Magic of Madaba: Youth-led NGO launches open-air exhibition

AMMAN — A youth-led organisation has launched an open-air exhibition to help visitors explore the “City of Mosaics” Madaba — some 30 kilometres southwest of Amman. 

 The exhibition features a number of interactive boxes placed at different stops along the city’s cultural trail, according to Yazeed Al Kharroub, the founder of Shababuna Ezwieh, a non-profit organisation concerned with tourism, youth empowerment and digitalisation. 

 He noted that this project, called “Reveal Madaba”, was implemented by Shababuna Ezwieh in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Jordan Accelerator Lab. 

 “It aims to offer visitors an authentic tourism experience by introducing them to Madaba’s intangible cultural heritage,” he told The Jordan Times. 

 The experience is currently made up of six boxes that employ advanced interactive technologies to engage tourists’ senses and educate them on the city’s culture and history in a fun manner, Kharroub added.  

He also pointed out that this exhibition promotes community-based tourism and benefits the people of Madaba by encouraging visitors to make certain stops that help enrich their visit and allow them to support local businesses. 

 The first box features the distinct vocabulary and expressions that are used by the people of Madaba, said Kharroub.

“It includes a QR code that direct visitors to a website with educational information and a video of Madaba’s people welcoming visitors in their spoken dialect,” he noted. 

 It also aims to support efforts to recover the Stele of Mesha, an ancient stone monument discovered in Madaba, from the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, he continued. 

 The second box introduces tourists to the city’s mosaics and encourages them to pass by local workshops to buy a mosaic as a souvenir to remember their visit, according to Kharroub. 

 The third stop features the “Mehbash”, a traditional Bedouin implement made up of a mortar and a pestle carved out of wood. It serves both as a manual coffee grinder and a musical instrument. 

 “This box allows visitors to touch the instrument and guides them to a local family, who allows them to try roasting, grinding and drinking coffee, the traditional way,” Kharoub pointed out.

 Tourists are then introduced to the Bani Hamida Women’s Weaving project for traditional rug making, after which they learn about tribal symbols then wheat cultivation and harvesting traditions in Madaba, he said. 

 Guiding information is written on the boxes in both Arabic and English, allowing visitors to move from one to the other and find their way along the trail without needing any help, he explained. 

 The project, first launched on March 8, is the first of its kind in Jordan, Kharoub noted.  

“We’re constantly monitoring how well visitors interact with it and how much they find it helpful in order to improve it. Hopefully, we’ll be able to replicate this experience in different governorates across Jordan,” he added.