I left Amman, I had been living in the apartment alone - with another colleague living in a unit downstairs. Now both apartments are full to bursting with the consulting team - 2 others here with me, another 3 downstairs. All are very lovely fellows and there is a nice, social atmosphere. I have learned that foreign consultant living is a little bit like civilized university dorm living, at a higher salary. I like it, but to get a bit more of my own space back, I will move this weekend to an apartment in downtown Jabal Amman. This upcoming apartment (my third in as many months) overlooks the Roman citadel and is old and big and ramshackle and affordable - a bit like my apartment in Toronto. It is probably too vast for one person with 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a big eat-in kitchen and 2 living rooms (standard in this country where a strict distinction is maintained between the formal place you entertain guests and the cozy place you share with your family - a tradition that I gather dates back to the bedouin tents). So I will indeed get a lot of my own space back. I will look forward to visitors! Photos are forthcoming.

The shirtsleeves temperature and blooming gardens couldn't be more of a contrast to my time last week in Canada, especially Deep River, which was cold and snowy and beautiful. I am hanging on to the memory of cross-country skiing across the Ottawa River to Quebec and seeing dozens of wolf tracks criss-crossing the ice along the way. After returning to Amman, I got an e-mail message from my brother saying that a person who had been skiing along the river a few days after I was there, suddenly found himself surrounded by 5 wolves. (Does that constitute a pack of wolves?). This was in the daytime. I have never heard of this happening before. He scared them off but it was a sobering experience, I'll bet. When I tell this story to my Jordanian colleagues - and that it might just as easily have been me surrounded by wolves - I can tell that they don't think it is neat or interesting that there are a lot of wolf tracks out there in the snow. Or that there is snow at all. Crazy Canadians.

A Change of Scenery

2010-02-04T22:07:00.000+02:00

I am in my hometown of Deep River, Ontario for a week, spending time with my mother who recently had hip replacement surgery. (She is making excellent progress). It’s cold here – minus 20 celsius or so – and underneath a 5- centimetre layer of dry, powdery snow, there’s a thick foundation of ice from a freezing rain storm two weeks ago. It is too treacherous for my mother to go out, so I am spending my time running errands like going to the library and the post office and the health food store in the mornings, and getting out into the bush or onto the frozen Ottawa River on my cross-country skis in the afternoon. I am not sure if there is place on the planet more fundamentally different from Amman.

Chatting with neighbours, sitting in the doctor’s office waiting room, or waiting in the grocery store check-out line, there are two topics of conversation that have the town abuzz. The first is the upcoming ‘Silver Spoon’ cross-country ski race this weekend that annually attracts competitors from across the province. The second, and vastly more interesting topic, is the disappearance two weeks ago of a local resident who has vanished without a trace. A 41-year-old man, single, originally from Australia was invited to a dinner party on a Sunday night (or so the story goes) and failed to show up. When he didn’t answer his phone, the hosts went to his house to find his lights on, wallet on the table, no signs of violence, but no signs of him, either. The Deep River police were called, and, in turn, the OPP. The search was on.

In addition to pasting up missing person signs up all over town, the OPP also pulled out their fleet of snowmobiles and proceeded to tear around the bush, looking for signs of the vanishing man. This is where the two topics of conversation collide: it turns out that in all their enthusiasm, the policemen dashing around on skidoos ruined the lovingly groomed ski trails. The town’s cross-country skiers and race organizers are livid. How can things be put to right in time for the race this weekend!? Outrage!

Truth to tell, I haven’t seen evidence of the destruction where I have been skiing, but there is nothing like a good story to spread around a small town to keep conversation lively, especially when the police are involved. Meanwhile the fellow is still missing. Maybe he has holed up in an ice-fishing hut in the middle of the Ottawa River to wait out the winter?

spelling

2010-01-23T20:54:00.000+02:00

When Jordan - or Transjordan, at the time - was established with lines on a map after the first world war, it was done so under a British 'mandate'. Meanwhile the neighbours to the North, Lebanon and Syria, were 'mandated' to the French. These different colonial pasts still manifest themselves today in different ways, large and small. For example, in Lebanon, bank notes are Arabic on one side, French on the other. In Jordan, they are Arabic and English. In Beirut, you can apparently get great coffee and croissants all over the place (I am looking forward to finding out!). Not so, Amman.

One thing that is perhaps a legacy of the British mandate in Jordan is the prevalence of the English language on signs. While there are some things that need no explaining when you are in a foreign place - florists are evidently florists, shoe shops are shoe shops - having signs in a language you can understand makes it infinitely easier to negotiate a city. It suddenly becomes possible to distinguish a dentist's office from a lawyer's without too much trouble and a government building from a police station. Particularly in a town where no one uses street addresses, this is a useful thing.

But one of the things that is both fascinating and charming is a total lack of spelling consistency for transliterated arabic words - particularly place names. You can walk down a street and see public street signs - presumably put up by the same people in the same city department - within 20 metres of each other using completely different spellings. Jebel Lwebdieh and Jabal Al-Waibdeh are the same place. So are Fuhays, Fuheis and F'hais; Bireen, Birayn and Birein; and Shmaisani, Shmeisani and Shemesani.

For the copy editors among you, imagine reviewing reports that are the result of many different contributors, with no advance agreement on consistent spellings. I am currently working with a draft report in which there is a King Hussein road frequently mentioned - or King Husayn - or King Hussain. All the same road. Random selection of spellings. It is not uncommon for an author to use two different spellings in two adjacent paragraphs. Or maps and legends to be inconsistent. And I guess it doesn't matter if we all understand. (Though it usually induces a "serenity now" moment for me!)

I have started taking arabic classes (and loving them!) and am coming to the conclusion that the inconsistency stems from the fact that any of these transliterated spellings are really just a pale approximation of the sounds that should be coming out of your mouth. In my notebook, I have written the word "we" phonetically on three subsequent pages as ihna... ehna... nihna... and none of them is really quite right.

All of this also means that I am coming to terms with no consistent spelling of my own name - Hana, Hanna, Hannah, Hanah - whatever works.

site visits

2010-01-15T10:53:00.001+02:00

One of the most interesting things about my work assignment here is going on site visits to the partner municipalities. This happens about two times a week and it might involve a walk through the city or a trip out into pristine farmland to see a place where a new residential development is being proposed.

These field trips invariably leave me feeling wistful. Despite this project's best efforts to push for better land use decisions, the population growth here is so rapid and the changes to the landscape are happening so quickly in real time, so much will happen before the plans come into effect. It is hard to look at those ancient olive groves and know that within a year, they will be no more.

The visits with municipalities also might involve meeting with local staff to answer questions, dig for information. The team I am with invariably learns new, surprising, unanticipated facts that we never imagined and which send us in new directions. We also, quite often, get to spend some time with the local mayors.

I like these opportunities when I get to watch the mayors in action. I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to spend time with these local leaders and see first hand the pressures they face. Until quite recently - 2007 - mayors were appointed to the position and not necessarily from the municipality they were governing. This is the first mandate for which elected mayors have been in position, and they face the same problems that are familiar in Canada but with greater intensity: unfathomable budget constraints, crumbling or non-existent infrastructure for playgrounds, schools, water, sewers, transportation, waste management - you name it - and never ending demands for more services as populations grow. It is much trickier to govern when one has to keep voters satisfied!

The mayors I have met so far bring widely varying experiences to their new elected positions. One is lawyer by profession, poet by avocation, and has a calm, philosophical approach that reminds me a little bit of Vaclav Havel. Another is a man of prodigious energy with four wives, thirty-two kids and many, many familial and friendship ties. All these people are knocking at his door wanting something from him in his role of mayor - a very delicate balancing act. A third has spent a lot of time in the States and has a clear vision for his town and a innate sense of PR that is serving him well.

Invariably these sessions with municipal partners never quite go in the way one expects: what you think will be a quiet meeting with three people, suddenly turns into a briefing for forty.... Or a television crew enters the room and starts filming... or sometimes our field visits turn into a convoy as more and more local folks join in, and then the police start to follow. No one really blinks when these things happen.

After spending years in my job back home trying valiantly to manage and choreograph stakeholder meetings so that they work to everyone's advantage, I have come to terms with the fact that anything can - and probably will - happen here. Chaos reigns. It is kind of great. A British woman I met recently told me - to my considerable astonishment - that I have the air of a yoga teacher - "always totally chill"! I think this is because my daily mantra has become that little alcoholics anonymous ditty about knowing when to give up control. Serenity now!

walking tall

2010-01-10T23:00:00.000+02:00

This past Friday afternoon saw a terrific event here in Amman: a mass walk through the centre of the city to celebrate being a pedestrian! The occasion was triggered by a visit here of New York City-based architect, academic and writer Michael Sorkin, who (fairly) recently published a book called "Twenty Minutes in Manhattan". It is a book about walking, but also about cities and what makes them livable.

It was a beautiful afternoon, sunny, warm, clear. The route took us from the top of Jebel Lweibdeh hill, down a series of winding staircases into the old town, then back up more stairs to an opposite hill where the Roman citadel lies. Then back again along a different route. Hills are one thing this town has plenty of.

About 500 people showed up - not counting the extensive police escort - and the mood was incredibly happy. The group spanned a wide age range. People were making friends, chatting, happy to be meandering in the old town. A couple of my young female colleagues had never walked in this part of town before - had never felt comfortable doing so as the area is so stigmatized - so it was a whole new experience for them to see their own city on foot. Tremendous.

The event was co-organized by the Institute where I am working and - a new discovery for me - a group called 'fast walk' that organizes bi-weekly 3-hour walks on Sunday nights and Wednesday nights in Amman. In part their mandate is about health and exercise, in part it is about getting people walking, seeing the city, experiencing different neighbourhoods. Apparently they get about 200 people or more out each time. The one condition: you have to wear a flourescent yellow vest. No vest, no walk.

While I am personally not too keen on this "safety" element - for reasons which I am sure my biking friends reading this will understand - I am interested in checking this group out. It made me go back to my earlier post about walking in this city and made me think again: maybe there is something like a sustainable transportation movement afoot (no pun intended).

the office

2010-01-04T23:19:00.001+02:00

One friend told me that his mental image of life at the office was something out of Lawrence of Arabia. Probably the scene where Peter O'Toole is being reprimanded by the military commander in an enormous, high-ceilinged room with graceful arching columns, carved wooden screens and ornate antique furniture:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DNfzocPxRo&feature=related

So in case anyone else is harbouring similar illusions, this post is intended to disabuse you of them.

My day is spent 8:30am - 6pm (or more) in a recently constructed (but already failing) government office building. The team takes up half of one floor of the building and most of the staff are grouped together in rooms that were originally designed as meeting rooms, but have now turned into 1950's- style "steno pool" rows of desks - 8 or 9 people to a room, all in a row. No such thing as a cubicle. People are remarkably good humoured and chipper about this - and maybe even more productive because of it.

As someone considered more senior, I share a room with 2 others, soon to be 3 and invariably there is a visiting municipal person or a staff person who needs some assistance who shares a desk over the course of the day. It is like a giant hotelling space - laptops only and, of course, no computer network. We have a never-ending series of computer viruses in permanent circulation from infected memory sticks, which causes no end of grief. These pictures might give a bit of a sense of the space and how it is used.

What is impossible to convey in pictures is the level of noise. The din in the corridor is truly awesome - yelling, chatting, an inexplicable amount of furniture moving and one keen gentlemen who takes it upon himself to sing the call to prayer in the corridor at the appointed times every day.

If it is a good day we have both heat and water. That is maybe 3 days a week. The building's furnace runs on diesel, and when it runs out, it takes a while before the fuel truck comes to fill it up. It also costs a lot to do so. So whether it is a logistical challenge or a cost-saving measure of a post-collapse, cash-strapped government, I am not sure. All I know is that it gets cold sitting all day in a building at 8 degrees celcius.

One thing that is common across every single government office that I have been in and public or private institutions of any kind - schools, hotels, banks, health clinics - is a picture of the King and of his father, late King Hussein, in every room. You see them here, watching over my desk.

new year - new words

2010-01-01T19:18:00.000+02:00

It is 2010!

I have learned that like Christmas, New Year's is not really a big celebration here. It's nice - just another normal social evening, so there is no big pressure to "do something" the way there can be back home. I liked that - it was a relief.

That being said, I was actually invited to two different events last night to ring in the new year. One was for an outdoor gathering on the beautifully named Rainbow Street in Jebel Amman - a lovely part of town in the old city centre that comes closest to being 'hip' in a western sense and rapidly gentrifying as a consequence. Apparently it was the first time ever that a new year's eve was to be celebrated in an outdoor public open space. Like Time's Square, only smaller. About 100 people were expected. People in my office were excited at the prospect of such a public gathering.

The second, equally lovely, invitation was to the home of the brother of a colleague where a group of friends was gathering to celebrate. This group is an accomplished bunch, well-travelled, well-educated, and well-placed in all kinds of senior positions in government and business. I was curious to meet the brother. The family is originally from the west bank town of Nablus, but the siblings ended up in different countries throughout the region.

The brother lived in Baghdad for more than 20 years working as an engineer and his wife for the UN. They left a couple of years ago, the current instability finally pushing them out. They left everything - their house, furniture, cars - and cannot get anything back. There are no records left in Baghdad of the family ever having lived there, so reclaiming these belongings, for the time being anyway, is impossible. And so they have begun anew here in Jordan, building a new house, setting up again. (As an aside: it is really interesting how porous the regional borders are for well-educated people ... the number of people I have met who grew up here, studied in Beirut, lived in Damascus, spent some time working in Abu Dhabi or Dubai or Baghdad, and ended up in Amman - or some combination thereof - is impressive).

In the end, I accepted neither of these kind invitations, as nice as they were. I moved into a new apartment, instead - same building, different floor, more light, nicer layout. And I was tired after a long week, so I went to bed early, slept a long time and greeted the new year feeling sunny and fresh - like the day itself.

To make the most of January 1st, I headed 50km north to investigate some more Roman and Byzantine ruins. Again there was sunshine and cardomom-scented coffee and bedouin shepherds steering goats through the ruins. And delight as I watched my taxi driver, the excellent Ahmad, play soccer with some street kids in a first century amphitheatre. Ahmad made me realize that I am actually learning some arabic. He spoke very little English and let me practice my best phrases like "i'd like coffee, thank you" and taught me new words to name the things we were seeing around us - pomegranates, sheep, olive groves, lemon trees, churches, columns. A curious vocabulary.

And so 2010 begins. No pictures of ruins today, as I misplaced my camera this morning. Instead a picture with some nice fellows Hashem and Hussam - tourists from Iraq - who I met last weekend when we were all hiking on a trail overlooking the dead sea. Proof I am really here.

Wishing everyone peace, prosperity, good health and happiness for the new year! H

roads to Rome

2009-12-26T22:04:00.000+02:00

I spent Christmas day in the town of Madaba. Madaba is mentioned in the bible, an ancient city, and also a very contemporary one. It houses one of Jordan's large Palestinian refugee camps and is a busy, happening place.

One of the things that drew me there is a renowned 15 metre x 6metre mosaic map that dates from the 6th century. The map, embedded in the floor of a Greek Orthodox Church, depicts the holy land as it was at the time. It shows the towns and villages and key pilgrimage sites in extraordinary, geographically correct detail, using designs to show water courses and valleys and mountains that are beautiful and functional too.

The centrepiece of the whole mosaic is Jerusalem, depicted painstakingly. All the ancient gates to the city - the Jaffa gate, the Damascus gate, etc. - are shown precisely. The standout feature is the colonaded roman road running straight through the centre of town, end to end.

On Christmas day, the church was thronged with tour groups from all corners of the world - India, Germany, the US, Japan. It appeared to be a regular stop on the guided tours to the holy land for religious folk. Lots of people snapping pics like the one above. (Something I learned: mosaics are hard to photograph.) I stayed a while and then gave up on the crowds and decided to check out the other sites in town.

Walking down a narrow street, I noticed a gate with a sign that said "Departemenet (sic) of Antiquities". I pushed on the gate and it wasn't locked, so I stepped in. Unlike the crowded church, there wasn't a soul. It was a cross between a garden and a rubble heap, interspersed with more mosaics. I figured out from the guidebook that it was a place called the 'burnt palace' - the partial ruins of a roman patrician mansion and a jumble of neighbouring buildings. I wandered in the incredible stillness, soaking in the heat of the sun. The aging caretaker came and informed me that the site was closed today, but 'please, stay, stay, no problem.' Then he offered me coffee and we sat on the roman ruins and he showed me pictures on his cell phone of his son and six daughters.

Sitting there, it took me a while to figure out the place and what I was seeing. But slowly it dawned on me that I was looking at a Roman road and what remained of the buildings that fronted on to it. The road is in perfect condition - flat, straight, unrutted - made from huge slabs of white limestone. 2000 years later and 2500 kilometres from the city of Rome, it is still there. It runs through the back yards of people's properties - like some kind of back alley - and the back of the mosque edges on to the ruins.

the new Madaba, the fragments of mosaics, the old enduring road make me think both about permanence and the fleeting nature of things. Layers of history piling up, fragments left, disregarded, but always there, in the back yard, as a reminder.

the biggest christmas tree in the middle east

2009-12-22T23:04:00.000+02:00

This 26 metre (fake) Christmas tree is set up in the centre of town of Fuheis in the middle of some beautiful Roman ruins. The proud mayor of the town lays claim to having the largest Christmas tree in the middle east - a story which made the front page of the Jordan Times this week, so it must be true. The whole town, which is majority Christian, celebrates this holiday with ardour - lots of lights and tinsel-y decorations and fir trees (imported, surely) in front yards. It is both over the top and comforting at the same time.

So in the same spirit of all Fuheis, from the heart of the holy land where the whole thing started, I wish you all, dear readers, a very merry Christmas and a happy new year. HE

voyage to the Dead Sea

2009-12-20T23:09:00.000+02:00

This past weekend I was asked to participate in a strategic planning retreat for work. To my delight, the event was arranged at the swanky Movenpick hotel on the shores of Dead Sea. I decided to head down early on Friday several hours before the opening dinner to see what's going on down there at the world's lowest point on land below sea level.

Driving there in the van with a couple of colleagues made me realize how much time I have been spending looking at sprawl since I got here. Unexpectedly, driving southwest out of Amman - a new direction for me - the city ended abruptly and we were suddenly passing through a wide open landscape of steep hills, terraced olive groves and deep valleys. A sight for my sore eyes.

And then we started to go downhill. One of the women I was travelling with offered me gum. I declined. She insisted... 'really, it is for your ears, they will feel the pressure.... like in an airplane...". Amman is indeed on a deceptively high plateau and though the Dead Sea is only 30 minutes away by car, it is a completely different climate and at a much, much lower altitude. In Amman, it was 6 degrees C, rainy, foggy and overcast when we left; half an hour later, when we reached the bottom of the steep hill into the Jordan river valley where it opens into the Dead Sea, the sky was clearing, sun was streaming , the humidity was rising and the temperature was a balmy 17C.

Suddenly there were banana plantations and orange groves and flowers and lush vegetation. And signs for the baptism site of Jesus. And weird rinky dink souvenir shops. And lots of plain clothes and uniformed security people because of the proximity to a certain neighbouring country. And the Dead Sea itself.

December 18th is not a peak season for swimming but there were a few other ridiculous tourists like myself (mostly German) who couldn't resist the water. We bobbed along in the briny sea. Fantastic feeling floating weightless. Amazing oxygen-rich air.

Will definitely do it again - highly recommended.

thinking about sidewalks and cultural imperialism

2009-12-16T22:01:00.000+02:00

When I first came here, I was warned off walking by a number of people: no one walks, it just isn't done, it isn't safe after dark, it isn't safe for a woman alone. On my first day on the job at the Ministry, a driver was sent to pick me up to ferry me safely to work. It was then that I realized that the Ministry is about 4 blocks from my apartment - about 6 minutes door to door on foot. It is quite literally faster to walk than to drive.

At that point, good sense prevailed over fear. I told the office manager - to his visible dismay - that he didn't need to send the driver every morning, and that I could make it to work under my own steam. I was also fortunate to connect with a couple of ex-pats from Madrid and Quebec City who are also walkers. They helped me get things in perspective and figure out how to get around a bit on foot.

While it has been great to get outside and see the streets, it has also given me pause. First of all, this is a city dominated by drivers and its neighbourhoods are separated and fragmented by so many giant, fast-moving arterial roads. These virtual highways are impossible to cross and unpleasant but often necessary to walk alongside when I need to get somewhere outside of the immediate vicinity.

Second, the pedestrian infrastructure is crazy. Since so few people walk outside of the historic downtown - maybe a few teenage boys, some labourers, and asian maids, who look like they are mostly from Indonesia - the role and concept of the sidewalk is understood differently here. For one, sidewalks are not a public amenity - they seem to be the responsibility of individual property owners. Consequently, their heights and widths vary widely from frontage to frontage. For many property owners, the sidewalk that they are expected to maintain in front of their house - for no clear purpose from their perspective, I suppose - becomes an extended planter or parking pad. I have started to keep photos of the elaborate plantings that homeowners maintain on their sidewalks - here's a few sample pictures. There is an amazing amount of topiary and that stuff takes work to keep up! And, of course, it makes walking on the sidewalk impossible.

So, I wonder, am I wrong to want sidewalks to be pedestrian-friendly ? If I am importing my pedestrian ways to a country and a culture that doesn't share them, is it wrong to think that they should be improved?

cultural dislocation... in a nice way

2009-12-13T21:41:00.000+02:00

I joined a gym last Thursday. The combination of being without a bike, walking very little, and being driven around a lot made it a priority for me to find a place where I could get some exercise. It is a nice gym - it has a clean, spacious work out area with lots of equipment, a divine steamroom with beautiful blue tile work and emanating a slightly mentholated steam that does wonders for sinuses, and it is also a reliable place for a hot shower (not always a given). The gym happens to be located in one of the international hotels here - but it is used by lots of local folks, not just hotel guests.

When I went after work today, I was astonished to find a Christmas carolling party happening in the hotel lobby. I'd say very few of the participants were guests. There were lots of little kids running around, women in headscarfs running after them, and there, on the stage, 7 bright young people wearing santa hats and singing a heavily accented version of 'hark the herald angels sing'. It was lovely. Lots of good cheer. Not something I would have expected.

Once in the gym, I decide to take my first fitness class in arabic. It is billed as an aerobic/step class and I figure even if I don't know the language, I can just follow along with the movements. In Canada these classes are almost universally the domain of women. Occasionally there is one stout-hearted male who is doing the 'grapevine' and 'chassee' along with the ladies. But only very occasionally. So imagine my surprise when I enter the studio where the class is being held to find a room full of men - the students - and one other woman, who turns out to be the instructor. She is covered head to toe - headscarf, long-sleeved shirt, long exercise pants and a tunic thing over top. She must be boiling, I think to myself.

So we get started. And the instructor kicks ass. It is one fantastic, energetic class. And all the fellows are, indeed, grapevining and knee-upping and hamstring curling and ab crunching just like you do. It was really fun and, for some reason, a good experience to see these fellows in a new light. Something about gender parity, perhaps?

a word about work

2009-12-12T02:00:00.000+02:00

As I was thinking about setting up this blog, I decided that I wasn't going to write about work. I wanted to try to capture impressions of daily life - walking on a sidewalk, grocery shopping, weekend adventures, tips on curing olives (which, by the way, I got a lot of this week from my colleagues - apparently December is the season for picking, curing and pressing olives).

But I thought I should mention that work is, indeed, a big part of daily life.

So a word about what I am doing: I am part of a project that brings together a joint team of the Jordan Ministry of Municipal Affairs, the Amman Institute for Urban Development (which I am working with), the Canadian consulting firm Planning Alliance, and a number of local municipalities in northern Jordan. The focus is to develop plans for use by the municipalities and national government to manage urban development better so that less agricultural and natural heritage land is paved over and, on the other hand, existing city centres and built up areas become a focus for investment and revitalization. The mandate is not entirely different from the work I was doing in the GTA. The context is radically different, however. Some pictures to give you a sense of the state of the downtown in a city called Rusayfa, and, on the other hand, the nature of the scattered residential sprawl happening outside of town on agricultural land. These rural outskirts of Rusayfa are in the biblical 'hills of Gilead'.

So far, one week in, I can testify that work is hectic. Any colleagues from MEI who might be reading this blog might be astounded to learn that I have been at the office at 8:15am every morning (jetlag turned me into a morning person!) and am there til 6pm or so, with plenty of catch-up reading in the evening. The work involves quite a lot of travel to the partner municipalities, which has been a great way to start to understand the landscape. It is one giant learning experience, fascinating, and intimidating.

So that's work. I just thought I would mention it in case anyone thinks my life is just one long stroll in the streets over the next couple of months!

what I now know about camel husbandry

2009-12-08T08:00:00.000+02:00

The weekend here starts on Friday and people go back to work on Sundays.

This past weekend, I had been planning to stay in Amman - after only being here 3 days - and settle in a bit, get my bearings, check out the downtown and a few neighbourhoods.

That plan went awry when another Canadian colleague, a truly intrepid global traveller, asked me if I wanted to go camping under the stars in Wadi Rum, a protected desert area sparsely populated by traditional bedouin communities. My guidebook describes it thus: "rugged and majestic, simply one of the world's

most alluring desert destinations. Think towering cliffs, red dunes and sleeping under the stars."

The opportunity was too good to refuse. We headed out early Friday afternoon, arriving at the Wadi Rum visitor's centre as the sky was getting dark (night falls at 4:15pm here!). Soon we were in the protected area and off to find a spot on the vast desert floor to call our own.

It became clear, quite quickly, that the desert is a big place and, fortunately for us, help came in the person of Raad, a young bedouin man. He assisted us in finding a camping site that night and served as our guide the next day. Raad was simply fascinating on the topic of camels.

I learned that the camels you see wandering about in the desert in herds - who look like they might be wild - are actually domesticated

animals who provide milk. These camels wander out into the desert unaccompanied for 2 or 3 or 4 days at a time, eat whatever sparse vegetation is to be had, and eventually wander back to their homestead or to a nearby spring to have some water. When a camel doesn't show up for more than 4 days or so, then the owner goes out looking for her to make sure everything is ok. The desert floor is covered with millions of camel hoof prints. Raad said that when looking for a lost camel, his father (but not himself) could identify all of his own animals just based on their shape of their individual hoof prints and track their trajectory in that way.

I also learned that racing camels are another category altogether. Raad is an avid camel racer and in a show of great hospitality took us to his encampment to meet his winning camel Wolf - along with the rest of his 'stable'. Though still a young man - age 22 - Raad had a going concern with these racing camels and even had a hired hand to tend them. (The hired hand was a young teenager from Sudan. I couldn't help but wonder how he had found his way to this remote community in Jordan's desert and what his personal journey must have been.)

These camels are smaller and sleeker than the

milk camels. And they don't get to wander. They are tethered and covered to ward off sun stroke, and muzzled to prevent them from eating any junky desert food. They are fed special diets, watered daily - not every four days - and are taken out for exercise frequently and for a fast run on Fridays. Raad showed us an awesome cell phone video of Wolf winning a race - which he had set to music. It would be a youtube sensation. He also bemoaned the fact that in Saudi Arabia, they substantially subsidize camel food which puts

Jordanian camel racers at a permanent disadvantage.

Unfortunately I didn't learn anything about the camels that are used for daily transportation - but did see a lot in action. One vivid memory is from shortly after sunrise seeing a woman in a black hijab and flowing black gown riding on a white camel across the desert expanse. I didn't get a picture. She had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

a conundrum

2009-12-03T22:33:00.000+02:00

It is my 3rd day in Amman and I am finding myself in a curious conundrum. I am staying in a (very nice) apartment that is outside of the downtown core - what Leaside is to downtown Toronto in a kind of way. ( Though that comparison really only works in an upside-down parallel Martian universe, because really Shmeisani is nothing like Leaside). There are a number of other ex-pat consultants from the team in the building and on day 2, I ask one of them: "so what's the actual address here?".

Response: "why would you want to know that?"

"well...in case I get lost or am somewhere by myself after dark and am feeling like I need to take a taxi to get back here."

This is when I learn that no one recognizes addresses. Or street names. There is no such thing as mail delivery. There are names on street signs and numbers on houses but they are quite academic and serve no functional purpose. Cab drivers (who rule in a city where there is no transit) know neighbourhood names - Jebel Amman, Jebel Lweibdeh, etc. - and major landmarks. And once you arrive in the general vicinity, you steer the driver in the right direction to get to where you intend to go. For example, the major landmark in this neighbourhood is a 24-hour (!) Safeway supermarket (which, by the way, is currently playing non-stop Christmas Carols -deeply incongruous) that is about 10 minutes walk around the corner and down a hill.

Here's the conundrum: this system only works if you actually know a city ... and you know what your destination looks like or where it is in relation to some other recognizable place that you know. I know nothing. I cannot describe what any place looks like. I also don't know anything that is nearby anything (except for the Safeway in Shmeisani, now my universal point of reference).

So for now, I am paying careful attention when I am being driven by someone else and just trying to figure out my personal way-finding system from point to point. It is a whole new way to decode a place.