Summer Program

So the opening ceremonies for the Summer Program was on Monday. There are about 85 kids in the program, ages 6-14. They're separated into 4 different age groups. I run two different station: music and dancing. The kids are really cute. Even though there's a bit of a language barrier with the younger kids, they like to sing and do hand gestures. The little kids are way better than the older ones at swing dancing, too. The program basically keeps me busy and lets me learn a lot more Arabic. Plus I get to be a kid all day, which is great. I have two students now that I'm giving private lessons to: Krestal Nimry on the guitar, and her relative (pretty much everyone on Al-Husn is somehow related . . . there is a very limited gene pool here) Maia on the violin.

I actually got to go swimming the other day, which was great. There is a really cool swimming pool in the middle of town that's well-maintained and relatively inexpensive. On Friday, I'm going with the scouts to Amman to celebrate 100 years of scouting.

Interestingly enough, people here are shocked when I tell them that I come from a family of eight kids. The Christian families here tend to have three to four, something that surprised me at first. I figured that they would pattern after their Muslim neighbors and have more. Then again, even the Muslim families in Al-Husn are starting to have fewer and fewer kids per family. There is an emerging trend of globalization that has its roots in Amman and is trickling down to the smaller cities. Amman seems a lot like a European city, and it has a gargantuan four-story mall that has every Western store and restaurant you could imagine. Plus, the religious practice in Amman seems to be fairly low - Muslim women commonly walk outdoors without a hijab, and everyone dresses in Western fashion for the most part. It'll be interesting to see what happens in Al-Urdun in the next 50 years as this trend continues.

Demographically, Jordan is interesting because over half of its population is Palestinian. Although it's not open war, there are a lot of ethnic tensions between Palestinians and native Jordanians. I think that this tension will lessen as time passes, however, since even now most of the Palestinians have been living in Jordan for several generations. A third group of people, the Egyptians, also live Jordan. The Egyptian presence in Jordan is very similar to the Mexican presence in the United States. Egyptians do janitorial and construction jobs, and maintain their own culture and dialect of Arabic.

I have an opportunity to go to Israel, and I've already applied for the Visa. What remains to be seen is whether the Jordanian group we'll be traveling with will be allowed to cross the border (Jordan, being half-Palestinian, doesn't get on so hot with Israel). I've been able to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the Arabs' perspective now, which has been and will continue to be enlightening.