"Bayt Yafa" Bayt Yafa by AldenM1

I wasn't sure what to think when the Peace Corps assigned me to Bayt Yafa. I wanted to live in Ma'in, so I was miserable to be so far away. Plus, I heard that Irbid and the north were cold, wet, rainy, gross. Which they did end up being!

Fortunately, I fell in love with Bayt Yafa eventually. I can't remember the exact moment when I realized it had become my home, but it happened.

The above picture is a view from the roof of my second house, facing sort of north-west. If it were a clear day, you could see Mt. Hermon in the north. In the evenings we could watch the lights come on in Israel too. It was the best place in Jordan to live television-wise -- I got television stations from Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan!

Summer Flowers

I moved to Bayt Yafa in October of 1999, and in short order it started to get COLD. I mean, it never got much below 30 degrees Fahrenheit, but when you're living in an uninsulated cinderblock-and-plaster house and it's drizzly and humid, cold can be a real pain.

Fortunately, the sun does eventually come out, and in the spring the sun and the last rains create the greenery featured on my Jordan page. It's fantastically beautiful. After a week or so, the green dies, and eventually the summer plants emerge.

I think it may be an acquired taste, but I think summer in the Jordanian-style desert is beautiful. The jasmine blooms all summer, the poppies last a good long time, and these little wildflowers are everywhere until the very extreme droughts hit.

The photo above was taken across the street from my school, in the dirt.

Bayt Yafa Girls' School North

We joked that there are a very limited number of official blueprints for school buildings floating around the Jordanian Ministry of Education. There's the Motel 6 style, the H-form, the one that looks like a row of shops, etc. In any case, you can recognize a school from a very long distance!

For the first year I taught at a really old Motel 6-style school in Bayt Yafa. At the beginning of my second year, they announced that we were being moved to a new school at the other end of town. Half of our girls were being left at the old school and half would be transfered to the new one. Unfortunately, they hadn't planned ahead and allocated twice as many teachers! After a few months the mess was straightened out and we departed for the spiffy new building at the bottom of the village hill.

When I left, Bayt Yafa had two girls' schools, one boys' school, and two or three private schools. Children attend school through Tawjihi, which is like our senior year in high school (when they are 18). After second grade they are always gender-segregated, unless they are in the cities and in private schools. There is an official uniform for boys, but I never saw them wearing it. The small girls must wear a blue smock, and the older girls (grade 7 and up) can choose to either wear a knee-length green smock over pants or a full-length jelbaab.

In school they study geography, Arabic, religion, history, math, science, art, and English. After 10th grade they get "tracked" into either college-bound classes or more career-oriented ones. In the girls' cases this involved classes on cooking, homemaking, and hairdressing, among other subjects.

School is free up through the Tawjihi, and heavily subsidized if you do well on your exams and make it into college. Students do not, however, get to choose which university they attend, or what their major is. Both decisions are made based upon the standardized exams.

The picture above is of my newer school. It was an H-form, so this is only the central wing. The writing says "Bayt Yafa Girls' Secondary School North."