Middle East Trip: Day 3

Day 3: The Reality Choice

Our first day at the conference was Sunday morning. The two hotels where the conference attendees were staying sits on the corner of the intersection of a couple of main streets in Bloudan. Immediately behind the hotels sits a beautiful Syrian Orthodox Church. After the Islamic calls for prayer had faded away the church bells rang out calling believers to morning mass. I later wandered up the church during mass and heard the sounds of chants being sung that probably date back centuries. I felt an admiration for a more liturgical worship style that was foreign to me, having grown up largely unchurched and what exposure I had was almost exclusively in the Protestant tradition. The liturgical style seemed to blend seamlessly with the traditional culture that still dominates the Middle East.
We had breakfast at the outdoor restaurant; the food is good but such a different taste to my palette. There are a few items I am so-so about. Yet so far all of us have remained healthy. We quickly began to enjoy the warm hospitality of the Kurdish wait staff. They genuinely seem to like Americans; later in the morning they would invite me to join a card game which I would have to reluctantly decline since I was scheduled to teach. We held our morning devotional in the lobby downstairs. I am impressed with what I have seen so far of the buildings. The facilities are kept reasonably clean, especially in high traffic areas. The interiors are amazing, complete with tile and marble floors, high ceilings, wood paneling and carvings, elaborate chandeliers and engraved ceilings. But money seems to be lacking for maintenance and incidentals. An electric hand dryer or a soap dispenser may be on the wall but neither will work. Paper towels and tissues are not to be found lying around. I quickly developed the habit of stuffing tissues (used for napkins at mealtime) into my pockets for when I have to visit a public restroom because toilet paper will not be supplied. From the look of the exteriors and the streets, building permits, zoning laws and safety standards are either lax or non-existent. Home construction seems to be an ongoing multi-generational project, which makes sense in the fact of the fact that people have lived in this area for thousands of years.

The conference began about noon. Initially less than 100 people showed up but many were resting after getting up in the wee hours to travel in from Egypt and other locations in the Middle East. Many more showed up after lunch, which was at 3 in the afternoon. Not only is the schedule in the Middle East later that in the west, but it resembles Latin culture in its approach to punctuality. I taught the Reality Choice to the young adults (ages 16-25): Realize I am not God. I admit that I am powerless to control my tendency to do the wrong thing and that my life is unmanageable. This was the first time in my life I have ever taught using an interpreter, which was L____. The lesson went reasonably well, and Angela saved the day by sitting next to the computer operator to keep the proper slides in Arabic up as we went through the lesson. We broke into our small discussion groups and W____ and L___’s son, S___, was the interpreter for our men’s group. I do not know if this was their first exposure to open and transparent sharing or not, but it was interesting. J_____, who worked nearby at one of the hotels and was probably Muslim, sat in on our first session. I liked him. He was a small young men who later showed me scars on his arm he got when he was 13 year old while hunting wild dogs in the hills surrounding Bloudan. He would love to come to American: his hero was Michael Jackson and he later showed me his moonwalk which would have made the “King of Pop” proud

The pattern for the conference’s day schedule was already being set that first day. We would take a late afternoon break when a short nap was wise if not mandatory. People would begin to filter back into the rooms shortly after the scheduled start time and we would begin somewhere about 30 -30 minutes “late”, i.e. off the designated time. We would have a lesson and small group time, and then meet again for dinner sometime after dark. Since it was Ramadan and also to avoid the heat, shops would open only after sunset. Those who had the energy would then stay out past midnight socializing and shopping. It would take me a day or two adjust to the schedule but I would eventually adopt it in my own way.
That first night E____ walked me down a half a block from the hotel to a small shop where I could exchange dollars of Syrian pounds. The shop keeper’s daughter was manning the front door and after E______ explained my need she called her dad on the cell phone she held and he was there within a matter of a couple of minutes. I exchanged $200 and received 9200 Syrian pounds. I felt flushed with cash.
We all retired pretty early. A shower was a necessity before lying down to be comfortable as the temperatures slowly fell. I loved the view from our balcony, with the lights glittering in the valley below. Early in the day before dinner I had sat on the balcony and listened to the evening call for prayer from two different mosques. That evening Jonathan let me borrow his guitar and for 15 or 20 minutes before bed I got to play music on the porch. I really like his Taylor guitar. As we fell asleep the voices of the people moving about enjoying the relative coolness of the evening kept rising up on breeze and it reminded me of the reality that I was in a whole different world and culture.