July 9

This morning, the refugee group visited Caritas, the United Nations Development Program, and the World Health Organization. We used the time to familiarize ourselves with the organizations and set up in-depth meetings for late this week and early next week. As stated in the last post, we have found the UN buildings in Amman to be fairly accessible; multiple organizations that are not easily contacted via email are reached simply by going to the door and asking for meetings.

The security cooperation group used a free afternoon for a more in-depth look at the heart of Amman. We visited a few areas of the city center that we hadn’t yet explored before returning to the bazaar above Hashemite Square, and a shopkeeper whom we had befriended on one of the first days we arrived. He directed us to the Citadel, a set of ruins that sits on one of the highest hilltops in town, which is exactly why we hadn’t yet gone to see it. In spite of the heat, the trek up was actually quite nice, as the residential areas it took us through provided a more realistic picture of life in Jordan than the cluster of buildings around our apartment. We encountered a lot of children on the walk up. There was one boy who looked nine, said that he was fifteen, and puffed on his cigarette like an experienced twenty-something as he tried to persuade us to go with him to the neighborhood sports center (“sports” in this case meaning “billiards”). We told him, several times, that no, sorry, we are on our way to the Temple of Hercules. He walked away when he realized we were serious. In all, however, the children were very friendly, and proved the perfect audience for us to practice our Arabic: they giggled so much on their own that it was impossible to tell when they were laughing at our mistakes.

Tomorrow, we have meetings with Dr. Hassan al Momani, Director of the International Relations program and Dr. Rula Quawas, Director of the Center for Women’s Studies at the University of Jordan, as well as with Special Agent Andrew Schad, Defense Attache and the USAID technical team at the Embassy. We are looking forward to another productive day in Jordan.