“the rose-red city, half as old as time…”

About half the people who I told I was going to Jordan replied to me, “Oh, Petra?” At the time, I couldn’t really understand why my response of “No, Amman”, didn’t provoke the same excitement from them – it took my trip to Petra for the last three days for me to understand quite why [...]

Settling down

Yesterday we finally met to talk about the evaluation concept and applying it to Ruwwad. I have to admit, I was a little nervous – I was leading the meeting – but in the end, it turned into one long stream of jokes after lunch, as we tried to decide what was most important for the foundation. [...]

Doing it for the kids

The preschool part of Ruwwad is in its seventh month of operation, and definitely still in development. The two women in charge, still a little confused as to where working with children fits into me studying Poli Sci., are completely open to suggestions for programs and activities they can run with the kids, so I’m [...]

Sand Castles

It’s amazing – you drive for half an hour out of Amman, past the city limits and hills, and there stand these “qasr”s, or desert castles. We had a car and a driver for the day, so we chose our route to allow time to visit 5 of the more spectacular ones, though the route [...]

School in the sun

Well, the view definitely beats anything in Chapel Hill… I went along with one of the Ruwwad scholarship students to his university today. I admit, I wasn’t expecting it to be a 45 minute bus ride from town, but then again, I wasn’t expect this to be the view out from the main entrance! Universities [...]

So close…

Yesterday night Nadim and I were, on the spur of the moment, asked if we wanted to go along with some young people down to the Dead Sea. They were off to a dinner for volunteering in the Jordan Rally a month ago. Anyway, our obvious response was that we’d love to, so 6pm yesterday [...]

One of Ruwwad’s more recently started projects is the preschool. I’ve been fairly free in the mornings while the older children are in school, so I’ve promised them I’ll help out there from now on. As you can see the kids are adorable – I didn’t arrange them for the photo above.
The kids are learning [...]

And the days go on…

(Above: Craft activities done with children after school)

The more I talk to the children around Ruwwad, the more I’m impressed with its work. Today we were working updating some of the English language stuff with the foundation, so I was “interviewing” some of them on their experiences through the foundation. I’m not sure which [...]

Around Amman

People have lived in Amman for at least a few millennia: it was known to the Romans as Philadelphea, a city with sufficient clout even then that it minted its own coins; archaelogical evidence suggests that the was a developed society here as early as 8500 BC. Originally covering seven hills, or “Jabals”; the city [...]

Cats, kids, and Outcome Mapping…

Today Nadim and I shared a taxi ride home with the smallest cat I’ve ever seen, sitting in a box next to us on the back seat. We had planned to go and play football (soccer) this evening with some of the kids we work with but when Nadim headed out of the office, [...]