part-time warrior

Last weekend I finally went off to see if the TA liked the look of me. I’d missed a call from the Sergeant-Major Thursday checking if I was still up for it, but was a little unnerved to call him Friday lunchtime and end up on a bus from the London HQ by 7 pm [...]

si se pu… maybe

The photo’s fairly convincing, right? It played host to what turned out to be most depressing events I’ve been to in a while. Picture a whole bunch of middle to old-aged “democrats abroad” still not quite aware that Obama isn’t just Howard Dean a couple of years later, combined with a whole load of well-meaning [...]

Over the wall

I’ve found it hard to know how to continue this blog, whether as a random collection of my thoughts or as more of an outside perspective into my time away from Carolina, and rather busier than expected has made it easy for me to delay posting. Still, I’ve rediscovered my camera from under my UNC [...]

Back in the warm

It was odd to be back at Christ’s Hospital (old school) last week, though hearing the National Anthem near the end of the end-of-term program turn out to be “God Save Our Gracious Queen… [et al]” certainly was a welcome change.
Wales was a welcome change to Jordan in many ways – everyone spoke English, for [...]

Happenings

So much seems to have happened since I last posted, so many experiences, two of which seem to stand out.
…sleeping outside in Wadi Mussa, me, two colleagues, and a Bedouin friend called Abu Sagaar, who brought with him his Oud (think Bedouin traditional version of the Oud). The following day, he insisted I borrow his [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]