Halfway Done!

            Hey everyone this is just gonna be a quick update of what I’ve been up to and where I’m headed next. Tomorrow our flight leaves in the morning for Malta where we will be spending our fall break! My friends Anya and Rosemary have been very on top of researching and drafting our itinerary, and it’s looking like a week full of churches and beaches and caves and cafes and fun times. It’s also looking like a week of thunderstorms, so we’ll probably have to be flexible, but I’ll take it! Expect lots and lots of pictures in the near future!

            This past two weeks have been a change of pace from the first half of the program due to the start of our content courses. There’s been a noticeable uptick in the workload and in class hours, but at the same time I’ve been enjoying the new subjects. My class on Discrimination and Marginalization in the Middle East is a seminar-style class that incorporates several Jordanian interns who discuss and share their opinions with us. While I haven’t written much of it yet, I’ll be focusing my research paper on the Coptic Christians of Egypt, their history, and the discrimination they have faced leading up to the present. My class on Islamic Sharia, on the other hand, is a more lecture-based class although we still incorporate student participation. It’s so exciting to be learning about Islam in Arabic in Jordan, especially because of the importance that the Arabic language has to Islam. Muslims believe that the Qur’an was told to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel and as such represents the direct word of God, and therefore the Qur’an is truest in the original Arabic and its translations lose some of the original meaning. There are lots of people in Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia and other non-Arab Muslim countries that will memorize the entire Qur’an without understanding a single word of it. Even Arabs can have a hard time understanding it because it is written in such formal, ancient Arabic.

            Last weekend I went to another (!) engagement party with my language partner Muhammad, this time within the city. Afterwards, him and a group of his chemical engineering friends and I hung out at a coffeehouse for a few hours, which was a great opportunity to practice my Arabic with new people. The following day on Saturday a group of us took a day trip to Wadi Mujib by the shores of the Dead Sea. We had to rent a car to get there and thank God for Catherine who drove us through the lawless traffic of Amman, I would not have been so brave. Wadi Mujib is a narrow gorge carved out by a stream that flows into the Dead Sea and it is one of the most beautiful and fun things I have experienced here in Jordan. For 18 JD they give you a life jacket and let you wade up the river through the narrow gorge. Along the path are deep pockets of water with ropes strung up to guide you upstream, some gentle rock scrambling and climbing up waterfalls until you reach the final pool where you can swim behind the waterfall and sit in a cave behind the spray. On the way back you can just lay back and let the stream carry you back to the entrance, interspersed with the occasional rock waterslide. It was honestly one of the most fun things I’ve ever done, although admittedly a little dangerous, and the canyon itself was gorgeous. I wish I could have taken pictures but there’s no way my phone would have survived, but you can find pictures on the internet!

            Yesterday we took our midterm and I could not be more ready for our break. I’m ready to recharge and to indulge in some English and be a tourist for a week. I gotta go finish packing so that’s all for now, talk to you all soon!