Petra

Last week, we traveled to Jordan for four days, and the highlight of the trip was Petra. It's a bunch of cool natural rock formations where ancient civilizations lived and carved incredible tombs and monasteries and other great stuff. We spent the day exploring the sites, kickin' it with the local Bedouins, and admiring the camels. I took about 1,223,433,523 pictures (so maybe I exaggerate a little) but here are just a few. Please excuse my extreme fashion blunder with the skirt and tennis shoes. It was hot, okay? When you can't wear shorts, you have to improvise. And I didn't want to smash my toes. I'll try to get up some more Jordan pictures soon, but seeing as we have final exams this week, no promises.

This is the treasury in which Indiana Jones found the Holy Grail

Petrificus Totallus: A petrifying experience

This lady came to Petra as a tourist when she was 18, then promptly fell in love with one of the local Bedouin shopkeepers and married him. I thought about doing it myself. Just think of all the romantic donkey rides I could have in the sunset. I'm sure my mother would approve.

This is Jack Sparrow, or so he said. And no, that is not eye makeup. It's a natural sun-shading technique he so happily applied on one of the guys in our group, just before telling him it doesn't wash off for 4-7 days.

A local Bedouin girl

Don't mess.

Hurdling over the monastery. No big.

Tons of the men in Jordan wear these red and white kaffias

Yep, I rode a camel, and it didn't even spit on me. Life goal: Check

We kept having to step to the side as these chariots came thundering through the Siq, or canal area.

Posting the colors.

Sitting on top of the world after a hot, sweaty climb.

The Siq

First glimpse of the treasury early in the morning. Truly spectacular.

Finding Myself

Sometimes when I read or talk to people, I come in contact with the phrase “I found myself…” For instance someone will say, “When I graduated from college, I found myself jobless.” I always thought this phrase was dumb. Like, what, you just woke up one day and realized you don’t have a job? Like, oh hey! Here I am! And look, I don’t have a job!

You didn’t see that one coming? The whole idea of “finding oneself” in a situation out of the ordinary seemed stupid to me.

Until now.

The longer I’m in Jerusalem, the more this phrase is starting to make sense. I get on the bus, I go where my teachers tell me to go, I follow the guides where they take me, and suddenly I look around and ask myself, ‘How on earth did I get here?’

This happened to me a few weeks ago when we took a field trip out to the Negev Desert and visited a Bedouin village out in the middle of nowhere. These villages are unrecognized by the government and the people live in crude conditions under aluminum roofs in sandy wastelands.

As the bus drove down the dirt road, we passed small shacks and barbed-wire fences, and we waved to school children smiling at us through the cracks in the walls. When the bus came to a stop on the side of the road, we hopped out to see a family of camels walking across the desert, and we squinted as the sand blew in our eyes. We then began our trek up a rocky path clear of vegetation as a little girl passed by, running across the sharp rocks and broken glass barefoot. Finally we came to a concrete building with slatted windows. We went inside and sat around the edges of the open room on cushions as a woman covered in a long black coat and a head scarf (despite the blistering heat) told us about the village, translating the Arabic to English.

After a few minutes of sitting in there, the battery to my headset died. I couldn’t really hear what she was saying anymore, I was hot and hungry, and the lighting wasn’t even good enough for pictures. I looked around the room and felt the warm wind blow through the windows, and that’s when it hit me.

I found myself.

Without quite knowing how, there I was sitting in the desert in some unnamed village in the Middle East. It struck me all at once. ‘How the heck did I get here?’

I mean yeah, I got on a bus, it drove down some roads, and then I walked to this little building, but really, how did I get here? I honestly couldn’t say.

After a little while, we visited a little school next door where grown women were learning how to read for the first time in their lives. They were using tables and whiteboards donated by the church and were struggling to master something I’d learned and taken for granted years ago. That’s when something else hit me.

It’s just not fair.

It’s not fair that I know how to read, that I sleep on a bed, that I have an actual roof over my head, and that I have a right to be taken seriously in society despite the fact that I’m a woman. It’s not fair that I have an education, that I get to wear what I want, that I’m allowed to go after my dreams, and that I get to choose what I want to do with my life instead of doing what somebody tells me I have to do. It’s not fair that after visiting that little village, I got to hop back on the bus and go home to dinner, while they had to stay there and keep on living their lives.

My heart broke for them that day. As I sat on that flat cushion in that dark building, I no longer felt hungry and I no longer cared about optimal lighting for photographs. I wished there was something I could do. I wished there was some way I could give those children real homes and a real pair of shoes. I wished so much and yet I felt so helpless.

I realized then, that maybe finding myself isn’t so bad after all. Maybe in order to find myself, I first have to lose myself. And maybe it’s when I lose myself, that I can really see the world how it is.

To Be Heard by a Million

 I have this romantic notion about bells. For some reason, hearing city bells ringing across landscapes from tall towers just makes my heart sing. I especially love the bells here for a few reasons.

1. I always think of that Coldplay song “I hear Jerusalem bells a-ringing…” and how cool it is that I actually do.

2. It makes me think of the ancient times here in the city and all the bells that must have played through these streets during significant moments in history.

3. It’s a nice break from the prayer call that happens five times every day (which, by the way, I can hear as I’m writing this).

Here at the Jerusalem Center, we are so privileged to have a huge, beautiful organ. The Jerusalem branch president who lives here plays it, and he plays it very well. Each Sunday (not the Sabbath, remember?) he is invited by the YMCA to play the bells in their huge bell tower that stands several stories high and looks out over the entire city of Jerusalem.

Each Sunday at 11:15, he invites the students to join him in the bell tower and watch him play.  When I heard this, I was thrilled. We took the tiny elevator up, and as we got out we saw him sitting at what looked like a piano on steroids. Instead of keys, it has big levers that you push with your fists. I was mesmerized by the sound.

We went up one floor to watch the bells ring and the sound in the tower was deafening. We could see the entire city from all sides of the tower, and I knew that the song was reaching all the houses and buildings in sight.

When I came back down to where he was playing, I was surprised to see a student sitting at the bells, playing a hymn from the Mormon hymn book. He played beautifully and when he finished, the branch president asked if anyone else would like to try. A few other students did, so he had them practice once on the small bell set, and then they could move to the real ones.

I decided this was an opportunity I could not pass up. I opened the hymn book to the shortest, easiest one I could find, which just so happened to be “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow.”

I stumbled through it on the small set. It felt strange playing with my fists instead of fingers, and the overall feel of the instrument was foreign. After I finished playing on the small set, I was so nervous that I almost didn’t even try on the real set. Thanks to peer pressure, I gave in and plopped the hymn book on the bell set. My heart was beating out my chest as I sat down, but after playing the first note, I was hooked.

I wasn’t just hearing Jerusalem bells a-ringing, but I was ringing them. I was playing the bells of Jerusalem. There are few moments in my life that I consider magical, but I think this one truly was. On the second verse of my little hymn, the branch president joined me in playing the harmony and the music came alive.

To me, those bells really were my praise to God, from whom all blessings flow. That day, over a million people heard my song from a million different backgrounds and a million different lives under a god who loves them all.

When the clock struck noon, we lined up at the bells, and each student took a turn hitting the key until we reached 12, striking our spot in history.

Julie, the Shepherd

This week, we took a field trip out to this nature park called Neot Kedumim. There, we learned about all the plants, animals, and water systems of this land that appear in the Bible. It sounds boring but was actually incredibly fascinating.

We drew water from wells, cooked pita dough we made over a fire we built and seasoned it with hyssop we picked and crushed. We also reenacted the story of Ruth (I was Naomi—don’t ask where the British accent came from) and watched a Jewish man read from a scroll that was 200 years old.

The highlight of the trip, however, had to have been the sheep herding. Anyone who really knows me knows how much I adore farm animals and how skilled I am at controlling them.

They also know I’m a compulsive liar.

The guide put us into a small group, sent us out into a flock of sheep and few miscellaneous goats, and gave us the task to bring the sheep to a circular location for 20 seconds. I danced around the piles of sheep poop as I made my way out there, keeping an eye out for snakes that might be lurking below and came up to a goat.

“Hey goat,” I said lifting my hands to push it, then seeing the dirt clumped in its hair, and deciding against it. “Uh…move goat.” I waved my hands at it its face which proved entirely unsuccessful. I kind of looked at, sighed, and nudged its neck with my leg (no, I didn’t kick the goat, okay?). It took a step and my hopes were lifted. “Yeah goat, that’s it. Keep walking.”

After a few more nudges, the goat joined the flock and it was just a matter of keeping them all together.  At one point I looked down, and behold! A stick! I felt a little like Moses as this little stick became my new prodding utensil, because no way in heck was I touching that smelly beast.

Now I know some of you reading this aren’t as experienced in the ways of shepherding as I am, so I should let you know from my vast knowledge on the subject that basically, sheep are really dumb. They’ll follow the sheep in front of them no matter what, even if it means walking off a cliff. Though I didn't send any sheep off a cliff, I did witness this phenomenon through the form of a little lamb.  

This little guy was in the front of the flock and in just 30 seconds of standing still, the poor dear snuggled on the rocky ground and fell asleep. Oh, he was just so cute sleeping there, except that like I said, he was in the front, which meant none of the other sheep would move anywhere.

He was so small, yet he had such an impact on this whole flock. We had to shake him, poke him, and even pick him up to get him to wake up. Once he got back to his feet and started moving, the rest of the flock followed and we were able to gather them in a circle. We closed them in and hastily counted to 20. Success! I’m a shepherd yet.

From this angle, it actually looks like I'm touching the goat.

Look, they actually touch them. Gross.

 Check out that stick in action.

So effective.

Yep, I made that pita. Mmm good.

Preschool, In Arabic

Last week, we had “service day.” This means we all signed up to do some sort of service in the city, and I signed up for the preschool. I didn’t know what that entailed, but it sounded like a party. We all gathered at the bottom of the Jerusalem Center gate and walked over there in one big mob as our leaders told us our task.

“Yeah, so basically we’re just going to play with the kids.” Okay, sounds easy enough. “Oh by the way,” they said, “these kids don’t speak English.”

When we showed up at the Palestinian school on what just so happened to be their last day of school for the summer, our leaders kicked us into a classroom with a list of suggested activities, and said “Have fun!” So there we stood with a bunch of little brown eyes looking up at us waiting for us to do a trick or something. We quickly looked down at our papers and saw suggestions like, “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” “London Bridges,” and more. We decided “Ring around the Rosie” would be a pretty painless one, so we got them all up in a circle and started running round and round ‘til we all fell down. Then as we were sitting on the ground, I was struck with panic.

‘Shoot,’ I thought to myself, ‘What’s the little song that makes us all stand back up?’ Then, I remembered they don’t speak English anyway so the new version of the song went something like this, “The cows are in the meadow the bees are in the hive, nahahha, something something we all stand UP!” It worked.

After that, we tried some hokie pokie and a few other songs. Combined, that all lasted about 3.6 minutes which was great except we were supposed to be there an hour. This called for game of leap frog. The kids didn’t understand it at all, yet somehow thought jumping over each other was a highly enjoyable activity. Just as I got them all riled up and out of control, it was time for me to switch positions and go face paint.

And by facepainting, I mean smearing cheap lipstick on their cheeks that vaguely resembled a heart or flower. They loved it though, and man those kids were cute.

After that, we played with the kids in their classrooms for awhile. This mostly entailed stacking up blocks for the sole purpose of knocking them down, or attacking one of the guys in my group which quickly became a mob of about 23 four year-olds against one. I’m not sure the teachers were thrilled about that one, but the kids thought it was fantastic.

We ended with a last day of school celebration where we all went in the hallway, cranked up the Arabic music and had a regular dance party. I think the real ones celebrating though were the teachers. At the sound of the music, they snapped their fingers and shimmied up a storm in their headscarves and everything until sweat dripped down their faces.

The kids, on the other hand, were bored spitless. That is, until I brought out my little point-and-shoot camera. It didn’t take long before they pleaded in Arabic, “Me! Me!” and needless to say, I know have about 30 blurry pictures at butt-level on my SD card.

Check out that face paint job.

Hey look, I made it in one!

Never a dull moment at preschool!

The Old City

I realized I write about the Old City of Jerusalem a lot, but saying “The Old City” doesn’t mean the same thing to you as it does to me.

See, there are three parts of Jerusalem and they’re all within walking distance. You have East Jerusalem which is the Palestinian Arab side where everything is in Arabic and it's kind of how you might imagine the Middle East. Then there’s West Jerusalem. That’s where most of the Israeli Jews live. It’s very modern, very clean, and everything is in Hebrew. It’s how you might imagine a nice European city.

And then there’s the old city. This is the part of the city enclosed in the walls built by Suleiman the Magnificent back in the 16^th century. It’s a maze of narrow walkways and tunnels lined with shops displaying anything from shiny belly-dancing clothes to leather sandals. It’s where the shopkeepers learn our names and offer “special price for Mormons.” It's a collision of cultures. 

Walking around in there can make a person feel like Aladdin. You turn down one way, duck through a little doorway, and suddenly you’re on a rooftop. The city is really quite small and it’s made of four quarters. There’s the Muslim quarter, the Jewish quarter, the Christian quarter, and a small Armenian quarter, and distinguishing between the four is absurdly easy.

The Old City is where the history is, and it’s almost tangible. Turning into a doorway may lead a person down a tunnel and into a cave under the city that just so happens to be the Virgin Mary’s birthplace, or at least one of them (I know, right?). The Old City is where Jesus roamed and Herod reigned. It’s where Abraham came to sacrifice his son Isaac 2000 years before the birth of Christ.

This Old City is full of mystery and unpredictability. It’s where little kids race by us on the stone streets on rollerblades (how they don’t kill themselves is beyond me), and where congregations of people saunter by, chanting behind a monk as they trace the path of Jesus when he carried his cross.

Yesterday, we smashed ourselves against the wall as a guy passed us pushing a wheelbarrow full of these:

Nobody batted an eye. I gagged.

That’s just what the old city is, and I love it.