Early on the morning of Saturday 17th July we took several taxis from the hotel to the Jet Bus station to travel to Rajef. The driver of the taxi I was in told me off for my bag being so heavy (for any familiar with Arabic or the Middle East - the word "haram" was used). It took about 4 hours for the bus to get to Wadi Musa (Valley of Moses - supposedly the place where Moses struck a rock and brought out water - but I think there are several places claiming that story), which is essentially where all the Petra hotels are as it is the closest town to Petra. We were met there by Alicia (an American Peace Corps volunteer, nearing the end of her 2-year placement in Rajef) and a couple of others, and driven to Rajef, which took about 20 minutes. I think Rajef has the most spectacular location of any settlement (ancient of modern) I have ever seen - it is right on the edge of the hills, looking down into very rocky desert. Unfortunately I didn't have a camera of my own in Jordan, but I am in the process of getting photos off the others - I will put some up on here.

The eleven of us were given a very comfortable flat in the basement / ground floor (building on a slope) of the special needs centre where we were based for the next fortnight. That evening Alicia took us on a walk to watch the sunset from a good spot round the corner of the mountain. And it was well worth it. Remember the bit in Lord of the Rings where Frodo and Sam reach the top of a mountain and see Mordor spread out below them for the first time? Like that, but infinitely more benign. Once the sun had set, we realised that the rather fabulous-looking residence next to our chosen spot belonged to some prince, I forget which one (there are a lot of princes and princesses in Jordan...), and the gate-keeper spotted us and came over for a chat. So we were duly invited into the grounds, but because the prince was not currently in residence we couldn't be shown around, and "just" drank tea in the gate-keeper's bit. And he played his flute to us, which was pretty cool. We all tried to play it too, but only Mark got anywhere near getting the right noise out of it. On the way back, by which time I was already desperate for the loo, we were spotted by the brother of one of the village big dogs (a chap called Abu Ayman, a former army general and generally wonderful), who invited us into his tent (yes) for coffee followed by tea, and a good hour of slightly forced conversation with his friends and family. And no toilet.

The set up in Rajef was that we spent the mornings running activities and general fun for the special needs children and women (mostly deafness and down's syndrome - and some un-diagnosed, aged from 4 up to 26ish I believe), and in the afternoons we split into boys and and girls and taught English to any children from the village who fancied turning up. For the first week I was helping run activities for the deaf (and hard of hearing) women, we did tie-dying, batik, friendship bracelets, chinese lanterns, and they made aprons. They taught us some sign language, and a couple of them could hear enough to have a spoken conversation in Arabic. We got along really well, they were very sweet and hard-working. The second week I moved upstairs and was with first the deaf children and then in what they called the severe classroom. With the deaf children, there were 4 or 5 boys aged under 12, a girl who was probably about 20 but I really don't know, who could hear perfectly well and apparently used to be downstairs with the women but for some reason preferred to be upstairs with the children, and a completely deaf 4-year-old girl called Taqua. Who hardly ever used sign language but had no trouble making herself understood when she was cross. The scere classroom was 3 children - a 15-year-old boy called Mohammed, and 2 girls - Raya (9?) and Zeinab (14?). I think they all had Down's Syndrome. Raya was a handful and didn't know her own strength, resulting in a big cut in the middle of Alex's forehead after she threw a metal box at him from close range, but she was very loving and liked hugs. Zeinab needed constant encouragement, and Mohammed needed constant praise, while Raya needed constant controlling, so there always had to be three of us with them, but we managed to have a lot of fun and I'm pretty sure the kids did too.

In the afternoons, I spent the whole two weeks teaching the older girls' group, who were aged from 12 to about 17, and we had about 20 girls on the busiest day, and about 10 on the quietest day. I had to play bad-cop quite a lot, which was sad, but we got along well and I like to think the girls enjoyed themselves. They certainly all seemed sad when we said goodbye, and a couple of them invited us over to their houses for tea.

The great drama of week 1 was the Attack of the Korean-American Christian Missionaries. It would take more time than any of us has to explain all the details, but one afternoon, 170 Korean Americans turned up, virtually out of the blue, claiming to be on a "cultural exchange" programme. Except that they were 2 hours late so we had to keep the kids waiting for ages, when we knew they were all hungry and thirsty and tired. Eventually they arrived, innapropriately dressed, and behaving very inappropriately as they walked through the village, standing in the equivalent of people's front gardens and taking photos of them and their houses, without permission, on enormous cameras. They put little effort into our inadequately planned attempts and cross-cultural activities, and generally made a nuisance of themselves. Then suddenly, as if on queue, they started forming prayer circles, reading the Bible, singing hymns, etc etc (bear in mind the group was split in half, with the boys and men at the boys' centre the other side of the village, but exactly the same thing happened there - they even made a prayer circle on the mosque forecourt). So we kicked them out. The staff at the centre didn't speak enough English to realise what was going on, and that was evidently the basket in which they had laid all their eggs, and hadn't planned on us being there to spoil their plans. Off they went. That evening we invited the centre staff to our flat for tea, and explained to them why we'd kicked out the nice foreign visitors. They were apalled and thanked us.

I tried teaching a couple of the deaf boys to write in English - I wrote "Hamoud" in English, and Hamoud copied it perfectly - backwards.

At some point during week 1 we experienced our first water shortage. The water all went off at about 8pm, and didn't come on again for about 24 hours. Many of us (although not me) had upset stomachs. Over the course of the month we experienced no fewer than 4 of these water shortages, each one a little worse than the previous one. I think the longest was 3 days, with no taps, showers or flushing toilets. And only one toilet between all 11 of us. Thankfully bottled drinking water was always available. The country description of Jordan, as one of the top 5 most water-scarce countries in the world, is suddenly brought home.

On Thursday 22nd we took all the children and women from the special needs centre on a day out to a nature reserve (Dana, for those who know Jordan). We started with a viewpoint, which was spoiled for us by the desperate need for toilets - the aforementioned upset stomachs - and those of us who didn't need them were acutely aware that the others did, so still a bit spoiled. On to the visitors' centre, with the luxury and bliss of 2 grotty toilets, both of which flushed and had working taps. The children played giant eco snakes and ladders - the snakes were pictures of things which harm the environment, and the ladders were the opposite. They loved it, although we suspect the point of the game was lost on them. We walked for about 20 minutes (it had been described as a 2-hour hike, and were understandably worried) to a spring, where we had a water fight, which was lots of fun, then walked back again and had lunch in a hotel buffet with an excellent view. After lunch, the boys and men danced as someone played a drum, and the girls and women watched. We were driven to an area described as "Roman camp site" but which turned out to almost certainly have nothing whatsoever to do with the Romans, and was just a pretty place where you could camp. We tried to do a scavenger hunt with the kids, in pairs, but found it almost impossible to explain what we were trying to do - especially as the instructions we had been given were only in English. While standing at the top of a tower with a good view with one of the female staff, (waiting for the truck to bring everyone else back up the incredibly steep hill) 3 women in burqas arrived - and Hadijja and I got talking to them. They were from Egypt, and 2 of them had recently got married. I think the 3rd was a sister or cousin. The interesting bit was - I had always sort of expected, without really thinking about it, that the dress under the face-flap of a burqa would be high-necked and modest. But a gust of wind came along and blew one woman's face-flap (apologies for the inelegant term, I can't think what else to call it) to the side - and I definitely saw lots of cleavage. Surely they'd have worked that out?

On the morning of Friday 24th, Abu Ali (generally useful chap) picked us up and drove us to the Wadi Rum visitor centre, where we were met by our guide. We were plopped onto camels and sent off round a sandy dead end with what they claimed was a Nabataean temple, for an hour, then the camels were extracted and we were bundled into the backs of two pick-up trucks. Much strenuous climbing over rocks, scrambling up sand dunes and runing down them again, balancing across the tops of rock bridges, etc etc, all in the harsh sun, was done, and then we encountered a stuck car. Some idiot had driven his wife and 3 small children into the desert without a guide and parked on a sand dune. Fool. The car got stuck. We all helped push it out, but as it finally got moving, my flip flop was sucked off my foot (by moving air? I don't know, but it happened) and whooshed under the car, and as I put my foot down, the sand under where the engine had been revving for a long time scalded my foot, and I hopped in much pain until I was reunited with my flip flop.

We camped in a small camp at the base of an enormous cliff, with a good view across to some huge ... mountains? cliffs? chunks of rock? I don't know what to call them, which looked quite close but were apparently the best part of 2 miles away, as the desert is deceptive and makes everything look closer than it is. Delicious dinner or chicken, potatoes and onions (whole!) baked in a furnace underground, and many salads. And sweet tea. The two guides played the 3oud for us and sang a bit, then we went for a moonlit walk (it was virtually full moon). We ended up in two groups, and I was in the group that went a bit further away from the camp. As we walked back, we were talking about snipers and army tactics etc etc, and decided to spread out and creep up on the others. Duly done, with great success - just before we jumped out of nowhere and frightened them, we heard them saying things along the lines of "this is how a horror film starts, and monsters jump out of nowhere." So great was our success that, when most of the others went bvack to the camp and Alex went for a walk by himself with his torch, Mike and Tom and I decided to do it again, to Alex. We kept a close watch on his torch, and observed his white-shirted self lie down to watch the stars. Down on our bellies and we crawled towards him, uncomfrotably through sand and spiky plants, for about 10 minutes. We were feeling quite proud of ourselves, as we got really quite close to him, then just before we jumped out, we realised, to our mortification (but also great amusement) that the desert had deceived us again, and we had in fact been stalking a plastic bag. Desperate not to be defeated, we tried to storm the camp by coming in through the back entrance. We ran in a wide arc around the others, banking on the moonlit behind us not showing us up. As we got closer to them, we tried to walk in one line so that if they saw us, they would only see one person and think we were a passing bedouin. We made it, apparently unobserved, to the back of the camp, got behind one of the pick up trucks and dropped down, but then a real bedouin from the other truck, who had seen us coming, managed to frighten us into screaming. And all was lost. We had to admit to the others what we'd done, and they had seen us running and walking bizarrely anyway.

Most of the others slept inside the camp, but Tom and Ben and I took our mattresses outside, and at some point (I have no idea what time), I woke up - just in time to see the moon set. It was right down on the horizon, huge, and bright bright red. Apparently early in the morning the camp was stormed by camels, but I'm afraid I slept blissfully through this and was unaware of it.

We came back to Rajef, to find that the whole village had run out of water, and no one knew how long it would be until more water was available. Abu Ayman (the former army general who ran everything) very generously gace us some buckets of water from his farm, which would have been used to water his crops. We rationed it very carefully. We were told that for the last few years, Rajef has run out of water at some point every summer, and each year it lasts a little longer.

As far as teaching / running activities goes: it went really well, on the whole. We made a volcano with the special needs kids - Tom had made a frame out of a cardboard box and some plastic bottles, and we got the kids to cover it in papier mache (or more accurately newspaper and glue, as there were moral issues surrounding using food for a non-edible purpose), then we took it outside, covered it in glue, and they threw sand at it to make it look like a real volcano. It dried overnight, and the next day we got all the kids to stand at a safe distance (or tried to, but just you try getting a bunch of excited kids who are mostly deaf and certainly don't speak English to stand back from a volcano) as the boys poured pepsi, lemon juice and red food colouring into the volcano's heart, which already contained bicarbonate of soda and toothpaste. They quickly screwed the lid on the carefully-concealed bottle, which they had pierced a tiny hole in, and hey presto the desired effect - a jet of bright red liquid high up in the air and at a slight angle.

We did a re-telling of the three little pigs, but were tactically advised by Alicia from the Peace Corps to swap pigs for camels, as the children didn't know what pigs were. Duly done. The three little camels (from the severe classroom) were wonderful and acted out the story (with Ben as the wolf, and Tom prompting the camels when needed, i.e. the whole time) to everyone else at the centre, as I read it loudly in Arabic and quietly in English so that Tom and Ben could prompt and wolf correctly.

As for the afternoons, in my older girls' class we covered various grammatical bits and pieces, some more successful than others, then on the last day each class did a small performance or presentation, so Zena and I prepared Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 with them, which they managed very well in rehearsal but lost their nerve in front of everyone and we got some rather odd but very sweet mis-pronounciations and other words they knew which were sort of similar to the difficult one they didn't know. My personal favourite was "...nor bends with the [mumble] to rainbow."

Just an hour before we were due to leave Rajef, and while we were desperately trying to finish cleaning the flat (thankfully there was water by this stage), we were summoned to see one of CARE International's grey water recycling units. Bad timing, but we had asked to see one, so we complied. The unit itself seemed to be good. It took the grey water (from washing up, laundry, showers etc, as opposed to black water which is from toilets) and filtered it so that it was clean enough to water trees with - and the family had several olive and fig trees supported solely by this unit. We spent some time (later on) debating whether the right families were getting them, as it was fairly clear they were going to quite well-off families, but in the end decided that if the better-off and well-respected families were reaping benefits, then less wealthy families would be inspired to get one themselves through CARE's micro-financing scheme. Also, as all of the village's water comes from one big tank up on the hill, then if the families using more water are given a unit enabling them to use less from the tank, then there is more left in the tank for everyone else, and therefore less risk of running out of water. There are currently 15 or so of these units in Rajef, and I believe I am right in saying that the money we raised this year will pay for 4 more. We got back in time to finish cleaning before we had to leave.