Cultural exchange

After a nice long post about the weekend travels, I don’t have a ton of time left to write about the second half, which were the work travels. I went to the Jordan Valley again and ended up spending the night at Sherhabil bin Hassnah eco-park, the project I am working on with FoEME.  I was not expecting to spend the night there, so I was ill prepared. I also had to be in Salt for a meeting at 8:30 the next morning, which meant getting up at 5:30 to catch two buses.

While I would have liked to have my toothbrush and a change of clothes, I had a great time which was spent visiting Mayor’s offices trying to get stamps and signatures and hiking around the park with Abed, my supervisor, envisioning its future in my poor, falling apart sandals that never dreamed they would be put through the type of traveling they have been through when they were manufactured for easy strolls down paved summer streets.

I have much to say about this trip and previous trips to the park, but not a ton of time to do it, so I will merely post this vignette of an amusing moment, with the intention of more to come:

I was at the park’s visitor’s center with Abed and our park manager, Yahya, who is a local Bedouin man who has worked at the park for several years. He speaks a little English and I speak a little Arabic, so we manage to communicate in simple conversation.

It was evening, and we had finally stopped working for the day. After we had cleaned up and changed into sweatpants and t-shirts that weren’t drenched in sweat, Abed started complaining about stiffness in his back. He had had this complaint before and I had suggested that he try yoga. He always said, “yes, you have to show me sometime,” so finally I cleared some of the chairs up and showed him how to breathe deeply and stretch down to his toes.

Within twenty minutes I had both men stretched in “downward facing dog”, a basic yoga position in which you form a triangle with your hands on the ground in front of you and your feet on the ground behind you with your butt up in the air. Both were concentrating hard on breathing as instructed. Looking at the slightly incongruous scene I had to sit back and laugh at the strange clash of cultures stretched out in front of me. California meets rural Jordanian life.

I was very amused by this, but Abed swears that his back felt much better and that he wants to keep learning more. Furthermore, our chairman today told me that he wanted to know more about this yoga business too.

What can I say? After all I’ve learned from being here, its nice to know I can give something back.

Sherhabil bin Hassnah at sunset

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