"A (Busy!) Day in My Life in Studying Abroad in Amman" by Destiny Magnett
7:15 - Wake up
7:20 - Scroll through the emails I received while I was sleeping— today only 22!
7:30 - Get out of bed, put on my slippers, and head to the bathroom to wash my face
7:40 - Eat breakfast - hummus, jam, bread, and leftover birthday cake from a family birthday party I attended last night
8:00 - Order an Uber to Amideast, rejoice that the fare is only 1.6JD
8:06 - Make small talk with my Uber driver
8:07 - My Uber driver asks if I am married
8:08 - Tell him I am married (untrue), and we talk about my studies for the rest of the ride
8:20 - Arrive at Amideast, have temperature taken at the door
8:22 - Realize I am the first to arrive, turn on the lights, make coffee
8:30 - Open my laptop to review vocab before Arabic - realize I forgot to do a homework drill
8:32 - Begin rushing to finish the forgotten drill
8:45 - Scrambling pays off, and I finish the drill before class starts
8:50 - The other students who have class at 9:00 arrive, and we chat over coffee/tea before heading upstairs
8:58 - Spill coffee on the table and have to clean it up
9:01 - Am a minute late to class even though I’ve been at Amideast for half an hour
9:02 - Arabic class begins- - كيفك؟ كيف اليوم؟
9:52 - Back downstairs for break, talk with classmates about Fall Break plans to go to Aqaba
10:05 - !نصف الثاني بصف العربية!
10:50 - Class ends, I call an Uber to take me to Search for Common Ground - my Community-Based Learning internship
10:55 - On my way out I promise Ben I will read another chapter of the novel he wrote tomorrow
11:00 - My Uber is lost
11:10 - My Uber finally makes it to my Amideast
11:25 - I arrive at the office, and my supervisor, Aya, tells me that I need to help Search’s Lebanon team with a copy-editing project before the week’s end
11:30 - I email the project manager for Lebanon, and then working on a set of guiding principles and governance for Search’s Interreligious Roundtables Project in Jordan
12:30 - I finish a draft of the guiding document and send it to other team members
12:35 - Go to the kitchen to get more coffee
12:37 - Realize I need to drink water, not just coffee
12:38 - Drink water
12:45 - The Lebanon team emails me the draft to review - it’s a project about perceptions of gender in Lebanon, and I am excited to read it. I tell respond that I’ll have edits made by CoB on Wednesday
12:50 - Read the first 10 pages of the draft. Very interesting.
13:25 - Get more coffee - and water - on the way to the conference room
13:30 - Meeting with the Interreligious Roundtables team and our community facilitator to discuss my draft
14:40 - The meeting goes over, and I speed walk back to my desk to join an online close-out meeting for another project which wraps up at the end of November
15:00 - I agree to help with English-language comms stories for the project
15:15 - Meeting ends early! Score!
15:20 - Browse Airbnbs in Aqaba for Fall Break
15:30 - Answer emails
15:40 - Start working on research on religious freedom in Canada for my other internship with the U.S. State Department Office of International Religious Freedom
16:00 - Consider starting my grad school applications, open a document
16:07 - Decide against it and get distracted playing a game on my phone
16:25 - Join the online meeting with my supervisor at State
16:30 - Meeting - we talk Cuba, Nigeria, and add Uganda to my list of assigned countries
16:55 - Meeting’s over and I call an Uber!
17:00 - Uber arrives, the traffic is bad, and it is 2.7JD
17:20 - I make it home, and dinner is already ready!
18:00 - Finish dinner, chat with my host mom and her neighbor who is visiting us
18:45 - Shower and change into sweatpants
19:00 - Homework time!
19:10 - Host mom brings me a bowl of pomegranate for study fuel
20:00 - Zoom meeting with Religious Studies Department Faculty Review Committee at Grinnell
20:30 - Catch-up on emails
20:40 - Rashida, our house assistant, brings me my favorite mint tea
20:45- Finish homework
22:00 - Make a to-do list for tomorrow
22:15 - Fill up water, brush teeth, make sure alarm is on
22:30 - Set timer on my audiobook Lies, Lies, Lies for 30 minutes and turn out the lights
23:00 - Sleep at last - briefly can’t believe the day is over already
Destiny Magnett is a senior at Grinnell College studying on the Area and Arabic Studies program in Amman, Jordan this fall.
