End of a long weekend

In order to break up the boredom of three days at home we went for a short walk today. Not too far from our home is a tiny store that sells essentials. We walked over there and bought some eggs to make brownies. It wasn't much of a walk - maybe 5 minutes - but it was nice to get out of the house for a bit.

It is still quite cold in our home although the weather is very pleasant outside. We have school tomorrow and about 8 weeks of classes left. We've been away from home for 11 weeks so this is about the half way point of our time away - reminder, after leaving Palestine we'll be in Romania for about 1 month. We're starting to miss the little things about being at home - restaurants, our little community, being able to go where we want when we want but we're really not missing work.

When we leave here at the end of May the faculty of optometry will again have one faculty member to teach all optometry related classes. An optometrist who graduated from Jordan is being sent somewhere in the UK (I don't remember where) to get a Master's degree. He will complete that degree at the end of next summer (i.e the end of summer 2008). He will then return to teach at An-Najah. We, as I've said before, hope to be able to spend two more semesters here to cover the transition.

We've had some questions about what the funds I'm trying to raise so I'll give some details on that now. We're not trying to raise funds from individuals. It would take far too many individuals to support us and it doesn't leave a lasting legacy at the school. Instead it was my bright idea to contact two Non-Governmental Organizations to ask them for money. The first has a fellowship program through which we hope to get at least two round trip flights to North America for each of us for the next year. We then hope for a second set of round trip flights for the following year so that we could come for a couple/three weeks to aid the new educator(s).

The second organization will be a harder sale. I'm basically asking them to hire both of us as full time staff. In my proposal it states that we would begin working for them in July but would remain in North America for July and August where we would be doing lecture/course/research preparation. We would then come back here for Sept. - December. We would go home for 4 or 5 weeks over Christmas and then come back for the spring semester next academic year. I think we would then go to Romania again and come back here for a couple of weeks in September of 2008 to help the new educator(s) before returning home to start our lives. I'm not really sure if the organizations will buy into this proposal but without additional funding we will go home and stay home. We'll see.

I really have nothing to say as we've just been sitting around working/wasting time. We heard a lot of gunshots yesterday but I think people were just firing into the air because of the holiday. Silly if you ask me.