Summer Happenings

Two months later, and I'm well aware this is a well overdue entry. I'll try to retell what has been going on since my last entry without boring you too much, but unfortunately, due to my lack of keeping an accurate track of daily activities, it will not be very detailed. But at least you'll get an idea of has been keeping my attention for the past two months.

I spent most of June in Southern Jordan in the village. I essentially hung out with some other Americans, going on visits, and just enjoying the village atmosphere. Around the last week of June, a volunteer team came in to teach English in the village, so I pitched in and helped with that before I moved to another village in the South to help a peace corp volunteer with a summer camp for a couple of days.

After all that was done, I was able to have a few days of R&R back in the capital before returning back to the South to partake in an archeological dig project. Four weeks later, I'm back in Amman catching up on some more R&R before heading back to the States to finish up school.

The dig was an experience. Despite how much tight muscle from digging and carrying dirt I might have, I must say I would do it again (and hopefully will have the opportunity to do it again). The site was based in the Iron Age in the ancient area of Edom. Long hours were spent digging into dirt where there seemed like there couldn't possibly be anything, but in the end, some pretty awesome items were found. I wish I could even begin to really explain the events that unfolded, but like I said, I failed quite miserably keeping accurate accounts of the events of the day. But to give you a sneak peak of what a typical dig day was like, here is the schedule we went by:

6:00- Rise and Shine
6:30- Breakfast (cookies and tea)
7:00- to the dig site; digging
9:00- second breakfast (Bread, veggies, boiled eggs, and sometimes juice) Dig again
11:00- Fruit break (which was most fruitless)
12:30- wrap up your work, clean up, and head out.
1:30- lunch
2:00-4:00 Rest time (which usually resulted in everybody chilling in the Bedouin tent at the campsite taking naps. Our tents were about 20 degrees warmer inside than it was outside)
4:00- visiting time with the locals
6:30- dinner and small group meetings
8:30- back to campsite

And the day was repeated. Usually the week consisted of 5 dig days, a free day, and a lab day. In lab day, the jobs varied from cleaning pottery, taking photographs of finds, making 3-d scanning images of some finds, restoring pottery by trying to match the pieces together, and entering the pottery bags into the database system for reference later.

One day, we heading up to the dig site like a typical day, only be to faced with a sand storm that made it nearly impossible to dig. Every time you looked up, your eyes and mouth and nose were bombarded by at least a pound of dust. After two hours of digging in such conditions, the supervisors called it a day. The next day when we returned, the weather wasn't any better. Instead of digging from 7:00-12:30, we returned at 1:00 and dug until 5:00. (I must say, I enjoy digging in the mornings better.)

Some of the visits we went on were definitely mind opening. You would think that after living here for 19 years previously, I would be use to somethings (for example, how young some girls are when they get married), but I guess I've had the mentality that it is a modern age, so maybe they've become more modern as well. We went on one visit, the girl was 24 and was about to have her sixth child. Another visit, a girl got married at 15, was currently 19, and had three children. It was mind opening to see that although some of the country has become more modern in ideas of women working, not being married at such young ages, etc, there is still a large portion of the country that still resembles the type of society found in this country a decade ago.

That is a very brief overview of what has been going on since my last entry, and an even more brief overview of what my dig experience was like. Inshallah (God willing), I'll eventually put pictures up of the past two months.