The next day we were allowed the luxury of an extra hour of sleep, which I was extremely grateful for. Catnaps on the bus were no substitute for real, uninterrupted sleep. We showered, had breakfast, then hailed taxis to drive to JETS (Jordanian Evangelical Theological Seminary), where we would be oriented to the school where we would spend the final week of our trip taking classes in. Before we toured JETS, however, we stopped by the Kelsey Language School for an hour’s lesson in Arabic, taught by a local woman who spoke English and taught Arabic for the school. The lesson focused entirely on spoken Arabic, and was a great refresher for me. After taking the lesson I was much more confident when speaking Arabic and a lot of the vocabulary I had learned came back to me during the lesson. We also spoke briefly with several other students who had come from America to work in Jordan and were learning the language.
Upon arrival at JETS we were escorted to a conference room where honest-to-goodness American coffee was waiting for us. This welcome wake-up booster gave us all the energy we needed for the day ahead. We were introduced to Abu-Nasser, the school’s legal counselor as well as general big kahuna. (Abu means “father of”. In Arab culture once a man or woman has a son, they are called “Abu [son’s name] or Umm [son’s name], so Abu Nasser is the father of Nasser) We also met Virginia, the school’s administrative head, and an Australian woman who’s name I missed but who was extremely friendly. The school’s dean also introduced himself, but I missed his name as well because of his accent. They were greatly welcoming and made us feel very good about our visit. Virginia then led us around the building on a tour, showing us all the different classrooms, offices, and the library which JETS partners with to provide books to the community. Lastly, we met up in a classroom and had an hour’s lecture on Israeli geography and archeology.
By now we were all getting a bit hungry, so we were led to the cafeteria, where we were pleasantly surprised to find real hamburgers and chicken sandwiches waiting for us! As we ate we chatted with Chris and Virginia about JETS, and about the unusually wet weather Jordan had been experiencing lately. Even as we talked about it it started pouring outside, so Dr. Haddad suggested we use the rest of our lunch break to find some jackets at the local superstore. After store-hopping through three different stores and not finding anything, we gave up and went back to JETS for another hour of lecture on Arab culture.
That night we were scheduled to have an overnight stay with some of the Iraqi families from the church we would be attending on Sunday. We met up in the church for a dinner (and Iraqi version of Spaghetti and some watermelon). Jennifer Grider and I were assigned to stay with someone called Rimaan, his mother, and his sister, who’s name was hard to pronounce but meant “wealthy.” Rimaan was 24 and very excited to have guests. Arab hospitality is famous, but we had no idea how kind and generous our hosts were going to be. Rimaan was exuberant but spoke only a little English, so typical conversations went something like this.
Rimaan: “What your father do?”
Me: “He works for the government.”
Rimaan: “What he do?”
Me: “He teaches new workers for the government.” (I didn’t really want to mention that my dad was in the military since I didn’t know how Iraqi refugees would feel about the American Armed Forces.)
Rimaan: “Ahh, that is good.”
But for all our language barrier we got on really well. About halfway through the night we went to meet up with some of the other families who were hosting students, all of which were related in several dozen ways. At one point we had about 25 people in one room playing UNO across two languages and using a lot of laughing, pointing, and playful slapping to communicate.
That night at Rimaan’s we stayed up late into the night watching an obscure Sylvester Stallone film and talking about things like work, school, and Texas (Rimaan’s brother lives in Texas, so the whole family was fascinated with Texas.) Rimaan said he is planning on taking his family to London when they can get visas to get cancer treatment for his mother before moving permanently to the U.S. The biggest issue is just working through the onerous process of getting immigration passes and scraping the money together for the trip.
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