e-Village and Ramadan
Madaba is a small village less than an hour south of Amman. It’s a unique area because it has two villages that fall under the same municipality, Lib and Mleih, and both contain a variety of historic Ottoman-style stone houses and other old buildings.
Why the history and geography lesson? Madaba has been selected by UNIFEM as the site for a new project called the e-Village. Partnering with the Jordanian government and dozens of organizations, they are converting all the historic, and some not-so-historic buildings, into a wide range of high-tech community buildings. The goal of the project is to transform the villages of Lib and Mleih into an economically empowered, well-resourced, gender-sensitive community where ICT is implemented to achieve a better quality of life.
The idea is huge and so in the project, which will include a learning resource center with computers at one of the schools, an Intel Clubhouse (of which there are only 103 in the world, and this is the first in a non-urban area), a Lego Robotics lab, a community radio station, a small business development center (which will front the money to help local entrepreneurs get off the ground), training and professional development courses, a language center, and then some.
The organization I am working with, iEARN Jordan, has been asked to sit on one of the steering committees for the project and to work with the four schools in Madaba. The committee meetings are monthly, pulling together so many different organizations is quite a feat and will hopefully be a success. UNIFEM has been working on this project for about two years I think and the official launch is slated for this spring. The UNIFEM coordinator, Yazan, is a friendly Lebanese guy that has so far been great and is very committed to making the project be something bigger and better than any of the individual orgs. could do on their own.
I visited the girls’ school in Lib with Khitam, a representative from the Ministry of Education, and also got a short tour of the Lib e-Village buildings a few days later. We are going to be conducting teacher trainings after Ramadan for all the schools, and getting students involved in interactive projects. The e-Village is also especially oriented at being environmentally friendly and of course focused on empowering women so I am hoping some interesting environmental initiatives will evolve out of the student projects.
Ramadan is supposed to start either tomorrow or Wed. but no one knows until they announce it, which is based on the moon cycles and determined by whoever is watching these things in Mecca. Everyone in Jordan has also already turned their clocks back because the King moved up daylight savings so it wouldn’t fall during Ramadan, which is very confusing, slightly amusing and apparently very practical (Egypt does it as well, and I don’t know where else).
I keep hearing stories and cautions about what Ramadan will be like but a few things seem to be true…everyone is fasting during the day, this means no food, no drink(you’re not even supposed to swallow unless you have to), no cigarettes, and no sex (which is somehow connected to the fasting? I guess it is in the ‘general deprivation’ category). This means, according to my coworkers, that everyone is tired and cranky, very little gets accomplished and everyone goes home around 2:00. They say literally the streets will be crowded, and then the breaking of the fast, called iftar, which is the word for breakfast, is at sundown (which is at like 5-5:30 since we already changed the clocks!) The evenings are apparently like street festivals with a great deal of eating and socializing. The desserts are supposed to be exceptional and at the end of the month there is a holiday, called little Eid (not to be confused with the larger Eid that is in late Jan. I believe, or 90 days after the end of Ramadan). So there it is, I will write more about what it is really like once it happens.
Why the history and geography lesson? Madaba has been selected by UNIFEM as the site for a new project called the e-Village. Partnering with the Jordanian government and dozens of organizations, they are converting all the historic, and some not-so-historic buildings, into a wide range of high-tech community buildings. The goal of the project is to transform the villages of Lib and Mleih into an economically empowered, well-resourced, gender-sensitive community where ICT is implemented to achieve a better quality of life.
The idea is huge and so in the project, which will include a learning resource center with computers at one of the schools, an Intel Clubhouse (of which there are only 103 in the world, and this is the first in a non-urban area), a Lego Robotics lab, a community radio station, a small business development center (which will front the money to help local entrepreneurs get off the ground), training and professional development courses, a language center, and then some.
The organization I am working with, iEARN Jordan, has been asked to sit on one of the steering committees for the project and to work with the four schools in Madaba. The committee meetings are monthly, pulling together so many different organizations is quite a feat and will hopefully be a success. UNIFEM has been working on this project for about two years I think and the official launch is slated for this spring. The UNIFEM coordinator, Yazan, is a friendly Lebanese guy that has so far been great and is very committed to making the project be something bigger and better than any of the individual orgs. could do on their own.
I visited the girls’ school in Lib with Khitam, a representative from the Ministry of Education, and also got a short tour of the Lib e-Village buildings a few days later. We are going to be conducting teacher trainings after Ramadan for all the schools, and getting students involved in interactive projects. The e-Village is also especially oriented at being environmentally friendly and of course focused on empowering women so I am hoping some interesting environmental initiatives will evolve out of the student projects.
Ramadan is supposed to start either tomorrow or Wed. but no one knows until they announce it, which is based on the moon cycles and determined by whoever is watching these things in Mecca. Everyone in Jordan has also already turned their clocks back because the King moved up daylight savings so it wouldn’t fall during Ramadan, which is very confusing, slightly amusing and apparently very practical (Egypt does it as well, and I don’t know where else).
I keep hearing stories and cautions about what Ramadan will be like but a few things seem to be true…everyone is fasting during the day, this means no food, no drink(you’re not even supposed to swallow unless you have to), no cigarettes, and no sex (which is somehow connected to the fasting? I guess it is in the ‘general deprivation’ category). This means, according to my coworkers, that everyone is tired and cranky, very little gets accomplished and everyone goes home around 2:00. They say literally the streets will be crowded, and then the breaking of the fast, called iftar, which is the word for breakfast, is at sundown (which is at like 5-5:30 since we already changed the clocks!) The evenings are apparently like street festivals with a great deal of eating and socializing. The desserts are supposed to be exceptional and at the end of the month there is a holiday, called little Eid (not to be confused with the larger Eid that is in late Jan. I believe, or 90 days after the end of Ramadan). So there it is, I will write more about what it is really like once it happens.
posted by prairie at
9:29 PM
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