Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies

Website: Institute of Traditional Islamic Arts and Architecture

Yes, I did the tourist thingy today

I rode a camel at Petra.

madaba and petra

Here is a link to National Geographic's Petra pic site.  This link will provide you with more of the scope of the place.  Just think, only archeologists say that only about 30% of Petra has been discovered.

Meeting Sana, Head, Fine Arts Program, King's Academy -- Amman

King's Academy is an interesting high school that is modeled after the one HM King Abdullah II attended in the United States, Deerfield Academy. I met with the lovely Sana Madadha who is in charge of the fine arts program in the academy and her husband, Maa'n Hayek, who operates a large farm in the Jordanian valley.  Their home shows the couple's beautiful tastes: mostly blank cream-colored walls with a few family portraits, expensive rugs on marble floors.   The centerpiece of the office is an elaborately inlaid desk that was given to his grandfather by the king.  I've never touched a piece of furniture so intricately crafted and wonderfully proportioned as this desk and its equally sophisticated chair. 

From the first few words it was easy to tell that Sana is an outstanding and passionate instructor-- she knows what it takes to activate students.  Although every student at King's Academy must take a least one year of humanities electives, her classes are full, she said, "because students really enjoy working with their hands, especially in ceramics."  We shared enough to realize that she deals with the same creative dilemmas as I do in her students.  She wants them to think bigger, to move with beyond personal doubts in order to be ready for an adventurous life.

University of Jordan

Fulbright House, Amman, Jordan

Alain McNamara is the Executive Director of the Jordanian-American Commission for Educational Exchange, the Fulbright that is led by a board of four Americans and four Jordanians.  McNamara complemented Earlham as an outstanding college with exceptionally substantive grant.  He looks forward to learning how our contact with this region is applied both when we get home and when the contacts Middle Eastern contacts we've made continue looking to the commission for educational exchange.
Fulbright in Jordan website

Hamam -- should I try it?

Another of our group has been working on getting to a turkish bath for a traditional hammam.  There are several in Jordan. She's done it in Morocco and loves how it feels.  Last evening, a Legacy staff member told me he used to go with his dad and didn't like it.  I don't know if I like the idea of being scrubbed with something as rough as a Brillo pad, but why not?

M. Mahler -- are you home?

Yesterday after noon, Margorie M. left us to travel back to Richmond, Indiana.  I hope she made it okay, but having traveled this part of the world for most of her adult life, she added such spice to the mix of our group.  Whether insisting on chocolate or sneaking in more subtle suggestions about sensorial clues, Margorie knows how to enrich the experience of newbies.

Sunrise in Jerusalem -- Frontloaded Melancholy

Sindbad Tours takes us to the Jordanian border tomorrow morning.

We all have to be packed up and ready to go tomorrow morning at 8am.  Our regular driver from Sindbad tours is picking us up from the hotel and delivering us an hour and a half later to the checkpoint at the northern border.  Once there we get our luggage and walk through the border and wait to have our luggage inspected.  Once that's done, we board another bus for the trip to Amman.

Sad to Leave the Jerusalem Legacy Hotel

This is the view from my balcony at the Legacy Hotel.  If anyone is interested in a great place with wonderful staff, this is the place for you.  I am very sad to be leaving.  The rooms are small if you have a roommate but it feels like home most of the time.  It's especially sad to see the staff mistreated by a recent tour group from Australia.  Snobby people who complain about everything.  They're treating the staff almost as bad as the Israelis treat Palestinians.

SURPRISE! Landrum Bolling sighting at Jerusalem's American Colony Hotel

photo by David Bolling.  From left to right: Kelly Burk, Landrum Bolling, Vince Punzo, Eric Murphy, Julia Allison. 


Last evening, four members of our group went to the American Colony Hotel to have a snack just for a change of pace from our hotel restaurant.  It was so strange.  One of the Earlham faculty members said, "You know, there is a man at the next table who looks just like Landrum Bolling."  Then a little later, the man left his table and returned after a few minutes. The same Earlham faculty member remarked again, "I think it is Landrum Bolling."   She got up and asked.  It was.  Landrum Bolling was traveling with his son, David Bolling, who is documenting the trip (an independent film maker from Sonoma, California.) Today, Dr. Bolling and his son traveled to assess Hebron, a desperate and volatile Palestinian city which has been declared off-limits to our group according to the grant made by Fulbright through the U.S. Department of Education.

Feral (Wild) Cats Run in Jerusalem like Squirrels in Indiana

Drink to Peace!

Enjoying Oud & Darbukkah Performance in garden at Jerusalem Hotel

Before watching the soccer game at the party at our hotel, Bill, Joann, Christ and I enjoy a light dinner and music in the garden restaurant of the Jerusalem Hotel.  Wow, what singers can do with the muscles in their throats to produce such hypnotic music is truly wonderous. The singer was an older gentleman with a seasoned voice that made it even more amazing.  Both of these musicians must have calluses of more that a 1/4 inch.

Legacy Hotel hosts "Canada Day" party

Tonight, the Earlham group has been invited to a party hosted by the Legacy Hotel specifically for its Canadian guests.  The Canadian consulate leases 20 rooms in the hotel for its employees to live.  It's going on right now in the front garden restaurant and everyone seems to be having a good time.

Startled on Ben Yehuda Street Shopping Area

Before lunch today, a few friends and I decided to go for a walk through the Ben Yehuda Shopping district in West Jerusalem.  It felt metropolitan and, except for the jewish theme, it seemed to be very similar to American shopping malls: clothing shops, craft coops, book stores, restaurants, even street musicians.  I got startled however when some young "skate-boarder types" in graphic tees, shorts, and Teva sandals darted through the crowd carrying their military-issued machine guns.  Nobody else seemed to care which made it extremely disconcerting and I wanted to get back to the east part of the city.

Catholic School Headmaster Civilizes Muslim Arabs

Yesterday, the Earlham group visited Bethlehem University for a second day to meet with individuals who most closely match our individual interests.  Part of the plan for the day included a tour of Collège des Frères in Bethlehem, a private Catholic school for pre-school-aged children to 12th grade.  Principal Michael Sansur preceded the tour with a question and answer period in the school's modest faculty lounge.  He discussed the how the school worked and it's mission.   Repeatedly, he extolled how the student population made up of Christians and Muslims co-existed in peace, although Christians seemed to get preferential treatment.  The Christians are afforded a regularly scheduled Mass for worship and the Muslim religion is suppressed because the school does not allow time for Muslim worship, nor does it allow its female students to wear the hijab.  Some of the many extra-curricular activities are only available to Christians.  Dr. Sansur also explained that the school attempts to keep a majority of Christian students here, but that the charitable mission is "to civilize" the Arabs.  Dr Sansur's use of "civilize" startled several members of my group and offended some of the school's teachers in attendance because of the piety and prejudice associated with his antiquated use of the word.

On the tour of the facilities, we could tell that the people in this school are working to get by with meager resources.  The students we saw (albeit few because of summer break) seemed to be happy.  Four high school students were playing basketball in the courtyard of the U-shaped complex.  It can even boast a pool which is open to the public according to a schedule by sex.  Yesterday, the pool was open only to females.

After the tour, the teachers from the Earlham group, their counterparts and the school's principal ate lunch at a local restaurant.

From email to Sherry

It is so weird, before I saw the separation wall, I got weepy just thinking about it.  I got really nervous about seeing a machine gun up close for the first time.  Then after seeing it this stuff so often, they become part of the "landscape" and THAT makes me really angry.

 A culture  (Jewish Culture) with a long history of being abused and thereby oppressed is now collectively abusing and oppressing other cultures -- and not just Arabs -- just as a father who was abused as a child is likely to abuse his own children.  The Nazi government made ghettos of Jewish neighborhoods and now the Israeli government is making ghettos of Arab communities.  The apartheid wall in Bethlehem is choking the lives of Bethlehem citizens in order to "secure" the Jewish settlements on all sides.  Although Bethlehem is "officially" under Palestinian control and Israel has forbidden any of its citizens from visiting the town, Israeli military has a free hand in the streets, especially when building a new section of the wall.  The separation wall cuts farmers and workers off from ancient olive groves and most aren't allowed to leave town to work on them.  The wall is less than 15 meters (and the adjoining guard tower is 35 meters) from the front gates of a public boys school.  Security is so tight that the thousands of tourists who come to Bethlehem every day come to the city for just 40 minutes and then leave without eating at the restaurants or really investigating the shops. Bethlehem citizens must get special permits to leave the city and they must have a very good reason.  Two to three thousand citizens stand in line every day to get through the Bethlehem checkpoint for work and private schools in Jerusalem.  And it goes on and on.
 Wayward Nazis committed horrid atrocities and humiliated millions of Jews and now the Israeli government is committing atrocities on and humiliating millions of Arabs.  EVERY Arab teenager (Christian, Jew, or Muslim) has been bullied by Israeli military troops that are under 22 years old -- especially at one of the hundreds of checkpoints.  They are profiled just like African Americans were and are profiled in Mississippi.  Homes are invaded and demolished.  Being a private security agency willing to evict Arabs is  a lucrative business in Jerusalem.  Jerusalem's right wing mayor
want to demolish nearly twenty (nice) Palestinian homes to expand it's territory on the pretense that his party wants to build a park and have green space for the huge Jewish settlements.  The treatment by the Israeli Zionists (controls military) is so bad that a father told me that his 14-year-old boy urinates himself when a troop waves his assault rifle around -- a victim of post traumatic syndrome from when his home had been invaded and his father for forced to the ground with a booted boot on his neck and a machine gun pressed against his temple.
 Anyway, I could go on and on.  And, I could go on to criticize Palestinian society: their treatment of girls and women, their cultural tradition of revenge and nomadic life, the passion of the extremists.  There is a difference, however, in that Palestinian culture is evolving and Zionists are devolving.