On our first day in Cairo, the tour guide greeted us with an eye rolling cliche – people are people everywhere. He continued: we want you to get to know the people of Egypt, not just our amazing historical buildings. Our guide in Jordan echoed similar sentiments.
To this end, we had dinner with a 78 year old Egyptian PhD at her house in Cairo. She talked about the NGO she had established in the Sinai to provide an economic outlet for the women embroidering textiles which she sold in her little shop. We supported it enthusiastically.
That was the beginning of many encounters with the people of Egypt, then of Jordan. Was it carefully curated? Well, we are tourists who don’t speak the language on a high end trip, so draw your own conclusions. Add COVID to the mix, masking and distancing definitely affected the experience. But, through it all we could see and appreciate how hard people worked to support their families.
We saw Bedouin tents overlooking the Dead Sea. We even stayed in a high end version in Wadi Rum – one of the most beautiful deserts we have ever seen. We visited a government run workshop that employs the physically handicapped to make mosaics near Mt. Nebo where Moses first saw the promised land. There, the artisan gets 60% of the sale price of their handicraft. And, yes, we bought a small mosaic table with the tree of life. We visited a school that teaches how to make hand-knotted rugs in Luxor. And yes, we bought a rug. We had lunch at a women run coop where the director explained how many people benefitted from our group stopping and eating at their restaurant. And yes, I bought the English version of her cookbook
Over all these purchases there was a conversation. And guess what? Although it is a cliche, it sometime takes traveling a very long distance to realize that if we step back and look at the big and small picture, we have more in common than we focus on. If we look to find common ground, we will surely have better conversations and better results at home, too.