Week Thirteen:

Once again I skipped a week of posting, and unfortunately I have no excuse except that I let the time get away from me. It seems a little odd that I am on week thirteen of my time here; it doesn’t seem so long. I certainly had enough to write about last week as I had gone out and about with a group of archeologists to a Hellenistic palace, and I did have pictures as each of those archeologists had a camera and kindly shared their photos with me.

The people who have been around ACOR, the archeological research center that is my home for this year, for the past few weeks and months are just an incredible group. To be honest, it doesn’t do much for my work as a graduate student, but I can’t pass up the opportunity to spend time with such interesting and broadly experienced people. The group is pretty mixed, as far as nationality goess too. There are some Americans doing research for their PhDs. One gentleman was an ordained minister who became interested in the archeology of the region and went back to school; he is now is working night and day on his thesis, waiting for the appearance of “the thesis fairy” to help him in the final stages. There is also a young lady from Maine doing her work on Iron Age glassblowing in the region, and it is fascinating to hear about ancient techniques and how trade, resources, and technology affected the art of glassblowing during that time period. There is a large group of Australians, so many in fact that we joke about the name of the center changing from the American to the Australian Center for Oriental Research. They are a really fun group, with a slightly different perspective on the world. It’s cool to be able to have intelligent conversations about everything from military issues and world politics to generational music and whose generation has the best love songs, all the while joking and laughing. We’re actually planning to grill out (or as someone who likes to give me a hard time for my Americanisms would say, “We’re planning a Barbecue”) sometime this week in celebration of the upcoming ‘Eid al-Adha; I’ll be in charge of the grill.

So I’ve finally found a consistent place to volunteer for a while. I just sort of fell into it, actually through a young (Australian) lady named Rose here at the center who is doing research for her Masters on nationality and women in Jordan. So now I will be helping to teach English on Thursday evenings to three groups of Iraqis, for about an hour for each group. I’m not entirely sure how it all worked out, it kind of happened quickly and without a plan. My friend Rose asked me if I could help put together a lesson plan. Then she asked if I’d like to come along to class and I decided it would be good, seeing it as an opportunity to help out for a class and maybe even give a quick presentation about Rotary. During the first class, I really only served as a back-up, walking around and helping to clarify difficult concepts for people, but I was able to introduce myself, talk about Rotary, and explain Rotary International’s mission of spreading goodwill and understanding. During the second class, I took the content part of the lesson and had a blast going over words and phrases (focusing on political vocabulary and election vocabulary because of the upcoming elections here in Jordan). Finally, during the third period, which was full of older professionals from Iraq, I took the beginning part of the lesson which was actually tougher and made me more nervous than the content part of the lesson. Somewhere in the whirlwind mix class and talking to people, the director of the school came in to check on progress and talk to Rose and she asked if I would be interested in taking Thursday evenings every week. So I agreed and there we go. Now I have a weekly class, just three to four hours a week and I’m teaching English. It should be a lot of fun.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s update! Thank you for your interest.

Respectfully,
Brennan Roorda