Water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!)