Arrival and first few days

Hello,

This is the first post of the blog, so I'll kind of lay out the plan as it stands at the moment.
I am a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar studying in Amman, Jordan. I will be studying at the University of Jordan for one year, aiming to attain a Masters in Diplomacy Studies. I graduated from the United States Military Academy about two months ago, receiving a Bachelors of Science with majors in Arabic Language and Middle East Foreign Area Studies. I also received a commission as a Second Lieutenant after graduation and am currently attached to the U.S. Army Student Detachment, which tracks Army students. My specific path is in existence essentially to allow graduates who owe service time to take advantage of graduate scholarships and then return to complete their training, bringing a unique skillset to enrich the Army’s arsenal. That’s the argument anyway, and I hope I can live up to that expectation.
My Rotary mission is an extension of Rotary International’s overall mission to promote peace, education, health, and goodwill around the world. My obligation is to make a number of presentations about my home district, 6870 in East Tennessee, to Rotary clubs and other groups here in Jordan. I hope to do a lot more than that though by serving my host community in more direct ways, most likely by supporting the local Rotary club’s endeavors. The second, but no less important, aspect of my mission is to return to East Tennessee and share my experiences at home. I look at both sides of that mission as one of the best things any individual traveler can do: demonstrate and express the good things that both societies share, knowing that the things that make us different are not necessarily bad, and in the end we’re all human.

So for my first few days here I explored some. I visited the American Embassy, where I will be working until classes start in September, and began to in-process there. My job will be to work in an office that directs military cooperation and training between the United States and Jordanian Armies. The U.S. has a strong relationship with the Jordanian government and a strong relationship with its military, thus we conduct a lot of cooperative exercises and I will be serving to support those exercises.
The Jordanian weekend is Friday and Saturday, so for Friday, I decided to wander around town and visit some of the cultural events that were going on. I was able to visit a weekly “souq” or market in an older part of the city after which I made my way down to the old Roman Amphitheatre in downtown Amman (wasat al-balad) to watch a United Nations sponsored celebration of Jordan’s cultural diversity, which is formidable even to U.S. standards. I took some pictures and videos of the event, so I will try to post those soon. I will continue and elaborate on many of the things I have mentioned thus far in later posts. As for now, I hope you have enjoyed reading and I thank you for your interest.

Respectfully,

Brennan Roorda