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Posted by: host	4/28/2006
Jordan has turned out to be an amazing adventure. I have met some of the kindest people anywhere who are very welcoming to strangers. The hotel that the Royal Office has given us is the luxurious five-star Grand Hyatt Hotel. For the last few days the King of Spain occupies the top floor while Bunny and I have rooms on the third floor. This was the hotel where the terrorist bombing took place last December. Nine members of the hotel staff were killed in the blast and when I talk to some of the staff now, they tear up because these were friends not just colleagues. Jordan is a very safe country by Middle East standards, but last week there were tanks circling the hotel because of a top-level meeting between the King of Spain and the King of Jordan. The newspaper has also talked about large arms caches that have recently been seized that were earmarked for bombing in Amman. Yet there is very little crime here like we have in the U.S. so in many ways we feel very safe here in Jordan. Jordan has turned out to be an amazing adventure. I have met some of the kindest people anywhere who are very welcoming to strangers. The hotel that the Royal Office has given us is the luxurious five-star Grand Hyatt Hotel. For the last few days the King of Spain occupies the top floor while Bunny and I have rooms on the third floor. This was the hotel where the terrorist bombing took place last December. Nine members of the hotel staff were killed in the blast and when I talk to some of the staff now, they tear up because these were friends not just colleagues. Jordan is a very safe country by Middle East standards, but last week there were tanks circling the hotel because of a top-level meeting between the King of Spain and the King of Jordan. The newspaper has also talked about large arms caches that have recently been seized that were earmarked for bombing in Amman. Yet there is very little crime here like we have in the U.S. so in many ways we feel very safe here in Jordan. Today we went into the rural countryside where we stopped a number of small villages (7 to 10 homes each). I think I must have been the first person in a Hawaiian shirt to show up there. As people flocked to see who the foreigners were, I was struck by their friendly greetings that were genuinely warm. We asked young Mohammed, a 17 year old who was just going into the army, if he had ever heard bout AIDS. He said, “Yes”, he had, and I said, “Where, in school or the radio?” He said, “No, on television!” And sure enough in this little desert town, his very small home has a television as the only piece of furniture in the living room. His family invited us to stay for tea and we went to the trunk of our car and retrieved a number of purloined bakery goods from our morning breakfast at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. We shared a nice meal together and when I asked him why they were so kind to strangers, they said it was part of their religion. I asked them if they had any questions about America and the first question they wanted to know was “Do Americans invite strangers into their homes for coffee or tea?” I had to admit that Americans who live in the cities certainly would never do that, although Bunny interjected that she lived in the country and if somebody makes it down to her dead-end lane, she does welcome them in for a cup of tea. The last few days have been filled with schools and street outreach. We went to an all-girls high school where I was very circumspect about how I would talk about the transmission of HIV because all the girls wore the traditional Muslim veils over their heads and faces. When I finished telling my story and giving the news about HIV, an official from the Ministry of Education who was accompanying me interjected, “Wait, Dr. John, you haven’t talked about sex yet.” I was almost flabbergasted. So we then talked about the sexual transmission of HIV but then the woman, Aesha, said, “Okay, that’s enough.” The Koran forbids sex before marriage anyways, and the girls all nodded their heads in agreement. We visited another school call Jubilee, so named in honored of the former King Hussein’s 50th anniversary on the throne two decades earlier. Two really good students, Amer and Farah, had made a film for the students on AIDS and I’ve asked them to make a shorter version that we can post on our website that will be in Arabic with English translations. This was an amazing school that was considered public with many private school qualities. The kids there knew all about AIDS but were curious for some of the facts that are often glossed over in polite Muslim conversation. I had a meeting with the Minister of Education, Dr. Khaled Toukon, who received his doctorate from MIT. We talked at length about our love for Cambridge and Boston and then we got down to business. I proposed a partnership between TeenAIDS and Jordan to have a satellite version of our website in Arabic that would be both medically accurate (my main concern) and also culturally sensitive. One of the key points that I’ve noticed here among Jordan youth is that they brag about not having sex before marriage, in the same way that western youth often brag about having sex. Do I think that Jordanian youth never have sex before marriage? No, because many of the young people I talk to acknowledge that there is some sexual experimentation by their friends, although very few people discuss it openly. I had a meeting with the Secretary General of the Health Ministry and his staff of experts. They told me that less than 500 people have contracted HIV/AIDS in Jordan. Undoubtedly, there are more cases that are unreported. Last night a health worker told us that he knew of friends in East Amman in the Palestinian refugee area who he knew had AIDS but they were not reported to any government agency. On the streets I conduct my AIDS attacks with Bunny and the young volunteers. A couple of times I have been confronted by disbelieving youth who say, “We don’t have AIDS in Jordan because we follow the Koran.” So I take their statement and I say, “Yes, you have AIDS albeit a small number but it is growing.” Jordan has welcomed in so many neighbors from other countries in the Middle East (including Palestinians who now account for 60 percent of the Jordanian population.) The Ministry of Health organized a press conference on Wednesday for me, and I was surprised to find that all the major newspapers and main television networks showed up. I talked about the invitation from King Abdullah for me to come to Jordan to speak to young people everywhere, and I asked the help of the media to spread the news widely. Last night on the main national television news, I was told that my colorful visage showed up and was a part of the major news happenings for that day. *One of the best events that we attended was the graduation of 30 university students from a volunteer HIV program in community service. Mozon was the boy in charge of the graduation who organized the AIDS service groups at the University of Jordan. Every university student must complete 10 hours of community service in order to graduate. It was purely by circumstance that we were going to the university on the day that these students had their graduation. The young people spoke about the AIDS projects they were working on. Three students made a film about AIDS that they were showing in schools and around the universities. The film was interesting because they said they had a hard time finding any students who would act in the movie because of the stigma of AIDS. This was the story line: A young Jordanian woman goes to an unidentified foreign country where she is injured in a car accident. She goes to the hospital and receives a bad blood transfusion that gives her HIV. She then returns to Jordan where she develops AIDS and dies. It is interesting to me that this is the “safest way” for even university students to talk about the issues of AIDS. A voice-over narration does mention that you can also get HIV sexually and by using needles. But of course, that is not likely in Jordan. Some of the other students talked about how they went around in schools where they presented programs on HIV education, but with a strong religious component. They asked me to speak and to hand out the diplomas to the graduating student. We then went for lunch altogether. Afterwards, about 10 of us gathered on the pathway and I began to tell the story of “Karen.” It’s one of my staples of AIDS stories that help explain the human face of the AIDS pandemic. Soon 35 students had gathered around to hear the story. Not only did it garner the attention of the university’s young people but the President of the 35,000 strong university system stopped by also to say hello and say thank you for our efforts. My translator was a smart, young woman named Reem who did an excellent job of talking to the large group that had assembled. It is interesting for us because some of our volunteers are traditionally Arabic dressed women with veils across their faces while others like Reem, with her modern frizzy hairstyle, blouse and jeans, represent the dichotomy of present day Muslim culture. Another highlight of Thursday was that we attended a workshop sponsored by Family Health International. The woman in charge, Basma, had invited 30 students to learn from professional actors how we do theater in schools on the subject of AIDS. This was right up my alley! I explained to them how we do Stop Action Theater and we did some practice improvisation. One of the funniest and perhaps most controversial was when I told 2 of the male students to reverse their roles and play young women at the mall who were being aggressively pursued by 2 males, who were played by females. While this gender role reversal is not unusual for my American students, it took a lot of guts for these Jordanian young people to attempt this. It also generated a lot of laughter. At the end of every role-playing session, we discussed the scenario and the comments raised by every participating student. Today we arrived in Aqaba in the Red Sea. It is a beach resort with a lot of young people because this is the long May 1st holiday weekend. On the route down here, our royal driver, Majed, drove at speeds close to 200 km. (we hit 160 miles per hour on one stretch) in one of the King’s royal fleets of silver Mercedes. We stopped and did AIDS attacks along the Dead Sea where young people were climbing down the cliffs to frolic in the water. You can’t actually swim in the water because the salinity is so high that you just float. A number of young people said they had heard about AIDS but beyond that, they knew very little. They eagerly take my cards and read the information on the back. Well that’s it for now. Bunny and I and our two volunteers, Hind (a girl of 17) and Mohammed (a boy of 21) are going for an evening stroll along the beach to talk to any young people we can find. Oh, one bit of bad news for me. Even with the help of the Royal Protocol Office, my visa application to both Sudan and Libya were turned down. It is becoming increasingly difficult for Americans to visit many of the countries in this large region. While I am personally disappointed, it is a shame that young people in those countries will not be getting the AIDS information that I am good at disseminating to curious and at-risk youth. Thank you.

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