It was our final night in Jordan. We sat in the hotel bar in the still-warm evening, reflecting back on a week spent roaming through the deserts, ruins and breathing cities of a country little-known and less understood by the inhabitants of our homelands. And as with most reminiscences, the stories twisted back on themselves, away from these final moments and toward the beginning of our journey.
Sixteen American and three Canadian journalists from a range of church publications boarded a plane in New York’s JFK airport in late September. Twelve hours later we would get off in Amman, the capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
“On the plane, I sat beside a boy who was in the States for university,” recalled Tricia Steadman, a spunky blonde whose quick wit and riotous sense of humour kept our local tour guide on his toes all week. “I hadn’t even introduced myself yet, but as we took off, I turned to him and said: ‘You know, I miss the towers. They’ve been gone for years, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop looking for them. They should be right there.’ And I pointed to the New York skyline.
“He turned to me with a smile and said, ‘Hi. My name’s Osama. And I’m from Iraq.’ And he held out his hand.
“I took it and said, ‘Hi. I’m Tricia. I’m from Washington, D.C.’ I really think that was a moment when God was saying to me, ‘Trish, this is not going to be the trip you expect it to be.’”
All of us were signed up for an ecumenical press tour sponsored by the Jordanian Tourism Board of North America. Our itinerary was packed with the sights and sounds of the ancient Biblical and Roman world: the citadel and Roman theatre of ancient Philadelphia (now modern Amman), the Nabatean city of Petra, the Roman city of Gerasa (now called Jerash) with its streets, temples and oval plaza, the Red Sea with its famous coral reefs and water-parting ways, Mount Nebo, where Moses looked out over the promised land he would never enter, Gadara (now called Umm Qais) where Christ is said to have cast demons out of men and into a heard of pigs which threw themselves from the cliff into the Sea of Galilee, and Bethany-Beyond-the-Jordan where Christ may have been baptized. Throughout the tour we would be treated like royalty, sleeping in luxury hotels, eating three-course meals and traveling in an air conditioned bus that was far too large for narrow streets designed for nothing larger than a chariot.
Many of us expected sights and sounds designed to impress (and impress they did), but few anticipated the occasional glimpses into the lives of others, and the simmering anger and longing for peace that pervades the Middle East. For a handful of days, we stepped back from the television screens and national news agencies, government sanctions and political machinations, to look into the eyes of people we had never met and histories we had never really seen.
