Summer camp, Ammarin-style

I remember watching the summer service placement presentations and thinking, during the one by a guy who was a camp counsellor at a summer camp for disadvantaged kids up in Maine last year, that I’d never spend my summer during that… ha, yeah. Last night was at least a little like that – we took [...]

arabian nights

Other than my laptop screen, all I can right now are stars. It’s 1130 pm, and I’m lying on the roof of Ruwwad’s new project, a library and community centre in Beidah, a Bedouin village about 5 minutes drive from Petra, 3 hours south of Amman. Above the sporadic whine of the water pump I [...]

Empowerment

So Ruwwad decided that they wanted a new project far enough away that it couldn’t overlap with the work in Amman. At the same time, a community association was being set up which required support, but was trying as hard as possible to stay out of the clutches of USAID. (Brief digression: USAID are great [...]

Summer school

The library at Ruwwad is, at the best of times, a hyperactive community centre. You can divide the kids who come at any time into three fairly stable groups: those who come along day in, day out, and really want to take part; others who are fairly involved when they’re around, but only visit the [...]

Pushing out the bounds

Every Saturday, the university scholarship students come to the foundation to meet with the staff and talk about activities going on: what they want from the foundation, and what the foundation needs from them. Yesterday was the same, though since the university semester has now finished, the discussion moved on to activities for the summer. [...]

Looking out

Last weekend was exhausting (both on the body and on the wallet), so I’m in Amman being a little more lazy. Today I went to visit Zenid, or The Queen Zein Al Sharaf Institute for Development, another Jordanian development organisation with a slightly longer history and better resources than ours. I had originally got in [...]

A few of the teenagers here have discovered the joys of facebook without the acquiring the etiquette to go with it: apologies to any friends who might have been pestered with friend requests from strangers with Arab-sounding names and “1 friend in common”. Still, it made for an interesting conversation yesterday when I commented, in [...]

Every corner you turn in the old city, it seems like there’s another monastary, chapel (or Jewish or Muslim equivalent), or religious shrine of some kind: I wandered past Ethiopian, Russian Orthodox, Franciscan, and Armenian monks today, each with their own turf and area of influence. This afternoon there the Franciscans led a walk along [...]

I wandered around the old city walls as the sun came down this evening. Near the opposite site of the city to the Jaffa Gate (near my hostel) lies the Mount of Olives, with a Orthodox church on the site of the original Garden of Gethsemane. The Jewish Cemetery stands on the same slope, opposite [...]

The Holy City

Success – across the border, in Jerusalem, and no stamp on my passport! To be fair though, five hours to travel 40-odd miles is a little tedious.
Jerusalem is spectacular, no two ways about it. The mighty walls, narrow streets, and hordes of tourists and pilgrims – wearing hats and head-coverings of all shapes and [...]