March 15, 2010
Greetings from the Middle East
My Mom and Dad are on a trip in the Middle East (where we spent many of the years of my childhood):
Greetings from Jerusalem… wanted to send you word that we are having an unbelievably wonderful time in the Middle East.
We are seeing signs of the tension here… ALL interesting, will tell you more later. Syria was incredible. Our days have been full of sights and sounds of the ME… keep wishing you were here to experience it. The swirl of life is intense and always full of person to person interactions that are welcoming and important. Seems we have made an impression with our own spirit of willingness to interact… people have responded with such kindness and generosity.
Food is incredible. Swam in the Dead Sea today and saw the Qumran ruins and community structures…
Could go on and on. Love you all.
Wish I was there.
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Oh, wow. Couldn’t you have gone with them? Fuck that–couldn’t I have gone with them?
I would love especially to see Petra.
by the time it might have been financially possible for us, the trip had already been set (they took a group, a fixed number of seats on the bus).
Oh, a group. Well, that changes things. Let’s make our own trek to the Middle East.
Did they visit the village in Syria where the last speakers of Aramaic – that’s the last speakers of Aramaic – live? There are around 30 families left who speak it, so within a few years, Aramaic will be gone. There are some attempts to make a cultural centre apparently, which appears to be a start-stop fiasco.
Cindy, I’m with you. On the plus side, he is leading the group.
clusterflockstock III, Damascus?
Lucy, I will have to ask. I had a general outline of the trip from conversation, but not the details.
A co-worker temporarily posted to Jerusalem wrote a story about a phenomenon in which the occasional visitor became unhinged by the very act of being in that area. They would begin speaking in tongues, wandering the streets, unable to sleep or eat because they were “seeing” figures from the bible, Jesus, Mary, etc. Even more interesting was the fact that these episodes could not be predicted in advance, the people who had them sometimes were not even religious before arriving. Often they were people who had never before had a day of mental “unhinging,” according to people interviewed for this story.
There were a couple of psychiatric workers employed by the government to tend to these folks, who would often be hospitalized and then go home and completely recover, according to the story, which was written in the mid-to-late ’80s.
I wonder whether your parents have heard of this. The author of the story wrote countless stories, but this one I have never forgotten.