TheYaraProject: Magazine, Short Story, Camp and Chapter 2

The flying elephant held onto the bundle ever so tightly. She flew quickly, searching for a home for her child. As she flew, she spotted a room with all the lights turned off. She flew to that window with speedy hesitance. Her size made the task of remaining silent quite difficult, but Mrs. Grey was not one to quit, especially when facing such dire matters. After twenty minutes of quiet struggle, she had managed to open the window, put little Timothy onto the yellow couch and close the window once more, but not before looking one last time at Timothy's white face. As she increased the distance between herself and her son, tears streamed down her wrinkled face. Little Timothy, who was asleep this whole time, sensed his mother's absence. Without him realizing it, his body began to feel hollow, and slowly he fell to an eternal slumber. The next day the girl woke up to see a fluffy white blanket placed on her couch. Thinking it was her mom's doing, she wrapped herself with the cover and felt instantaneous love and warmth. She would never know it was not only a blanket, but little Timothy, transmitting the warmth and love he had once received, one that he'll hold with him forever.

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I couldn't go to sleep and I realized my blanket looked like an elephant, so I wrote that little short story about the warmest blanket in the world. It's my favorite and I would wear it forever if I could.

A lot of exciting news, the first of which is the publishing of the school magazine, The Eagle: http://madmagz.com/magazine/377013 which you can read there. They spelled my name wrong, but that's okay, because the editor is super sweet and it shows she put a lot of effort into the project. So please read it my dears.

Another exciting piece of news is that we're extending the deadline for the story. Instead of Tuesday, it will be Sunday, so we can have the weekend to write it.

So, we went to the camp this weekend, and it was splendid! We went to Wadi Rum, and although we went to the same places as last year, I had a great amount of fun. The first day we walked through a path in Little Petra to get to . Then they gave us food and tea, which is like a little piece of heaven.

Side note: Tea tastes so much better after hours of walking and hiking.

Other stuff happened, like singing in the middle of the desert as we were going back to the camp, and at night the stars were ever so clear. They all shined so bright, they looked absolutely gorgeous and I want to go up to the stars so badly. It's a true shame we have so much light pollution in Amman... I may write a blog post about that actually.

A couple of friends and I were such rebels that we "disturbed" some of the other girls, although it was only 12 AM, so they forced us to sleep at a criminally early time, which I am now thankful for, because the next day was super exhausting. We woke up at 6 then had breakfast. After that, we took an hour to get to Wadi Rum from Little Petra, and when we got there we did some hiking until we got to a waterfall-ish thing. We all soaked ourselves with its meager drops of water then one of the Captains gave us a demonstration on how we can tell if a plant is poisonous or not.

That was all to waste time until the other group finished their turn doing some form of mountain climbing, but downwards. I think I may have a picture below, because that sentence makes no sense. Anyway, from that exercise I got three bruises on my right thigh, because I kind of lost control, but then I did it so well, so it kind of evens out.

Went down the mountain to the bus again, to get to the next camp site, which had the most beautiful bathrooms I've ever seen in a camp. They kind of gave us a break here. We ate lunch and put our things in the tents and then they held a dance party. An organized fake wedding occurred and we danced around them and clapped for them, and we met an girl our age from India, who was traveling to Jordan with her family, and she taught us Indian dance moves. To add to that, I convinced two of my friends to dance, so that was amazing. Yay! VICTORY!

After that, we went on a walk in the desert, and three of my friends and I got seperated from the groups, so we were stuck in between the two walking groups, the guys behind us, and the girls in front of us, and all we could see was their flashlights. However, it was super fun, because we just talked and the stars were so beautiful. We finally reached a certain spot and an astronomy professor gave us a presentation about the stars, that was drowned out by the wind and the whispers of freezing students. They then gave us tea, also known as one of God's blessings. While we drank our tea they lit up two lanterns and set them loose in the sky, and they looked gorgeous with the stars as their backdrop. When we finally got to our tents, my tent-mates and I went to sleep so quickly, while the others played cards until 2 AM and got sick.

The next day we got onto the bus and came to Amman, where I showered, ate, then slept for thirteen hours.

Visual evidence of the trip: