Trip for Eid al ul-Adha

Sednaya Church
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All:

As most of you know I am living on the other side of the world in Jordan. I haven't talked to most of you in quite some time now and I thought it would be a good idea to keep in touch. Life has been good here and mainly consists of working, sleeping and eating. The normal workweek is 6 days a week with Friday being our only day off. I am working for a French water systems engineering company and we are building a drinking water plant for Amman. I thought I would share my recent trip to Syria with everyone; so read on if your interested, else just look at the pictures. Be sure to write me back to let me know how you are doing, what you’re doing and where you’re doing it.

I was being my usual naïve friendly self and talking to strangers on the bus when I think I stumbled upon the wrong crowd

Gathering for lunch with frieds in Damascus
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Ma Es Salama, (goodbye)

Evan

I recently took a trip to Syria for Eid, a Muslim holiday, from 9 Jan until 13 Jan. Damascus is only about a 3-hour car ride from Amman, however, the wait at the borders can take up to 3 hours. The Syrian border is utter chaos. It’s a large room with Syrian military guards everywhere. There are no lines or organization to the building just a few windows with hundreds of people trying get there passports stamped. All the while everyone is smoking in the building and there is absolutely no ventilation. The process is as follows:

Lost in the Bus
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1. push and shove your way to the front of the crowd
2. beg the guard that is handling the passports to take yours (you must explain why he should take yours instead of the person standing beside you)
3. stand back, your now at the mercy of the admissions officers
4. after 10min-3hours your passport will be given to someone at the front of the line who yells your name. When the recipient is identified the passport is passed through the crowd until it reaches you.

• Note if you do not speak Arabic this process is greatly inhibited

After two hours we were on our way to Damascus. We had to stop several times because the taxi’s windshield wipers weren’t working (it was pouring rain).

The first day we went to a small town named Ma’ula. This is last area of the world that Aramaic (the language of Jesus) is still spoken.

The second day I met up with my Arabic teacher who resides in Damascus. She took our group on a walking tour of the old city. We walked through the open-air markets where merchants yelled prices at us and desperately tried everything you can imagine. In Syria they do not import any products from the “west”, so you see knock offs of every type of product. For example I saw a vendor selling shirts that said, “Mike” and had the Nike check. From what I saw the products were extremely cheap.

On the third day we went to Palmyra, which is a Roman city to the north of Damascus. For me the ruins were not very exciting what was interesting to me was the vendors. They all sell post cards and offer camel rides and tours. Their existence and well being greatly depends on tourism and the money that it brings in. The kids begin learning languages at a very early age. Since the tourism is mainly from the western world they learn these languages first. As I was walking along enjoying the sites a kid of about 10 years of age approached me. As this was the 4 or 5 person that had tried to sell me postcards I decided to speak Spanish and convince him that I obviously didn’t know any English. He immediately started speaking Spanish with me. To my frustration I turned to a French colleague and spoke my broken French. The kid who, was still standing there, began to speak perfect French. At this point my colleague and I had run out of languages and out of admiration we paid the kid for some postcards. I think back to my days of Spanish class and I remember how difficult it was, even for the honors students who were in very advanced classes, and I look at this kid who was no older than 10 already speaking at least 4 languages. This absolutely blows my mind.

As a side note, the notion I had going into this project was that our educational system in the US must be far superior to any other country, for after all, we are the United States. That has been proven wrong time and time again. It is amazing what you can find even in remote areas of the world.

On the return trip to Damascus I was being my usual naïve friendly self and talking to strangers on the bus when I think I stumbled upon the wrong crowd. I started speaking with this kid in Arabic (believe it or not my Arabic was better than his English) when he and his friends realized I was an English speaker. I quickly told them I was from Canada and I was feeling a little uneasy about the situation. They all turned around and started asking me about my country where I lived what it was like. Later in the conversation two of the guys told me they were studying law. When I asked them what they wanted to do with their degrees, they quickly responded to me that they wanted to go be a part of the Saddam trial. They told me what a just and honorable man he is. I quickly turned the conversation to sports. About half way through the bus ride they started to whisper to each other and look back at me. They were getting up and milling around near my seat. At this point we were very close to the Iraqi boarder and I was getting a bit nervous. Finally I turned back to my friends to ask them what these guys were doing. Apparently there was a gas leak on the bus and they were trying to open a window or open the back door to get some fresh air. I was so busy thinking up images of them throwing me off the bus and taking me to Iraq that I had not even noticed the awful smell on the bus. Anyway, the point of the story is that all I had heard from my friends, family, and the western media was negative things about Syria, so much that it had been in the back of my mind the whole time I was there. Not one time did I ever feel threatened or endangered while I was there. Syrians made it very clear that they did not like our government but it’s completely understandable, they are living with the decisions that our government makes concerning our foreign policy. However, I will be very quick to point out that they love Americans.

Every night we were eating at 4-star restaurants, with 4 or 5 courses and a few bottles of wine. The cost per person was equivalent to about 5 USD. The last night was no different, we were dining in style as usual. I unfortunately made the mistake of eating fish. About two hours after the main course we were sitting in my friend’s Aunt’s house when the food poisoning hit me like a brick wall. I have never been so sick in my entire life. It only lasted one long night but it was not fun at all. Hindsight being 20/20, everyone I spoke to now says, “never eat fish or shell fish in a situation when you don’t know the origin of the meat. Oh well, lesson learned the hard way.

On the way home we again took a taxi. I think the price was equivalent to about $15, not bad considering the drive. We went to the Damascus taxi station and bartered our fee to Amman. If you have never seen a taxi from the Middle East, I suggest you look at one on the Internet, it’s quite the automobile. They are quite different from the taxis in the States. First of all, since the driving is so much different (basically no laws and no enforcement by any type of police) the cars must be very small in order to fit anywhere. In the interior, all of them have the typical Middle Eastern rug hanging from the ceiling. Driving is absolute chaos in Damascus, lines don’t mean anything and speed limits don’t mean anything either. I even saw cars driving on the opposite side of a divided highway! When you approach a traffic light everyone wants to be at the front of the line. So if you have a road with two lanes in each direction, cars will line up 4 across. When its time to go everyone honks their horn and merges into each other.

On the return trip, the borders were just as much fun as the first time except this time I was still sick from the fish and tired from not sleeping the night before.

All and all it was a wonderful trip. Syria is a beautiful country, and the people are very warm and friendly. Even to Americans from Canada.