Middle East

Following the Latin America travels and a short stop back in California and New York, I decided to come to the Middle East instead of returning to Colombia and continuing south. Most of my time in the Middle East was spent in Jordan and Lebanon though there were some short trips to Turkey and Syria.

Jordan – Having met some great people  (and connections) in Lebanon, I was offered a position with the United Nations Development Program of Iraq located in Amman, Jordan. This helped to make my time in Jordan very productive. My project with the UNDP was centered around the production on the Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004. It reported and analyzed the living conditions in Iraq as they were approximately one year after the change of regime in the country, as a result of the 2003 war. The survey served as a census of Iraq, interviewing over 21,000 households. My responsibilities for this project included editing the English version, producing the English and Arabic versions, creating the website, handling the launch and dealing with some of the press fallout, 99% of which highlighted one sentence of the survey that revolved around the number of Iraqi deaths since the US-led mission of 2003.

Beyond this work, I had a large (and great) crew of friends and family in Jordan. It seemed like we were always doing something, from weddings to trips to hanging out. Some of those trips included Petra, the Dead Sea, the Dana Nature Reserve, Jerash, and a few trips down to the southern sea port of Aqaba. However, the majority of time was spent socializing in one of the many nirghile cafes (hookah bars as people like to refer to them in the west).

Strangely, my next-door neighbor was a virtuosic piano player from Japan whose husband was in Amman working with an NGO. So, we rehearsed a bunch of classical repertoire together.

Lebanon – Lebanon is a wild place. First, the reconstruction since the civil war is absolutely unbelievable! I was there just a few years ago and though still a pleasant place, many remnants of shot-out buildings covered the city. In only a few years, countless buildings have been gutted and redone, not to mention all the new multi-million dollar buildings going up everywhere. It is actually one of the largest urban reconstruction projects in history.

Beyond the obvious beauty of Lebanon, there exists a strange beauty in it’s people…all of them! Plastic surgery here seems more plentiful than in southern California. Though already people known for their elegance and beauty, Lebanese have a very Brazilian view of plastic surgery that makes them perfect themselves without thinking twice. This is partly due to the large Lebanese population in Brazil, much of which have become very talented surgeons, and have returned to Lebanon to practice.

Again, I had an amazing time here with my father who happened to be in the area visiting. Much of this has to do with our great hosts, Hadil, Shadan, Jinan and Nada, who made it possible for us to experience the real Beirut, well…primarily a bunch of shi-shi bars. Oh, I also saw ruins and stuff