Our GX Delegation

Nov. 26, AM

This day at 12PM a driver for Global Exchange would pick me up and take me to the Amman Inn Hotel. I took a short walk from my current hotel. I would only walk a few blocks on the meandering streets for fear of getting lost. Then I heard, the Call to Prayer, typically heard throughout Muslim areas. I had heard it the morning also, shortly after I woke up at about 3AM. If you have not heard this religious chant, it is a most beautiful sound. On my late morning walk, I then heard another sound. A flute maybe; a child practicing perhaps, in one of the apartments overhead. I recognized the song as "Fur Elise," but just the first few bars of Beethoven's masterpiece. I walked, and the song seemingly followed me. My mystery was finally solved when a truck came up the road filled with propane gas tanks and piping out Fur Elise over and over again. It seemed out of character to see this in an Arab country; but then again, why not, who really owns the great composers?

Nov. 26, PM

I finally met the other members of the Global Exchange (GX) delegation as they appeared from many places. Maruko, Jenny and David all came from San Francisco, independently, a paralegal, in advertising, and an arborist, respectively. Peter, a computer analyst from Ontario, Canada; Richard, an Episcopal minister and Anthony, a real estate agent, both from Chicago; Lisa, a travel agent and significant other, Bill, a non-practicing physician from Sacramento CA, Kendall, a psychologist from Reno, Nevada; Nuriya, a web designer at Stanford University; and me, a letter carrier from Cleveland, Ohio comprised the delegation. We also finally met our group leader Khalid, an environmental engineer from Amman, Jordan.

Khalid Jarrar, GX group leader is originally an Iraqi Palestinian. He left Iraq in 2005. He was kidnapped in Iraq and released 2 weeks later. Khalid was one of the first bloggers after the US invasion of Iraq. His now famous blog is www.secretsinbaghdad.blogspot.com.

Nov. 27, AM

Today we met officials from the UN High Commissioner's Office on Refugees and a Jordanian, Palestinian journalist who remembers the Nakba, the displacement of Palestinians, of 1948. This will be detailed tomorrow, inshaallah.