Hey Guys,

I'm in Jordan, doing a study abroad in Amman at the moment. We're supposedly studying Levantine Arabic, also a hybrid course dealing with gender issues in the middle east and that kind of thing. I've seen a lot of cool stuff here, I just got back from Damasucs-which is quite nice. I'm doing a kind of internship with a local environmental group, who are doing some interesting work with Iraqi refugees. In general, the whole thing has been poorly planned by the university, but its certainly an interesting experience.

A component to the trip is working with NGO's in the area. There's a great deal to say about this, Jordan is very safe-very pro-western. There are a lot of weird dynamics at work in their country. For instance, their national budget is around 30% foreign aid and their economy is mostly held afloat by tourism. In a country with very little regional power, its interesting how dealing with their other nation's foreign policies have shaped the country into a pro-western alcove (sandwiched in between Israel, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia).

Lots of Palestinians here, the country is 45-60% Palestinian descent depending on who you ask. Their are refugees camps south of Amman that have become towns-the biggest one dates back to '48. Despite that, people are very friendly to foreigners here. I've met a fair amount of Iraqis as well, their is a huge populaton here as well. Anyway, because Amman is so stable (thank you, monarchy) it is the ideal staging ground for a lot of US funding. Tons of USAID and State Dep. grants get thrown to contractors in the area, the fate of which I won't bore you with-l'll just say that the cycle of money wasted, lost, reinvested and squandered is wild to see at work. You get a sense for how much money is being thrown at this region.

For the record, Syria is extremely safe for tourists and the people in Damascus were very polite. We saw a lot of Ottoman era houses (gigantic, richly-decorated) that you can basically walk in and tour, get served coffee and tea, with no expectation of any kind of reciprocation. There are pictures of Assad and his late father all around (the same is the case of amman, with King Abdulla) and the guy has a creepy kind of affect. I believe their was a prison riot recently, but Damascus seemed as stable as anywhere I've yet seen. That said, in a week or two I'll be dropping by some more rural regions so I'll get a sense how they are.

I'll be going by Hana, which in the mid-80's was the site of a government crack-down, around 3000 people got killed by the government. This was a retaliation against the Muslim Brotherhood, a group associated with Hamas/the Egyptian arab nationalist movement, and the mosque in the city got burned to the ground-apparently if you go there now the locals claim it never existed. The government has been strictly secular for over 40 years (all of the Assad rule) so Islamists are seen as a threat to the power structure-which is a much more complex kind of picture then what I think is presented to the West in media, etc. I met a woman whose family lived in the area, she said her uncle was shot on site for no reason (they asked where his family was, he didn't know they had fled). There's a lot more to say about this kind of thing, but I've got limited amounts of internet time, so I'll talk about that in another post perhaps.

I'll have more than a couple Syrian stamps on my passport now, so if I get stopped and questioned by DHS maybe I'll have some more interesting stories to tell.