Things have taken a turn for the worse. Originally, today was supposed to be the first day of the pilgrimage. Unfortunately Iran, which was to be our starting point, has recently suffered from several ongoing outbreaks of violence. One of them is related to a terrorist group stationed along the Iraq-Iran border. The other involves political tensions, which have recently turned bloody, between reformists and hard-line Islamic fundamentalists near Tehran, the nation's capitol.
Because of these recent turn of events, the Iranian government, despite their overwhelming support for the Journey of the Magi, has decided that it would not be safe for us to travel along our intended route. Hence, they have temporarily denied us access into the country. Although we are still hoping that this situation will change and that we will be able to start our trek through Iran a little bit later than scheduled, perhaps with a smaller group of people, the Journey of the Magi may not officially begin until October first, when we will start the Iraq portion of the pilgrimage. In the meantime, we intend to take advantage of the free time this situation has provided us by exploring as much of the Middle East as we can before our pilgrimage begins.
We recently visited Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, Palestine. We were given a tour of the camp's children's library and internet center which had been attacked in the night and burned to the ground. No suspects have, as yet, been identified. The internet center had been used to connect refugee children from all over the world.
After our visit to Dheisheh, we joined a group of marchers protesting for the "Right of Return", one of the most significant issues over which the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have had conflicts. Since the Arab-Israeli war, nearly four million Arabs have lost thier homes and are now unable to return. Many of them now stay in refugee camps, like Dheisheh. The "Right of Return," then, is an extremely complicated issue which centers around the idea that these refugees, after years of exile, should be allowed to return to their homes or the areas in which they originally had lived. The protest swarmed with media representatives: local news agencies, CNN, and random tourists taking snapshots and recording the protest on their home-video cameras.
The "media strategy" of the event was designed to give the children center-stage. They stood at the head of the march, carrying most of the banners and Palestinian flags, as well as black flags of protest. At the end of the march, it was the children who gave speeches, the young orators amazingly self confident, articulate, and passionate.
Peter's Journal
September 18
Palestine
The city of Bethlehem is a strange mixture of the modern and the ancient. The buildings, all of which seem to be made from faded white or off-white brick and stone, often look as if they could have been scuplted straight out of the hill-side. from the view in my room at the Bethlehem Bible College I can see, beneath the eight-story hotels and the beautiful, grandiose churches and mosques, a very small yard where a goat is kept; a cement children's playground, fully equipped with a basketball hoop; an empty patch of dirt in which there is an overturned car scavenged for parts; a litter of hollowed out oil drums. Five times a day the Muslim call-to-prayer can be heard from the mosque minarets almost like a city-clock. From the speakers mounted on the minarets pours an Arabic prayer song, duplicated by several other towers, creating a weird echo, or round. At night, when no other sounds vie for your attention, the call can be eerie, enchanting.
In the daylight hours, the notable sound is the "sonic boom" of Israeli jets which, the first time I heard it, sounded loud enough to be a gunshot from the streets below-- the sound is powerful enough to set off car alarms and shakes the windows so violently that we are sometimes afraid that they will shatter.
In my journal yesterday, I mentioned our visit to the Dheisheh Refugee Camp for Palestinian refugees. Since then I've collected more detailed information that I thought would be worth mentioning.
Pope John Paul the II visited the Dheisheh camp on his recent pilgrimage to the Holy Land and, in a speech there, told refugees that he has "felt close to the Palestinian people in their sufferings" and strongly opposed the "degrading conditions" in which refugees often have to live.
The "Across Borders Project" at the Ibdaa center of Dheisheh (recently the victim of an arson attack) was sponsored by Bethlehem's Bizeit University. The project, according to B.U.'s website, will "allow the refugee community to establish links with the outside world in a way never seen before." By setting up internet-capable computers in Dheisheh, "Across Borders" allows refugee children not only to speak to the outside world, but also to speak to each other. More specifically, they will be able to speak to children from refugee camps in Gaza and Lebanon.
The old city of Jerusalem is a complicated maze of tourists, residents, capitalist pop-culture, and religious zeal. We started the day's wanderings from the Islamic quarter, crawling our way through acres and acres of dimly-lit tunnels and bridges before reaching the heart of the city. The narrow walkways were tightly packed with souvenier shops, resteraunts, youth hostels, street vendors peddling Marlboro cigarettes and "AA" batteries, veiled women sitting flat against the old city walls selling bundles of grapes, and candy shops taunting pedestrians with crate-loads of gummy-worms and stacks of coke bottles. In essence what we saw was a sort of "outdoor mall," in which people seem just as eager to buy Pokemon back-packs and Mighty-Morphin-Power- Rangers dolls as they are to purchase any of the touristy "religious" baubles.
Once we had fought our way past the money-makers, the flood of the city's history came crashing down on us. We walked up the "Villa Dellarosa," the path through which Christ is said to have carried his cross; got a quick look at the exterior of the "Dome of the Rock;" and watched a line of several dozen people, segregated by gender, pray at the "wailing wall." (In order to go into this area we had to don Yamicas.) A group of Israeli soldiers stood praying when we arrived, leaning their foreheads against their automatic rifles, pressed against the wall.
After a few hours of walking, we had a late lunch and were ready to call it a day.
Yesterday, we left the city of Bethlehem in Palestine to return to Amman, Jordan, where the rest of the Magi-team will eventually arrive. Leaving at around 11:30 A.M., we called in a taxi from the Bethlehem Bible College and headed to the border, where we had to wait for a bus that would take us across "no man's land" (an unclaimed military "buffer" zone between Israel and Jordan). Although the trip came with a great number of small hassles, a very slow moving Israeli check-point during our first taxi ride, a passport check half-way through "no man's land," etc.) border-crossing is even more difficult, sometimes even hazardous, for Palestinians, who are forced to undergo a seperate series of security inspections and are segregated on different buses.
Israeli security can be extremely intimidating. At the check-point near "no man's land" there is a base armed with two machine gun towers manned by teenage soldiers propping their feet up along a thick wall of sand-bags, leaning back in their chairs. Below the base are several other ground-troops, armed with fully automatic weapons, one baby-faced soldier with a flamethrower. On the Jordanian side the miltary presence is very real, but more subtle: Air-pipes are visible protruding out of the hills randomly, indicating the presence of bunkers. There are also ground troups, but they smile and wave at the buses as they pass by. The difference is understandable: Israel deals with higher security risks.
Once in Jordan we caught a second taxi to the Amman West Hotel, our "home" as we await the final approvals of our visas, sharing a cab with a Australian tourist heading into Egypt. The taxi-driver spoke only a very little English, of course our Arabic is much worse, so the last segment of the trip took a few unexpected turns and detours before finally getting us "home."
Today, after a late-start, the Journey of the Magi team conferenced briefly with Holy Land Trust staff from Bethlehem, Amman, and Baghdad at the Amman West Hotel. This was the first time I had a chance to meet George Sada, our team's main associate in Iraq. He struck me as a very passionate man, immediately telling us of a medical plane which would be landing in Baghdad with 80 English and American physicians on board, despite U.N. sanctions prohibiting this. Russian passenger jets have also recently violated the Iraqi "no fly zone" in protest of the sanctions and the U.S. embargo. George told of his difficulties in explaining the Iraqi crisis to Americans, who typically either support current U.S. military action or are completely oblvious to the situation in Iraq.
The meeting lasted several hours during which we discussed our middle-east "media strategy" and the current difficulties in obtaining visas for some of the countries along the route, particularly Peter Thiepp, from Sudan, and John Vencer,from the Phillipines.
Today, George, Robin, Nabil, and I traced, by car, part of the route in Jordan that the pilgrimage will be passing through once the journey begins. Starting in Amman, we drove several hours until we were in sight of the Syrian border. The landscape was broken and barren, dry—desert. Bbut random fields of green would splash up to the surface sporadically, as if from no where. Amidst an ocean of rock and dirt and sand an unidentifiable field of a crops that assumed an unnatural "metallic" tint, as if someone had spray-painted them green, gave testimony to the ability of the natives to live in this harsh land; a distant hill was filled with pine trees.
While overlooking the inhospitable land we discussed the potential hazard land-mines along segments of this national boundary.
From the Syrian border we found our way to Umm Jimal, which we selected as one of our group's future camp-sites. Umm Jimal houses an extremely large set of castle-ruins, which have supposedly been around for three thousand years. Though a tour-bus passed by while we were there, the area was filled mainly with locals using the shade of the crumbling walls to host their social gatherings. One of the locals we met had been trained as a lawyer. George and Robin later mentioned that many peole in the Mid-East, though out of-work, were highly educated. it is possible, even likely, under the current circumstances, that someone selling you souvenirs off the street corner has a PhD.
After Umm Jimal, we drove to the city of Jerash. On the way we had to stop and ask directions. Although the first person we asked told us, quite confidently, exactly where to go, Nabil and George thought it wise to ask someone else, just for verification. To some Mid-Easterners it is a matter of pride to always "be helpful" in such circumstances, and they will always confidently give you directions even if they really don't quite know where to go. Robin compared this to the stubborn tradition men have in the United States of not asking for directions even when hopelessly lost.
Once we arrived in Jerash we selected a camp-site near the ruins of an ancient Roman coliseum on the edge of the city. The Roman coliseum was spectacular. On the stage there was a spot chiseled into the stone marking where one should stand to be heard clearly by the entire audience. We hiked to the top and briefly had a chance to enjoy the view. I developed a sharp fear of heights when we mounted the final steps—to either side there was a long drop and the wind was, at the moment, extremely fierce. On the way down a tourist, due a combination of fatigue, vertigo, and dizziness, vomited into her hat. Though far better than heaving all over the ancient staircase, is not, by any means, a happy occurrence.
The day's main event took place in the evening, when the whole Journey of the Magi team went out to dinner at "Abu Akmed's." Though I managed to get us lost on the taxi-ride over, we arrived in good spirits. Believe it or not, it was the first time that the whole group has been in the same place at the same time since the inception of the Journey of the Magi by Robin and Nancy Wainwright back in 1996. Things are pretty cordial now, but after a month or two in the desert, eating and sleeping together it will be interesting to see how things stand.
Later in the night, much later—about 2 A.M.—the Journey of the Magi media/tech crew uploaded a video file to the website using one of our satellite phones. Security at the Amman West Hotel let us onto the roof, where we climbed up a metal ladder to the highest section we could find, turned on our equipment, and tried not to freeze to death while we huddled around the computer screen for an hour and a half watching it slowly upload, byte by byte, with no way of knowing whether or not the transfer would be successful until it was finished.
Each minute of satellite phone time costs seven dollars and fifty cents. By the time the video had uploaded we had spent some four hundred dollars. Though these particular dollars and cents do not come out of our own pockets, it felt as if the money was being sucked straight out of our blood-stream. The only way to make ourselves at ease with the expense was to make jokes about it. We'll be using the satellite phones throughout the journey when in areas where there is no phone access.
On the roof, the wind kept us company, the noise of cat-fights, howling dogs, and traffic from the streets below giving counterpoint to the over-all quite of late night. We crashed at about four A.M.
After spending a couple hours at the Holy Land Trust office this morning, a group of us went out to have some passport photos made for our Syrian visas. Keith went down to the British Embassy trying to get a second passport. Two passports are needed for several reasons: firstly, because most countries in the Middle-East will not allow visitors whose passports have an Israeli stamp. This would make it potentially difficult for us to travel. Unfortunately, though we had been told that they were open until 3 in the afternoon, the embassy closed early: one of the workers there was leaving, and they needed to celebrate his departure.
Our trip into Iraq has been delayed for another day.
This morning at ten A.M., Robin Wainwright, George Sada, and Sami Awad held a press conference for Jordanian reporters regarding the Journey of the Magi. More than fifty photographers, reporters, and journalists showed up to hear Robin, George, and Sami explain the current situation and our intentions for the trip. They also had the opportunity to snap a few photos of Todd Elkins, one of our three "magi," on the back of a camel in front of the hotel.
The conference started with a prayer from Archbishop Mar Thoma of Iraq's Eastern Orthodox church. Both Sami and George spoke to the reporters in Arabic, so, unfortunately, I am unable recount what they had to say. I did pull out a telling quote from Robin in regards to the situation in Iraq, where our journey will begin: "We believe that God grieves when innocent children die without reason. We have been shipping in medicines and we have been sending doctors. The problems are very large and it will take many
years to rebuild what has been lost. We, as Christians, cannot wait for political solutions—we must act now."
Speaking of the situation in Iraq, our trip there has been delayed yet another day. A small voice in the back of my head keeps telling me that our plans are going to fall through at the last minute. We can only hope and pray for the best.
It sometimes seems as if the whole world is against us. A few days ago, after we held a press conference announcing our departure date, we were informed by an individual within the Iraqi government that our visas into the country would take at least another month to process. For some visitors this might not cause difficulties but, because of our schedule, which allows less and less room for maneuvering as the days go by, this delay could effectively disable a large portion of our pilgrimage. The Iran segment has already fallen through the cracks and, if we also lose Iraq, half of our intended pilgrimage will have vanished into the void of bureaucratic technicalities. There is, of course, still a great deal of hope that this situation will be resolved.
This morning, at about nine o'clock, George Sada stopped by the Cameo Hotel, across the street from the Amman West, and had breakfast with the magi team before returning to Iraq. He hopes that he will be able to convince several officials that our cause is worthy of Iraq's support. After an initial round of chatting, we stood around him in a circle as Robin Wainwright prayed for his success and general well-being. We should hear from George sometime tomorrow and plan our next few weeks in accordance with what information he has to offer. If our delay remains a persistent problem we may spend the next couple of weeks touring parts of Jordan, or perhaps even return to Palestine.
Later in the day, Jason, Jake, Andre, and I hiked up to the King Abdullah Mosque and shelled out a J.D. apiece (a Jordanian Dinar is worth about twenty or thirty cents more than a dollar) to have a quick look around. It took us three tries to get through the "correct" entrance for non-Muslims, but it was well worth it. It was absolutely beautiful—see for yourself: Jason should have some pictures posted.
The innermost sanctuary of the mosque was housed beneath a giant dome ceiling laced with half a dozen thin stripes which converged in the center like the core of a ripened orange. From this convergence, three golden rings dangled like marionettes from a few dozen nearly invisible wires, each ring twice as big as the last. From the rings hung glass-incased lights, each one like a glowing jar of honey. The red carpet was sliced into sections with a yellow pattern of interwoven stars and encircled with a second, thinner, section of light-blue carpeting. We were only allowed to stay for five or ten minutes, but the image burned into the hardwiring of my memory.
It has come to light that we are currently being closely monitored by the Jordanian police force. A few days ago we noticed that a squad car was stationed against the curb alongside our hotel, on an around-the-clock basis. After doing a bit of questioning, we soon discovered that it was indeed us they were keeping an eye on. Apparently, after our press conference, they decided to keep a couple patrol officers in front of our hotel for our own protection, in case of the unlikely event that protests (concerning Palestine/Israel) turn toward us. It is bizarrely flattering to receive this sort of attention.
This morning it was decided that our group needed a change of scenery. We chose Bethlehem, despite the current atmosphere of violence, because we (Holy Land Trust) have an office there, and it will give us a chance to review sections of the route we will travel in December.
Keith, Todd, and Prosper Kwenda, the three who are organizing soccer clinics along the route of the pilgrimage, decided to stay in Amman to continue organizing soccer events in Jordan, while the media/tech team Jake, Andre, Jason, Tim, Steve, Joseph, a Palestinian cameraman who just recently joined our trek, and I decided to head to the border. We arrived later in the evening and had to wait a short time for the bus that would take us through "no man's land," a sort of neutral zone between Jordanian and Israeli territories.
While waiting at the border we witnessed a wounded Palestinian man being transfered from one ambulance to another to be transported to an emergency hospital in Amman. We learned later that this was the father, Jamal Al-Dura, who, in a truly tragic turn-of-events, was unable to protect his son, Rami, from a fatal wound to the abdomen by Israeli bullets*.
After crossing the border we paid for a taxi to get us into Bethlehem but were stopped at an Israeli checkpoint where we had to switch cars. gunshots had just started firing nearby and the soldiers did not want to let our taxi through because it was Israeli owned (even though the driver was Palestinian) and, therefore, would be a target. We couldn't even get to the Bethlehem Bible College, where we planned to stay, because the whole area was closed off. Instead, Sami Awad found an empty room for us in his apartment complex to spend the night.
Though all of this makes it sound as if our group is in a great deal of danger, the violence is actually fairly easy to avoid. It happens in the same areas at the same times every day. Friday, we've been told, will most likely see a great deal of bloodshed because larger groups of people will be more inclined to protest after morning prayers at the Mosque.
Like clockwork, every night in Palestine after the sun has gone down a new round of violence unleashes itself onto the rooftops and into the streets. On Wednesday night, the power was cut at about 7 o'clock at the Bethlehem Bible College and the shooting began. Residents huddled into the lounge connecting our individual rooms, staying as far from windows and doorways as possible and hiding a candle, our only source of light, beneath the coffee table, so as to not attract unwanted attention. The deep, rapid fire of Israeli high calibur guns and slower shots of Palestinian rifles literally surrounded us. Several strangers joined us, unable to walk outside for the soldiers stationed in the street. For two or three hours, most of which spent in a prayer, the power and intensity of which seemed heightened by our current surroundings; prayer for peace and for the sparing of human life during the night's conflicts.
This morning, on their walk to the office, several children started chucking rocks at Jason, Jake, Andre, and Tim, but were quickly stopped by a group of older Palestinians, who apologized profusely for the misunderstanding. America, because of the political stances and foreign policy our government has taken, is second only to Israel as a target of Palestinian anger. Unfortunately, in many cases, this anger is justified.
As these events accumulated, it was recommended to everyone in the college to leave the country immediately. There were two concerns: One was obvious: the violence itself. The second concern was that at some point, in response to the violence, Bethlehem might be locked down, leaving us unable to leave if we needed to. Better to get out now, it was decided, than to risk being trapped indeterminately.
So, after a day's adventure in Palestine (day-light hours are safe at this point) we packed our bags and headed back to Amman, leaving only Steve and Joseph behind for another day or so. Our trip out, however, came with it's own series of complications. On the Israel side of the northern border crossing, for example, we discovered that travelers are guilty before proven innocent.
I can't remember all the questions they attacked us with, but each was thrown at us like a slap in the face. "Where are you from?" "why did you come to Israel?" "how long are you going to stay in Jordan?" "are you planning to return to Israel?" "where did you stay in Israel?" "why did you stay there?" "where did you sleep?" "do you speak Arabic?" "why did you bring a laptop computer
with you?" "where are your plane tickets?" "do you have a student I.D. card?" "where are you staying in Jordan?" "who do you know in Jordan?" "who do you know in Israel?" Our responses, frightened, angry, and admittedly evasive, were encased within pleas for mercy: "we're tired," "We're just tourists," "We just want to go 'home.'"
We arrived in Amman, Jordan, at about 11 in the evening, just in time to join the rest of our group for "dinner" and check our e-mail at the office.
Today there was a massive demonstration in Amman that passed directly beneath the Holy Land Trust office, where we could observe protestors from the roof. A few of them eyed us distrustfully from the streets below. Strangely, protesters clashed with Jordanian police, despite the fact that the Jordanian government
seems overwhelmingly supportive of the Palestinian cause, and prevented the protestors from marching on the Israeli embassy.
Later in the day, while the media/tech team pretty much stayed indoors, Prosper, Keith, and Todd went to a soccer field in Gilead that Holy Land Trust renovated as part of the "gifts of the Magi" to set up a soccer-clinic with kids from Amman and the surrounding area in December when our group passes by the field during the pilgrimage.
Tonight, after cramming three tables together in the balcony dining area of the Amman West, the entire magi team, with some new friends: Faddi, Munir and Ra'ed who work in the office next to Holy Land Trust, sat down for a last meal together and, without provocation, broke into a round of "get-to-know-each-other" games. First, we debriefed each other on the days events. Jason described his morning walk from the hotel to the office: hearing the shouts and chants of Jordanian protesters, he reached Wadi Saqra street just in time to see a few cars purposefully run over the American flag. Faddi's interest was sparked: "tell me honestly, what did you feel when you saw this, what does it mean to you?"
Jason admitted that he was offended at first, because to him the flag they were defiling represented what America is supposed to be: democracy, freedom, founded on godly values.But he realized the flag, to the protestors, symbolizes something entirely different: the unjust foreign policies of the U.S. in the Middle-East, concrete policies rather than abstract ideals. The offense began to fade.
Then, maybe because the anticipation of tomorrow's trek had put us in a festive mood, we tried to guess each other's ages. Faddi, Munir, and Ra'ed all guessed that I was 29 or 30. Once I admitted that I was only twenty-one, they refused to believe me. The beard makes me look old.
After dinner, we headed back to the Holy Land Trust office for a couple rounds of low-stakes poker, black-jack, and even a few games of crazy-eights. Faddi went home that night with a smile on his face and all of our Jordanian Piastres (pennies) buried in his pockets.
Tomorrow we're going to Iraq. It's surreal. I always think I'm prepared for the next phase of our journey until the moment actually arrives. My only disappointment is that Peter Thiepp, one of our three Kings, will not be able to come to Baghdad with us because of his Sudanese citizenship. I had a chance to start a friendship with Peter over the summer and consider him one of the most kind-hearted people I have ever met. His temporary absence will definitely be felt by all of us.
Earlier today, Keith and Prosper headed down to the Haya Cultural Center in Amman, kicking the soccer ball around with some children and "just hanging out" for a couple of hours. Unfortunately, they didn't do stretches before playing soccer and Prosper strained his upper thigh, limping all the way back to the hotel, where he soothed his wounds with an ice-pack, hoping that he wouldn't have to start our trek through Iraq with a injured leg.
It was about a ten hour drive from Amman, Jordan to Baghdad, Iraq, a full day's trip, from which we squeezed as much sleep as possible, but not enough to prevent us from exhaustion as we finally pulled up to the Sigman Hotel. The city of Baghdad surprised me at first: traffic was thick—people, despite current hardships, have places to go and things to do; city streets are ornamented with impressive public works of art; down the street from our hotel is the statue of an Iraqi air force pilot standing proudly over the wreckage of an Iranian fighter. Of course, most statues and murals here seem to commemorate Iraq's President and Commander-in-Chief, depicting him in all acts of life: conversing with young children, at his desk hard at work, in uniform or clad in traditional Arabic garb.
Shops and restaurants are adorned with paintings or murals as well, mostly cartoon characters. Mickey Mouse, who comes in all shapes and sizes here—I've seen him fat, extra thin, with oddly shaped ears, and Donald Duck are both popular subjects.
We've been able to attend worship services at Baghdad's Evangelical Presbyterian Church. We climbed the staircase up to the pews in the balcony, settling in and then straining our ears to hear Albert, a friend of ours here in Baghdad, translate the sermon for us into English. The church's ceiling curves like the top of a narrow tunnel, streaked with several shades of blue, leading to a mosaic cross and paralleled by a string of small glass chandeliers, glass which drooped downward, as if to resemble the melted wax which pours from a burning wick). Later, we dropped by the Sunday School services dressed in full "journey of the magi" historical garb: Todd, Prosper, and John Vencer playing the role of the three kings, or wise men. We entered with a slow procession through the aisle, being closely monitored by a room full of wide eyes and giggling, as a children's choir sang "star of wonder, star of light" to us in three different languages to celebrate the beginning of our journey.
Todd, Keith, Prosper, Jake, Andre, and Tim (the Magi 2000 Soccer Team) participated in a friendly match against the air force's "under-seventeen" league on the sixteenth, ending the game with a five to three win. Afterward, the team signed a soccer ball which was presented to the air force commander "in the hopes of peace." We are all very grateful for the men at this base who welcomed us despite our nationalities, giving us full access to their facilities and treating us as friends.
Tonight was spent in prayer and in darkness.
In Baghdad's Al-Amiriya bomb shelter, revamped as a memorial for the 300 innocents who lost their lives there during the Gulf War, the oxygen flow is tightly contained by two giant iron doors and the only hole through which natural light seeps is the cavity through which death found it's entry on February 13, 1991.
This giant hole from which twisted metal pipes sprout like gnarled and wiry fingertips seeking to grasp hold of visitors, is where two U.S. guided missiles burrowed through the ceiling, killing all but thirteen of the shelter's inhabitants. The first missile, a screw rocket which can penetrate through 2 miles of concrete, killed a small group of mostly women and children sitting directly beneath it's entry-point, spraying the rest of the room which a barrage of charred limbs and flesh, the impressions of which can still be seen on parts of the ceiling and walls like shadows. Cutting off electricity, the rocket made escape through the electrically controlled doors impossible. Helpless, trapped in a fashion not altogether unsimilar to victims of one of Nazi Germany's many gas chambers, the shelter's residents had six minutes to wait for the next missile, a fire rocket, which brought the majority of over 300 fatalities.
The Journey of the Magi team was joined by the congregation of Baghdad's Evangelical Presbyterian Church for worship services in the shelter earlier this evening. The shelter walls are filled with framed pictures of the victims, "martyrs" as they are called here, and various memorials of all shapes and sizes: plastic and paper roses, reefs, hand made paper banners demanding an "end to sanctions," a small crayon rainbow highlighting a child's simple request: "peace for Iraq," framed news clippings, a sticker of the now famous Palestinian father and son who were shot in the crossfire between Israeli soldiers and protestors, and much more.
That night, between several spotlights, a keyboard was perched in a nest of wires along with several microphones and two large amplifiers. The church choir sang a few Arabic hymns, between which people came up to offer prayers—a pastor from the church, Robin Wainwright, and David Johnston. Both Robin and David prayed a request for forgiveness, since the tragedy was caused by Americans and is symbolic for other atrocities committed in war and the larger death toll our nation is causing through a military strategy of economic sanctions.
"Heavenly Father," David's prayer began, "our hearts are full of sorrow and horror in this place where so many innocent souls were martyred. We Americans especially come to you, O forgiving and generous God, confessing our great guilt and owning up to our responsibility in this savage and despicable crime."
The services ended and the church congregation, several hundred people, soon left. The silence of the room became almost overwhelming. Or team stayed the whole night to perform a candle-lit vigil and to offer up ceaseless prayers. "It will be dark, because this is a place of darkness" Robin commented in his speech to the congregation before the lights switched off, leaving us at the mercy of a few dozens candles.
After a group prayer the team split off into their own separate corners for silent devotions, some spending time to wander around the complex with candles in hand, absorbing the surroundings. In my wanderings, I tried to memorize the faces of victims—infants, young men, wives, old women. I picked out features of their faces which resembled friends or relatives, trying to find a personal connection with the endless collection of images—beautiful, smiling babies, bewildered children, mothers—but only so much can be seen through a single photograph. David accompanied me, reading many of their names, pointing out that, in the listing of family members, the fathers were almost always missing; they had stayed outside to work leaving their families alone in the "safety" of the shelter. Who can imagine the horror of losing their entire family after putting them in the only place that was thought to be safe? The rage and sorrow stirred within me in a silent upward spiral.
The group as a whole seemed driven to a similar state of being: all of us seemed far more sober and serious-minded than I have ever before seen, some, appropriately and beautifully, drawing very close to tears and most all of us struggling to find words to describe what we were seeing and how it made us feel.
At midnight we met again as a group, reading passages from Psalms, singing hymns, and offering more prayers—pleas for forgiveness, guidance, and strength. Most of us slept eventually, rising at six-thirty for another set of devotions. Nabil, one of the members of the church, brought us Turkish coffee and Nes-Café when the vigil started, extended his kindness even further by offering us breakfast at his house that morning. Unfortunately we were had to decline. Sunlight crept in from the rupture the explosion had created in the ceiling, where birds, who cheerfully greeted our awakenings with song, have strategically nested.
Dairy cows grazing through a field of palm trees; a young boy in white robes rolling a tire twice his size down a dirt road; a dried up gas station; the siren of an ambulance; a horse pulling a cart through a crowded intersection; a horde of brightly clad school children running back to their homes; a flock of sheep being herded over a set of iron railroad tracks; a mural stretching beneath four apartment windows depicting a field of sunflowers and a small cluster of white chickens on the road from Baghdad to Babylon. These are the images that assaulted my eyes. The smells were equally poignant: burning garbage, gasoline fumes, the soothing fragrance of the Tigris river, the earthy manure of cattle.
It was one of our groups few away-from-the-hotel excursions since arriving in Iraq, so you'll have to forgive the melodramatic tone of my descriptions. It feels good to be out in the open again.
It was a two hour drive by bus to reach Babylon, the ancient city that plays prominately in the book of Daniel, and Biblical prophecy. We entered through the famous "Ishtar Gate" which, in my opinion, was the most impressive thing we saw in the city's entire set of ruins. It was painted a bright blue, stretching up into the Heavens, the arching gate plastered with intricate carvings of dragons and bulls, representative of two gods that were worshipped during the gates construction. The "blueness" of it, our tour guide later explained, was necessary because it was said to protect against the "evil eye" and is also a soothing color, encouraging those who pass through it to be at peace with themselves and, more importantly, with local authorities.
Bypassing the souvenir shop and the Nebuchadnezzar Museum, which we meant to come back to but, were unable to as we ran out of time, we followed our hajib-covered tour guide into the city's center, visiting the throne room were Alexander the Great died and walking alongside of the main procession road. Our tour ended at a statue of a lion outside the city walls, overlooking the new palace in Babylon belonging to Iraq's president (which, for obvious reasons, we were not allowed to photograph). The statue, so faded and worn that it was nearly unrecognizable, had a very rough surface; as my hands brushed across it, it reminded me of the gravelly surface of a graham cracker. The walls of the old city were uniform in color and design-a faded yellow, made so that each individual brick could be distinguished from the others. It seemed almost as if the whole construction was made out of Legos.
Tomorrow, inshallah (God-willing), we will actually begin our journey, taking the first steps along the long road to Bethlehem.
Today we walked. The first official day of the pilgrimage. It was a short hike, about an hour on foot and camels, starting at the palace ruins of Ctesiphon and ending on the opposite bank of the Tigris River. We've been told that three of our six camels are pregnant, one of whom today had been vomiting, green ooze soaking into the fur around its mouth. Gently kicking their stomachs with both feet and yelling "Doh! Doh!" (somewhat equivalent to "yah! yah!") to make them move, our journey went smoothly and without incident. throught the day we were closely observed and scrutinized by hordes of children from the side of the road, simultaneously welcoming us and laughing at our awkward riding as our camels kicked up dust and left "Pac-man" shaped hoof-prints on the ground.
Returning by car to Ctesiphon once we had reached the Tigris, Todd, Prosper, Keith, Jake, Andre, and Tim joined up with a nearby soccer game. After they worked up a sweat, and evening came on they changed into their "magi" clothes (kingly garments for Todd, John, and Prosper, and Roman-esq "soldier" uniforms for the rest) so that we could film a scene at the Ctesiphon ruins. Along with filming a documentary about our journey through the Middle- East, our media crew has been shooting footage to be used for an historical feature about the original journey of the magi.
On film, each King explained what he had discovered to make him come on the journey in his own language: Todd in English, Prosper in Shona, and John in Tagalog. The "kings" and their "guards" then gathered around a small fire in the corner of the ruins of Ctesiphon. The call for "quiet on the set" was issued with a quick shush from George Sada. After a few takes, we called it a wrap and headed back to the Sagmon Hotel.
Tomorrow, if our feet can handle it, the whole day will be spent walking.
Today, starting from the Tigris, we pushed ourselves to walk until nightfall, stopping only once for lunch. We started late, however, because we took time in the morning to attend a festival—the first gathering in Iraq of all Christian denominations, near the ruins of Kohe, the oldest known church in the world. For the gathering we dressed in our "Magi" clothes (kingly garments for Todd, Prosper, and John and roman-esq "soldier" uniforms for the rest of us—complete with swords) and rode in on camelback.
Immediately, a large swarm diverging from the thousands of people attending the event overtook us, welcoming us and crowding around to have their pictures taken. We stood still and smiled for photographs with hundreds of different groups. In an unbelievable twist of fate, the first people I shook hands with were residents of California (my home state) living very close to where I had grown up—they had flown in specifically for today's festival. Hopefully, we will cross paths again. The world is sometimes smaller than we suspect.
Though we stayed very briefly, our presence at the gathering set the tone for the rest of the day's events. Even three or four hours after we left, tour busses returning home from the gathering honked, the passengers waved frantically, shouting "ahlan wa sahlan," "marhaba," or "hello hello." One bus even pulled to the side of the road so that more people could get out and have their pictures taken with our group. We spent half of the day with our hands in the air waving to everyone who had first waved to us. Never in our entire lives have any of us come this close to "celebrity" status. The warmth which the people here have shown continues to overwhelm us.
Once we had gotten ourselves moving a bit, a group of thirty or forty school children stumbled across us and started to follow us along the road, welcoming us while laughing and singing. They chanted "Bitraih! Bi-dam! Nafdeek ya Saddam!" By Spirit! By blood! We will redeem you, oh Saddam!.
Toward evening, as we started racing the settling sun, our camel caravan began walking along a larger highway, curving around several freeway onramps. The camels were rather displeased with the situation, to say the least. They especially disliked the highway tunnels we walked beneath where they could hear the thumping of cars above them and had the feeling of being trapped. In the future we hope to avoid major streets as much as possible.
Camels, we've recently discovered, have a mind of their own. Very early in the day a horse and cart began following us along a stretch of asphalt paralleling our dirt road, a bell hung around the horse's neck, loudly announcing its presence with a constant clang. As the horse and cart passed us by, Todd's camel went berserk: leaping into the air and flipping both Todd and saddle to the ground. Bruise-less and laughing off the fall, Todd dusted himself off and hopped back on without a moment's hesitation. Later, Tim, who had already endured a barrage of white-green camel spit, was saddled atop a camel that had suddenly decided to scratch an itch along her backside. Dropping herself to the ground,at which point Tim leapt off, the camel proceeded to roll over, as if to squash the giant human "bug" that had been riding her. Tim, of course, is fine.
Other than those two episodes the day was almost flawless. On our way to the ruins at Sippar a few men lay down a giant, beautifully woven, orange,black, white, and red carpet at our feet. The meaning behind this symbolic gesture is simple: the men were inviting us into their homes for tea, food, or whatever else might have need of. We thanked the two men profusely, taking pictures with all of us together, but reluctantly declined, knowing that the road ahead of us was long and that we were still short on time.
Endless fields of corn and wheat, green grass, friendly locals welcoming us into their homes. It seems, at the moment, that we are traveling through one of the quietest and most peaceful areas of the world. Then, without warning,a rumbling can be heard in the distance—loud booms from the Southern no-fly zone, maybe fifty or so miles away. Another round of bombings courtesy of the U.S. military. This happens so frequently that U.S. newspapers don't even bother themselves with it any more. There were seven blasts altogether, each followed by at least a minute's worth of silence.
Another local we met heard that we were going to Palestine and told the camel-drivers (in Arabic) that he wanted to come along, that he was ready to come to Palestine to "join the fight." To win our approval, he sprinted down the road and back again, proving his fitness and his determination to "tag along." Like hundreds of thousands of others here, he has signed a government-sponsored petition stating his willingness to voluntarily join the armed forces in order to help the Palestinian cause.
Just before reaching Sippar a school-house full of children were on their way home and crossed our path, merging seamlessly with the camel caravan. They crowded around Robin, clad all in pilgrim white and leading our procession, and began chanting (as the other group had done yesterday): "Biraik! Bi-dam! Nafdeek ya Saddam!"
The ruins of Sippar, once we reached them, were, at first glance, unimpressive. It was like most other archaeological dig sites: a few square holes in the ground where only the force of imagination could conjure up images of the past: the people, the homes, the city walls. Upon closer inspection, the ground at our feet was littered with shards of pottery, marked with various patterns, as well as the intact portions of the heads and bases-truckloads of ancient relics, shattered in pieces, but beautiful nonetheless.
Toward the end of the day, we met with Karagholy, the head Sheikh of the area through which we were passing, whose Bedouin tribe lives nomadically from the areas around Mosa to the area surrounding Karballa. Offering us an extremely dark, and richly sweet tea served in shot glasses, they brought us into their tent which was roofed with 15 large strips woven from goat fur and propped up on wooden poles. Several ropes had been attached to this tent and staked to the ground, from which clothes had been hung to dry. A chicken and a dozen or so baby chicks ran past us as we entered, along with a dog and sseveral sheep. As the men sat with us, the women hid behind the tent flaps and Robin
Today we were welcomed with gunfire and Pepsi. The people we meet on the road seem to know about us before we arrive. Though we haven't verified it yet, we may have been mentioned in an Iraqi news segment in relation to the Kohei gathering a few days ago. It is also possible that news of our journey has spread simply by word-of-mouth from household to household. At one point a group gathered around us, handing all of us Pepsi and firing several shots in the air with a rifle. Though unexpected and a bit startling at first, it is actually a sign of great respect. Shots are fired in the air traditionally to accompany any event worth celebrating: a birth, an arrival, etc.
More walking... there's no room left on my feet for blisters—the spaces have all been filled. After six hours of movement my leg muscles tighten up and my body begins to burn, inducing the symptoms of fever, while a heat-rash breaks out along the sides of my legs. By the end of the day, it usually hurts to move.
This morning, as we gathered together for prayer, Robin called over Yasir, a small child from the crowd surrounding us, to us in the circle as he read.
As the camel caravan strolled off into the distant horizon, Robin and I stayed behind to let the fluid out of a few blisters and bandage them to make walking a bit more tolerable. Most of the crowd that had gathered around us for morning prayers stayed to see this spectacle.
Robin's goal is to walk every step of the journey on his own to feet, instead of sometimes riding a camel or taking a water break in the bus every so often (as I have been doing). Straggling a few kilometers behind the rest of the group, we discussed the history of the area—the Parthion Empire, Alexander the Great, King Herrod—while at the same time trying our best to greet everyone we passed with "salaam aleikum" and breathing in the landscape. Our walk through the fertile crescent in Iraq will undoubtedly be the greenest portion of the entire trip.
Women and children carry stacks of hay three times their own size; a dog barks furiously with gasping breathes, like a severe asthma patient; cows eye us suspiciously; a barefoot man walks across his field with a shovel slung over his shoulder; a woman reaps wheat with a small bag and a sickle; a group of Egrets wades through a swampy marsh—all of this capped with fields of palm trees, irrigation canals, and endless greenery.
We caught up with the rest of the group near the Euphrates, where the media crew shot some footage for the journey's documentary, with the Kings on camels, dressed in their "magi" costumes, while the rest of us relaxed in the shade of a cluster of palm trees. A small group of children had gathered next to Jason, one of them making duck sounds. Jason was quick to reciprocate, eliciting a frenzy of giggles and Donald Duck "quacks." Jason looks over to me, "see," he says, "there's no language barrier."
Ending the day at about 5 PM, we stumbled onto a group of kids playing soccer with a flat ball. After giving them one of ours, the men gathered together, clasping hands on each other's shoulders in a circle and treated us to a traditional Arabic dance as one of them twirled a set of red prayer beads in the air like a cowboy's lasso. They were accompanied by a Zimmara—a small, double headed flute that lets out a sound slightly reminiscent of bagpipes—and a impromptu drummer, using a bright-red one-galloon gas drum.
At the start of the day amazingly we crossed paths with a man from Ireland who, like us, is walking through Iraq on a pilgrimage which re-enacts an historical event: he started his journey in Turkey and will hike to Babylon, retracing an ancient war route the Greeks took through the region, returning to Turkey along the route through which their armies fled. Since we were both eager to get on the road, we spoke with him only very briefly. (I actually only caught a glimpse of him passing by: a European, which is a strange site in Iraq, with sunglasses, a baseball cap, and a hiking back pack waving "hello.")
Today was also the first day that anyone we've met along our journey has actually done something to make me angry—it made my blood boil, actually, and it happened twice.
The first incident happened very early in the morning. A young child, no more than ten years old, wearing all blue (a blue pull-over sweater, blue sweat pants, even blue sneakers) and with one eye that had faded white with blindness, started tagging along with our group, conversing with us in Arabic as if we spoke it fluently. I shrugged my shoulders quite a bit, answering his questions with "ma behki arabi" I don't speak Arabic (though no one ever seems to believe me!) An older boy in nicer clothes who had been trying to explain his whole life story to me with hand gestures yelled some thing at the boy and chased him down the road. Still, the boy trailed behind us along the other side of the street. After a while, the older boy picked up a pile of rocks and started chucking them at the boy, responding to my signs of disapproval with a "thumb's up" and a three- mile grin, as if he had just done me a very great favor.
The second incident occurred outside of a restaurant in Felugia. We had just finished a satisfying meal and four children began begging for money from us. A man came to shoo them away—slapping them around in the process. The eldest of these children was a young girl with three younger brothers, probably parentless and surviving day-by-day off the kindness of strangers. Their hair was raggedy and the hands they stretched out to beg with were black with dirt and soot. After handing them a small, pink bag of bread we had leftover from the meal, Prosper and Keith began tossing them small candies, wrapped in plastic. This amazingly elicited large smiles and giggles from the children, who seemed, for a moment, like "normal" children, the kind that went to candy stores, ran through playgrounds, and brought sandwiches and apples with them every day to school.
It didn't take long for a man from the restaurant to emerge, shouting angrily at the children, who, even as he threaten to hit them, would not budge. He pushed them, pulled them by their shirts, slapped one on the side of the face. Despite these attacks, the children shouted and waved at us, as happy as ever, as our bus pulled from its parking space, leaving the restaurant, the children, and Felugia behind.
Recently, in order to emerge myself more deeply into the culture(s) of the Middle-East, I've started reading novels and poetry written by local authors. Although the U.S. academic world generally hasn't seemed to take much of an interest, I'm starting to realize (or formulate the opinion) that some of the better literary works of the last fifty years were written here, despite the "novel" in the Arab world as relatively new idea. The two most interesting books I've started reading so far have been "Prairies of Fever" by Ibrahim Nasrallah and "Palace Walk" by Naguib Mahfouz—although amidst walking and site-seeing it's sometimes hard to find time to read.
"Prairies of Fever" is one of the most unusual texts I've ever come across. It seems to randomly blend sections of a narrative told in first, second, and third person about a teacher living in a small Saudi Arabian village, who has been told that he is dead and must pay for his own funeral. He insists, however, that it is really his "double" who has died, a man with the same name and same physical features. The themes illustrate a sort of constant fear of "disappearing," characters seem to vanish into crevices in the earth or into the landscape for no particular reason.
Naguib Mahfouz' "Palace Walk" is structurally a more concrete story that narrates the life of a family. it takes place in Turkey during world war II. While the Turkish government had been on the side of the Germans and Italians, so far in my reading this hasn't been a predominant feature of the narrative.
I read an article in the Jordan Times about the problems of text translation, mostly from Arabic to English, in which Nasrallah expressed the mixed feelings of joy and sadness which come from having his works translated. So much of the poetry of the words and sentence structure are lost when books are transferred from one language to another. Yet another reason for me to (despite myself) attempt to learn the basics of reading and writing Arabic.
Though we made it into Iraq we're still waiting for the journey to really begin. We're still waiting to receive support vehicles, camels, and full permission to travel from the Iraqi government. In the meantime, the Sigman, as a hotel and as a place where we have been spending the majority of our days, has exceeded far beyond my original expectations. The building is beautiful and (for better or worse) they feed us like kings: at least three servings of meat with every meal (lamb, chicken, steak), an endless stream of bread baskets, fresh fish, fruit, bowls of palmgranites layered beneath a pile of sugar. We've tried to invite some of the hotel employees, who we've had time to befriend, to join us for dinner but management policy prohibits it. The same people who serve us giant platters of meat are unable to afford even a single serving of such a delicacy. In fact, they abstain from meat entirely because of its high cost.
Emerging from a field of palm trees, our group crossed a long bridge welded together with thin metal planks stretching over the Euphrates. The bridge led us into Heet (or Hit) the main Mosque of the town stretched proudly into the skyline on the opposite shore. Being one of the larger cities we've passed through, our camels were intimated by the traffic and pedestrian swarms. The walkers amongst our group were careful to stay close by as we slowly navigated our way through a maze of curving city streets. A large three-faced clock, one face in Roman numerals, one alpha-numeric, and a third system I didn't recognize, stood in the city's center, bearing a faded painting of the President.
In the middle of the city, a few men in suits—local officials—lead us to a historic tar pit, which had, over the black tar that bubbled fiercly, a whitish substance, like spoiled milk or a fountain of puss, violently gurgling and smelling of rotting eggs. A man crawls down towards the tar with a bundle of dead palm leaves, placing them on the tar and they instantly burst into flames. Our suited guides tell us a bit about the pits history. Tar was probably taken from here to pave the roads of Babylon. He wishes us luck on the rest of our journey as we go, and upon leaving Heet, we are instantly returned to the middle of nowhere—a desert highway stretching into the void.
November 4 This morning, after we had gathered for breakfast and prayers, we witnessed an orange and white taxi slam into a goat from a young boy's flock on a nearby road. Pushing up a cloud of dust, the goat's body rolled down the hill toward our campsite. After a moment's pause and the screeching of wheels, an argument ensued in Arabic between the driver and the young boy, loud enough to draw the attention of a small crowd of onlookers. John, diligent in his duties as cameraman, raced onto the scene with his D.V. cam., capturing every possible moment on film.
After a day of walking, going gradually further and further uphill and trying very hard to reach the city of Baghdadi, we drove back to base-camp but stopped first to pay our respects at a local wake, which was mourning the loss of the region's Sheikh.
Entering a large hall where prestigious locals and Sheikhs from surrounding areas had gathered ("sheikhs 'n suits," as I like to call them), we stood next to the long line of alternating chairs and couches, said a short prayer, and sat down. Through the windows, whose dark blue curtains had been flung fully open, hordes of children stared in, trying to catch a glimpse of what the men were doing. I had the sudden urge to make funny faces, wiggle my ears, or otherwise entertain this new audience, but the polite sobriety required in my current surroundings outweighed such considerations. Once the room had formally welcomed us, we were offered water, then tea, then coffee, then tea, then tea again (and tea several more times after that) and eventually, an entire meal. In the center of the room they had left an entire metal platter of cigarette packs (brands I didn't recognize: "Miami," "Aspen," and "Craven"). Hospitality, it seems, can sometimes be so excessive that it's lethal. Our meal was outdoors: chicken and lamb over rice on giant platters. Men stood around the tables, children in a separate area, women not at all, digging into the meat with their hands and fingers: a situation so laid back and "manners-free" that it became deeply liberating.
The new Sheikh said of the man who died that "There are four types of people in this world. There are those who have money and who use it to help other people and to help the poor. There are people with no money who, if they had the resources, would give what they had. There are people with money who use it only for themselves. Finally, there are people who have no money, but, even if they had it, would not use it for anything other than selfish purposes. The first two categories are the best, and he was of the first variety."
After dinner, we sat listening to the local Imam (Muslim teacher) preach for over two hours in Arabic. Even the Arabic speakers were beginning to fall asleep. Although we joked about the length of his sermon for about an hour afterward, as soon as we heard some of the speech's translation we realized he actually had some interesting things to say. For example, he commented (at length) that it doesn't matter which direction you face when you pray, if your heart is not facing towards God, if you are not praying sincerely, it doesn't matter if you face Mecca. At the time, of course, I had imagined the worst: that he was preaching Jihad, and specifically targeting Americans (maybe even pointing us out as examples). I guess I'm a bit of a pessimist.
November 5 Coming home from a long day of walking we realized that there was no dinner waiting for us at base camp. Apparently we were supposed to have eaten in Ramadi (about a half an hour drive back from the way we had come). To some of us the idea of getting back into the car—even for the sake of food—after a full day of walking and a two hour drive to and from base camp, was enough to make us slightly nauseous. Most of the media crew stayed behind, editing video or photographs, while I crawled into bed, curling into a fetal position, and took a quick two hour nap.
After dinner, Abu Galen (who has generously allowed us to set up our camp on his property) threw us a giant "farewell" party. Tomorrow we move our base camp further along our route. Along with an Iraqi singer and keyboardist, several hundred people (all men) from the surrounding villages gathered around our tents to listen to music and dance. It was strange to be at a dance with no women, but, in a way, it was refreshing: people were actually here to dance, not simply to use dancing as a means to flirt with the opposite sex. We were placed in a row of plastic chairs, our seats of honor, but when the dancing started we were invariably pulled into the heart of the celebration. I enjoyed the dancing but, unfortunately, it aggravated a few of my blisters, so I often found myself wishing that I could politely decline. Eventually I found that the only way to avoid being pulled in was to wrap myself around the armrests of my chair.
The dance style ranged from typical disco-tech, to "whirling dervish" style, to a strange military-esq dance resembling marching in place, to a conga line, to a traditional Iraqi circle dance. The keyboard, switching from "string" to "organ" mode, would also occasionally imitate metal drums, a sort of "machine gun" sound, at which point most dancers would break into a rapid-fire chest-shaking maneuver.
Abu Galen, who before had seemed a very soft-spoken and mild mannered gentleman, marched around the circle proudly, violently waving his stick, pushing the crowd further and further away from the center.
At one point, for whatever reason, struggling with all of his might to free himself from his grip, a young boy was pulled from the dance floor by an older man, probably his father, but, when they had reached they outer rim of the circle, the man's grip was loosened and a few other men, who were in a better mood, apparently, pushed the child back into the center.
As the party was drawing to a close, a man flung Iraqi dinars onto the ground and into the singer's face as he circled him—the traditional way of showing one's approval of a hired performer. When the music stopped, Selan quickly dispersed the crowd and we fell into our beds, very quickly falling to sleep.
November 6 Today was our first day at the new camp—four bedouin style tents piled up along a small field of broken bamboo cylinders and a patch of cornfield stretching over a narrow cliff ending at the Euphrates. At night the river is lit by a dozen sparkling rubies: the fiery lights of fishering boats.
After a long day of walking, we had to scout around several cities in the area surrounding our new base of operations to find a restaurant with enough food to feed our whole group. After a half hour or so, we finally settled on a spot in the city of Rawa, a cozy looking "hole in the wall" with a whole lamb hanging from a hook out front, drawing us in like a dangling fishermen's lure. The room was just barely large enough to fit our whole group, with smooth cement floors, two sinks for washing, an ashtray on every table, and a pair of ceiling fans twirling at the pace of an inch-worm. There were two choices on the menu—kebob and teeka, but they were both carved from the same slab of meat. By the time we had finished with it, however, the poor carcass' bones were licked clean.
Perhaps from exhaustion, our team seemed particularly clumsy that evening, spilling at least three bottles of Pepsi or Miranda-Orange before we had finished our meal. Keith, in a gesture that must have required some degree of psychic premonition, spilled his drink at the same instant he had asked for a napkin. The meal was actually quite good—e walked away with satisfied spirits and heavier bellies. As the bus pulled away from the curb to drive us "home" to our campsite, Keith and Prosper continued their habit of tossing out small candies to the children that had gathered around our vehicle.
Tomorrow, inshallah, will be a day of rest.
November 7 We awoke this morning for a large breakfast of eggs, bread, and a platter of fried onions and tomatoes. Yesterday, we were told that today would be a "rest day" for most of us so that Robin, who has been delayed, would have a chance to catch up to our group. So, after sleeping in, having tea and breakfast, and engaging in about an hour's worth of casual conversation, which included a brief theological debate regarding pain and suffering, Edward's car came tearing through our camp. Edward is working with George Sada, Executive Director of Holy Land Trust and our generous Iraqi host, to help us in whatever way he can.
Apparently, Robin was upset that we were not walking, though we had all thought that it was his idea. The lines of communication, somehow, have been severed. He insisted that we didn't need to wait, that he could catch up with us, even though it would mean walking about sixty kilometers. Aside from feeling that this was an impossible feat, we were also a bit disgruntled at the thought of having to walk on our "day of rest." With a few groans we threw on some socks, rubbed on some sunscreen, and limped into the bus, kicking up dust with our tires as they pulled us into the desert.
As we started walking, our stomachs gave a collective cry of pain—each of us having to, in turn, pull over to the side of a road for a "rest." After about an hour, toilet paper and Tums were in short supply. Maybe it was a bad batch a food we ate, or a bad batch of water but, whatever it was, it hit us hard and got us where it hurts.
The day was spent completely in the desert, no homes, no buildings, no water, no people for miles. Every once in a while the landscape collapsed into a series of small craters, as if the ground had been hit by a barrage of meteorites. We saw a few large herds of sheep, a couple rotting humps of road-kill, some shattered glass, an endless road, some telephone lines, a couple of stink bugs... not much else.
"What are you doing here?" a voice said in perfect English from a car window, half demanding and half "just curious." We get a lot of people who stop and try to figure out what in the world a group of rag-tag Americans and Internationals are doing walking across Iraq with a herd of camels. But this, for some reason, seemed different. After a few minutes of conversation with Jason Drake, the man was quick to say, "this is a very good thing you are doing."
"When you reach Palestine," he continued, "what will you do? Return to America?" We nodded our heads "yes." Of course we would go home, what else would we do? He almost seemed surprised, or disappointed, by this. After a pause: "You have permission from the government to be doing this?" Answering in the affirmative, it was hard to suppress a laugh, we'd have to be pretty idiotic to try to do this trip without the approval of the Iraqi government.
By the end of the day, we had walked about 32 kilometers and Robin had walked 50. Coming back to the camp, we found Robin already asleep, "the sleep of the dead" John Vencer described it. Our friend Solomon attempting to hook up a full screen TV, of all things, next to our tents. We had thought that we started "camping" that we would be roughing it, but each campsite has been like a five-star hotel: a bathroom, bath, mattresses on each bed.
November 8 After several weeks of walking, the road seems like a home and everything else, the campsite, the meals, the towns we've left behind, begin to fade like a roll of film exposed to sunlight. Its as if we have always been walking, since the beginning of time, and will continue to walk until the day that we die. Even when I stop for a moment, the desert keeps moving—a trick played on my eyes by the heat—it stretches ahead of me like the tide of the ocean, curving deeper and deeper into the horizon, leaving me a bit sea-sick and slightly off-kilter; a feeling our "number 4" camel must have shared today: vomiting as she trotted along, a bit sick and maybe slightly overfed.
The trek, as we dig further into the desert, is becoming more and more of a solitary activity. For an hour, I can hear nothing but the pebbles crunching beneath my white tennis shoes, the fierce hissing of the wind, and the occasional whine of an automobile approaching from half a mile's distance—like a mosquito slowly piercing through the depths of an eardrum. Soon, another journeyman gradually paces in front of me, without a word spoken between us, and a few seconds later, I'm alone again.
Today we got our first glimpses of real sand, a "sneak preview" of what awaits us in Syria. At first, the ground became scarred, peeling from the earth in the pattern of a leaf or an endless fingerprint. Each fractured segment, though they would crack beneath the force of my feet, was unnaturally hard, like a kitchen tile. Gradually, in certain areas, the ground became softer and softer until it grinded down to a whitish powder. Eventually, my feet found themselves in a naturally formed "ditch" stretching alongside the road trimmed by a greenish fuzz, lit up by the setting sun. At the moment, I'm laying on my bed at base camp, typing these words onto a computer screen, but it feels like I'm still moving, still walking across the desert, inching closer and closer to our final destination.
November 10 This afternoon, after we had given our feet a long rest, like a cool drink of water after a year's drought, George Sada brought a group of a dozen or so students from various Baghdad Universities to help us celebrate our upcoming departure from Iraq—we will reach the Syrian border tomorrow and cross over the day after. Our trek through Syria is a source of much anxiety. Most of our "international" journeymen, everyone but the Americans, have yet to received their visas, and very little logistical planning has been done for this segment of the trip: we have no support vehicles, no camels, no tents, no food or water supply—nothing.
Ten of the students, evenly divided between men and women, after dressing in traditional Assyrian garb, danced while two older men played a Zora (a strange combo between a trumpet and a flute) and a Dahoola (a type of drum). The women wore glittering dresses, dark red and shades of deep purple, with headdresses from which metal jewels dangled, almost long enough to cover their eyes. The men wore long white scarves, patterned with red diamonds, black polished shoes, and hats from which long feathers sprouted into the air.
It has been quite a while since we've been in such close proximity with women of our own age ("We've been in the desert too long," Todd Elkins puts it) and several of the women who visited us today, aside from being married, were also George's nieces. So George felt the need to explain to us—very directly—that he had brought his gun with him today, in case any of us tried to do anything inappropriate. With a giant grin he announced: "Gentlemen, these women, if you get too close, I will shoot you"—we're still not sure if he was joking.
November 12 "Gentlemen, we will not say good-bye," George Sada says loudly as we reach the Iraq-Syria border, "we will say only 'see you soon.'"
Our last day in Iraq, despite George's assurances, was filled with final greetings: hugs, a few tears, promises to send post-cards, requests for prayer—all emotionally intense, to say the least. There is no way to express how much the people here have meant to us and it would take me at least ten pages to thank them for everything they have done. Our Iraqi brothers&mdahs;Edward, Solomon, Oday, Sagben, Albert (who hasn't been able to visit us in over a week), and most of the others—walked with us for the final ten kilometers of our trek through their country. When a few of the Americans started wandering too far ahead, Robin called us back: "For once," he told us, "let's try to stay together. Let's walk as a group." So we walked shoulder to shoulder, almost as if our arms were glued, slowing down our pace a bit but making our final steps seem more meaningful.
After reaching the border we spent most of the day waiting for governmental clearance (on both sides), sitting on the curb and the sidewalk in small patches of shade, fading in and out of sleep. The "internationals" (John from the Philippines, Prosper, Zimbabwe, and Keith, England) were still uncertain that their visas had cleared and were, at several points during the process, convinced they would be denied entrance into Syria.
"I'm okay with it either way," Prosper says, trying to stay optimistic, "whichever way the pendulum swings..." Keith's visa, which had to be issued on the spot, ended up causing us the most difficulties. We later learned that his is the first visa to be issued to a foreigner from that border crossing in three years.
"Welcome to Syria: the Cradle of Civilization," a sign proclaims as we pass through a set of roadblocks and shuffle into the Syrian border station, where we're brought to fill out a few forms. Alongside pictures of the Syrian leader, several home-made "no-smoking" signs are posted, with a real, but flattened, cigarettes taped to a piece of construction paper and slashed with the marks of a red pen. After presenting a few officials with soccer-balls as a token of our appreciation, the bulk of our group drove to base-camp, which is staked a few yards from the old city of Dura-Europas, which dates back to at least 1,000 B.C. and may have been active until 1,000 A.D. The original Magi definitely came through here. Unfortunately, the "internationals" were forced to wait several more hours for clearance. Actually, Keith was the only still waiting for the official "thumbs-up," but Prosper, not wanting Keith to endure the process alone, decided that they would all stay.
November 14 Finishing today's 15 kilometer hike, an unrecognizable figure greeted me from the distance—without my glasses from half a kilometer away, he was just a blur on the horizon. Coming in for a closer inspection, however, I soon realized that it was Peter Thiepp, our friend from Sudan who has, at long last, joined us on our pilgrimage to Bethlehem. Because of his refugee status, Peter was denied entrance into Iraq and has been waiting patiently in Amman, Jordan for a chance to meet up with us. As the journey's fourth and final "king," Peter's presence makes our re-enactment of the Magi's trek finally seem real.
After lunch our group wandered over to the nearby ruins of Dura-Europas, which spans about 5 kilometers square. The huge city walls contain the now barely visible remains of a greek-style theater, a synagogue whose walls and murals have been shipped to a Museum in Damascus, and one of the oldest Christian churches in the world dating at around 100 A.D. "But," Robin explains, "it was more like a house-church. It wasn't really a separate structure, it was part of a larger complex." As the sun begins to set, the media crew quickly herds us into our "Magi" outfits (historical garb, resembling those of the period in which the wise men made their trek, and we film several scenes in the ruins to capture Peter Thiepp, our newest King, greeting his comrades and joining them in their walk through the desert and their search for the new born King.
November 15 Gripping the skin of a half peeled orange from his teeth, Todd Elkins dangled the ball of fruit tauntingly over the head of his camel who, like the rest of us, had been lounging in the shade after a long day of walking. The magi team, now a rowdy audience yelling our support for this spectacle, watched attentively, wondering whether or not the beast would swallow Todd whole—or at least pull him in for a smooch. After thirtyfive kilometers, we decided to pull over to the side of the road for a few cheese sandwiches and call it quits, until tomorrow, throwing the discarded remains of tomatoes and rolls of bread to our new "pets," who would grunt their appreciation before inhaling their meal of scraps. One of our Syrian friends even tried to get one of the smaller camels to puff on his cigarette. The offer was vehemently rejected.
The camels here, in comparison to the herd we had in Iraq, have earned high praise: they seem cleaner, more obedient, generally healthier, and consistently friendlier to humans, making the ride a great deal more comfortable (as well as more expedient, since they move a lot faster). But Robin Wainwright, the leader of this expedition, still has dreams of bringing the offspring of our Iraqi camels home with him to Sierra Madre in California. "My neighbors have objected to us having horses on our property," he confesses, "I wonder how they'll feel about camels." Personally, I've had a love-hate relationship with these creatures. For the most part, I've preferred to rely on my feet (or one of our motorized chaperones) Sitting on a camel, other than inducing vertigo, can produce a severe sense of powerlessness: the camel, at all times, is in control. When they run, which happened quite a bit today, it's even worse. Peter Thiep, after taking his first ride on one today, seemed to agree with me. "I feel better now that I am walking," he tells me as the camels race ahead of us, half-galloping over the curving hillside.
November 16 Even while stranded here, deep within the void of the Syrian desert, our group has been buzzing with news about this year's U.S. Presedential elections. According to the scattered tidbits of information we have collected, it seems as though Gore, after a recount, has won even though Bush originally was thought to be the victor. (If this is inaccurate, or things change, someone let me know). We can only imagine the insanity that's rippling through the American media over this. At the end of the day, we sometimes thirst more for the black print of an English newspaper than for a glass of water to cool us down.
The other sure sign of homesickness amidst or travelers has been the collective rumblings of our Westernized stomachs. It's really amazing the foods you start craving after abstaining from them for too long. I could kill for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a Dr. Pepper, a Mexican burrito, a bowl of way-too-sugary cereal, a chai tea, or a pound of green M&M's. Though everyone is feeling similar cravings, their mouths are watering for different things. The East-coasters keep talking about a marshmellowy spread called "Fluff" which people apparently put in sandwiches. Personally, it sounds kind of disgusting to me. Tim, Jake, and Andre have been dreaming about the "old-fashioned" apple pies they make at the McDonalds in Amman—deep fried, rather than the lighter, "healthier" American version. On our hike today, Peter Thiep also told me about Sudanese food—lots of milk, kebob, and shaya (meat cut in pieces, grilled, and sauced with different oils). "And," he says, "there are so many fish that you don't see here, fish that come only from the Nile."
There have been more than a few moments on this journey when all of us have day-dreamed about our eventual home-coming, the things we have lost that we will eventually regain.
November 18 Holes magically appearing in every corner of our tents last night, we shifted our sleeping bags throughout the night in a desperate attempt to avoid the onslaught of rain. Piling raincoats over our sleeping bags and huddling into the centermost place of our Bedouin tents, we eventually found refuge and even sleep. Unfortunately, once the storm had finally cleared, the wind grew more fierce and blew out the fires of our gas-heaters.
Immersed in a thick fog, we awoke this morning slightly more sleepy-eyed than usual and damp. Despite the dark clouds we saw no rain on our hike this morning. In fact, the cool weather and wet roads, which prevented the kicking up of dust, were a welcome change. Besides, for its crops and its inhabitants, Syria needs whatever water the skies will grant them. Our needs are secondary.
Eventually our group ran across an impassable roadblock—a bridge which had been left unfinished. Part of the mostly concrete edge was boarded up with wooden planks and the center was filled with giant mounds of dirt. The now flooding waters, chocolaty brown, were funneled through giant metal pipes running beneath the road. Though we are able to walk along the narrow edge of the bridge to the other side, the camels were too large and there were vehicles stuck on both sides. The river rapids were also too intense for the camels to wade through. Fortunately, we got lucky: after a twenty minute wait, a bearded red-head in a faded green jump-suit emerged from over the hillside, driving a Volvo BM L120 tractor which proceeded to bulldoze its way through the mounds of dirt, smoothing out the road. Though the road was flooded in at least eight more places throughout the day, the sections were more easily passable.
November 20 Last night, after walking another 35 kilometers, the Magi team crash-landed at the Cham Palace Hotel in Palmyra, which was constructed directly across the street from an endless sea of ruins, "the city of a thousand columns" as one brochure describes it. Though the rooms are small yet elegent, the lobby is grandiose and even a bit overwhelming in its design. Mimicking the structures of the nearby ancient city, the roof is held aloft by intricately carved pillars and a paint-on skyline, blue with white clouds, ripples through the center of the lobby, whose ceiling seems to stretch endlessly upwards. Vines drape down from the second floor balcony, shading a trickling fountain and a large sitting area. Quite a contrast to the desert. After taking a much needed hot bath and watching a few hours of CNN in my room, it almost felt like I was back home.
If the hotel is impressive, the ruins are doubly so. The walls of the ancient city of Palmyra extend outward six kilometers with a second wall extending another twenty, and I've honestly never seen so many large, intact, ancient structures huddled in such close proximity to one another. Though the statues have been removed, the pillars have platforms where thousands of statues once stood-honoring heroic soldiers, rich merchants, and the noble class. The highlight of our tour, however, was the "funerary towers": five story towers which at one point housed 200-400 coffins, a sort of inverse burial—burying them in the sky rather than the ground. The city had a small Greek-style theater, a temple to the "god of gods," Bel, a series of baths, and even an underground sewage system.
After grabbing lunch, touring the Palmyra museum, where some of the statues and sculptures from the city are held, and shopping along the streets of the Souk for T-shirts and rusty antique candle-holders and tea-pots, we returned to the Hotel for another night of welcome rest.
November 21 Our second rest day in Palmyra. After grabbing a quick lunch, Prosper, John Vencer, Peter Thiep, Gasan (our new Palestinian camera man) and I were invited next door for tea with Adnan Khatib, the head manager if the agency of news and radio in Palmyra. The rest of our Magi team were otherwise engaged editing film clips, involved in other meetings, resting, etc. Adnan, even before tea had been served, was quick to squeeze information from us. "First," he said (in Arabic, which was then translated) "give me your names and occupations. Then tell me the purpose behind the journey and what you have thought, so far, of Syria."
Unprepared for an interview I thought that we would fumble the ball, but John came through with a detailed response. "The main purpose of the Journey of the Magi, apart from retracing the route of the Wise men from the Bible, is to put a face on the people of the Middle East and especially in the areas we are traveling through. From the International media, the only news people get about the Middle East is bad news, people end up believing that all Middle Easterners are terrorists. But we want to show the people here as they really are: they're the same as us. They love their children and we love our children, they wake up and go to work every morning just like we do."
Peter Thiep then explained the journey's personal meaning to him: "The purpose of the journey is to find peace between Muslim and Christian. I am from Sudan, where they are at war, so I am here on the journey to say that we need peace. We need peace for Sudan and peace between Islam and Christianity."
November 22 After two days of rest, we hiked a good forty kilometers today though more sparse desert wasteland. But we're almost passed the most barren section of our journey. Soon we will be traveling through towns and villages again.
At the end of the day, before going back to the Cham Palace Hotel, we stopped by base camp, where the camels and our support crew are staying, for some tea, fruit, and cookies. Taking off our shoes to enter the Bedouin tent where a fire and cushions had been prepared, seven unrecognized faces stared back at us, smiling timidly. Basin, Sadam, Barick, Said, Ahmed, Farid, and Khalid, all of them brothers and all still very young—elementary school age and younger. Apparently, only a few minutes before we arrived they came to the camp for an unexpected visit. When Souhil Da'as, our generous host, asked them why they had come they replied, "To take some rest here with you." It wasn't long before we loaded up fruit in a plastic bag to take home to their mother&msash;unfortunately, the children are all fatherless—and filled their hands with cookies from a tin. After asking a few questions, we began uncovering a few random facts about their lives in Syria. Two of them are twins (Peter Thiep had asked because they were wearing matching coats); they own 150 sheep, etc.
Spontaneously, drum beats spurt from the hands of one of our camp organizers, and soon Souhil and others were dancing, pulling in Prosper and Peter Thiep into the fray, and also trying very hard to convince the shy brothers to join in. In one of the trip's funnier moments, one of the Syrian dancers started mimicking the moves of American pop artists, breaking out into a wildly parodied "Macarena."
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. We may miss out on the traditional festivities this year, not many turkeys around here, but we hope everyone back in the U.S. has a good visit with friends and family, a nice meal, and a brief vacation from the normal worries of everyday life.
November 23 Navigating through and around heaps of garbage, the magi team entered Palmyra, which greeted us with endless fields of glistening black bags (as well as a few soda cans and the peeled rubber of flattened tires). We draped a series of flags across the saddles of our camels (British, Syrian, Sudanese, American, Iraqi, etc.) and put on our "magi" outfits (which are tailored to imitate what the kings may have worn on their original journey) before heading into the denser areas of the city. It didn't take long for a crowd to form-hundreds of children running alongside us, laughing and shouting as they did everything they could to stand in front of the lenses of our cameramen. Behind us, a stream of cars honked in an annoyed frenzy, peeling off to the side of the road so that they can drive passed the swarm-it started to seem a bit pompous of us to block off traffic so severely as we marched ceremoniously through the city's main streets…
In the chaos, Prosper, as one of our camel drivers grabbed his hand in order to join him on his seat, was accidentally pulled from his saddle, very narrowly escaping a head-first collision with the curb… Jake also "brushed shoulders with death" today: as it turned dark and we reached the ancient ruins near the Cham Palace Hotel (illuminated by mechanical spotlights), he tripped over a boulder while walking backwards to film a shot of our group… even more dangerous than these two incidents were the less-than-cautious children who followed us in hordes-more than once it seemed as if they would be trampled beneath the feet of our camels or beneath the tires of a car (the automobiles swerved through the crowd recklessly at times, seemingly in a very great hurry)
November 24 Drawing a map of our destination and the road in a patch of dirt with his finger, Robin explained the intended "short-cut" route we would take, hugging a nearby mountain range and shaving a few kilometers off of today's journey to the ancient ruins of Halabat. We would save time and have a more scenic route through the hills, giving our cameramen better photo-ops and the rest of us a change of pace. It sounded like the perfect plan.
Unfortunately, our "mountain route" was not a road or even a path. It was an endless stretch of pebbles and small boulders, field upon field of rocks to stumble over. Even the rocks, which killed our feet and slowed our pace down to a crawl, weren't quite as bad as the ravines, slopping up and down, making it tough for our camels to navigate a clear path. Crossing through one of these, John Vencer's camel stumbled on a rock and toppled over very nearly flattening John like a pancake in the process. The camel, Gazella, as we call her, promptly sat down and refused to move any further, perhaps afraid that she would fall over again if she trie. After determining that none of her legs were seriously injured, the magi team tried yanking her into submission and then tried luring her with chunks from an orange. Tt took quite a while to inspire her to make the attempt, but, once she was on all fours, our team was moving again. We ended early (thankfully) and half of our team rushed off to compete in a soccer match, for which they were already late.
November 25 Amidst the walking today, we were invaded by a swarm of media representatives, filming our walk and asking us questions about the journey. "What do you think of Syria?" "What is the purpose of the journey?" "Have you had any difficulties so far?" After seven hours of walking, 6:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., we drove to the village of Hafar to visit the Christian community that lives there. We were told that the drive would take an hour. It ended up taking three and a half. Some of the people we were scheduled to meet had waited patiently the entire time for us to arrive and greeted us warmly when we pulled into the church's driveway, but most had gone home. Father Abdullah, from the Syrian Orthodox Church, made a speech to officially greet us, saying that "In the name of the two villages [Hafar and Sadad] and in the name of our fathers, we welcome you. We hope that your objectives and goals will be achieved and that you will each go back to your homes safely. We also ask that you pray for us in the place where salvation was offered since we cannot go there ourselves. Especially pray for us when you reach Bethlehem." Robin responded to his greeting with an apology for our tardiness and a request that they also pray for us as we walk along the route to Palestine.
Four of the church leaders then sang a quick prayer in Aramaic which was so beautiful that it would be difficult to describe: crisp and clear, it sounded as if only one voice were singing, though each singer drifted off into separate parts. At the same time, it resounded with the full intensity of a twelve-man choir, reminiscent of Gregorian chants. After the prayer, we were shuffled into the dining room where we ate Safiha—a bread in the shape of a split pea-pod, containing meat, onions, tomatoes, and spices—and a bowl of yogurt as well as fresh fruit served for desert. The ride home, because we found a quicker route, took only two and a half hours, bringing us back into base-camp just in time for bed.
November 26 The landscape has continued to provide rocks and ravines as obstacles to our progress, but the clouds also provided the terrain with deep and endless shadows, lending us shade and a cool breeze. Our silver van rode alongside us, often very far off, shimmering in the distance and closely resembling a "micro-machine" toy. Surrounded by mountain ranges, our destination lay on the horizon where the two sets come close to touching before flattening into solid ground.
Toward the end of our trek, we ran head-first into a rock quarry: huge industrial buildings puffing smoke, endless mounds of white rocks, and monstrous vehicles roaming the roads with tires taller than their drivers. Not sure whether or not we were even allowed to pass through the area, Keith, Tim, Jake, Peter Thiep, and I stopped at the guard station to wait for the others, have some tea, and ask Muhamed Kasim Drehie, our host, what route we should take through the area. Muhamed was an older gentleman, with thick golden glasses, a red Khafia wrapped around his face, and a fuzzy gray sweater. Using Peter Thiep as a translator, we discovered that he sleeps in his guard station throughout the week, going home to Karia Tain, 95 kilometers away, to see his wife and seven children only on Fridays. Despite this, he told us, he enjoys his work. His guard station, a small room made purely from concrete, was center-pieced with a rusty tin furnace stretching into the roof and bordered by two beds, one of which was a mattress slung on top of a concrete crate with a wooden lid. Other than a super-thin pair of sandals, a string of white prayer beads, a torn Arabic magazine, a tea pot, an old-fashioned gas-lamp, a few cardboard boxes labeled "detonating cord" and a set of keys pinned to a curtain the room was bare with green and white wires dangling from holes in the ceiling.
Once we had passed through the mining fields, the sunlight began to fade and we were forced to stop walking. Unfortunately, we weren't able to travel very far today. The reason for this, other than the fact that we slept in a little bit later than usual, the magi team had to wait at base-camp for Robin, our fearless leader, to arrive from the Cham Palace Hotel where he had been staying with his wife, Nancy. Only too late did h realize that his ride from the hotel to the days starting point had not yet been arranged.
After a leisurely breakfast, a round of soccer-ball juggling, and a brief tour of the ruins in Halabat, the crumbling remains of a military garrison, the car we had sent to fetch him returned with news that he was suffering back pains and that today would be, for all of us, a day of rest. After a brief discussion about possibly returning to the hotel, we decided to veto Robin's tentative orders and walk as much as we could, taking tomorrow for rest so that Robin would have time to catch up with us. And so, because of all the delays, we didn't start walking until almost noon.
November 29 "We want to change how the Western world sees Syria. Syria is such an important part of the history of the church and has been a beacon for faith to Christian leaders around the world. But the media's portrait of people of Syria has been painted with a terrible brush. Syria has been labeled as a place that is primarily concerned with helping terrorists. This is a lie. We want to expose this lie for what it is. The people we have met here have been warm, loving, and caring. Our love for Syria grows everyday. When we go home, we will tell the people there: 'We fell in love with Syria!'"
These statements from fellow journeyman Phil Elkins, closed our evening's festivities and was met with a fury of applause by the audience at the Greek Melkite Church in Damascus.
We had been invited there this evening, after another long day of walking, so that the Choir of Happiness (Jaouket Al Farah) could honor us by singing a few Arabic hymns. The choir, composed of 15 men and 21 women, as well as a lute player, keyboardist, and tambourine percussionist. The stage stretches out like a pop-up book: an enormous tapestry speckled with a grainy portrait of the Virgin Mary pressing the baby Jesus up against her cheek along the far back wall, in front of which stood a small gazebo-sized structure bearing a cross and, from a distance, appearing no thicker than a cardboard cut-out. The front diases, on whose steps the singers had positioned themselves, was decorated with an overarching portrait of the last supper "round-table" style, connected with a series of portraits of Saints along each side. Red curtains hung from these arches, between pillars, and gave the whole stage the ambiance of a playhouse theater. When the music had finished, Peter Thiep delivered a speech to the crowd in Arabic, which was then translated into Syrian Arabic by Nuhad Tomei. Peter's version of the language, which is rooted in a Sudanese/Egyptian dialect, is so incomprehensible to the crowd that it must be translated by a native speaker—though he had originally intended to translate Peter's words into English. The crowd, in high spirits, responded in unison to his greeting of "salaam aleikum" and, besides finding humor in the language differences, laughed at all of his jokes. A thunder of applause greeted him as he left the stage.
November 30 Passing through the narrow market streets of Damascus, speeding by a few bicyclists, a woman carrying a plastic bag on atop her head, and an endless array of shops and pedestrians, we arrive at the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch for our meeting with the Honorable Holiness Patriarch Zakka Iwas. The day is cushioned by soft clouds—though they bring sporadic rains, they also pleasantly dim the mood of an otherwise frantic metropolis. We were led into a grand meeting room, whose white walls were decorated in small patches with a soft pattern of red velvet. Sitting down in a square formation around the Patriarch's stylishly golden "throne-room" chair—an obvious symbol of his rank and importance within the church. Wearing flowing black robes with a red lining and clutching a thin black staff with a silver handle, his own picture, mounted in a giant silver frame, sat proudly above his chair and, next to it, a portrait of President Assad, on one side, and a picture of them both on the other.
Our group, once again overwhelmed by the limitlessness of local hospitality, were served a round of tea, then cake and cookies, then coffee, and then small candies wrapped in plastic, all brought to us by two bearded men in long black robes and head-coverings. After a brief conversation with the Patriarch, in which we exchanged mutual admiration and gratitude for the opportunity to share a visit, we were back in the van, racing towards our next scheduled appointment.
Pulling into a field of thin white trees, slowly fading beyond the realms of Autumn into the depth of Winter, we walked into the headquarters of the Grand Mufti—Syria's Islamic spiritual leader—appointed directly by President Assad. We await his arrival in an immaculately white room on the second floor—decorated with a painting of a river crackling through a lush forest, a docked steam-boat beneath a full moon (painted with placid blues and grays), and a framed poster-size photograph of a million worshippers gathered at Mecca.
"I welcome those who love our master Abraham," he says after making his entrance. The Grand Mufti, an ancient man, walked in slowly with the aid of his assistant and a cane, and became instantly reinvigorated after he took his seat. He explained to us, in his own words, the beliefs of Islam and preaching about the basic moral framework of our lives on Earth.
December 1 "This is an American shop," a voice yells out in a Brooklyn accent as we pass through the streets of Damascus. "Any of you from New York?" Ducking into the church of St. Anais, a small "bunker," with a few pews, rock walls, paintings, and a place to light candles, we have a quick glance around before being rushed to our next destination. One historical site after the other, walking far faster from point to point than we ever do out in the desert. It gets so bad that my head starts spinning whenever we take a moment's rest.
We ran through the National Museum at 90 miles an hour, headless statues and ancient artifacts flying passed us in a incomprehensible blur. We stopped next at the Military museum—a vehicle "garden" with green and tan jets, tanks, and several larger-than-life statues of green soldiers holding invisible rifles. They look as if they're made out of wax. The whole collection is center-pieced with a rectangular pool and a small, trickling fountain, beyond which Muslims gather for prayer at the front steps of a mosque. Inside a parallel building on the opposite side, rocket launchers and machine guns are displayed behind glass next to a giant wall mural, starting from the right with images of explosions and bloodshed but ending, on the left, with images of celebration and peace. These apparitions were oddly juxtaposed with other paintings, hanging without titles along the perimeter of the wall—shapeless masses of color and lines, sometimes forming the edges of distorted human faces.
After a day of tourism, we met with three different church groups: one at the National Evangelical Presbyterian Church, one at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchette of Antioch and all the East, and our day's last stop at the Greek-Catholic Patriarchette of Jerusalem and Alexandria—which broke with the Greek Orthodox in 1724, aligning with Rome but keeping Greek Orthodox traditions.
At our first church visit we were lead into a basement where a large group of children were loudly celebrating St. Babara's Day, who, as the daughter of a king, converted from paganism to Christianity and was eventually martyred. Though the holiday's purpose is to re-enact her story, it is celebrated in a fashion similar to Halloween in the West. The young children, who, as the music played, screamed and "danced" (in other words: "ran chaotically about") were dressed as gypsies, as bunnies, as a Superman with a paint-on beard, as a "nerd" doctor, and even as a giant cell phone. One very young boy, dressed as a soldier, stared up at us fearfully as we clattered down the stairs, but too much was going on for our presence to be noticed otherwise.
"We work for the Union of the church," the Bishop representative from the third church explains, "The church has to be open and the church has to find the truth. The truth, in Jesus Christ, is to accept all others. I think that the Muslim churches are our churches. The people in America and in Europe, they have ideas like stones—they don't realize that Muslim people are good people. When you arrive at Bethlehem, open your eyes, open your eyes and see the truth." Strong words, which rang in our ears as we returned to the Cham Palace Hotel in Damascus and a full night's worth of sleep.
December 3 "Never hit a man in the face," John Vencer, a self professed "tomb of worthless knowledge," explained to me after teaching me how to punch. "The skull is the hardest bone in the body. If you hit someone in the head, it's gonna hurt. Always go for the throat." Lounging around the upstairs lobby of the Cham Palace Hotel in Damascus, we're waiting to be interviewed by a very attractive young reporter from the Syrian media. Meanwhile, John is teaching me how to hurt people.
Earlier this morning Ghassan, Peter Thiep, and I accompanied Thomas Bol Chan, a Sudanese man living in Syria, to several Sudanese apartments within the Palestinian refugee camp of Damascus. The camps are tightly packed buildings in large ghettos. Thomas himself is living in a small room in the church of the Sisters of Saint Paul, where he volunteers. "I cannot say that I am working," he tells me, "because I am only a volunteer. But it is different for me because I am single. Sometimes I eat, sometimes not. The bible says 'some just live for God.' They don't know where the food will come from."
Walking down the narrow streets, a young boy races past us, the treading of his bicycle clicking loudly as they wheel over the wet asphalt as he screams out a loud mimicking of an ambulance siren. Before reaching the front door, we wander passed a "ghost"&a woman whose head is completely covered in a black cloth, a burkah, through which you can barely see the outline of her skull.
Entering Thomas' home, we are greeted by Chuol Simon and Margaret, peeking into the next room to see their newborn baby Badhiel which, in Nuir, means "hope," wrapped in cute brown and white "fox" pajamas and cradled in her mothers arms. The front room is fairly bare, with a few couches, some plastic chairs with a matching table, and a golden boomerang shaped clock hanging from the wall, etched with several bouncing kangaroos. A small picture of President Assad is taped to the back of the front door. Three very young Palestinian neighbors wander in behind us giggling and ask us questions in Arabic. The youngest, Camela, asked Ghassan the name of every piece of equipment he hauled inside—his camera, tripod, batteries, etc.—promptly responding to his answers with "it's mine." The oldest, wearing blue pants and a blue shirt reading "Franklin Foxes. Appleton, WI," refused a piece of candy offered him—a traditional gift when visiting a new born baby—because this is the month of Ramadan.
We get back to the hotel just in time to drive over to the soccer game, in which the six of our journeymen are matched against a team from the Syrian military league. We lost, 8 to 7. Of course, we have our excuse: half of the team has been struggling with illnesses and the boys, in general, had been greatly fatigued by the last couple months of walking.
We come back to the hotel for a quick shower and the photo shoot and interview with a Syrian reporter and then head down to the Cham Palace's Chinese restaurant, where a group of thirty or so of our new Sudanese friends have gathered for a meal. Polite conversation is attempted, but the language barrier makes things difficult.
Today will be our last day in Damascus, which is rather unfortunate. The city has so much to offer and we've made many friends here.
December 4 "Damascus was just a dream," Prosper Kwenda mutters to himself as we continue the day's march through the desert. "Remember that."
From the back of a camel, we waved our brand new Journey of the Magi flag, white with gold lettering in English, the flipside in Arabic. Today are were joined by seven Sudanese refugees living in Syria, making our group a much more entertaining spectacle for the local children, who chase after us in herds. "Good morning!" one of them shouts, even though it's well into the afternoon. "What is your name? How are you?" One of them even hands me his English language book from school. For a moment, I suspect that he's asking me to do his homework for him. Todd starts handing out candy, rumors of which eventually spread throughout our accompanying parade of children, making Todd's generosity high in demand. One even asks for money. "I don't have any," he admits, pulling a small Syrian coin out of his pocket, "but, in the name of Jesus Christ, I'll give you all that I have."
Eventually, with the twenty or so words of Arabic I've learned and the twenty or so words of English one of the children has been taught in school, we struck up a conversation. I was able to communicate that I'm from America and that Prosper (or "Mustafa," as the people here have been calling him) is from Zimbabwe and that we were walking from Iraq to Bethlehem. The young child tried to teach me about hajj (pilgrimage), pointing to a small Islamic pamphlet that he had been carrying in his pocket. From the bits and pieces of his sentences that I understood, I realized that he was beginning to ask me questions about my opinions regarding the current situation in Palestine, but the Arabic is too complicated for me to fully understand or respond to.
Our seven Sudanese friends, who we met with yesterday and invited for the rest of our journey through Syria, chatter with the children in Arabic, towering above them like giants, tall enough to be professional basketball players. When one of them, Tito hops onto a camel, it is joked that his feet are still touching the ground. The day ends after 37 kilometers, less than our recent averages, but we've slowed down a bit after our five day rest in Damascus.
December 6 The only equivalent I can think of to a large group of foreigners passing through a Middle-Eastern village on camelback is the arrival of a circus caravan through a major city. Just by being there, we cause an outbreak of laughter, smiles, and excitement. For example, today, a man on a four wheel scooter, three in back and one tire up front, drove alongside us for nearly half a kilometer, holding his young child against his chest, pointing at us and yelling enthusiastically. Another boy burst into tears at the mere site of one of our camels and, when a large group of young bicyclists began holding onto our coat-tails, Joshua Daniel, the tallest of our Sudanese pilgrims, hopped onto one of their bikes, which was barely large enough to reach his knees, teetering like a clown on a unicycle. Several other pilgrims followed his example, pouncing onto the backs of some of the children's bikes as they proceeded to ride circles around the rest of our caravan.
At lunch, ceremoniously begun with a rap song deafeningly blasted from one of our van's stereo speakers, we competitively knocked down coke bottles with rocks and then, as a grand finale, watched in absolute amazement as Bazio, one of our Syrian companions from Bel Tours, completed a back flip from the top of a camel. He did it twice actually, once for fun and the second time so that we could capture it on film. Some of the other members of our group had been "camel surfing" earlier in the afternoon: standing on top of the saddle as the camel walked through town. But Bazio clearly won today's award for acrobatics.
Of course, like everything else in life, today's walk was not all fun and games.
"The American flag is not welcome here," a man declared angrily to our group. "Take it down." As an international journey of peace, we had recently strapped on a strew of flags to both sides of our camels: the Syrian flag, British, Filipino, Sudanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Zimbabwe, and a few others, including U.S.A. Even though the comments about the presence of our red, white, and blue's were isolated incidents and may not have reflected the view of the majority, Robin, the journey's fearless leader, decided that it would be better to tuck it away for safe-keeping. "Especially in Southern Syria, the negative impact of U.S. policies has had a huge impact, because of the Golan Heights and the water-rights dispute over the Sea of Galilee. So, waving around an American flag is a bit like pouring salt on an open wound."
Earlier this morning, as part of our international effort, we prayed for peace within Sudan and within Palestine because "both situations," Robin explains, "are equally discouraging. Each has lasted about fifty years, with no end in sight. I don't know of any man-made effort that can solve these conflicts, so all we can do is pray." Prosper Kwenda, following up on this, asked God for an "invasion of righteousness," an inverse of the invasions which have already occurred. In related news, we've received word from Sami Awad, who runs our parent organization in Bethlehem, that shelling from tanks and guns has continued within the city and several windows have been shattered in the Bethlehem Bible College, where our group stayed a few months ago. Despite the continued violence and "cancellation of Christmas" in Palestine, it seems as if our group will still be able to reach our final destination.
Once we started walking today, I began to notice that the greenery of the desert was beginning to perk up a bit. In the towns, behind walls of black rock, people had set up cactus gardens which bore ripe fruit, red like swollen fingertips. Occasionally, we would also see large clusters of trees and we even saw a grassy lawn with red and pink flowers—a play-pen for a family of white chickens. In the same village, we walked by a group of turkeys.
We also took note of at least have a dozen tombs along the road to the town of Shahba, mostly military. The first one was an erected pillar sprouting stone wings and bearing the portrait of a young officer, from which a small helicopter model hovered from a thin metal pole. The others were cut from similar designs, some with jet plane models, and others bearing none.
Walking through the city, passing through ruins hidden amidst an endless rows of shops built on the steep upward incline of a hill, we waved "hello" to several groups of "nuns" belonging to the Druze religious tradition. The Druze combine elements of Islam and Chirstianity. Young children stared down at us from second floor balconies and men greeted us on the street.
At the end of the day we raced through a dirt field and crawled beneath a fence to enter a soccer field, where the Journey of the Magi team played against a large group of local boys. We lost 3 to 2 much to the delight of the children, who screamed in victory after every goal until they were out-of-breath.
December 7 If yesterday was a circus, today was a zoo. Based on a suggestion from Jake Martinez earlier this morning, we held communion on the top floor of the Cham Palace in Bosra. After we had all gathered around the Bedouin rugs and mattresses which had been set up in the wide hallway between rooms, the Syrian media arrived. As our Sudanese journeymen began to sing songs of worship in the language of their birth, a bit of a ruckus was made setting up a giant flood-light, killing our hopes of maintaining a dim and modest atmosphere. This light was soon amplified by a wandering bulb mounted on top of their camera. Though I tried hard to avoid it's penetrating gaze, it often felt like the only real "presence" in the room, its luminescent eye consumed everything in its path, mutating everything it was seeking to "preserve" on film. Our communion had, it seemed to me at the time, been degraded to the status of "photo op." I should have felt grateful to the press for spending so much time and energy to capture the spirit of our journey, but, for whatever reason, all I could think about was how absurd it all seemed. Our own cameramen, whose presence I have somehow grown slightly more accustomed to, began circulating through the room as well, weaving through layers of Sudanese, Americans, Syrians, and Internationals.
To further confuse things, a group of about fifteen middle aged tourists from Catalonia clattered upstairs to join us. I'm still, at this moment, not sure whether their presence was spontaneous or if they had been invited by a member of our group. After a bit of prodding, we were able to convince them to sing a few Christmas songs in Spanish, the first of which alternated between a series of lyrics and an underlying chorus of "foom, foom, foom." Based on their own suggestion, they followed these tunes with the national anthem of Catalonia (which, for some reason, involved holding up four fingers at random points during the melody). They explained that every year in their country children would traditionally wait for the arrival of the three wise men, bringing the presents to peoples' homes. Their version of Santa Claus, I guess.
Following on the heels of the Sudanese and the Catalonians, all of whom sang beautifully, as if they had been practicing for months, the rest of us—who now seemed, more than ever, like a rag-tag bunch of misfits—attempted to sing a few songs of praise without straying too far off key (or forgetting the words). To salvage our blundered hymns, Andre sang a song he wrote in Iraq called "Deeper" while strumming his guitar, drawing the largest applause the night had seen.
The Catalonians left before we began communion, warmly thanking us for the opportunity to attend. After a reading from the Bible by Phil Elkins, an ordained minister, the bread and wine were passed and, at about 11:30, Robin Wainwright ended the session with a prayer.
Tomorrow, hopefully, some of us will get a chance to tour Bosra while others continue to walk the route.
December 10 Our first day in Jordan.
7:50 a.m. Parts of the team wait for everyone to huddle into the vehicles so that we can drive to our starting point. Sometimes the "walking" aspect of our pilgrimage is low on the list of priorities. Today, because of these other delays and distractions, our actual trek didn't start until about noon, even though we still have a lot of miles to cover in order to reach Bethlehem by Christmas. The newspapers for weeks have been declaring Christmas "cancelled" in Bethlehem , but as far as we know our holiday festivities will still occur on schedule.
At around 1:30 we stopped for lunch and many of our team members matched their soccer skills against some locals who had gathered around our vans. Our caravan doesn't start moving again until three in the afternoon.
December 11 "Giardia" has a nasty ring to it, and that's what Jason Drake, our journey's photographer, has been contaminated with. We knowingly took the risk of falling prey to this type of illness by accepting small sips of water or milk whenever offered by locals. Hospitality here is sometimes hard to refuse. Despite his poor health, Jason was in high spirits tonight, as we received a small concert of bagpipes and drums in our Bedouin tent (which has been set up in the backyard of the Olive Branch in Jerash). Though refusing encouragements to dance, Jason begins juggling oranges in sync with the rhythm of an accompanying conga. Quickly tiring of fruit, he began to unsuccessfully juggle knives, though without injury, and then attempted a two-man juggling routine from across the room with fellow pilgrim Prosper Kwenda. This act, however, is very short lived.
The tent was filled with smoke, mostly from a small campfire in the corner, but also from an excess of cigarettes and gurgling Nargilla pipes. One wall is striped with thick lines of black and red, another has the texture of a potato sack, and a third is merely a plastic tarp staked to the ground with the others. The whine of bagpipes drowns out the sound of our hands, clapping the beat, and play traditional songs which most of the middle easterners in the room are able to sing along with, sometimes dancing and pulling us out to join them. Todd Elkins is one of the first bodies they grab and he quickly breaks into a kung-fu hustle, nearly knocking over the musicians with his sharply swinging hands and feet. At one point, everyone joins in a congo-line, after which I station myself on a towering stack of carpets, which have been laid aside against the back wall, nearly collapsing the roof every time I lean backwards. We are all entertained and in high spirits, the mood very relaxed.
We were joined tonight by the owner of the hotel and his family who, though originally from Jordan, had lived in Austin, Texas for many years before moving back to Jerash. Both of his two daughters will join us on our walk tomorrow. A few permanent members have also been added to our group: Tamara, the daughter of Daoud Katab, an editorialist for the Jordan Times who has been working closely with Holy Land Trust, and her grandmother Maha. Though she doesn't speak English, Maha has managed to deeply impress most of our group by stopping to talk with nearly everyone she meets along the road.
Before the music had started, Da'ar, our new Jordanian guide, offered to explain to us the meaning of Ramadan and asked us a few questions about Christianity. "The meaning of the Ramadan fast," he says simply, "is to teach a lesson about what it's like to be poor. Many Muslims make the mistake of just not eating during the day and then feasting at night, but without paying attention to the meaning of what they're doing." After prodding him with follow-up questions, he explained that children, in Islam, would be introduced to Qu'ranic teachings at the age of seven, but without being pressured into doing or believing anything they are not ready to accept. "Because," he explained, "if you apply too much pressure, you don't get good results." He also reviewed some basic information about the Islamic lunar calendar, the reason why, on our calendar, it seems as if Ramadan moves backward ten days every year. Then it was his turn: asking us politely about the Old Testament, he explains his bewilderment that many of the old testament prophets are highly flawed, committing grave sins, when "prophets" are supposed to be example-setters through which the rest of us can live better lives. The question, even more than his statements, provided a great deal of insight into the Islamic perspective. Before any of us gather up the courage to provide him with a detailed response, the room was filled with the blaring of pipes and the beating of drums.
December 12 Luring one puppy up a slope to the side of the road, another two remained behind, shivering, too cold even to move. The dogs were fetched and moved into our vans, quickly earning names—Jacque, Zorro, and Runt. Though we later smuggled them into our tents in a large cardboard box, it is still unclear whether they will be left with a willing family we meet on the road, or somehow brought all the way into Bethlehem, and eventually back to one of our homelands. But the metaphorical significance of rescuing these pups, which gave life to today's name for God—Al-Jame', the Gatherer—was as irresistible as their timid whines for help.
The road slanted into the hillside, buffered by a soft layer of pine trees and moistened by fog. The morning, though darkened by a smooth layer of black clouds, was brightened by the presence of Seema and Deema Kheirey, daughters of the owner of the Olive Branch Hotel, where we have been staying for the past couple of days. Deema, whose name loosely translates to "Small White Cloud," played hooky from an American high-school in Amman so that she could join us; Seema was pulled out of a college in Palestine about a month after the recent conflicts began, taking her out of immediate danger, but leaving her extremely bored.
Interspersed between a discussion about the situation in Palestine and the cold treatment in general that she has received from Israeli store owners, Seema manages to make fun of me for waving to almost everyone we meet on the road—"as if you were Miss America or something." The conversation extends into what it's like for her living in a secluded hotel in the hills; the culture shock she experienced after moving to Jordan from the United States, her parents having been worried that their daughters were losing touch with their Arab roots; and a brief explanation of our trip, along with my amazement that our group has maintained solid friendships throughout the journey, despite the stresses involved.
We ended today's walk at the ruins in Jerash, which date back to the Roman era, with an impressive amphitheatre and the usual arrangement of intricately carved stone pillars. First, before strolling down the hill, we changed into our "magi" outfits—king and soldier costumes—international flags adorning each side of our camel harnesses. Seema wore one of the "queen" outfits which we have always had but have rarely had the opportunity to utilize. She quickly became the main target of the cameramen, from a French newspaperto our own media crew. A large group of European and Canadian tourists peered down at us from the top row of the amphitheatre as we arrived, waving and shyly taking photos. After about an hour of posing for photos, I ask Seema what she thinks of being a tourist attraction. "Actually," she says, a worried grin pushing her eyebrows up into her forehead, "I don't think I like it all that much."
Driving home, we spent the evening playing ping-pong, foosball, and shooting pool at the Olive Branch's "game room" while snacking on ice-cream bars and sodas from the hotel's fridge. For a while we watched the evening news in hopes that another story would appear about our trip, as it has for the past couple of days, and quickly returning empty-handed to our other distractions. Sitting in the lobby as I type these words, I can still hear the clatter of ping-pong paddles and the slamming of the bars on the foosball table, back-dropped by a constant dripping—the remnants of the now subsided rain—and the fierce wind, which presses firmly against the glass of the front entrance.
December 13 "Hail, rain, sleet, snow, mud, fog," Phil Elkins told us with a laugh, attempting to describe what awaited us along the road. The sky, continuing to stew with dark clouds, provided most of these, along with a stiff wind, which grew increasingly fierce as we climbed further and further into the hills. The smells, beside the scent of wet asphalt, ranged from the poignant flavor of an olive farm to the subtler, though far more putrid aroma of chicken ranches and an occasional lump of roadkill.
The day started with rain, soaking through my jeans and socks, then hit us a bit harder with clumps of hail, creating icicles along my eyelashes. Soon the group ahead of me vanished into a thick soup of fog at which point, Tamara, Maha, Seema, and I crawled into the van defeated, driving back to the Olive Branch Hotel. Seema kicked herself a bit for being too cold and too exhausted to walk the whole way, but, from the reports I've heard, the weather only got worse as the day's marching progressed.
After a meal of Mansuf in our Bedouin tent, the team drove to the Baptist Church of Jerash where a group had gathered in a small building to meet us, a meeting for which, as usual, we were late. The room was no bigger than a kitchen, with a small stage lined with four green chairs and back-dropped by a yellow curtain. Next to the podium stood a giant iron oven, whith a pipe that zig-zagged its way toward the ceiling.
Pastor D. Issac was there, welcoming us as a small children's choir sang an Arabic Christmas hymn to the tune of "Old Susanna". After Issac introduced us, Todd Elkins stood up to make a small speech, in place of Robin who was too exhausted to attend, while young Tamara translated. But we grew quickly tired of speeches, moving steadily to food, drinks, and festivities as the children sang a few more Arabic carols. We responded, in turn, singing "Silent Night," after which they needed to sing for us the real version—in Arabic. Singing these, and other carols the rest of the room spontaneously matched our voices with the song's Arabic counterparts, creating a perfectly chaotic harmony and splendidly incomprehensible lyrics . The children's songs became sillier and sillier as we slid deeper into the evening. They shared the Arabic version of "Jingle-Bells" and several songs which involved increasingly rapid movements of the hand, almost always ending with a serious of mistakes as the girls erupted into giggles. For some reason, the choir was made up of all girls; the boys just ran around the room, some of them imitating our cameramen by making "clicking" motions with their fingers. Ending the evening, we sang "Father Abraham" which, after every chorus, adds on a new activity for the hands and feet, eventually becoming too complex for the body to follow through with. We left the church with a few new friends, carrying the songs with us on the car ride home
December 14 "If this is as far as we can go," Robin Wainwright declared, frustrated and worn, "than this is holy ground—so take off your shoes." At the Mosque and tomb of the Venerable Companion and guardian of the Islamic Nation, where we ended today's walk, non-muslims are not allowed entrance into the mosque itself. After a small guard in a green military jump-suit politely explained this, Robin walked as far as he was allowed, kicked off his shoes, customary for entering a mosque, and opened up his arms in prayer. Silently standing like this for at least five minutes, throughout which time worshippers would awkwardly brush by him from both directions, the guard finally relented and the whole group entered the main temple.
The insides were unexceptional: red carpeting with intricate white stripes and a decent series of chandeliers, but as far as we know, we could be the first non-Muslim group to ever have entered the building. Robin, expressing his belief that true Islam recognizes that houses of God are meant for everyone, finds Da'ar, our Jordanian guide, quick to agree with him. "But," Robin admits, "I'm sorry to say that many Christian churches are just as unwelcoming to outsiders."
As far as walking is concerned: The ground upon which we tread is becoming greener with every step as we sink deeper and deeper into the Jordan Valley, hugging the shoulder of a large canyon on today's downward slope. The terrain is absolutely spectacular: large white boulders, beautiful brown horses, mossy green hills—the kind of landscape I'd expect to see in Ireland, not in the desert of the MiddleEast. For better or worse, we can already see the mountains of the Palestinian territories, the end of the journey will arrive in less than two weeks.
As we draw in closer and closer to Bethlehem, our media coverage, like the greenery, has increased. Though we haven't seen the clip, it has been confirmed that our journey has made it onto the headlines of CNN. A local paper also did a story about our arrival at Jerash but somehow were unable to sort out all the facts, saying that we had arrived in Amman and that our journey consisted of 99 people (an exaggeration of about 600 percent).
After the Mosque our next stop was the Union Alliance Church of Mafraq, where a graduation of sorts was being held for members of the congregation entering into the Youth Group Sunday School division. Planning to share dinner with them at a local pizza house our group, as usual, pulled into the driveway an hour late. Eating alone and showing up halfway through the event, all but our costumed "kings" took seats in the back row. After several hymns sung in combination with an Arabic Oud (lute), Todd said a few words about our journey and Peter Thiep ceremoniously presented the graduates with gifts. When the dust had finally settled and we arrived back at the Olive Branch hotel, the whole event had taken us five hours.
We arrived back at the Olive Branch just in time for the Kheiry family (the owners, whose daughters, Seema and Deema, joined us for a portion of our walk) to say good-bye by arranging a dessert send off party with tea and Qataif, a rolled up taco-shaped pancake wrapped with either nuts or cheese and dipped in a giant bowl of yellow maple syrup. The event, like everything at the Olive Branch, was pleasantly casual. The evening continued downstairs in the game room, where team members rotated between the pool and ping-pong table before heading to their rooms to pack up their bags. Tomorrow, once again, we're on the move.
December 16 Plopping beneath the shade of a tree and laying down with several other nap-takers along the asphalt, Robin waited for his cell phone to ring, very subtly revealing signs of impatience and the heaviness of his own exhaustion. Gradually, group members pulled themselves up to their feet and continued walking, leaving a few others behind to face the penetrating gaze of our cameramen circling around Robin and his phone. Our three white puppies were play-fighting and frolicking through the dirt, recklessly close to the trickling stream of automobiles and tractors along the road. Finally, a few minutes behind schedule, a radio station in Bethlehem sent out the call to Robins cell phone. Robin, sitting up, answered a series of questions as part of a live interview.
Mentioning the need for peace and justice in Palestine and other regions of the Middle East, Robin also expressed his surprise that, at the age of 59, he has been able to walk every foot of the journey. "I didn't think that I could do it," he explained. Besides the hardships we have faced, as always, he was quick to mention the overwhelming generosity and kindness of the people we've met along the way. Before handing the phone over to Tamara and Peter Thiep for their interviews in arabic, he spoke a bit about his attempts to observe Ramadan today: "Because of it, my throat, as I speak to you, is very dry."
During the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims abstain from food, medicine, cigarettes, and even water in the daylight hours, ending and beginning the day with a large feast. Several members of our group have been observing the month, out of necessity, however, drinking fluids. Technically, Muslims are exempt from the Ramadan fast if they are traveling long distances or embarking on pilgrimage.
Not surprisingly, as we ended today's 40 kilometer hike, many of us were extremely thirsty and a little bit hungry. Huddling into a Ministry of Tourism building near the site of Jesus' baptism, we prepared for a large meal of Mansuf—lamb piled on rice. After a tourism video for Jordan and a slide show about the Baptismal site, we quickly flung on our King and Soldier costumes, crammed into our vans, and drove to Amman's Holiday Inn, where local Christians had gathered for a Christmas celebration.
The hotel, towering above the city, hosted several hundred people in its dining room, where a short video was shown about our journey. The segment received a warm round of applause and the team was briefly introduced.
After a buffet dinner and a sermon about the Wise Men's journey—"men who were searching for the truth"—they a gift raffle was held which seemed oddly stacked in our favor. Prosper, Souhil, one of our van drivers, Jason Drake, and I all received trinkets. We arrived at our campsite near midnight, almost too tired even to pull of our costumes and crawl into bed.
December 17 It was an invasion: 50 or so American singers in long black and red winter coats and a crowd of Arabs, clustering in a huge semi-circle of plastic chairs extending from our Bedouin "dining" area, now converted into a stage. For a few songs there was a flutist, as well as a pianist fully equipped with an assistant to turn the pages of her sheet music. In addition to these, a choir of a dozen Sudanese singers from Amman performing two songs in Arabic. We had been told that a "few" singers were arriving sometime after seven. But this is typical: on a journey like this it is hard to anticipate what will happen next. The only unfortunate thing was that we were settling in to have dinner and had to scramble in order to be able to offer everyone something to eat or drink.
Long wooden branches were gathered in the center of the semi-circle of chairs and set ablaze, puffing up smoke toward a sea of dazzling stars. Behind the tent, serving as the stage, our camels crept through the darkness, quietly peering in as "Silent Night" and "O' Little Town of Bethlehem" filled the air, and a few children gathered around them in awe.
When the choir was finished, Phil Elkins introduced the journeymen who were there and explained the purposes of our journey. Unfortunately, most of our team had already left to compete in a local soccer match, a friendly game that we won 3 to 1. Sanjeev Parmar, on of the Charolette Eagles soccer club, had joined us earlier in the day as our teams newest soccer player.
John Vencer, putting down his video camera, spoke after Phil. "About five days ago, we found three puppies on the side of the road. Tomorrow we leave the country and, since they don't give out visas to dogs to get into Palestine, we were wondering if some of the families here would be willing to adopt them." Almost before he had finished his sentence three hands shot up. We've grown quite attached to the little mongrels, there'll be a few tears shed before we finally cross the border.
As our last day in Jordan, we've been forced to make several other goodbyes, to all the people who have been helping us over the past few weeks. In accordance with the traditional preparation for the Ramadan feast and as an honoring of one of Jesus' teachings, we ceremoniously washed the feet of everyone who had helped us: the van drivers; our camel guides; Da'ar, our guide; and Souhil, who helped us to do the impossible. It was a small gesture of thanks which.
We also visited several spots along the Jordan river today: the place where Jesus may have been baptized by John the Baptist, the hill from where Elijah was taken up to Heaven in a chariot of fire. Dr. Mohammad Waheeb, from the Ministry of Tourism, led the tour, showing us the remains of several churches on both locations. To learn more about his research, you can visit www.elmaghtas.com
December 18 Chaos, an absolute whirlwind. It would take me fifty pages to describe everything that happened today, but I'll try to be brief.
Waking up early we started our walk toward the Israel-Jordan border, at the Allenby Bridge crossing, sporadically saying our goodbyes to the friends we're leaving behind. Joined by Gail and Jason Martinez, as well as Mark Wainwright, we loaded an endless stream of luggage onto a tour bus the size of an airplane. The bus shuttled the luggage across "no man's land," a military zone between the two countries, as we journeyed behind on foot. Robin chose today, one of the most important days of the trip as we cross into the occupied territories, to get sick—too sick to move, much less hike across one of the most heavily guarded borders in the world. Inshallah (God willing) he will catch up to us tomorrow.
As perhaps the only group of international citizens to walk across this border, which is extensively guarded by machine gun turrets, lands mines, and barbed wire, our egos were rapidly inflating. But our hopes were soon dashed when we realized that violence had broken out in Jericho and we would be forced to get on a bus to pass through the Israeli section of the military wasteland. Dani, who works with the Bethlehem office of Holy Land Trust, was working so frantically to get everything sorted out that, at one point, he had a cell phone held up to each ear.
In the midst of this, our tour bus suddenly obtained a tire problem, leaving us scrambling to move our luggage from one bus to another. Eventually, after realizing that we would be unable to walk through the border, Todd and Kieth headed back to Jordan, in the hopes that tomorrow they would be able to walk the whole way on foot—as they have travelled on foot and on camel all the way from Baghdad and didn't want to compramise so close to the journey's end.
To make matters worse, Prosper Kwenda,from Zimbabwe, and Peter Thiep, from Sudan, were not allowed into Israel because of visa problems. "It's official," Dani proclaims, walking through the lobby of the Israeli border crossing as we wait for clearance, "they're prejudiced." He says this because John, from the Philipines, is allowed to enter even though he has the exact same visa complication as the two dark-skinned Africans. In John's own words, "There were three of us that went in there with the same problem. None of our countries really have good diplomatic ties with Israel. And yet of the three that go in without any visas, only one comes out."
Arriving at the border at 10:00 we didn't actually make it into Palestine until about 7:00 in the evening, after waiting at border crossing stations on each side and waiting in our bus for special permission to pass into Jericho. Arriving at our hotel tired, hungry, and, for at least a few of us, in desperate need of a shower, we were greeted by a room filled to the brim with important public figures: Dr. Saev Erekat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, leaving tonight for a conference in Washington; Sami Musalam,the head government official for Jericho; Ishmael Al-Jamal, the local Grand Mufti; Manil Al-Jubb, a local poet; Father Simon from the Catholic Church; Sister Columba, principal of the local Franciscon school; the local chief of police, the local head of the military, as well as Terry Macintosh and Tim Sparks, Americans from the Jesus House of Prayer. Spinning in a swarm of warm welcomes addresses, we also had time to greet Awni Jubran and Sami Awad from the Bethlehem Holy Land Trust offices, both of whom already dear friends.
It's already late. I wish I could write more, but tomorrow, I think, will be even more overwhelming.
December 19 "Ignore them," Sami Awad yelled from his van as Todd Elkins and Kieth Dakin walked across the border today. "They can only do two things—shout or shoot." Though granted permission to walk into Israel, a guard perched at a gun turret yelled at them from a distance, telling them to "come here," an idea that seemed somewhat unappealing.
The two met up with us as we spent the day touring the city of Jericho. We climbed up to the Monastary of Temptation. Constructed in 1895, it has to be one of the most beautiful churches in the world, carved directly into the mountainside. Because of the persisting conflicts between Palestine and Israel there are no tourists in the area and so the gondola that usually runs from the middle of Jericho to the monastary is shut down. The building was carved from walls of rock and built up with adobe bricks. Two black crows queitly perched above the entrance to the main sanctuary, nestled between a thin crack in the side of the mountain.
We visited the sites of several other ruins, but I mostly avoided the "guided tour." It's not that the information he distributed wasn't perinent, I just decided that I would rather queitly wander around the realm of the ancients on my own.
Our last stop was related to more recent events. The road stretching up to the hillside Israeli settlement was fenced with trees, so far away from the bombed building—a block of white concrete now resembling swiss cheese—that Palestinian guns would not even have been able to hit a target at such a range. Nevertheless, the Jericho Dolphin Resteraunt was blown to pieces, its front entrance paved with shards of glass because alleged gunmen fired on the settlement from it's cover. The Continental Hotel and Casio across the street were also damaged, though to a lesser degree. All this a part of the ongoing conflict that has plagued this region for several months.
On a related note, we found a very good site recently, created by the the Palestinian Center for Rapprochment, which gives a detailed account of the damage done to both buildings and people here in recent conflicts.
Our day ended with a breaking of the Ramadan fast at the Jericho offices of Yaser Arafat. A meal well earned after a high energy soccer match against the Jericho Select team. We won the game 3-1 on a field encased with mud and utilized our team's newest members: Jacob, Donavon, Todd, and Nathan, all from the Charlotte Eagles.
December 20 Waltzing out of Jericho on a sliver of road, winding steeply up the hillside, our camels were blocked by a towering mound of sharp rocks blasted out by Israeli soldiers to block off all traffic in and out of the town. The roadblock has also prevented any media teams from chasing after us with cameras and requests for interviews in the past couple of days. But as soon as this obstacle was passed, representatives from AP and NBC greeted us with red-lighted Beta Cameras and fluffy boom-mikes, eager to capture the moment on film. However, the camels were unable to cross the roadblock, forcing us to dismount and scale the boulders on foot. Because this moment had been anticipated, there was a second herd waiting on the other side.
The walk, being brief today, left us time to wander down wadi Kelt, the canyon that our road had overhung, to the Monastery below. Passing over a roaring river of dirt-brown water we climbed back up the other side of the wadi part way and into the plain building which had been dug into the mountainside.
"The life of a monk," our guide explains, "is divided into three sections: silence, prayer, and work." Unfortunately, despite the Monastery's beautiful panoramic view of the wadi and it's gorgeous array of paintings, many of the sections were, at the moment, unlit, and the sound of a mechanical saw filled the air, drowning out the sacred silence. The "life of a monk" thankfully included touring us around the, admittedly impressive, gift shop, transfixing many of us within the store goods even as our guide yelled at us to hurry because, as always, "time is short."
After another meal of mansuf, digging into the lamb and rice with our hands, tightly packing the rice with our fists, like balls of bread-dough, and a few tiny cups of wine, we received good news: Prosper Kwenda and Peter Thiep, previously denied entry into Israel, will now be allowed to join the rest of our team. Peter had told me once that his dream five years ago was to travel to the holy city of Bethlehem. It has been one of his lifelong goals. Prosper, having already been denied entrance into Israel on an earlier trip, is undoubtedly very pleased with the current reversal as well. To top it all off, Robin has been feeling a bit better and may be able to walk tomorrow. Also, a few of the personal bags of our four newest pilgrims have been found—in an amazing blitzkrieg of airline incompetence, all of their luggage was lost on the flight over.
Washing the sticky rice from our right hands, the only hand one is allowed to eat with, and leaving our camel drivers' campsite, we walked down the road toward our bus, the darkness having already descended over the sky. In the distance, we hear gunshots.
Tonight, we're sleeping on the concrete floors of the Nabi Musa mosque, our mattresses packed tightly together in a handful of small rooms paneled with three or four windows along each wall. Tomorrow the daybreak will creep through the glass, slowly nudging us out of our sleeping bags and summoning us back to the never-ending road.
December 21 Zig-zagging our way through an endless sea of sandy hills and canyons, steep walks up and stumbling jogs downw mountains, our twelve camels passed by a small patch of green—an Israeli settlement far on the outskirts of Jericho—and several abandoned concrete military bases, large enough to fit jeeps or small tanks. We stopped for a twenty minute break after stumbling onto a more elaborate abandoned base, constructed almost entirely of blocks of large rocks packed in squares of wire fencing, mounted into ascending layers reminiscent of stairs. Closed in by several iron doors, the bunker was surrounded by a garden of rubber tires. Somehow, a few of the camel drivers found their way inside and the rest of us piled in after them, fumbling in the perfect darkness, interrupted by the faint glitter of Keith Dakin's flashlight.
We ended the day walking into Nebi Musa, the ancient mosque surrounded by a vast and beautiful emptiness beyond a large graveyard of tombstones blended in with the soft shades of the desert. A journalist and photographer were there to greet us, conducting interviews and taking a few photos of us on camel back. The rest of the team rummaged through some plastic bags of bread and cardboard crates of bananas and oranges, eagerly breaking into the jars of peanut butter Gail Martinez brought with her from the States.
After lunch, Todd Elkins, Keith, and I drove back toward the Dead Sea where we met up with Robin, Prosper, Peter Thiep and Andre (who was filming). All were fresh from the Israel-Jordan border crossing, which they passed through on foot with minimal complications. All three of them were overwhelmed to finally be here. We have only a few days left before we reach Bethlehem, where we will be joined by thousands of Palestinians for the Christmas celebration.
Tonight, as our entire team gathered, together for the first time, we were visited by George Rishmawi, who sang and played the lute, and a few of his friends, who accompanied him on conga drums. One Arabic song he sang seemed appropriate for today: it was about the world being a single nation, and about not needing a passport to travel anywhere on the face of the globe. When the music had commenced, after several of us joined in on drums in the Mosque's courtyard and Andre Martinez shared a few of his songs, the night reverted into an absurdity of games. A large group game called telephone; another game, fruit salad, which caused a few bruises and at least one broken chair; a "circle story," where everyone adds one word to a sentence string, creating a narrative; and ending with a violent game of musical chairs—won by Awni, but only after a great deal of pushing and stealing of seats.
Eventually, the evening quieted down again as the group gathered around for songs of worship, only briefly interrupted by a cat-fight from the second floor of the mosque. One cat, fleeing the battle, broke the sound barrier crashing down the stairs, charging towards the team, causing a few screams and a collective flinch. We were so concerned with the cat that we failed to notice the slowly tipping mounted light, used by our camera guys, about to fall straight onto Gail's head. "The light! The light!" John Vencer shouted. Though sitting further away from the danger zone than anyone else, he rushed out into the center, catching the light-stand before anyone was electrocuted.
December 22 "No," Father Lazurus explained as we bombarded him with questions, "we don't have vacations in monastic life." As a psychology student in California's Santa Cruz University, he casually pursued the teachings of the early fathers of the Greek Orthodox church, eventually converting and coming to live the life of a monk. He now calls the 'Ar Saba Monastery within the Palestinian Territories home. "We wear all black," he says, in answer to another inquiry, "to symbolize the death of the world. Not the physical world but the world of passions." But beneath his glasses, his flowing beard, his black hat and his robe, his feet are fit snuggly into a pair of black Reebok sneakers—a small reminder, perhaps, of the world that he has left behind.
"We live here," he continued, "on what we call Byzantine time. When the sun sets, that is our midnight—the beginning of the next day. We wake up at about one in the morning, according to the "normal" clock schedule, and come to prayers until about seven." He explained several other details of monastic life, including the belief that the dead buried beneath the holy site never collected an odor and why women were not allowed into this particular monastery, while the female members of our group waited patiently outside.
Scaling down a steep cliff, we had to leap over a small section of a polluted river, many of us very nearly falling in, to reach the day's final destination. As the quickest route to 'Ar Saba, it ended a long and difficult day of walking. The last stretch was endlessly steep. The hills always stretched up at a ninety-degree angle, and seemingly never sloped back down again.
A long section of today's journey took us through an Israeli firing range, where we passed by a lot filled to the brim with tanks, their engines humming with life and soldiers sitting on top of their hot metal hoods. They stared in disbelief as our caravan passed by waving a whole strew of international flags adorned on twelve camels and with about thirty pilgrims riding and walking along side.
We were joined by several new journey members: Montseraat Cata, originally from Catalonia, she has been living in Bethlehem and working at our Holy Land Trust office; Don Wagner, a professor of Middle East Studies at North Park University, and board member of Holy Land Trust-USA, and daughter Ana; as well as Mark Khano, general manager of Guiding Star LTD tours, with his wife and baby child strapped to his back.
Only a few more days left…
December 23 A basketball beating against the concrete and a flood of voices awoke me this morning from my sleeping bag, which is stationed in a large crate made from criss-crossing planks, wrapped in a transparent green tarp, and utilized as a tent. We slept last night on the floors of these temporary "rooms," set up on the basketball court playground of the Al-Abediah high-school for girls, and guarded by several officers equipped with Soviet rifles. A small mural in the courtyard displayed a canoe-shaped tanker ship painted with the colors of the Palestinian flag on a sea of blood, with several hearts floating like kites in the sky. A few unfinished murals, faded black outlines, showed a young boy with an amputated leg shouting, "Come on! Is the blindness in your hearts?" And a mother, holding a baby in her arms, trapped between rows of barb-wire, whispering softly, "They say we have won, my son, why are you crying?" More unusual was a painting nearby which depicted a giant purple monster-hand holding a torch, also in the colors of the Palestinian flag. Another piece of concrete art depicted two little girls on a see-saw, both of whom, surprisingly, were white non-arabs.
Crowding into two vans, many of us sitting on each other's laps or on the floor, we drove to our starting point and began the day's walk. Passing by an ancient water cistern and climbing up a steep off-road hill, stumbling over rocks and ducking under a barbed-wire fence. Coming upon the outer wall of St. Theodosios, lined with towering clusters of green cactus, we entered the monastery, greeted by the Abbot Reverend Archimandrite Ierotheos Sifakis, described in the site's brochure as distinguished priest due to his "piety and politeness." According to tradition this monastery was built over the cave the Wise Men used to hide from King Herod after greeting the new born King. After a quick tour of the dimly lit cathederal with chandeliers covered in plastic, and several tombs within the cave-section of the church, we returned to our campsite at the Al-Abediah school. Grabbing some lunch and kicking the soccer ball around with our camel-guides, hordes of children gathered around the chain-link fence surrounding us, curiously peering in, as if we were the main exhibit of a zoo.
We then drove to the towns Municipality building, where we broke the fast with Mitril Abu Ateh, the Minister of Tourism, and Bishara Daoud, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. Several speeches were made, including one from our fearless leader, Robin Wainwright. I thought I'd include a few tidbits of what was said:
From Mitril Abu Ateh: From Robin Wainwright: We ended the day with an ecumenical service at the Greek Orthodox Church in Beit-Sahour, where we were warmly welcomed with Christmas songs in Arabic and a darkly ironic version of Oh Little town of Bethlehem. Because it was in English, our group was able to add our voices to the choir:
December 24 It's been a long, steep, damp, blistering, joyous, peaceful, traffic-ridden, sharp, smooth, and curving road that we've been walking these last three months but, today, we reached the rainbow's end. At mid-afternoon we arrived in Beit-Sahoor, where Sheperd's Field is located. Usually we are in a great hurry for our legs to carry us to the next destination but, today, we savored every step. Tomorrow, we will walk from Sheperd's Field to Manager Square. A few days later we will part ways and fly home.
Once it had turned dark and the wind began fiercely pummeling the rain, we hiked a few hundred yards off road, soaking ourselves, to reach a small and cave— the cave where sheperds at one time had kept their flocks. Though there was no light, small white pamphlets containing the lyrics of Christmas hymns and verses about the angels visit to the shepereds were passed out. Straining our eyes to see the words, we hummed out the tunes until candles were brought in, giving the atmosphere the flavor of a vigil, and bringing to mind the night of candlelight we spent in the Al-Amiriya bomb shelter in Iraq.
Driving back to the Bethlehem Bible College for our Christmas Eve celbration. It was small and intimate, no crowds, no reporters. Robin presented all of us with "Journey of the Magi" flags in thanks for our help. After a few songs of worship, Robin read a poem by T.S. Eliot: "Journey of the Magi" written 1927, describing the journey of the three wise men. We found in this text many things that we experienced on our own pilgrimage.
December 25 "Merry Christmas!" Ja'ad, a Palestinian Christian, shouted to us from his car. Pointing non-chalantly to Israeli soldiers sitting casually in an armored jeep blocking the road, he said, "this is our Merry Christmas." The man, whose family was tightly packed around him on all sides, radiated with signs of exhaustion, worn, droopy eyes; paleness; and frailty, as if at any moment he could either snap like a twig, turning violent, or simply fade into a lifeless heap of bones. Stopped by Israeli soldiers at dozens of check-points—which appear at any place and at any time, strategically located to cause frustration and humility—it is nearly impossible for Palestinians to drive or walk through their own land, to go to work, to school, to Mosque, or church.
It was one of these checkpoints that not only kept Ja'ad from visiting relatives on Christmas day, but that also prevented our bus from picking us up at the Bethlehem Bible College. Instead of the bus we had to hire taxis to take us to another Israeli checkpoint, walk about half a kilometer through a thick drizzle, and load onto the bus from the other side. This caused us to be late for our meeting with Fisal Hussani, the Palestinian Mayor of Jerusalem. This extreme, pointless and humiliating inconvenience is what the people that live here suffer through day in and day out. What we received was only a very small sampling of this, yet was still enough to enrage us.
Finally reaching the Oriental House, and pulling off our soaking jacks and hats inside, we gathered around a conference table with Hussani. "I remember once, as a child, I was in Egypt. My family was watching a film—Tarzan, one of the Tarzan movies—I remember I asked my sister: 'my father is stronger than Tarzan, right?'" He laughed. "Any child will look to his father in this way. A father is a child's protector, his hero, everything in his life. So what happens when a man is stopped at an Israeli checkpoint and the soldiers humiliate him, telling him to stand here, or treat him as though he were nothing, maybe even beating him? To the child, this symbol of power—the father—will collapse. What happens to the child who watches this? Something will have died inside himself. He will no longer listen to his father. Deep inside, he will say to himself 'you couldn't protect me.'"
After a pleasant conversation, the mayor wished us luck and thanked us for our visit, inviting us to tour Jerusalem with his blessing. In part because of this, we became, through special permission, the first tour group to visit the Al-Aqsa Mosque in three months. The site is where this year's violent conflicts were sparked when Ariel Sharon, widely condemned as a criminal for to his involvement with the massacres of over 3,000 Palestinians in Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, entered the Al-Aqsa compound with 2,000 soldiers igniting Arab and Islamic rage.
Pausing the day's important events for a Christmas feast at lunch time, we threw on our soldier, king, and queen outfits—our "Magi" uniforms—and headed to Shepherd's Field, where we began the final day of walking. Reaching a nearby church, we stopped as we were joined by thousands of Palestinians for the procession, the final few miles, to Manager Square. At the front of our parade two men carried a giant white banner with an image of the crown-of-thorns Christ in tears, stating simply: "Jesus weeps for Palestinians." At a slow pace, we walked behind them, most of the journeymen on camels. After us came a group of children, holding individual signs with statements in English and Arabic such as: "Santa has no homes to bring our presents to this year" and "We deserve freedom." From a yellow taxi in front of all of us a set of double speakers blasted Christmas Carols. George, one of the organizers of this event, ran around shouting orders to everyone, his face caked with sweat, mostly telling us to walk slower, "shwey, shwey." Cameramen filtered in and out between us, sometimes ramming into us or blocking the way. I glanced back briefly at the road curving behind us and saw nothing but an endless stream of flickering torches lighting up the night, carried by the marchers. Absolutely beautiful. One of the greatest moments of my life.
Reaching manager square, we found that the Islamic services were running late. So we waited, and waited, and waited—for several hours, conversing with a handfuls out of the thousands that had joined us for the final leg of the journey. Eventually, the Christmas celebration began—a dance reenactment of the birth of Jesus, starting with the Shepherds visit by the angels. A cluster of metallic balloons circulated throughout the crowd. One of them, a shark, finding it's way into the hands of a young boy standing in the front row along the railing. Ninety spotlights stood above the expansive stage, splotched with a thick green tree and a fake cave with steps leading up to the top on each side. The dancers, clad in goat skin spottily covering their torsos and upper chests, twirled around with long wooden staffs, sometimes tapping them against the hardwood stage floor. At the right time, our "kings" were led up to the cave,used as the manager—the wise-men bringing gifts to the baby Jesus, represented here only by a small golden light.
Most of us were simply told to get on stage, with no advanced warning. Later, Sami Awad introduced us one by one to the crowd, a thousand voices cheering at the sound of each of our names. Then, as if that weren't enough to overwhelm us, family members of Palestinian martyrs walked onto stage, their sorrow still visible, and took our hands with warmth.
The celebration closed with Andre Martinez and his mother Gail in song. He Came in Winter was written by Carissa Wainwright, the music by Andre himself about a month into the journey). Though Andre's guitar was nearly mute, they sang beautifully. The crowd, already having trickled down quite a bit, still provided a solid applause as they walked off stage.
Wow. It makes me dizzy just thinking about everything that happened today. The final day of the Journey of the Magi.
Peter's Journal
September 16
Israel
Peter's Journal
September 21
Jordan
Peter's Journal
September 22
Jordan
Peter's Journal
September 24
Jordan
Peter's Journal
September 26
Jordan
Peter's Journal
September 27
Jordan
Peter's Journal
September 28
Jordan
Peter's Journal
October 1
Jordan
Peter's Journal
October 3
Palestine
Peter's Journal
October 4
Palestine
Peter's Journal
October 5
Palestine
Peter's Journal
October 6
Jordan
Peter's Journal
October 7
Jordan
Peter's Journal
October 8
Iraq
Peter's Journal
October 11
Iraq
Peter's Journal
October 14
Iraq
Though we made it into Iraq we're still waiting for the journey to really begin. We're still waiting to receive support vehicles, camels, and full permission to travel from the Iraqi government. In the meantime, the Sigman, as a hotel and as a place where we have been spending the majority of our days, has exceeded far beyond my original expectations. The building is beautiful and (for better or worse) they feed us like kings: at least three servings of meat with every meal (lamb, chicken, steak), an endless stream of bread baskets, fresh fish, fruit, bowls of palmgranites layered beneath a pile of sugar. We've tried to invite some of the hotel employees, who we've had time to befriend, to join us for dinner but management policy prohibits it. The same people who serve us giant platters of meat are unable to afford even a single serving of such a delicacy. In fact, they abstain from meat entirely because of its high cost.
Peter's Journal
October 16
Iraq
Peter's Journal
October 17
Iraq
Peter's Journal
October 21
Iraq
Peter's Journal
October 22
Iraq
Peter's Journal
October 23
Iraq
Peter's Journal
October 24
Iraq
Peter's Journal
October 25
Iraq
Peter's Journal
October 26
Iraq
Peter's Journal
October 29
Iraq
Peter's Journal
October 31
Iraq
Peter's Journal
November 1
Iraq
Peter's Journal
November 2
Iraq
Peter's Journal
Iraq
Peter's Journal
Iraq
Peter's Journal
Iraq
Peter's Journal
Iraq
Peter's Journal
Iraq
Peter's Journal
Iraq
Peter's Journal
Iraq/Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Syria
Peter's Journal
Jordan
8:40 We finally hop into the van, driving back toward the border between Jordan and Syria.
8:55 We realize that we are going the wrong way. The car makes a u-turn.
9:50 We arrive at the border, but are not taken to the right starting point. Robin, who has walked every foot of the journey so far, insists that he be taken back to the exact location we ended our walk yesterday. Unfortunately, to do this, we must first convince a security officer to let us through.
10:30 We begin walking at a slow, steady pace.
10:50 A newsman from Jordanian TV stops us in order to conduct interviews with Robin and the rest of the team.
11:15 We walk a few yards over to a Bedouin tent where we are welcomed graciously. Due to Ramadan, however, no tea or coffee is offered. More cameramen. More filming. More interviews.
Peter's Journal
Jordan
Peter's Journal
Jordan
Peter's Journal
Jordan
Peter's Journal
Jordan
Peter's Journal
Jordan
Peter's Journal
Jordan
Peter's Journal
Jordan/Israel
Peter's Journal
Jordan/Israel
Peter's Journal
Palestine
Peter's Journal
Palestine
Peter's Journal
Palestine
Peter's Journal
Palestine
"We hope that you will pass the message back to the people of your countries and to your governments that we do not want our children killed and we do not want the children of others killed. We are a people against terrorism and a people against bloodshed. We want to live with freedom, dignity, and independence in a Palestinian nation with a shared Jerusalem and under the leadership of President Yaser Arafat. We are not here to throw the Jews into the sea or anything like that." [Someone in crowd responded to this: "it is they that throw us," which was answered with a great deal of laughter]. "It is a blessing that Ramadan and Christmas occur at the same time this year, representing the unity of the Christians and Muslims in Palestine."
"On the way here, literally thousands of people have asked us: 'why do you walk? Why are you doing this?' We never have enough time to give a complete answer. Of course, we are here to honor Jesus on the 2000th anniversary of his birth. But what is it that honors Jesus? It is peace and justice. We are walking for the children of Iraq, who have caught polio from the water poisoned by the U.S. during the Gulf War, because these children will never walk again. We are walking for those here in Palestine whose legs have been shot, who will never walk again. We are walking for those here whose spines have been injured by rubber bullets&madash;supposedly harmless—who will never walk again. We are walking for the Palestinian children who have died, who will never walk, laugh, or play ever again. If you believe that Jesus is the prince of peace and believe that Jesus will judge at the resurrection, as both Christians and Muslims do, then rise up and be warriors for peace. When we reach Bethlehem, our journey will not have ended, rather our journey towards peace and justice will have only just begun. We are proud to be your brothers and we are proud to be here with you today. Allah jeeba salaam!" May God bring us peace.
Peter's Journal
Palestine
Peter's Journal
Palestine