Madaba

Today was the first day of our second weekend in Jordan. As no one will give interviews or meetings on the weekend, we are taking advantage of this time to explore other parts of the country and observe life and activity outside the capital. This afternoon, I went with Alex T, Margaret, and Ivette to Madaba, another Jordanian city about 1 hour from Amman. We took James, another Tufts student along with us; James has been traveling around the Middle East for a few weeks before enrolling in summer classes at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It just so happens that next year James will be co-chair of the New Initiative for Middle East Peace, another program run through the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts. We were happy to take a fellow IGLer along with us.

We left our apartment at about 11 am and headed to a bus station in downtown Amman. With the help of some very gracious Jordanians, we found the public bus heading to Madaba and hopped on board. We found that taking the bus rather than hiring a cab just for ourselves was a fun way to interact with other people and practice our Arabic. It was also a lot cheaper, about one US dollar per person for a 1 hour ride.

Madaba is famous in Jordan for two reasons -- first, because of the beautiful mosaics found all around the city (many of which are quite old and still being restored) and second because it is still considered a largely Christian city. Before we even reached the city proper, which is located up on a hill, we passed the first church I have seen so far in Jordan. Our first stop in Madaba was St George’s Church, which hosts fragments of a mosaic map that once depicted all the sites mentioned in the Bible from Egypt to Jerusalem. We tried to get our bearings and identify the places on what was left of the beautiful mosaic. I had hoped that taking Professor Mufti’s infamous map quiz last fall would help me in situations like this, but we ended up relying more on the guidebook with us since the map, while extremely detailed, isn’t 100% geographically accurate. The atmosphere in the church was calm and serene, as we were some of the only people there, and we took our time looking at the paintings and elaborate ornamentation in the building. The arrival of a large tour group inspired us to head to our next destination, Mount Nebo.

I was a bit skeptical before actually going to Mt Nebo. I guess the idea of turning a Biblical site into a tourist destination is a little off-putting to me. Biblically, Mt Nebo is the hill Moses climbed to see the Promised Land before he died. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to be blown away, or more than marginally impressed, by the place. I was pleasantly surprised, however, both by the somber and respectful treatment of the site and by the view itself. It was pretty awe-inspiring to look across the Dead Sea to the West Bank. Yet again, I was reminded of how close everything in this region is to everything else.

One official related a story to us in a recent meeting to illustrate this point. He described how, when flying into Amman over Israel, the pilot invited him into the cockpit to better see the view. On one side of the view, he said, he could see Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Amman in a straight line. On the other side, he saw Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad. When I read about these places, I imagine them further apart, and more isolated from one another. Being here in Amman, so close to those five major cities as well as multiple other places that I read about in my classes at Tufts, has really drilled home for me the reality of space and place in the Middle East. Here in Jordan, a country often considered “a good house in a bad neighborhood,” I feel the weight and confluence of all the historical and contemporary realities that I’ve studied. I was wrong to view the war in Iraq as an event largely separate from the recent fighting in Lebanon, or from the political reform process in Jordan, or from a resolution to Israel-Palestine. These cities, the countries they are in and the events that happen in them, are anything but isolated from one another.

Later in the evening, after returning to Amman, we met up with Katie, a Fletcher alumna working at the US Embassy. We went with Katie to a café near our apartment to watch the soccer game between France and Norway. The café was virtually full of people, all smoking, drinking tea and coffee, and watching the game. I really enjoyed the experience; it’s true that sports bring people together.

Tomorrow we have plans to visit Jerash in the morning, followed by an afternoon and evening of preparation for our coming week’s meetings. I am particularly excited about meeting with UNHCR, the World Health Organization, and the UN Population Fund. We’ve yet to get the UN’s perspective on our topic, and it’s obviously a critical component of our topic. We are also setting up a focus group of Iraqis in Jordan through Save the Children, which will add a much-needed perspective to my group’s research. Though my group was initially looking at legal status for Iraqis in Jordan, the meetings we have had so far are pushing us in a different direction. We'd like to examine two contrasting frameworks that can be used by the Jordanian government and the international community to address the Iraqi refugee crisis in Jordan – first, viewing the refugees through the prism of their impact on traditional national security, or second, through the lens of human security. This will make for an interesting and relevant application of theoretical discourse to a concrete subject. In my opinion, it will be a fantastic basis for the policy memo that we will write at the end of the trip.

- Nancy