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It was there that I finally started to grasp what the international diplomacy community, the NGOs, the militaries, the governments, the corporate interests, the colonial forces were really doing. The camp was a bustling village, but Amman itself felt like Switzerland compared to everywhere else I’d visited during my Middle Eastern travels. Their hospitality and eagerness to learn about me, and to absorb the English language, was paradigm-shifting for me. People born in this refugee camp were older than I was. The cement block buildings, the schools, businesses, and family homes thrown up in a rush, but filled with precious family heirlooms dragged away from their previous homes, or more likely the homes of their parents. I will never forget the feeling of entering the camp, an established city in existence for over fifty years, but existing in a liminal purgatory. His friend was working with UNRWA, and invited me to volunteer in a refugee camp teaching English to Palestinian women there. He was on his way back to his apartment in beautiful Amman, and said I could stay with him there. That’s where an American journalist living in Amman found me, and rescued me. #Safe exam browser haiku for freeShaken, ashamed, and with a very out of whack budget due to the fact that I was supposed to be spending a month living for free in the desert, I convinced a little hostel to give me a huge discount in exchange for some social media and English translation help. #Safe exam browser haiku driverI asked the maids to come with me, but how could I help them, really? They helped me find a driver to get me out of there and take me to Wadi Musa, where the tourists all gather before they visit the ruins of Petra. So I ran away, in the middle of the night. I was mortified, and afraid, and paralyzed. The Filipina maids (who were able to speak to me in basic Spanish) told me that they were being treated terribly, and when I tried (alone, in a remote desert) to talk to him about our concerns, he responded by menacingly trying to coerce me into some sort of seduction. But after just a few days there, I began to see cracks in the moral facade of the proprietor. ![]() I was first meant to be doing a longterm working stay at an eco-lodge in the Dana nature reserve, high on an ancient cliff overlooking the deserts stretching out toward the Israeli border. My Arabic never got great, but it improved much faster than that of my fellow students, living in fancy foreign-style apartments on the luxury island of Zamalek.Īfter the month of language immersion, I traveled the rest of the country, then ventured into Jordan. The only time we really talked “politics” was when we had to pay bribes to the police, or when my gracious Egyptian hosts let me know that I was making some sort of social faux pas that as a woman living like a local was totally taboo. I learned to play backgammon, and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes indoors. I was the only international student who was living and working with Egyptians. We could walk to Tahrir Square from where I lived, and the society seemed - from my superficial foreign perspective - to be quite stable. I was studying public and cultural diplomacy, and took an intensive course in Arabic in Cairo, working for my room and board in a youth hostel in the old city, Funduq Africano (African House Hotel).
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