Last Friday we (the group of American immersion students and a few of the expats taking language classes with us) went to the Jordanian shore of the Dead Sea and a place called Wadi Mujib (Wadi means “valley”), where we hiked to a waterfall. As a point of note, let no one tell you that the Dead Sea isn't too salty, or that you should put your head under. It took fifteen minutes for the “water” to evaporate off of my face (leaving granules of salt as it went) and stop burning my lips and eyes.

What fills the Dead Sea is thick enough that it’s really more like salty soup than seawater, and the slightest breeze on a wet face causes a heating sensation rather than a cooling one. That being said, it’s pretty amazing to float atop the water like you’re lying in a hammock on a sunny day. A few people cut themselves on the salt crystals that form on the rocks jutting out into the water (I suspect the crystals form from the breeze coming across the water, but the water may just get to a much higher level than that at which we saw it), but the cuts closed up within a few minutes in the water. We collected a few smooth souvenirs off of the beach (charitably called such—the beach is essentially rocks that have washed up) and walked a hundred yards or so to a freshwater waterfall where we cleaned the salt from our skin.

We hopped back in the bus and drove another few kilometers to the Wadi Mujib Nature Reserve, paid the fee to get through the gate, and started the kilometer-or-so walk to the big waterfall. We were advised to leave our cameras in the bus because they’d be ruined, and the warning was not an exaggeration. After a couple hundred yards we were walking through shin-deep water and after a few hundred more we were all but wading. We quickly entered a canyon, the walls of which soared a good hundred or hundred-and-fifty feet above our heads. After climbing up four sets of small waterfalls (and sliding down them a fun few times in the process), we got to a deeper part of the canyon and saw a waterfall about seventy-five feet high. Trying to stand up straight under it, without buckling or being pushed out, is terribly difficult, but we had a great time trying. After a little while sitting in the waterfall pool, we trekked back and boarded the bus back to Amman. We were all exhausted when we got back in the late afternoon, so we slept, thinking we’d get up in a few hours and go to the coffee shop. We didn't wake up until the next morning.

Arabic classes continue to challenge us, but we persevere. Robert, Craig and I have an odd way of cementing pronunciation. When we learn a new word, we say it to each other a dozen times or so, going back and forth in a manner befitting, in the words of Nicole (a Villanova senior), “the seagulls from Nemo”. It may look odd to observers, but once we learn a word, it’s rare that we all forget it the next day.

Rami, our classical Arabic teacher, has spent the last four days (and plans to spend Sunday through Wednesday of next week) playing a game with us for an hour and a half or so each morning, wherein he says a word (sometimes a nonsensical one) and we have to tell him how many letters it contains and how to spell it. Our pronunciation and ear for the language (likely interdependent, if my slight knowledge of human psychology and pedagogy is accurate) have progressed very far very quickly. Looking back on the two weeks we've been here, I'm amazed

Christine is our spoken Arabic teacher (spoken Arabic, 3amiya, is a somewhat simplified version of classical Arabic, the name of which I don’t know how to spell, and we learn both because no one speaks classical except in news and politics), and she’s much more effervescent than Rami is, though they’re both incredibly nice and very good teachers—I’m quite certain I lack the patience necessary to repeat simple phrases over and over again only to hear them butchered by half the room. It may be the result of our spoken classes being in the afternoon and after three hours of classical classes, but the atmosphere is significantly lighter and more prone to distraction, tangent, and the mental state that accompanies as much class time as we have.

In the two weeks we've been here, we've seen two weddings near our apartment. First, it’s really odd to hear a man half-chanting/half-singing into a megaphone with bongo drums and bagpipes backing him, but the sound is surprisingly good and the rhythm gets into your head. Second, these songs go on for a very long time with no break. The crowd is clapping and dancing and singing along as the bride and groom stand on a dais and watch, and we've stood and watched for twenty minutes without ever seeing a pause. Weddings here are much more fun and exciting than Christian weddings back home.

One last thing: Christine crashed our classical Arabic class this morning to teach us all, as Rami frowned at her, how to say tame Arabic words that sound like English swear words (faak, `ass, shita, etc). She laughed devilishly as she walked out of the room.

An Update And a Note on Dissonance

Classes are more fun now that we've learned the alphabet and how some of the letters interact with each other (all letters have multiple forms depending on their placement in the word, but some letters change depending on what precedes or follows them, and some just have multiple forms depending on various sentence characteristics we haven't learned yet). I have somewhere around 100 vocabulary words in my notebook, as well as a growing number of greetings and common phrases ("How are you?", "I want...", "How do you say...in Arabic?", "What is your name?", etc.), but the more interesting indicator of my progress is that I can read signs around Amman and break them apart into letters, enabling me to sound them out. The benefit of language and culture immersion is, as anyone who has been in a program can tell you, the fact that one is surrounded by the language--learning the language is accomplished largely through classes, but enforced by the osmosis of walking around.

The Yemeni restaurant across from CGE has become the default lunch spot for Robert, Craig, and me. We eat until we're full and pay 2JD (about $2.80 US). We learned on Monday how to say the names of the dishes we like, and today we added enough words to turn our order into a sentence: "`ordii khobz, kabd, [we say "and" in English because we haven't learned the Arabic] ful."

T-shirts are rare in Amman, as are shorts and flip-flops. Men wear jeans or dressier pants and collared shirts, with closed-toe shoes. And yet the streets are lined with garbage. For a society that cares so much about appearance, dissonance makes itself evident in how they treat common space. Having no compunction about littering and no apparent desire to live as cleanly as they dress, their trash only makes it to a bin when convenient. This is much more obvious on the bus ride from our apartment to Philadelphia University (where we have our morning classes)--the sides of the highway are piled with garbage of all kinds, some of it unrecognizable after so long in the sun. The only time the aroma of trash in the city is unnoticeable is in the evenings, when from every restaurant and cafe wafts sweet-smelling hookah smoke.

Still, I'm very happy to be here and immersed in foreign culture.

`Assalaamo 9aliikom, friends. Peace be upon you.

A Brief Update

I arrived in Amman on Thursday night, met up with Craig and Robert (my friends from PHC, also here to study Arabic, also having no prior experience with the language) within an hour or so, and rode to our apartment with Fred, the director of CGE [Consortium for Global Education] Jordan (that's the program we're participating in). I hadn't been able to sleep more than a half hour or so on the planes (and I certainly didn't want to sleep during my layover in Milan - I had a great panini at a cafe and ate the best gelato I've ever tasted), so I was exhausted by the time we got to the apartment. We met the guys who are living next to us (three are participating in the program, the fourth teaches ESL at the office), unpacked enough of our suitcases to clean up and get to bed, and then slept from midnight to 3PM the next day.

We were only awake for about 9 hours yesterday, which meant that we woke up rested this morning, in plenty of time to get to the orientation session at 9:00. We were at the office ("the office" is the phrase I'll be using for the CGE office suite, which includes several classrooms and a common area for students to hang out--basically it's the base of operations and the locus of most of CGE's activity) until almost 5:00 this afternoon, and on the way back from dinner we found a WiFi spot we could leech a connection off of. Thus I'm posting this update. I have some thoughts on the culture here, and my reaction to it, but I don't think it's fair to post them after only two days. I'll give a full debrief of my impressions and reactions when I think they're more informed and honest.

Oh, one last thing. For lunch, 10 of us went across the street to a Yemeni restaurant where we ate family-style for 2JD apiece ($2.82). Ful is one of my new favorite foods. It's like refried beans if they were better-seasoned and served with hot, crispy flatbread instead of tortillas.

That's all for now. Thanks for your prayers, everyone. I'm getting more acquainted to things here and settling in for the long-ish haul.

Salaam

Getting Ready

I'm packing up the parts of my life I want to bring with me to Jordan, and I'm struck again by the recognition of the peripatetic, almost nomadic, nature of my life. From the comfort of home to the home of school to my family to a friend's family in another state, back to school, back to my family, and now off to a foreign country for more than two months, I've traveled a lot since January and I've had a lot of fun doing it. The result of all this traveling is that I have packing down almost to a science. Underwear, socks, and undershirts on this side of the suitcase; t-shirts and shorts rolled up on that side as a foundation for the flat-laying polo shirts and jeans; Dopp kit with hygiene essentials over here; extra razor blades and extra bottles and tubes of this and that over there; don't forget the deodorant. Pull out the garment bag, lay out the jacket, shirts, and slacks; don't forget the collar stays in a pocket. The laptop bag holds the computer, the iPod, the Kindle, and chargers of all sorts. My life reduced to a few bags.

I don't know what the next two months will hold. Of course I have a rough outline of class time, weekend trips, and a mid-term vacation to Egypt, but this summer is an exercise in ceding control. After all, I'm not even guaranteed language credit from participating in this immersion program and receiving satisfactory marks--I have to take the ACTFL to satisfy the registrar. I was talking to a friend last night, and she told me that my anxiety about that uncertainty is, in addition to being an unproductive pastime that serves nothing but its own degenerative cycle, an indication of my lack of willingness to trust God. In the first half of Matthew 6:34, Christ says, "Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself." Anxiety is not just a waste of time and effort; it is disobedience to God. In exerting undue care for the future, I engage in a separation of my will from God's and a removal of my soul from God's order. In attempting to control everything around me, I ignore the lesson I learned last semester: that my relationship with God hinges on my ability to accept my place in the order of things and my willingness to subject myself to him.

Thus, my goal for the next few days, and going forward into the next couple of months, is to mitigate this anxiety. Spiritually, this means I'll be refocusing from myself to God, from the reasons for my worry (my desire for control, my desire for comfort, my desire to fulfill my appetites, &c.) to the reason for my hope. Practically, this means spending more time reading my Bible (yeah, that book I should pick up more often) and meditating and praying, in addition to the more philosophical work of spending some time each day in authors like Lewis and Chesterton (assuming I have any free time).

In this sense, this imperative of proximity to God, this summer may be just what he wants for me.