Pfirst Days in Pfoho

            Hello again! I’m settled in at Harvard and ready to expound on my first-week experiences and how it feels to be back. First things first, though – I need to wrap up the rest of the summer.

            After I arrived back home from Jordan, it was my pleasure to participate in the wedding of a very good friend. After that, I traveled with my parents to North Carolina (my dad had a conference to attend, and since I was only home for another week, he took me along.) Finally, I had a day to say goodbye to Texas until Thanksgiving, and then I flew back here to Boston to start the new year.

            I must say, the weather here is exactly like the weather I left in Texas – hot and humid. Except that here, my room doesn’t have AC – only heating. I’m sure it will cool down in a couple of weeks, though. The biggest challenge in Pforzheimer (Pfoho), my new dorm, or “house”, as we call them at Harvard, is that it’s a twenty-minute walk from the main campus. There are shuttles, but they don’t run all the time, and either way, it adds in a lot of time for transportation. But I like my room; it’s bigger than last year, and I have more decorating stuff. Pictures are attached!

            Coming in, I was planning on getting to the airport at six pm and then taking the Subway to Harvard, where I would then half to walk or take a taxi to my dorm while hauling all my luggage around, all after dark. Thankfully, God provides, and I found, to my delight, that one of the graduated seniors from my a cappella group, who is now interning with CI*, was picking up one of my friends from last year’s Bible study at the airport at the same time.

            Thus, instead of attempting to lug all my stuff through Boston after dark, I walked out of the airport and into the (literally) open arms of the Christian community at Harvard. I was picked up by friends and driven to an actual home for a welcome-back event (with food they ordered for me without my asking!), dropped off at my dorm and assisted in getting my key and carrying my stuff in, and then invited to yet another event to meet the freshmen. It was a very long day, but it was great to have someone to come back to.

            That’s what it is, even though I’m twenty minutes away from where I was last year. It’s not exactly coming home, not quite yet, but it’s coming back. It’s still hard being away from my family sometimes, but not as hard as it used to be. I have friends who even before I said goodbye to my parents were texting to find out when I’d get back, and I have a suite-mate** who bought me a chocolate bar as a welcome gift, complete with a welcome note. And after I’d unpacked all nine of my boxes (and my suitcase) into my room, I felt I was indeed beginning to make myself at home.

            I’m also a lot more confident that I was last semester, I think partly because I’m older, partly because I know my way around better, and partly because being in Jordan gave me a lot more experience navigating unfamiliar situations. In America, even when strange things happen, you get to speak English to solve them! When I’m given things to organize or get done, I don’t feel as annoyed or overwhelmed as I used to; I have begun to take them in stride.

            In fact, instead of feeling tired and unready to start, the way I’ve felt the last couple of semesters, I find myself wanting to go to class and study. That may be partially because I’m taking more classes related to my major, classes I want to take. At the moment, I’m taking Leadership and Management for ROTC, Hebrew (a film and literature class), second-year Arabic, Physics, and a Philosophy course. I’ll post more details next week, when I’ve had more of a chance to feel them out, but I finished four-and-a-half hours of class today energized and ready to go.

            It’s a good thing, too, because ROTC took off running before I’d even hit the ground. It’s much better as a sophomore, knowing one’s way around and not being at the bottom of the totem pole, but that also means that I have more responsibility, especially as we try to help out all the freshmen who are just beginning their ROTC experience.

            Freshman are the main concern in a cappella, too. We are doing recruiting now, and soon we’ll be doing auditions. That, combined with trying to put together a budget and figure out recording costs for our next CD as treasurer, puts quite a bit on my plate at the moment, completely independent of my academic responsibilities. And of course, there are all the moving-in concerns that still have to be taken care of, and the usual paperwork to be filled out.

            Well, this post is quite long enough, and I’m going to make it quite a bit longer with a bunch of pictures I hope you’ll enjoy. I hope everyone else had a good start of school as well, and thank you for coming back to read my blog for a second year!

*Christian Impact, or Cru, formerly Campus Crusade for Christ

**She’s not exactly my suitemate; she’s my blockmate, which means we were placed in the same dorm and filled out our housing forms together. As it turns out, we have interconnected singles, which is very nice. But interconnected-single-mate, while fun to say, is a little clunky on the page. So I settled for suitemate as the closest approximation. In case anyone was really interested in that little explanation.

PS - Wow... that was a lot of pictures...

Jordan: Conclusions

            I’m writing this on a plane somewhere between Paris and Atlanta. I haven’t slept in a bed in 37 hours, and it’s still only 11:30 in the morning in Texas (I’ll hopefully get in around 10:00 pm). Still, I’m fairly awake, and this seems like a good time to sum up my thoughts on the summer.

            First, though, there are a couple other things I should mention. First, thank you for your concern, and my ankle is doing much better. I walked around Paris for several hours today without anything other than normal soreness. I won’t mention much about Paris, since this post is meant to wrap up my experience in Jordan, but I will post pictures, and I will also say that I understand why everyone wants to go.

            We must have done one of the quickest walking tours of Paris ever attempted. We ate breakfast at a café, walked down the Champs-Elysees, and saw the Arc de Triomphe in about three hours. Despite the fact that we kept accidently speaking in Arabic instead of French, everything went very smoothly, and we had a great time. My favorite part, though, had to be Notre Dame – it’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything so breathtakingly, elegantly beautiful. Despite our rushed pace, I stopped a moment to sit and pray before we left.

            With those subplots out of the way, I can turn my thoughts to pondering the significance of this summer. As the summer drew to a close, I noticed a lot of things I was looking forward to returning to in the US: not just family and friends, but little things like being able to flush the toilet paper, bread meaning loaves or rolls or pastries instead of pita, driving or using public transport instead of taking taxis, having WiFi at home, not getting constantly honked or whistled at in the street, tex-mex food – the list goes on.

            However, the closer I got to leaving, the more things I started to realize I would miss about Jordan: cheap falafel and shwarma everywhere, practicing Arabic on a normal basis, the half-Arabic, half-English puns that no one not in our program can really understand in context, beautiful warm weather, mountains everywhere, Arabic hospitality, and the call to prayer that woke me up at four in the morning and then lulled me back to sleep with its melody, reminding me that God is great and that there is, indeed, no God but God. I’ll miss the inherent conservatism and the religion that permeates all of life here, from the always-present steeples and minarets to the religious sayings tacked up under street signs.

            It’s been a lovely summer, and I know I’ve grown a lot. One way to measure this is to list out things I’ve come to regard as common place: navigating around language and cultural barriers, using taxis for everything, buying groceries, living with a roommate. But I think the best way to describe what I’ve learned is general independence. On the plane heading out into Paris earlier, it occurred to me that I was comfortable with the idea of going out and sightseeing in Paris and then making it back to Texas by myself. I didn’t need to, but it was a concept that wouldn’t have occurred two months ago.

            And of course, my Arabic has improved a great deal. Seeing as I couldn’t get past ‘hello’ when I left, and I can now start intermediate level Arabic at Harvard, I’ve made it quite a ways. I was expecting that more this time, so the thought of how much I’ve learned doesn’t make me near as giddy as it did last summer, but I’m still very content with the way things turned out.

            Final thoughts on Jordan itself? It’s a beautiful country, and it will always hold a special place in my heart. The scenery is magnificent, from tree-covered mountains to desert castles. The people live up to the idea of Arab hospitality – I don’t know how many times I’ve had strangers offer me food and drink just because I happened to pass by them. It’s definitely harder to be a woman here, but Amman is a pretty safe city if one takes care, as one would in any large city.

            During a practice oral exam, I was asked to explain what any visitor must do in Jordan. Petra is obvious, and Wadi Rum is a close second; the Roman ruins in Jerash and Amman are also a must-see. And of course, there are all the biblical sites I’ve mentioned along the way. There are plenty of sites to see, but Jordan is more than the sum of its sites. Buy some falafel or shwarma, visit a mosque, enjoy the scenery, or wander through a suk*. Enjoy some Arab hospitality (be suspicious if you’re a woman traveling alone, though); go to church and sing the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic; listen to the call to prayer.

            There’s much more I’d like to say, but I’ve been long enough already. This summer has been an incredible blessing for me, and I couldn’t have asked for a better experience. In a couple of weeks I’ll be back at Harvard, so I’ll resume my usual blogging then. I look forward to seeing many of you very soon! Thank you for reading this summer, and God bless. Until September!

*the Arabic word for an outdoor market

Jordan: Wrapping Up (Literally)

            A lot of things have happened since I last wrote. The thing foremost in my mind at the moment is my ankle. It behaved for all of my hiking during the holiday, my running at the gym, and most of the additional day of tourism we had on Saturday. And then, just as I was climbing down the steps of Ajloun Castle, it slipped, and I fell on it. And now I have this lovely bruise and swelling on my heel. However, as bad as it looks, it doesn’t hurt at all, and the doctor said that just wrapping/bracing it for a while should be enough, so it’s not that much of a problem. It just means I won’t be on a treadmill in the near future.

            However, that is far from the only thing that happened. I’d better start at the beginning so as not to leave anything out. I got my midterm grade back, and I got an A, so that’s good. We only had one day of school last week, and we spent most of it talking about holiday traditions, since the chapter we were in happened to line up nicely with the end of Ramadan.

            Then there was break. I ended up, last minute, joining a group that was heading up north to Ajloun for the break. We spent three nights in bungalow-type accommodations. During the day we lounged, snacked, and went hiking through the beautiful mountain countryside (pictures attached). And at night we grilled dinner and roasted marshmallows, and then sat around and talked. It was nice to have nothing to plan except for dinner, and I hadn't had s’mores for ages. It was wonderful.

            We got back on Thursday, and I watched TV for most of Friday. Having Eid al-Fitr in the middle of the session is like trying to recover from Spring Break with a week-and-a-half left of school; no one wants to do anything, but there’s no time left to procrastinate. I did do some studying over break, but it was a lot less than I’d planned to do. I don’t really regret it, though; I’ve worked ahead in the book, and I am learning. And besides, it is summer.

            On Saturday, everyone studying in the program headed up to Ajloun (yes, the place we’d just gotten back from) to tour. First we visited the Roman ruins at Jerash, and then we went to Ajloun castle. I also have nice pictures from the views there, all taken before I sprained my ankle and had other things to worry about. Luckily, that didn’t happen until we were on our way back, which meant that all I had to do was awkwardly stick my leg across the aisle all the way home to elevate it. It’s getting significantly better every day, though; I’m hoping I won’t even be worrying about it by the time I’m on my way home.

            As far as academics go, things are beginning to wrap up. One of my teachers is still on vacation, but she should be getting back soon. Meanwhile, we have a quiz in formal and colloquial Arabic tomorrow, a colloquial Arabic project due on Wednesday, and an oral exam on Thursday. And after that, there’s only finals to worry about, and I’ll be done. In a way, things are getting busier here, so there’s more and more to do. On the other hand, I’ve been here for long enough now that I’m in practice; my Arabic is in a constant state of semi-readiness. It’s like jogging; after a few miles, your body is more tired, but your muscles are warmed up, so things get easier. Especially in language-learning, where everything is cumulative, that’s a great help.

            This is especially true with my speaking skills. At the moment I’m fairly comfortable launching into a broken conversation in Arabic, despite the fact that I can’t communicate a lot of what I want to say. I just finished a practice oral exam, and it went nominally well, though I’m not sure how I did yet. I’ll be more prepared for the actual exam (which was of course the point of practicing), so I’ll let you know how it goes. But my speaking and listening improve markedly from week to week.

            Church services are great for gauging language learning, because if you've been to church enough, you’ll probably know the general ideas, and the speaking is generally slower, but still at an adult, real-life level. I love going to church in Arabic, singing the songs, attempting to decipher the sermons, and then chatting with a few people afterwards. It’s been a great way to supplement my classes with real-life experience, outside of directing taxis and ordering food.

            It feels strange to think that by the time I write again I’ll be all packed and ready to reflect on the events of the summer, and then sign off again until the start of next semester. I like it here, and I don’t want to leave, but I’m certainly looking forward to seeing everyone again. Just one more week to go!