A Day in the Life ... of Clinical Skills Exam

I set off early at 7:15am with Ethan for the 45 minute drive to the University to make sure that I arrived by 8am. Negotiating the university corridors with flights of stairs was a bit tricky with the buggy but I managed to enlist the help of students to carry the buggy up and down the steps. No-one was there when I arrived at the Clinical Skills laboratory where the practical exam would take place, although I had been assured by the nurse who is responsible for the lab that everything was ready for the exam.

Ethan in his buggy

A different definition of 'ready'

On entering I could see that everything was not quite ready! I spent a hurried half an hour sticking instructions to clinic room doors, sorting out boxes for students to put their written answers in and organising the manikins for the students to do CPR. Then the 6 doctors who were helping to examine the students arrived and I gave them their instructions and mark sheets. Eventually 9 students arrived who were going to be “simulated patients” but we needed 10. I explained the patient scenario and the student helping with the organisation quickly made some phone calls to try to recruit another student to help.

 Students demonstrate their skills on manikins like this one

Multitasking

By now it was 9am and time to start the exam. We were on a tight schedule of examining 18 students every half an hour for 3 hours. There wasn't much room for contingency plans! When the nurse brought the first group of students, we were still missing one simulated patient so I ended up taking this role and being the “patient” to have my blood pressure measured. Thankfully a lab technician doing the exam timing helped to feed Ethan some mashed banana and look after him whilst I was busy!
Eventually another student volunteered to help and took my place so that I could breastfeed Ethan and keep instructing each new group of students every half an hour. It was frustrating telling the students a number of times to put their written answers in the boxes and they did not listen. Perhaps because Jordanians can find it difficult to remember more than one or two instructions at one time.

 Putting answers in a box was a little too difficult to remember!

'Bend the rules' culture

Another problem that is rife in the university is cheating. The Clinical Skills laboratory has video cameras and microphones in each small clinic room and the lab technician called me to look at one room where it seemed that the student had talked on a mobile phone. I marched into his clinic room and demanded his phone which he sheepishly gave to me. When I turned the phone on to see if he had been making calls, I was amazed to see the screen saver was the table of blood groups that was the answer to one of the questions in the examination.

 The answers on the student's mobile phone!

The doctors praised me for the organisation of the examination but it was a challenge to make it organised when the students and others involved were not so organised! Thankfully it all went fairly well and we managed to examine over 700 students in 4 days.

Petra & Wadi Rum

Our recent family trip to Petra and Wadi Rum was enjoyable and also interesting because we can see some things which are changing and others which have stayed the same, as Morpheus would say.

Mother of the bullets

We visited an old Roman town called Um Al Rassas (Mother of the bullets), which has the biggest and most spectacular church mosaic we have ever seen. Kate felt like a real archaeologist when she and the kids cleared away lots of sand to reveal an amazing mosaic of two lions, which was hidden from view.

Mosaic of two lions discovered by Kate

Too much health and safety

Petra is still a place of amazing archaeological beauty, but not as fun as it used to be since the most interesting or exciting carved caves are now roped off in the interest of conservation or health and safety. It is good that they are considering these important things, since the numbers of tourists make it necessary if Petra is to remain in good condition and for the tourism industry to comply with international standards. But this also makes us feel that we need to look elsewhere for a real adventure, which has not been so sanitised.

At least they have not introduced Western style price labelling on all the craft stalls. Whilst all the gullible tourists were getting ripped off, Kate was using her Arabic and her expert negotiation skills to bring the local Bedouins down to a third of their asking price for a necklace which Kira wanted.

Petra treasury - you can't go inside anymore

Lawrence of Arabia would drive a Jeep today

We then went to Wadi Rum to find that it is still a great place for adventures. We hired a Bedouin to drive us around the desert in his Jeep so that the kids (and parents) could climb on rocks, jump around in sand dunes and explore a big canyon. Conservationists are also voicing concerns about the impact of all these jeeps, saying that tourists should only use camels like Lawrence did almost one hundred years ago in this very place. We like camel rides, but in small doses rather than the whole day, which is what it would take to get around the sites we saw in 2 hours in the Jeep.

 

Bedouin climbing the 'chicken rock'

We were impressed with the desert campsite, which showed a good level of understanding of Western tourist expectations, but remained authentically Bedouin.

Bob Marley and Michael Jackson

Modernisation of some things is good to see, but not Westernisation, which could slowly erode the heritage of authentic Bedouin culture. There is more danger of this in Petra, where the income from tourism has increased dramatically in recent years. The contrast can be seen in the choice of names of the animals which Kira and Isaiah rode. In Wadi Rum the camels they rode were called Hashish (Grass) and Irian (Naked). In Petra, the donkeys were called Monica and Whiskey, and the horses were called Bob Marley and Michael Jackson.

Day in the Life ... of a Dance Show

Star Wars ballet show

Only in Jordan would you get the opportunity to see a Star Wars ballet show. In the West, it would be considered very uncultured to contemplate such a concept. In the UK, a slang term for someone who is uncultured is 'Philistine', which is the same as the Arabic word for 'Palestinian'. Perhaps this explains why Kira's dance school in Amman, where the population is almost 80% Palestinian, decided to pick this subject for their ballet performance.

Short-term thinking

Kira had been practising hard and attending many rehearsals over the previous weeks and was very excited about performing her dance. Jordanians typically demonstrate shorter-term thinking than other cultures, so the whole show had been put together in the space of five weeks. I would not blame the dance school for this, since they know that it is very difficult to get parents to bring their children to rehearsals any more in advance than this. Some of the performers probably joined in at the last minute and learned the dance during the course of the intensive rehearsals over the last 2 days.

Find it yourself and don't expect the show to start on time

About 700 people came to watch the show, most of whom were members of the performers' extended families. Jordan is a 'high context' culture, which means that less information is communicated and you are expected to find out more for yourself. It is also a 'time loose' culture, so things rarely start on time. This meant that we struggled to find the right entrance at the cultural centre in the absence of any 'This Way' signs and the show ended up starting half an hour late, which did not surprise anyone.

MIB vs The Mask vs Darth Vader

I will now attempt to summarise the storyline that was danced and acted out in the show. It started with the Men In Black fighting 'The Mask', trying to confiscate his green mask, but Darth Vader came and stole it first. So the Men In Black set off in their space ship to find Yoda, in order to get a light saber for fighting Darth Vader but in the process ended up crash landing on the Avatar planet. There, they were attacked by aliens but got rescued by white fairies. Eventually they found Yoda, got a light saber, were rescued by Princess Leia and then caught up with Darth Vader and defeated him, enabling them to recover the green mask from him. This is a truly unique storyline, which could not be seen anywhere else in the world, because Jordan is a truly unique country. The Western view of 'culture' is so boring compared to this.

Day in the Life ... Visit to the Insurance Company

A car insurance claim in Jordan is a very different experience from the UK. In the UK, both drivers involved in the accident will exchange insurance details and then both will write their account of what happened. The two insurance companies will then decide who was at fault and therefore, which company will pay. The police only become involved if someone is seriously injured. Everything is done over the telephone or by post, unless there are further police proceedings.

In Jordan, the police must be called immediately for any crash. They decide who is to blame for the accident, and then write this in a report for the insurance company. When Kate had an accident in her car recently, the police rightly decided that it was the other driver's fault, so I had to go to his company to sort out the claim. These things are never sorted by telephone or post in Jordan.

 

Fortunately, my Jordanian friend came along to help guide me through the process. The insurance office was very full of other people making claims, and it took us a long time to talk to someone. There did not seem to be any queueing system, so it was a matter of barging in and pushing your papers further forwards than everyone else. We did not manage to complete the process before their 12pm closing time because they did not accept the photocopy I had of the other driver's insurance policy and he was not on their computer system.

The next day, we returned with the original policy, went to a few different offices to get different stamps and signatures on the forms and it was all finished in about half an hour. Everyone served me very quickly. 'Why was it so much easier today compared to the yesterday?', I asked myself. But then I realised that it was because I was wearing a suit, since I would be having an important business meeting later in the day. In shame-honour culture, the more honourable clients are served before the less honourable. Wealth is one characteristic of an honourable gentleman, so anyone in a smart suit will be served quickly, just in case they are someone rich and important. This is a source of great irritation to scruffy-looking Western tourists who complain that other people who arrived at the hotel reception after them are served first. I made a mental note to always wear my suit in these kind of situations in the future.

Getting a Jordanian Birth Certificate

I arrived on the road which contains the office which issues birth certificates at about 8am, after dropping Kira & Isaiah at school. I was not sure of the exact building and office to go to. As soon as I got out of my car, I was accosted by one of the many “fixit” guys who hang around trying to find people to help. They know all the offices and requirements on the road and can save a lot of confusion.

Mr Fixit didn't know everything

I had brought along all the paperwork I could possibly need, and first he took me off to the translation office to get an official certified translation of our passports. Then we went to the birth certificate office and was told that we needed a translation of our wedding certificate so we had to go back to the translation office and wait for them to translate it. When we got back to the birth certificate office, a queue had now built up but thankfully it had a post-office style ticket numbering system. Many establishments in Jordan have started using this kind of queueing system, since Jordanian queueing skills are no match for the British.

When my number came up I handed in all the paperwork, but was told that one of the forms needed a stamp from the hospital. “Ethan was born at home!” I told them, but they insisted that I go to our local hospital and get our doctor to stamp it.

Foreign Concept

I drove over to the hospital and they refused to stamp the form, but our doctor made a phone call to someone at the birth certificate office to explain the fully story of our home birth, which is a very foreign concept in Jordan. I returned to the birth certificate office and asked to speak to the man who our doctor had called. He promised me that there was no problem and told me to sit and wait for about an hour. 3 hours later, the birth certificate was ready, just in time for me to go back to pick up Kira and Isaiah from school at 2pm. On the birth certificate it simply states the name “Ethan” since the tradition here is to follow your first name with your father's name then grandfather's name and then family name. We had decided to follow this tradition for Ethan so he is called Ethan Paul John Miles, but it doesn't quite work on the local birth certificate since Paul's middle names are not his father's or grandfather's names! Thankfully when we apply for the British birth certificate and passport they write the name as we state it on the application form. 

Our visitors' last day

It was the final day of the visit of our friends from Cambridge. In the morning I took them to Mount Nebo and decided to try a new SatNav program on the way, but it was rather poor. There seems to be no decent satnav app for Jordan, so it is fortunate that I am married to the human GPS.

Mount Nebo

Mount Nebo was very crowded with tourists, probably on religious tours of both Israel and Jordan. Sadly, we were unable to get a good view of the Promised Land, as usual, due to all the dusty haze. We have never had a good view in all our visits to Mount Nebo. In Moses day it would have been a much greener place, so his view must have been much clearer.

Something I had not noticed before was a copy of the Mesha Stone (the original is in Paris), which is an account of wars against Israel written by a Moabite king, called Mesha. It is very interesting to hear it from the other side's perspective.

Amman Traffic

The journey back to Amman took twice as long due to crazy traffic. We dread to think what the traffic will be like in 10 years' time if the population of Amman doubles to 6 million, as some are predicting.

Later on, I telephoned for a taxi to take our friends to the airport at 6pm. Normally, this taxi company is very good at being on time, but at 6.10, I decided to call them to see where the taxi was. A few minutes later, the taxi came speeding down our one-way street in the wrong direction. The taxi company called to check he was there and he looked a bit stressed about it. It is good to find a Jordanian company that takes punctuality seriously, but they may find that it gets harder to keep to time, if Amman traffic continues to increase.

Mother's Day

Mother's Day in Jordan is on the 21st March. It seems to be highly celebrated. Students even came up to me after my lecture at the university to wish me "Happy Mother's Day"!

The following day was a special celebration at Kira's school. I arrived at the school hall and greeted the mums who were already there. As is the custom, as each new mum arrived, she went round shaking hands and kissing all the other mums!

The children processed into the hall and Kira gave me a little wave as they took their seats on the stage. Then the children stood up and some music played. I soon realised that the other mums had stood up too and I was the only one left sitting down. It dawned on me that perhaps the music was the national anthem so I quickly stood up too!

Kira did really well joining in with the Arabic and English songs for Mother's Day. This was followed by the sports teacher leading the children and the mums in a little "zumba" workout! This was a cross between dancing and exercise and it was fun to see even some of the very conservative mums joining in wiggling their hips!

Kira gave me a special door hanging she had made with a flower and poem. Then we tucked into a fine spread of pizza, hummous, falafel and vegetables, followed by strawberry or chocolate cake. It was interesting that they made such a big celebration of the day!