Day trip to Madaba with Peace Corps Volunteers

Over the Eid holiday we hosted two friends of our friend Rob. (We offer our hospitality to friends of friends, or else we'd have no houseguests at all). Rob's friends had just finished up their 27 months in Morocco. We hoped that a few days with us, as fellow Americans in the Arab world, would help their transition back to the States - but we have our doubts. We had a dinner in their honor, and invited a few of the many former Peace Corps volunteers who now work for the State Dept. I don't think our dinner table discussion (rug shopping in Syria and the discovery of a new spa) compared with their tales of washing clothes in a plastic bucket. Or as one of our guests put it - when he was in the Peace Corp he met many State Department officers and found them all to be "neo-colonialist [jerks]" I fear we left the same impression on our guests. We were, however, able to provide hot water, a down comforter and Internet access - so maybe they can be bought.

They took a day trip to Petra and the next day we showed them the Baptism site and Madaba (site of a mosaic map and our favorite restaurant in Jordan). They suggested we all go somewhere we hadn't been before but we had to admit that Jordan is a small country and their really aren't that many places we haven't seen. We are thinking about organizing an outing to Mafraq because we heard there is a sheikh there with a herd of really pretty white camels but it didn't seem like a good destination for people who are only in Jordan for two days. In the Madaba church, which is known for the mosaic map, we noticed a different (less ancient) mosaic which we thought looked a lot like Joseph with his baby Jesus hand puppet.