Karen: Princess Muna

Today I met Princess Muna. You should google her. Basically she was married to the previous King of Jordan, King Hussein, and is the mother of the current kind of Jordan. She is the president of the Jordanian Nursing Counsel and today they had a meeting. The whole meeting was in Arabic and I had no idea what was going on, but at the end I walked up and asked if I could meet Princess Muna. They took our group into a back room where we shook her hand, chatted, and took a picture. She said when she walked in the room and saw us she was a little surprised where all the blond hair came from and she thought maybe we were paramedics because of our uniforms. We had come straight from the hospital. she was the perfect “royal British lady”. Like Julie Andrews. She IS British for those of you who didnt google her. She asked if we had gone to Aqauba or Petra...not yet!! (we are going next week..this is my last week of clinicals!!!) She told our instructors to stop working us so hard and let us go have fun. I was hoping she would invite us to come stay in her palace...haha, no such luck. But it was pretty cool. So Elaine has taken us to see the Pope, Princess Muna, and this friday we are meeting the Ambassador. We mingle with high rollers when we're with her. Today I was on a new floor at the hospital because they closed my usual floor so they could do examinations for the med students. Yah they just completely shut down the floor. They bolt the doors. It doesnt seem very safe to me. When I was walking downstairs the patients families were sitting in the hall and wondering when they could get inside. Crazy. So I was on a different floor, the orthopedic floor. I pretty much did my usual thing except it was a male nurse instead of a female nurse. After we did the morning routine he asked me and another girl to come take a break with him and another nurse. We usually just hang out with the students and wonder where the nurses are during this time, but now we know they go to a back room and sit down to have a drink. of course we had to explain that we dont drink coffee so he went and got us some juice. We had a great conversation about Mormon standards. A conversation I have at least once a day. He had been to America before ("I worked at the restaurant, Wendy’s, you’ve heard of it?"...yes, Ive heard of it…) and he didnt believe that there were Americans who had standards like mine. I assured him there are. He started asking me questions that were a little deeper then what I'm used to. I was a little worried because I dont want to proselyte, but he was so curious. He wrote down Mormon and said he was going to google it so I told him to go to mormon.org ...if hes gonna look it up he might as well go to the right website... haha, and he knows who Thomas S. Monson is now. But it was strictly an educational discussion and I asked him lots of questions as well. The church has done so much work to have good relations here so we really dont want to offend people and start preaching. Its just global and cultural awareness. When we told Princess Muna we were from BYU she totally knew what it was. BYU does a lot of work in Jordan. Anyway, it was a fun day. Tonight we're going to a nice restaurant. I'm so excited!