Dinner With May

Wednesday, we were invited to dinner with one of Jill’s participants, May, who works for the Ministry of Education and also heads a women’s organization—a very influential person.

She selected a restaurant that gave us an Indian Jones-esque journey through the back alleys of the old city. Our friend at the hotel told us to go left, go right and then ask somebody. We finally found it, but had to backtrack because the restaurant was in the Moslem quarter of the old city and didn’t serve drinks.

The dinner was to begin at 9 PM (yes, our bedtime). Syrians prefer late dinners even though they still arrive early to work the next day. Yikes. We could only do that once, but it does allow us to go to any restaurant at our normal time (6 PM) and ALWAYS find a table—usually the only ones in the place.

There were a dozen at dinner and everyone was talking at once, which was fun. The waiters started to bring wave after wave of food—dishes piling up on top of each other. The dishes were fantastic—hummus, dips, salads, chicken, lamp, beef. I looked at all this then at my watch realizing I would be going to bed stuffed.

Not to worry. We left at 11 PM (the rest of the folks were there until 1 AM) and walked more than a mile back to our hotel. Now we know why there are very few overweight people in Damascus—you walk everywhere.

We spent the morning at AAMAL and then Jill was off to the Ministry of Education for a meeting. We have another meeting at 5 with the media folks I met in March. Jill said the meeting went very well, with the deputy minister for research accepting all of the surveys Jill’s team has been working on to assess teacher and parent attitudes about inclusion. They also presented a rubric to be used to evaluate inclusive classrooms this fall—the minister was doubly impressed with that.

Tomorrow, we will be interviewed live on Syria TV, a show about disabilities. The host was one of my participants in March and it should be fun, but we spent the morning for an outfit for Jill to wear.