Despite the occasional little local misunderstandings - ten thousand people in Hama and the Lebanese Prime Minister for example – I love Syria.
The people have a warmth and simplicity often lacking in other Arab countries.
Here to do the budget for next year, it is also an opportunity to take part in the Teachers’ Training Course Diana is running in Tartous this week.
The ladies involved, at least at first sight, are not the sort you’d want to get into an argument with. Yet they have a sense of humour and a desperate longing to hear of the latest developments outside their own country.
We are able to make a major contribution, not only to teaching styles, but to curriculum development.
But it is still a pretty tough society. The Veterinary Clinic retains all the joy and glamour of a 1950’s Soviet Tractor Factory – nothing is ever cleaned or repaired or painted. In a tour of the building, heaps of builder’s rubble and dangling electric cables threaten to dismember the unwary.
The same joyous atmosphere includes the local management style – i.e. shouting abuse at any underlings.
One of our drivers was roundly attacked by the Director for parking the vehicle in the middle of a muddy puddle. Quite reasonable, you might think. Except the driver had been nowhere near the car – the parking had been done by the Director himself. No matter. That’s what underlings are for.
We went to visit the Marronite Archbishop of Tartous – genial old buffer.
I was introduced in the normal style:
“This is Mister Jermy from SPANA, London”.
“ Jermy? You’re German then! Du bist ein Deutsche! Guten Tag!”, quoth he, then proceeded to sing a little ditty about the Virgin Mary to the tune of Beethoven's ‘Ode to Joy’. Quickly embracing the spirit of the occasion, I felt an overwhelming need to join in, humming the chorus enthusiastically.
After a meeting with the Ambassador in Damascus, we left for Jordan by taxi, thus facilitating the driver’s thriving little cigarette smuggling business. As we passed through the border customs area, he had so many packets stuffed down his shirt the searchers must have thought he had some kind of interesting new skin disease.
But it was good to be back in Amman – still with no rain – which makes our little green gem of an environmental garden at the education centre even more stunning.
Our Patron, the Prince, regaled us with his memories of life at Millfield School in the sixties – although strangely, he’d never heard of the trick of running round the back of the group in the long panorama school photos and thus appearing twice in the same shot.
The mighty River Jordan After battling through the budget, we treated ourselves to a trip down to the Jordan Valley, visiting the Baptism Site, right on the edge of the river.
‘The mighty Jordan’ is actually only about ten feet wide, and it’s easy to call out greetings to the people on the other side, under another flag, but it confirms the old cliché ‘It’s an ill wind…’ – the scary security situation means there is a no-go strip about two hundred yards wide on either side of the river, and running pretty much the whole way up to the Sea of Galillee. Best nature reserve in the country – with otters, marsh cats, gazelle, deer, foxes, jackals and hundreds of wild boar. And of course some stunning birds – Azure Kingfishers, like luminous jewels, Palestinian Sunbirds, Tristrams Grackles (crazy name, lovely bird) and myriad others.
There is a welcome silence there, despite the political tension, and a wonderful golden evening light, bathing the leaves and branches of the tamarisk shrubs and the stands of phragmites reeds.
Welcome especially after following a group of our Antipodean Cousins onto Mount Nebo (where Moses breathed his last after being given a brief glimpse of the land of milk and honey).
‘Strewth’, says one ‘It’s f***g hazy. I’m bloody off.’
Shades of Sir Les Patterson, much loved Minister of Culture...
Jeremy Hulme
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Flying back from this last week, where we visited both Jordan and Syria, it’s once again challenging to see the differences between the two countries. Neighbours – yet so very different. As you look out of the window over Jordan, there is almost nothing to see. South of Amman there is hardly a trace of green before the craggy, arid mountains that run down to Aqaba, hiding Petra and Wadi Rhum.
Yet look north, across the Syrian border and there are fields of green, orchards and market gardens, before crossing the long sandy coast-line and out over the Mediterranean Sea.
On the ground it is even more striking. There are huge fertile plains around Damascus, along the coast, and in the northern half of the country – we drove past irrigated crops of cotton, tobacco, wheat and barley. Sleek fat Friesian cows graze in long grass beside the road. Bedouin shepherds tend their sheep (the lead sheep is in fact a donkey, who the herd follows wherever he goes).
There is oil and gas, minerals under the soil, and a long coast-line for fishing and tourism. In contrast Jordan has almost nothing – no gas or oil, no coast apart from its port at Aqaba, and so little rain that most of the country is parched desert.
Yet Jordan’s standard of living is about three times higher than Syria.
Investment finance pours into Jordan from the Arab world as well as the west - Jordan’s position as trusted ally of the US has given it a huge economic advantage, but of course at a price. The hated Bush/Blair partnership, makes Jordan a target for Islamic extremists, and the authorities have to be constantly on their guard.
We held a prize-giving for the three hundred animal clubs we have set up in schools all over the country. Princess San’a gave the prizes, Lord Newall, SPANA’s President, and the Minister of Education made speeches, and the children performed songs, dances and plays. Sadly, the British Embassy in Amman was too busy to send a representative.
Meanwhile in Syria, things are not quite the same. We spent a couple of days in the coastal resort of Tartous – ‘Jewel of Western Syria’. Well, not exactly.
The seafront is a five mile stretch of rubble. The city’s sewage system empties directly onto the ‘beaches’. Rusting boats and laid-up tankers sit rotting just offshore. Litter and rubbish clog the open waterways through the town.
Yet at the Education Centre up in the hills above the city, a group of biology teachers listen raptly as Diana gives them new ideas for teaching children. We are struggling to introduce the idea of empathy – difficult in any culture. Yet here, there is an almost overwhelming eagerness to try new concepts and ideas – and a welcome and friendliness to us as outsiders that is truly humbling. My stumbling Arabic is gleefully applauded.
SPANA is probably the only British Charity working in Syria. Sadly, the British Embassy in Damascus were too busy to help in any way.
It’s difficult to pin down, but despite all the obvious problems, there is something very special about Syria and its people.
Jeremy Hulme
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Writing this sitting in Frankfurt Airport. It’s five o’clock in the morning – just arrived from Amman, Jordan. My eyes feel like someone’s been pouring sand into the sockets, and my mouth has been a testing ground for a glue factory. But it’s reassuring to know that Germans are just as incompetent at running airports as the British.
We actually started out, via another overnight flight, landing at 4.30am in Cairo last Friday. I’m not a big fan of conferences, but I know, I’m a dinosaur, everyone tells me, and I must enjoy the networking opportunities and long-winded, jargon filled speeches. Yes, and it is, truly, a chance to meet up with old friends.
Then on Sunday we left for Amman in Jordan, and the Egyptians airport authorities are right up there fighting for the last place in the competence stakes. Cases lost or broken, flights over-booked, long delays with no information. Oh. Joy.
But it’s all quickly forgotten as we drive down to Petra. We are getting lots of complaints from tourists about the treatment of animals provided by the local Bedouin for the tourists. These are getting worse and worse as no-one seems in control or willing to enforce the bye-laws.
Riding horses are raced up and down the tourist tracks at breakneck speed as teenage riders show off their macho inferiority complexes to the visitors who at the same time they envy and despise. Saddle and girth sores, with swollen and skinned joints attest to the indifference of their owners.
There are a few carts for carrying tourists too fat or lazy to make the mile-long walk through the rock-cleft to the fabulous ‘Treasury’ at the start of Petra proper. These carts are whipped-up mercilessly, soaked in sweat, as they race back up the hill to the entrance gates with their grinning passengers - the soonest back get another load.
And once past the treasury, children hawk their donkeys to carry fat visitors up a thousand or more steps to ‘the Monastery’, for a stunning view across the whole ruined city. Why can’t they just walk up?(And the vista seems even better for the little bit of effort involved.) Clearly, donkeys were never designed to carry the huge American lady we watched, as the little creature struggled to carry her. I wonder how much Mary weighed when she road down to Bethlehem. Not a hundred and twenty kilos, I bet! Depressingly little SPANA can do as we don’t have a project in the area, and it’s a hundred and fifty miles from Amman.
Still, apart from that, it’s impossible to visit Petra without being almost overwhelmed by the whole place – the sheer enormity of the task the Nabateans took on – carving whole cliff-faces into temples and tombs. And the colours. Pink, red, purple, ochre – hard to describe it as the sun moves and changes the light and tones. Let’s just leave it as unique and unforgettable. Certainly something everyone should try ‘to see before they die’.
After all that a good night’s sleep would have been welcome. Instead, the Saudis in the room next door threw an all-night party, with girls and Black Label – after all that’s what they come to Amman for, but it was too much for us, and finally at four in the morning we admitted defeat and moved rooms, two floors up. Could still hear the singing and screaming – what on earth could they be doing in there?
Then for our sins, in the morning it was over to the SPANA clinic in Wadi Al-Seer to spend a happy few hours fighting over the budget.
Then via the Education Centre – amazing how tiny saplings grow in a desert when you chuck on a bit of water now and again, and down the long hill to the clinic in the Jordan valley. There we treat the animals of the field workers who toil amongst the little plots of strawberries, lettuce, tomatoes and other winter goods – doubtless heading for Europe – but also the donkeys and livestock of the Bedouin shepherds who bring their flocks down from the freezing hills into the warmer valley – and watch over them diligently.
As we climbed back up the steep road to Amman in the dusk, we could see the lights of Bethlehem twinkling away across the river in the distance.
Happy Christmas.
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