All Good Things...

It's been a pretty relaxing couple of weeks here in the desert. I read a couple of decent books, met people, learned some Arabic words, and generally recuperated from the exhaustion I was dealing with by the end of the English school. By the end of the ~2 weeks I had free, I was getting sick of sitting around home and doing nothing. So, when the Friday the 9th came around I was pretty content to go and meet my coworkers.

In what may be a typical circumstance, plans for a "staff retreat" were shelved at the last minute in favor of a "staff day" which involved a few classic get-to-know-you games and some general explanation of the rules and guidelines for doing my job. I also discovered that everybody at the school has one of the following: A Ph D, a master's, teaching certification, or teaching experience. Oh wait, not everybody, quite; I'm the only person teaching this year without one of the above. This is, I must admit, pretty intimidating. Everybody tells me not to worry, this happens all the time. Well I think I'm going to continue worrying, thank you very much. I work better when I'm nervous than when I'm complacent.

On Saturday, my roomates and I, along with two local guys named Taariq and Ahmed, drove about an hour from Amman to a canyon in some limestone hills near the southern end of the Dead Sea. We packed a picnic lunch and our swim suits and hiked up the canyon for about an hour. It was pretty cool in several senses of the word; the bottom of the canyon only got direct sunlight in places, and not for very long. We found a huge boulder with a waterfall coming over it that more or less filled the whole canyon (maybe 12 feet square). There was a dry space at the bottom of the waterfall which would have been perfect for for eating our lunch and resting. We were 5 young men. Naturally, we spent 20 minutes trying to find a way up the waterfall with all our stuff without getting soaked, and then ate our lunch at the top of the waterfall less than 15m from the otherwise perfect spot. A man has certain principles, after all.

We built a makeshift dam out of rocks to form a pool about 18 inches deep and all just sat there in the water eating food and smoking nargeela (that's what they call it here, but I'd have thought of it as a hookah. It's the only manly way to smoke peach-flavored tobacco, so it's cool with me). It was a good time, and even though I spent the whole day outside, I'm not sunburned. On the hike back down, we built another dam just because the first one wasn't good enough. Some might consider this a waste of time and effort, but they are probably women or Frenchmen. It was IMPORTANT.

So, staff bonding followed by male bonding followed by Christian bonding, and that's my weekend in a nutshell. Starting tomorrow I'll be writing my curriculum for this year with lots of help from Julia, my immediate superior at the school. Please pray for me this week as I head into this uncharted territory and will need help to make it happen. Vacation is over, the grind is beginning.