A water story

This is a little illustrated story about water in Jordan.
It might as well be called "The great theft".

Now Jordan has never been a country blessed with water – over 80% of the country is more or less a desert – but until the early nineties, things were OK. There was enough to go round and projections weren't bad. Then the population grew and along came the first Gulf War – hundreds of thousands Iraqi immigrants flooded in... putting severe stress on the country's water supply and the capital Amman's waste water disposal capacities.
Since then, Jordan has been struggling to meet its water demand, especially that of its exploding capital Amman. Jordan is considered one of the five water poorest countries on earth, with an average water availability now estimated around 170 liter per person per day. The WHO designates anything under 500 liter as SEVERE water stress. So - what to do?

Water was first pumped from Azraq, an area in the eastern desert, which at the time was a huge, flourishing oasis of wetlands in the middle of a basalt desert. A major stop for migratory birds en route from Southern Africa to Asia and Europe, with abundant wildlife and - water. Now it is pretty much a basalt desert again, except for a tiny little "conservation park" funded by some international donors, who pay for water to be pumped up from underground to fill a few ponds and keep some reeds growing... it's maybe the most depressing place I've visited in Jordan. The Google Earth image below give you an idea of the place.

Then, after a peace agreement with Israel in 1994, Jordan got a share of the water from Lake Tiberias (the "Sea of Galilee") and pumped it up from the Jordan Valley (-200m) to Amman (+1000m), but that wasn't enough either. The black whole of Amman, spreading over the barren hills surrounding it at vast speed, sucked up every drop and wouldn't stop crying for more, while around half of the water that it did drink, simply disappeared - illegal connections, leakage from an old distribution system... nobody really knows.

What you see here, is the continuation of this tragedy: the story of Wadi Ma'in and Wadi Mujib - two wadis that carry water year-round (VERY rare in Jordan) to the Dead Sea. Well, they USED to...

This is Wadi Ma'in... a steep canyon, carved out by the water from a series of hot springs up on the edge of the Jordan Valley. In its lower part, as it descends to the below-sea-level Dead Sea, lush trees grow in its warm waters.

Well, and as it is about to flow down the last hundred meters to the lowest place on earth... there is an obstruction... a concrete blockage prevents it from doing just that.
The hands of the thief.

Here you see the thief running away with his booty... well, he's kind of a permanent installation, actually... and unless there are floods after a heavy winter rain (the only time when it DOES rain, actually), not a single drop will flow on into the saltiest of all seas... but instead, it is pumped along the shore of the Dead Sea to a treatment plant at its northern shore.

And we're not talking any kind of treatment plant... this is Jordan's biggest treatment and desalination plant and maybe THE most advanced treatment plant in the whole area... finished only about a year ago, with all the newest technology, fanciest equipment and best trained staff.
With what aim? Well, you can guess now...
The waters flowing down the two picturesque canyons of Wadi Ma'in and its neighbour Wadi Mujib (an even more spectacular sight by the way - also carrying a lot more water), are destined to feed the ever-thirsty capital. But before they can, they need to be treated a little...

In this picture you see a so-called Mediazur Filter, which filters the water after it's been treated biologically and before it goes to be desalinated (as it streams down the canyons, the water washes out a lot of salts from the stone - part of the reason why the Dead Sea is so salty).

"Reverse Osmosis" is what the process is called that goes on in these tubes, which are about 15-20 meters long and under a pressure of 17 bars. This will force the salt out of the water and make it potable. Well, almost...

First it needs to be "re-mineralised", because all the minerals that are so vital for us humans were pushed out with the salt in those long tubes...
This is "lime milk"... which sounds like something that might turn into a delicious Cuban cocktail... but alas, it is dissolved limestone, which returns some minerals to the water before it can be considered 'potable'.
Right, so now it's ready to feed the great capital... Well, again, not quite... because the drinking water is now about 40 km away from Amman and exactly 1279 m further downhill in elevation.

But, thank God, we have pumps... pretty huge pumps, too... each of which can pump about 2000 cubic meters of water in just one hour. My converter tells me, that's over 3.5 MILLION British pints (for my friends who still haven't adjusted to the metric system... bless your souls!). In total, this is expected to supply 38 million m³/year uphill to the capital - around 40% of its annual allocation.

"What is this?" you might ask...
Maybe it's a bit mean to put this image at the end here... but the Wadi Ma'in & Mujib treatment and desalination plant was built mostly thanks to the "American People"... and I cannot resist pointing out a certain ironic connection here... it was also those same people who voted a president into office who then waged a war on Iraq, which in turn caused Amman to overflow with refugees, but NOT with fresh water...
It did however overflow with waste water... and guess who helped finance the largest, fanciest and newest waste water treatment plant to treat Amman's sewage?
Thank you, America.


But the story doesn't end here... because Amman is STILL thirsty.
So in a few months time, another major water engineering project is going to begin, which is estimated - upon completion - to supply almost three times the amount now feeding Amman from Wadi Mujib and Ma'in. This time, it will come from even further away... from a place in the middle of another desert - more than 5 hours' driving, 325 km south of Amman at the border between Jordan and Saudi Arabia, north-east of the Red Sea town of Aqaba. There, under the hot, mountainous desert lies the Disi Aquifer - a large quantity of water that has been captured underground for more than 10 000 years and is what water experts call "fossil water", which means as much as: when it's gone... it's gone.

I'm not sure there is a moral to this story... it's just the story 'we' live with over here. And... it is the kind of story that my Master course is trying to teach us to help solve or avoid in the future.


And this is what it looks like near Disi... and what they do with the water there at the moment:

YERUSHALA'IM

Jerusalem is sooo close.
And yet so far... for me, at least,
because apparently I am a "security threat".

Snow on palm trees

Yesterday it snowed in Amman.

You wouldn't believe what an even that was for people here. Before even leaving the house in the morning, I got a call from Mustafa, one of my class mates.
He asked if I was going to university.
"Sure", I replied "aren't you?"
"Probably not. Normally university closes when it snows."

And it did. But only at lunchtime. So on the bus that morning, the radio presenter was shouting with excitement and telling the involuntary listeners crammed into the little bus, that his radio station had put up cameras all around Amman, so that "all Jordanians all over the world can enjoy the amazing view of snow in the capital Amman".

When I got off at the University's Agriculture Faculty, the snow flakes were thick and sinking calmly to the sludgy ground. Two palm trees looked a little misplaced with their fan-shaped, giant green leafs covered in a thick layer of white. A group of three guys were holding onto each other, screaming as they slid down the path from the Engineering Building.

Dr. Butros, the director of the Water Centre greeted me as I walked up the corridor - late as ever - "We will close after lunch. Make sure you get out as soon as you can, otherwise the roads will close and you'll have to walk home. You know, we're not prepared for snow in this country."
I went to our classroom and checked my eMail quickly before the lecturer arrived: an eMail from Mustafa entitled "snow near my house". It contained 8 sketchy, random phone-camera photos of views from his home windows...

Today, when I walked up the stairs to the Faculty, the trees' drooping branches were slowly letting go of the heavy snow, weighed down by this morning's drizzle. The slush on the ground immediately disintegrated under my soles, as if waiting to return to water after the straining structure of ice.
It was a short adventure, I guess... but I surely wouldn't have thought that it would be in Jordan that I first step on snow this year.

Miss Sissippi

It is so odd, sitting at my little white desk here in Amman, sipping cinnamon tea to the quiet sound of my gas-stove and nearly falling asleep while trying to finish an essay on the consequences of high nutrient loads in the Mississippi Basin and who should pay for them.
But did you know that 41% of the surface of the lower 48 US states drains into the Mississippi River and subsequently into the Gulf of Mexico, where, as a result of the intensive use of fertilisers in the Midwest’s ‘corn belt’, it then causes a very large ‘hypoxic zone’ in the bottom water layers of the northern Gulf, in which oxygen levels fall to below 2mg/l, meaning that no life can survive?
Well, I didn’t either.
But now I do.
And I know a hell of a lot more about all that, but I shall spare you (unless you specifically express interest of course…).

Well, what’s so odd about that? you might ask. After all, you yourself might be sitting in Japan, writing about the devastation a storm caused in Bangladesh, or in Oxford, assessing the impacts of draughts and lawlessness in Somalia. And – granted – my situation is no more odd than that.

I’m quite happy the way I’m living now and I’m glad to be in the Middle East, where I’ve always wanted to be. I even had some almost nostalgic feelings of ‘returning home’ to this place a week ago.

The odd thing about it is that, much unlike the last 5 years of my life,
a) I live an almost completely isolated life,
b) apart from my colleagues who I see in class five days a week, I only socialise and communicate with one other person, my fellow student Marc,
c) since a few days ago, I now cut my own hair,
d) I’ve taken to listening to BBC news programs wile I shower,
e) I wash up straight away after using anything in my kitchen,
f) I regularly clean my stove and work surface,
g) before I leave my flat, I make sure it’s in a tidy state,
h) occasionally I read (or at least start) a book,
i) and since a few days ago, I walk around with a pretty bad haircut.

All of that I shall not complain about. I enjoy it.
Unfortunately, point a) and b) have lead to the fact that the only Jordanians I meet, and the only people I speak Arabic to, are shop keepers and taxi drivers. Hence my Arabic has only barely improved; but it’s ok – there’s a time and a place for everything and I know that time will come, too.

But one thing I do mind:
Apart from one trip (and excluding my fruitless attempts to cross the Israeli border) – for the last six months I have only seen the same bright 4-5 storey apartment blocks of Amman’s suburbs and occasionally the broad streets, fancy cars and Western shopping malls of its ‘metropolitan’ areas or the few old houses and trees of Jabal Amman, one of its oldest areas, although that doesn’t mean much… 100 years maximum. And if you know what Jordan has to offer, you’d agree, that this is quite a shame… there’s the famous Rose City of Petra, the incredible desert at Wadi Rum, crusader castles all along the Jordan Valley, Roman ruins abounding in Jerash, Bedouin villages dotted all over the country, nature reserves and unimaginable stretches of nothing but pristine, stony desert.
But even for that there might be a time. And God-willing, it will not be too long.

Ammanophile

I’m back.
Home, more or less.
And I love it.

All the little things you neglect to notice after a while of living in one place, are all apparent again, giving me a strange feeling of belonging and making me smile.
First and foremost (just in time for my first waking-up this morning): the ever-repeating melody of the gas-van, sometimes annoyingly loud and close, then again soft and distant, as he makes his way through the neighbourhood, selling his highly subsidised, bottled gas. Then, once I had unpacked, showered, dressed and opened my front door: the cold gentleness of Amman’s winter and the cool of its sunshine; wind-torn clouds in a sun-bleached sky and the omnipotent call to prayer, giving regularity to the passing of days, like a giant clock set not to Greenwich Mean Time, but to a world-wide religious rhythm emanating from Mecca.
And as I go for a stroll in my neighbourhood: the sprawling housing projects everywhere (all looking nearly exactly the same) and the wastelands between them; the sheer randomness with which these housing projects seem to spread over the bare, rolling hills of Amman; the near-total absence of trees in between the blocks of houses, giving it a kind of Wild West look; giant and ugly black water containers on every rooftop; children chasing each other in the street or throwing stones at a cardboard box; two people next to a building site arguing with raised voices and mighty gestures, hands up in the air, periodically pointing to the One above, only to embrace each other in agreement minutes later; the nosiness of three young lads, who halt their stroll in the middle of an empty suburban crossing only to stare at me unabashedly, their heads turning nearly 180º as I walk past; the fear of burglary that makes people bar even their 4th floor windows; and again – the wastelands in which you will always find – among huge boulders spread over rubble, rubbish and dust – a lonely, single shoe, forever separated from his other half…
…though after seeing a dozen of those within a few hundred meters, one does begin to imagine that maybe one day, when a bulldozer bulldozes over the wasteland that has become their involuntary home, to turn it into yet another 4-storey apartment block, that maybe then – as masses of rubble and dirt are moved and re-moved – a lonely left half of a pair of fake adidas trainers will – for just a second – be reunited with its forlorn right half, and their laces touch in the midst of this earthquake between layers of waste in motion – until a rotting cardboard egg-tray and a half-empty sack of Saudi cement come between them, separating them again, maybe for the rest of time.