Isaiah's graduation

We arrived at Isaiah's kindergarten school for his graduation ceremony at about 10.30am. Isaiah went to his class to get ready while we sat in our allotted seats in the school courtyard.

Last on stage

The ceremony was supposed to start at 11am so the graduates made their grand entrance at 11.15. We've never been to any Jordanian ceremony or performance that started on time. Isaiah was the last to take his place on stage, since they were lined up in reverse alphabetical order, and the first letter of his name is at the start of the Arabic alphabet.

Long boring speeches but great songs

The honoured guests gave the obligatory long boring speeches which nobody seemed to be listening to and then the children started their graduation performance, which was a mixture of English and Arabic songs. At the end of the ceremony, the children were presented with their graduation certificates.

'He's the best!'

We are so proud of how well Isaiah has done at school. His teachers told us that he was their favourite pupil and that all the other children love him as well. His Arabic pronunciation, they said, is better than some of the Jordanian children. Next year he will will start grade 1 in the big school with Kira, who has also done really well in grade 2 and she will start grade 3 in September.

Isaiah with his KG2 teachers

Translation of the song Isaiah was singing in the above video

God God God God God God God
Protect King Abdullah

Lift your head and don't kneel to anyone except God
With King Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom

Jordanian Jordanian
Hashemite Kingdom

How high (great) is our country, and God, the highest, made it

God is happy and pleased with Jordan

Day in the Life ... Various Visits

After dropping the children at school, Paul took Ethan, Jenson and me in the car to the Royal Cultural Centre. I breastfed Jenson in the car and then Paul took the boys off for a few hours whilst I attended the prize giving ceremony for the Prince El Hassan Prize for Academic Excellence. My work at the Clinical Skills Center at the Hashemite University had won first place with a prize of 7000 Dinars for the University.

There was a lot of security around the Cultural Center but I was let in when I showed the gold embossed invitation card. There were bagpipes from the military band playing to welcome visitors and I was shown into the ceremony hall.

 Bagpipes!

An attendant asked who I was and initially I was shown to the seating area for diplomats and ambassadors! I think they thought anyone who was non-Jordanian was from an embassy. However I explained that I was working for the Hashemite University and directed to another, even better seat!

 Awards

Surprisingly, for this culture, the Prince and his wife arrived early for the ceremony and I was one of the people with whom he shook hands as he walked through the hall. As is customary for any ceremony here, it began with the national anthem and then a reading from the Quran. After various speeches, the prizes were awarded to the different university presidents. Photos were taken and that concluded the ceremony. The military band played whilst people left the hall, however it took a long time to leave since the Prince was personally greeting every visitor as they left the hall for the reception and there must have been over 300 people attending!

Paul came to collect me and Jenson was ready for another feed!

Jenson - a growing boy!

In the afternoon I visited our new neighbours upstairs with Kira and Jenson. It was fun to chat together with the older aunties, drink sweet black tea and try some homemade sticky sweet pastries. I was given some on a dish to bring home, which meant that I would have to think of something to take back when I returned the dish. We were also given presents as "house warming" gifts, a beautiful tea tray for me, necklace for Kira and keyrings for the boys. The elderly grandmother has taken a shine to Kira and given her a few little gifts (to which Isaiah says "where is my present?") Usually here it is boys who are favoured and given more gifts than girls!

Later the children helped me to prepare our new guest room and also Kira's room for friends from Cambridge who were coming to visit us. Paul had gone out the day before to buy 3 single beds (one for Kira and 2 for guests). It has been blessing to have a bigger house and have visitors to stay.

Ethan playing with our friends' son Isaac

The Miles Family moves to Mogadishu

Don't panic! We haven't moved to Somalia, but to Mogadishu Street in Amman.

Mogadishu in Iraq?

Most of the other streets near our new house are named after places in Iraq- (Mosul St, Karbala St., Babel St., Basra St.) But for some reason our road is named after the capital of Somalia. There is a nice group of shops on the corner of our street which has most things that we need.

 

 Mogadishu St from the front door

Time to move

After so many problems in our house with water leaks we had been wondering about whether or not to move to a new house. Even though the water leaks into our house had stopped, there was a lot of mould on the ceilings which came back very quickly whenever we cleaned it off. The rent for our house was due at the end of March, and we pay once every 6 months, so we knew that if we wanted to move, now was the time, even though it seems a bit of a crazy thing to do with a one month old baby.

Our new house

A house in high demand

The first house we looked at was amazing and perfect for our needs, but it was a bit too expensive for our budget. We looked at a few other houses but they were more expensive and not as good, so we decided to try and bring the price down for the first house. Lots of other people had wanted the house but the owners had turned them all down because they had been waiting for a family they liked. Apparently, they like us, because they reduced the rent down to what we wanted and, less than a week after starting to look at houses, we signed the contract.

 

Our new lounge area

Jordanian version of Pickford's

We decided to use a removal company which we heard about through one of the parents of Isaiah's classmate at school. They had promised to handle everything except for our clothes, which we should pack and transport ourselves.

Miscommunication 

After dropping the kids at school, I started packing a few of the more delicate things into our cars, before the removal guys arrived. When they arrived with their truck, they were surprised at the amount of stuff we were expecting them to pack in addition to the furniture and had not brought any boxes. It seems there had been some miscommunication between them and our initial contact. One of them went off to get boxes while the others started dismantling our big wardbrobes. Even when they brought the boxes, they were not enough, so I had to get some bin bags from the supermarket.

 

Ethan brumming his car around our new garden

Making the wardrobe fit our bedroom

When we arrived at the new house and, as we had anticipated, our big wardrobe was too tall for the ceiling in our new bedroom, so they cut off the decorative layer on the top, which meant that it would just fit with a couple of centimetres to spare. The removal guys worked very quickly and we were a bit concerned about things getting broken, but they did a good job and the only damage was a dent in the side of the cooker.

 The local shops

Our new house has just been renovated and is bigger than the old house, which is good for our new family size. There is quite a big lounge so that we can have lots of visitors, it has a nice garden for the kids to play in, and is located much closer to most of the places that we go to regularly. We feel so blessed to have found such a nice house in such a good place.

Three days in the life of the Miles Family

Leaky house

For the last few weeks we had been experiencing a variety of water problems in our house. Some of the problems had been fixed but there was still a lot of water coming through the roof of both of our bathrooms and in the hallway. Some of this water was dripping through the light fixture and had caused the light bulb to blow.

The plumbers were coming in and out of our house, the flat above us and up and down from the roof, trying to diagnose the problem. Were concerned that the house was a rather unhealthy and unsafe environment for our family and not quite ready for Kate to give birth in, but we also knew that the birth was imminent.

Good timing

The next morning we managed to have a bit of a lie in because it had been declared a national holiday on account of the snow forecast. Shortly after waking up, Kate's waters broke and so we called the midwife who made her way to our house, and we also called a friend of ours to come round and play with the kids while the birth took place.

 

Labour pains started a short while later and we put the gas heater on full blast to try and get the bedroom warm enough for giving birth. In the winter, we normally only keep the lounge warm and the bedrooms can get as low as 8 C. I was aiming for 18 C, but only managed 16 C. Fortunately, the midwife was busy warming up towels by the heater and laying them over Kate's shoulders. After two hours of labour, the baby was born. We still hadn't settled on our final name choice, and the midwife suggested 'Thelgy', which is Arabic for 'Snowy', on account of the imminent snow. In the end, we agreed on Jenson, which means 'God is gracious' and 'God protects'. We were thinking particularly about the time when Kate had a threatened miscarriage after 4 months of pregnancy but God, by his grace, protected both her and the baby.

A couple of hours later, the snow started and I gave the midwife a lift home before she would become stranded at our house. Travel in Jordan in the snow is very dangerous because there are no gritters and a lot of steep hills. Last time it snowed there were 100 accidents in the first hour of snow and a further 500 accidents over the next two days despite the 6pm curfew.

Snow baby

The following morning, we woke to find a foot of snow and I managed to take the kids out to do some tea tray sledging and make a snow man while Kate stayed home with Jenson.

In retrospect, it's amazing that Jenson came into this world the day after all the plumbers were coming in and out, and just a couple of hours before the snow would have forced me to be the midwife. The plumbing problems upstairs are still not diagnosed but at least the water has stopped coming through after they closed off one of the upstairs bathrooms.

The village which is not on the map

I left home at 7.30 am to drop the kids at school and carry on to the village of Qastal. It was my first time in the village, but the first of many as I am starting my village English teaching project. I am starting an English class, which I can use later for coaching the English teachers from different schools in the area. Today I was going to do level testing for the local children who would like to take part in the class.

What village?

The village does not exist according to the gps app on my phone, so I had to use the satellite view to find the village library, where our training will be taking place. Kate has been there before for the village playgroup, so she put a star on my phone map and I followed it like the three wise men.

Follow the star

Village time keeping

The local children had been told to arrive at 9am but only two of them were there at 9am. I was not surprised at this and felt confident that a lot more would drift along later. Over the course of the next two hours, 35 local children came to have their level assessed.

What is your name?

I had a page full of questions to ask them in order to determine their English level. The first question was 'What's your name?' which received a blank look from the majority of the children. When I repeated the question very slowly I still had a blank look from most of them. If I said it in a very strong Jordanian accent, some of them understood. Out of 35 children, I considered 8 of them good enough to start a beginner class and the others need to start with some literacy work to learn the English alphabet.

What do they learn in their English classes?

All of these children have been receiving English lessons at school but the lessons consist of learning grammar rules and memorising huge dictation paragraphs. Even those who get full marks in their English classes are hardly able to utter a word in English. One lady explained to me that her son's English teacher gives them a ball and tells them to go outside to play football.

Speaking focussed lessons

My aim is to model and then coach the English teachers in teaching speaking-focused lessons, but first, I suspect that I will need to help the teachers to improve their own English level and pronunciation.

The village of Qastal

Day in the Life of ... Isaiah's 6th Birthday

I got up and I opened some presents from my family. Then I had to go to school. I got given a party hat at school to wear. 

I invited friends from school to my birthday party in the afternoon. But Daddy picked up some of my friends with me from school earlier so they came to play.

When my party started, we drew stuff that are for space, like rockets, planets and the moon. We stuck them on a black piece of paper and stuck stars on to make a space picture.

We played games - finding the planets, obstacle course, pass the parcel, space freeze, space dancing. We had lots of fun. The girl who won pass the parcel tried to give me the prize (which is a Jordanian thing to do - give the birthday person the prizes!!) but I told her to keep it.

I got lots of presents, like spy binoculars, lego and cars. My friends tried to help me open the birthday presents (which again is a Jordanian thing!) but I didn't want them to.

We had party food and a space rocket cake that Mummy made. It was yummy.

We all had a good time.

Day in the Life of ... a Village Playgroup

Early Birds

We arrived early to set up the toys, snacks and craft materials we'd brought with us to the community library in a village not too far from the capital. We were amazed to see one mum with 3 children already waiting an hour and half before we were due to start! Word had spread that there was a new fun time for Mums and Toddlers, although the local ladies had no idea what a "playgroup" would actually be like.

We set up the toys that we'd managed to collect and buy cheaply second hand in the main room. There was a small library room with children's books which we put tables with playdough and colouring. Then another room we used for the craft.

Another surprise occurred when a bus full of children arrived from a local school. It had been explained that the Playgroup was for mums with toddlers, but the school teachers had thought it would be a trip out for the children. We were so grateful for our local friend, who had invited us to do the Playgroup in her village, as she very diplomatically handled the situation in a culturally appropriate way. We were sad that the children could not join us but there would not have been space or appropriate supervision for them.

Copycats

By the time we started at 10:30am there were 32 mums and nearly 40 children! Our local friend introduced us and then I gave an introduction in Arabic to explain what would be happening in the morning. We started with a welcome song and other songs in Arabic and then songs in English (such as head, shoulders, knees and toes!). The children loved copying the actions and joining in.

Funky Fish

Then we divided into groups and took 8 children at a time, with their mums, into the craft room to stick coloured paper to make a fish. Some children looked like they'd never seen glue before! They were all pleased with their finished fish. Meanwhile other children played with the toys and playdough and colouring.

We told the mums to help themselves to tea and coffee and snacks. Since they rarely get tasty treats like this, everyone was piling their plate high with cookies and cakes. Also some were popping snacks into their handbags to take home to share with family. We hadn't expected this and what we thought was plenty of food, was soon all gone! We enjoyed having some time to talk with the mums but most of the morning we were busy organising things.

Why should the kids have all the fun?

The mums also surprised us by asking for a competition! Again our local friends helped us in dividing the mums into teams and thinking up a quick competition – writing down as many fruits beginning with the letter … (in Arabic of course!). It was surprising how competitive the women were!

We finished by going outside and the children catching bubbles from a bubble machine. Everyone said how much they enjoyed the time and what fun they had!

After clearing up, we were invited by the village sheikh’s wife to visit their house for a cup of tea. The ground floor of the large house was a big space with lots of seating for holding village meetings and ceremonies whilst the upstairs was the family home. Even upstairs, the lounge was large and we relaxed and chatted drinking mint tea and eating home-made date biscuits. Arab hospitality is renowned and we were invited to stay for lunch but sadly had to decline since I had to get back home to look after Kira and Isaiah after school.