Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Snow in Amman

While I was working last night the wind was howling outside. There are a couple of tall thin cypress trees about 20 feet from our back deck that kept snapping against the railing. I had threaded the internet cable through the sliding glass door and so I was getting a steady breeze in my work space in the living room.

We woke up this morning to about a foot of snow. It was pretty much little slushy balls almost exactly like raw material for slushies. Or for Farheed the snowman:






There are a couple of snow plows in this city of 2 million, but most of the people seem to call it a day off.

Going back a month, to new years, we got to go into the Intercontinental hotel because of Ann's coworker Fires. Its hard to get into these parties because they need to do a security check on everyone who gets in. But Fires was a former bartender there, so we managed to get fast-tracked:



Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Today: by Ann

Hope your holidays were Merry .Here's to a 2008 filled with Peace and Happiness to all of you.

Reed and I spent our Christmas holidays in the Occupied Territories (Jerusalem and West Bank) and in Tel Aviv (Israel). We were in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve and stood in the very spot where Jesus was born (true story).









At sunset we gazed over Shepherds Fields and tried to imagine what the voices of those angels who were heard on high sounded like as they announced the birth of the baby Jesus but it was really hard because the Israeli construction crews were hammering away.






Busy little elves building illegal settlements. What would Jesus say about the flagrant violation of UN Resolution 242? (WWJSAFVUN242?).

Not sure who promised this:





Thank God George Bush showed up to make peace in the Middle East. He's only been in office for 7 years.

My job is pretty amazing. Today I chatted with a former aviation engineer who had visited Seattle in the late 70's. His host from Boeing took him Sockeye fishing in the Sound and their dinghy deflated and they had to be rescued. It felt surreal to be having this conversation with a refugee en route to resettlement in Utah.
Words like Mosul and Anbar have taken on new meaning as there are faces and stories to go with the names of these places. I have met engineers, doctors, lawyers, librarians, cartographers and artists. The stories are sad and heartbreaking but as always there is a whole lotta hope in the room that the US will offer a new start in life. I try to feel hopeful too- that people will be kind to them and recognize what they have been thorough and not call them terrorists and beat them up at the 7-11. And that all the lost husbands, wives, parents, children, neighbors, and limbs are not in vain but of course we all know that nothing will ever be worth it.

Meanwhile we work out at our swanky gym across the street from Starbucks and Bennigans. On TV I watch Oprah, Dr. Phil and Shaq's Big Challenge (the latter being my favorite). Hummers careen through neighborhoods of McMansions that would make Carmela Soprano swoon. There is still the odd empty lot with a few Bedouin families and their grazing sheep but soon they will be gone as the Gulfies build their summer homes in Amman to escape the heat and the mall craze continues. We go to dinner parties with relief workers where conversation topics include the rising land costs in Kurdistan and the best carpet shops in Damascus. Our friends are Palestinians, Circassians, and Assyrians-not to mention Serbian, American, Italian and Romanian. I love the blue, blue sky and the olive trees and the kindness and complexity of the Arab culture. It's a fantastic place to be at a pivotal moment in history .

We are excited for spring (it's snowing today!)







and more days at the Dead Sea wallowing in the mud. In a few weeks I'll go to Cairo for work so we will spend Reed's birthday in Egypt.

Lots of people ask how to help. The resettlement agencies always need help-always. Many Iraqis are very highly educated and skilled... if you would like to help with job or financial assistance I can put people in touch with an agency in any city in the US. And of course the Burundians are still en route-I was interviewed for this article in the Des Moines Register: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008801130331

As always Reed updates the blog and if you click on a photo it will take you to the gallery: http://blog.reedko.com/



So here's to Peace on Earth. Let's hope that it actually materializes this year- Inshallah.
Mucho love, Ann

Friday, January 18, 2008

Bethlehem : The House of Meat

Bethlehem: The House of Meat

Beit Layhm. It means the house of meat. But we just think it means where Jesus was born. From Israel, Jerusalem, to get to Bethlehem, you have to go through a check point. There is a wall. A huge wall, 40ft high in places, made of steel reinforced concrete sections that were maybe made somewhere else to preclude terrorist involvement in the manufacture and dropped into the ground and linked by giant helicopters. It is very grey and ominous, as we approach on Christmas eve, with nary a red or green light. You can see the lights in the watchtowers, but they aren't very festive, being spots to ease the aim of snipers picking off suspected destroyers of peace. Not very festive at all. But still, hope abides, because its quiet and it looks like we can all get along for one more day.

The taxi driver from Jeru drops us off for 20 shekels at the cattle gate and we weave through it gazing at the razor wire. Like sheep making our way to slaughter we wander into the building made of half inch thick rumpled steel. Just like at the border with Jordan, all the checkpoint officers are women. They are so bored. So bored, and still they ask the cursory questions and try to see if your eyes dart when you answer.

And I make the bahahahah sheep sound as we scuttle thru the turnstile. But its pretty grim here, and no one laughs. The grimness doesn't wear off for a while, because we quickly cop to the fact that there is some active oppression going on here.

And the grafitti on the bethlehem side of the wall confirms it.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Temple Mount

We didn't expect so many people in Jerusalem to speak Arabic. 9 of 10 Taxi drivers were Palestinian, 1 was Israeli. It depends where you catch the Taxi. The Arabic taxi drivers said that a lot of Hebrew words sounded like Arabic. That the languages came from the same root. Proto-semitic, I think is the root language.

The rock is under the golden dome behind us:


Jerusalem is a city with a walled city inside that has inside of it the core of three world religions.


And that part is very quiet and hard to get to if you look a certain way or can't answer questions a certain way or betray a certain bent. But still its way too easy to get there. Ariel Sharon got there and 3000 people died.

Inside the Mosque that was built on top of the ruins of the second temple (destroyed 70 AD by the ROmans) that was built on the ruins of the temple of Solomon (destroyed ~500bc by the Babylonians, when the Jews were first exiled from Israel), there lies a rock.

This rock is where Mohammed ascended to heaven for a day and got the stories from the Angels that we call the Q'uran.

This rock is where Abraham checked the mortal descent toward the throat of
his son of a sacred knife. When the Ram appeared. Jews say that son was Isaac, Muslims say it was Ishmael.

This is the Rock where Jacob dreamt of a ladder where angels went up and down from here to heaven.

Some say this is the rock where creation began.

I always thought that the second temple was utterly destroyed except for the western wail (wailing wall), but I read somewhere that all four walls remain and a number of pillars. They call it the wailing wall, maybe, because the Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple.

Here's us squatting near the east wall:


So we were standing at the entrance to the dome and a guy was sitting on a plastic deck chair there, so we figured he was some kind of guard. There are doors on each side of the dome but we didn't try them because nobody else was, until we got to the western side where we saw people going in, but they were obviously Muslim. I thought the guy was a guard, but it became pretty apparent that that wasn't the case when he went to have a smoke and left his 6 year old son at the door while he meandered over and chatted with the guy sweeping cigarette butts up off the holiest site in the world. We went to talk to him anyway to see if it was OK to go in, about the same time a guy with a Yankees baseball cap was talking to him. He had some English, but I picked up "Blame king Hussein" and "Forbidden" and "welcome". So we decided not to go in, not to risk offending anyone. But we talked to the guy in the Yankee's cap and he kind of moved his toe around in a circle on the ground and pointed, and then indicated the whole whole area saying "You could pose as a muslim and go in, but not a good idea, really. This piece of real estate is the most contested land in the world right now. Right here. War and destruction over the rock of creation. I don't know why that guard was saying 'blame king Hussein'". I tried to interject here that Hussein of Jordan made the Mosque off limits to no Muslims but Yankee hat was on a roll.

So the current King of Jordan, Abdullah is the son of Hussein who is the grandson of King Abdullah, who was assassinated pretty close to where we were standing on the Temple Mount because, they think, some Palestinians thought Abdullah was trying to negotiate peace with Israel. Always dangerous work. Work his grandson eventually completed.

So we left the Temple Mount and made our way to some bakery in the Christian quarter. We'd been hanging out with a couple from Florence who were working in Jordan since 6:30 am, and I knew that none of us had eaten yet, so I figured this would be breakfast. Coffee and pastry for everyone else, but by God breakfast for me. Or brunch, for it was well nigh on noon. Hummous and pita.

So we went back to the Hotel, it was 12/23. On Christmas eve we planned on going to Bethlehem.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Coming into Jerusalem, we hopped a bus heading for the Damascus Gate.








It was December 23rd, apparently a pretty high traffic day in Jerusalem. The last day of the Islamic Eid and the beginning of some thick Christian inflow. We had a booking in the 7 Arches Hotel which they lost, which didn't surprise either one of us at all. The hotel had the ambiance of an institution like, say, the Department of State in D.C. Perched on the top of Mount Olive, where somewhere in the bible it says the Angels go for vacation, it commands a splendid view of Jerusalem. This is totally true.










What they don't tell you is that there are 197 rooms and only 7 enjoy this view. Those seven are all booked. They also don't mention that the comforters on the bed are so worn the frigging cotton is drooling through the liner. Threadbare. Before I get a chance to see what kind of holy book is in the drawer, Ann peels out of the room and back down the hall, the afterimage of her approbation momentarily burned into my retinas.

We check into the Ambassador, there is no holy book in the drawer.

From here it is a 15 minute walk past the American Colony Hotel to the walled part of Jerusalem. Five out of six world religions agree: This is the part where a lot of significant events occurred. Stuff like the 14 stations of the cross.






We walked by most of these stations but surprise! There is some argument about where they are between protestants and Catholics.

Wouldn't it have been cool to go to every station and take a picture of one of us posed there? Wouldn't it have been cool if we even walked to every station and considered for a moment what happened there? Yeah probably. We got to some:

Across from the first station:




Near the second:




I was surprised by how many people spoke Arabic in Jerusalem. In the taxis, for instance, we had 9 Arab taxi drivers the whole time we were there and 1 Israeli taxi driver.