Week Nineteen:

This past few weeks has been busy and full of a lot of activity. Enough has gone on that I’m not entirely sure where to begin… so I guess I’ll try to hit high points and sum up.
I believe my last post was right before Thanksgiving, which seems like forever ago. One of the activities that took up a bit of time over the past weeks was the English class I have been teaching, affiliated with the Jesuit Refugee Service here in Amman. The program period is now over, the graduation ceremony was Thursday afternoon, but the next “semester” is set to begin on January 3rd. For the last few classes that I taught we had some excellent discussions. One class, right on Thanksgiving Day, we spoke about holidays and learned about different family traditions. The next class we spoke about sports, both popular U.S. sports as well as more international sports. I had a fun time trying to explain the rules of American Football, particularly when I had to switch to Arabic for some of the more complex explanations. Finally for my last class, we wrapped up with music. There were some students who knew very much about U.S. music, surprisingly. I also got one class, with the older professionals, engaged in a very serious discussion about a popular singer here in the Middle East named Haifa Wehbie. It turned into a multi-party yelling match, mostly divided along gender lines, yelling as to whether Haifa classified as music or not and why all women hate Haifa (which is not true, of course). It reminded me a lot of the debates about Britney Spears between adults, when I was a younger kid.
I’ve also been spending a lot of time writing, reading, and studying. I believe I’m at about 60 pages of writing for the semester on various issues, but primarily on nuclear energy and diplomacy. Hopefully this will translate into a better time for my Master’s thesis, which is looming and slightly scary (I’m not sure how many pages are expected, but I’ve heard anywhere from 100 to 200).My midterm tests are now, finally, all done, as well, about ¾’s of the way through the semester. Now, it’s just to spend the last few weeks writing, researching, and preparing for my final tests which should start in about three weeks. As long as everything goes well, I should be home for just a short period in mid-January.
Today’s adventures were, to my mind, the most interesting of my recent adventures (as well as the freshest in my memory, naturally). As I’m still living in the American Center for Oriental Research and still predominantly around archeologists, I have a few odd opportunities. Today I was able to help an Australian archeologist with a questionnaire that is part of her research, taking it to a small, very poor town on the southern edge of Amman. The town is thought to have had one of the souqs (markets) of Philadelphia, which was originally a Roman city in or around modern day Amman. It also contains a number of different, cool archeological sites, including a few churches and an old Roman shrine or mausoleum. Residents of the modern town, because the economic situation is not very good, sometimes make direct use of things, such as gates, signs, and fences, brought in by the government for the archeological sites… ie they steal it and use it for their houses. On the one hand, one might get angry that the residents are stealing public property and not caring so much for the sites. On the other, I think it might be possible to find a little sympathy when you see that gate on someone’s front door or the sign serving as another person’s roof. We gave the questionnaire to a number of shopkeepers along the town’s main street, focusing mainly on locals, and trying to stay away from those who might live in Amman proper (though I don’t think we would have found too many). We also were attended to by a large number of curious kids, all wanting to see what we were doing, but a little too shy to ask directly. All in all, it was an awesome experience and I hope to have more, similar opportunities in the coming weeks and months.
I hope you enjoyed this update, and I’ll try to be a little more regular about it over the next few weeks! Thank you for your interest!

Respectfully,

Brennan Roorda