AMMAN, Jordan – “Now boarding rows 32 and above,” said the ticket agent for Royal Jordanian airlines. I looked around the crowded gate area and saw only one student of the six I’d brought with me on the eight-day tour of this Middle Eastern nation.

 

“Where the devil are they?” I thought to myself.

 

Then aloud to the lone journalism graduate student standing beside me: “They better show up,” I told her. “I can’t go home and tell someone’s mamma: `Sorry, ma’am, your daughter didn’t make the plane home.”

 

In retrospect, I realize this was my first real panic attack. I’d survived a student canceling two days before we left Columbia for Jordan. Weathered another getting ill (and canceling) the day we were scheduled to depart. Found a doctor in Jordan to tend to another who was so sick to her stomach that she was doubled over in pain.

 

And I’d made it through assorted questions in the weeks before we left – and the week while we were in Jordan. (When you’re group leader, you’re supposed to know EVERYTHING.) So I’d spoken often as an authority on what to wear, what to say, how to act – even “Do I have to eat this?” at a meal more suited to Jordanian palates than Southeastern American taste buds. It had been a good trip, but I was ready to go home.

 

And furious when five of six students were not on hand 20 minutes before our international flight was scheduled to depart from Amman for New York. The students did finally show up. So did my colleague, Scott Farrand, who doggedly helped search for them when I got so worried. When I ranted over their tardiness, the young women to whom I’d grown so attached responded with confusion, courtesy and apologies. They hung their heads, slipped quietly into their seats and slipped over to my row to say how sorry they were. Typically, the excuse was simple:

 

It was the crack of dawn. They had found a Starbucks in the Amman airport, a favorite hangout in the United States – and a favorite coffee stop for Christine Moore, the consultant to the Jordan Board of Tourism who had helped organize our trip. The problem? The airline had a new rule: no coffee from the terminal could be brought aboard the plane. While I’d panicked, they’d been sipping.

 

Such is the life of this de facto tour group leader – really a journalist-turned-college professor. My first trip to Jordan in 2005 with my husband, Jace Holloman, a freelance photographer had been just as busy as the one this spring, but I’d had a little less responsibility. Last year, all I had to do was be wife and reporter. This time my Type A personality struggled not to lapse (read ZOOM) into overdrive. I wanted to lead this trip, open my students’ consciousness to a new people, a different faith, a gracious, welcoming culture in what Americans view as a really dangerous part of the world. It was far too easy to worry too much and forget why I was group leader and why I’d jumped through so many hoops to organize the Student Journalist Study Trip to Jordan for the University of South Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications. My goals were really close to ones I had for 23 years as a full-time journalist, most of them as a reporter on religion for a secular newspaper. I wanted to explore myths – not make or magnify them. I wanted to help eradicate stereotypes, break down barriers, change personal perceptions. I wanted my students, just as I once wanted my readers, to see Islam as friend not foe, Jordan and Jordanians as American allies in every sense of that term and the Middle East as the vast, complex, incredibly fascinating part of the world that it is.

 

So I was willing to add to an already labor-intensive teaching load, and organize a trip in less than 30 days in the final month of the spring semester. That meant juggling meetings with the students, determining and outlining course objectives for several independent study projects and answering question-after-question-after question as plans for the trip ensued.

 

My learning objectives for the students were multiple. We had a lot of ground to cover in a short period of time. That part was similar to the goals I had had as a reporter for the stories I wrote. And this time, I felt a little like an ancient Greek heroine. Our journey became an eight-day Jordanian odyssey that took us from the hubbub of Amman to the heights of Mount Nebo where Moses finally stopped after his arduous Exodus in the Old Testament and looked out upon the Promised Land. We’d danced in a bar called The Cave in the little town near the rose-red rocks of Petra, the ancient city literally carved from rock by the Nabateans several centuries before Christ. We’d mimicked Bedouins, crowded around a campfire under the incredibly bright stars visible in the night sky in the desert spaces of Wadi Rum. We’d climbed an enormous sand dune, ridden camels and horses, dipped our feet in the Jordan River and covered ourselves in mud from the Dead Sea.

 

The Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, visited by an aging Pope John Paul II in 2000 and now ruled by King Abdullah II – son of the famous King Hussein—is, in many ways, a good place to begin an adventure into the Middle East.  An American ally, this monarchy is around the size of the state of Virginia. Despite tensions in this region, Jordan is safer than one would think and receptive to Americans. Moreover, its king wants to build bridges of interfaith understanding.

 

In March 2006 as part of that effort, the king welcomed an American Roman Catholic cleric, Archbishop of Washington Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick. The king briefed the cardinal on Jordan's efforts to promote religious coexistence and interfaith dialogue on the basis of the guidelines set by the Amman Message, an approach to interfaith outreach outlined by the king and one that decries terrorism.

 

McCarrick commended the king's efforts toward peace in the region and establishing an understanding between the followers of the three world faiths, known as monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.  He said the Amman Message offers a middle ground for the followers of different faiths and cultures to counter attempts to use religion to promote extremism and justify wrongful acts.

 

For photographers and sightseers, Jordan is a visually beautiful nation with landscapes ranging from beach vistas reminiscent of the Caribbean to majestic deserts and the rose-red city of Petra. Jordan’s people complement its scenery. They are friendly, helpful, interested in Americans, outgoing and often speak English.

 

For students of religion, going to Jordan immerses one in the culture, history and sites holy to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Muslims are everywhere. But what the newcomer learns is that the stereotypes of Islam are all wrong. Jordan is a place where Islam is a significant part of the country, but neither the only faith nor an overpowering one.

 

In Jordan, clothing associated with Islam is as much a part of the culture as it is part of religion. For example, long flowing robes and head coverings (often worn by both men and women) are practical attire in the hot, dusty environs of the desert.

 

And Christianity is alive and well in Jordan, as evidenced by churches and by the vigor of Madaba, a center of Christian activity and a region offering an amazing adventure into the ancient art form of making mosaics.

 

In addition, visitors quickly learn that Jordan really is the "other" holy land.  From Bethany Beyond the Jordan, where archaeological excavations suggest Jesus was baptized and John the Baptist ministered, to the ruins of Byzantine churches and Lot's cave, Christian history comes to life in Jordan.

 

Delving into that history is like taking apart the layers beneath the earth's surface. At one site, the visitor will encounter ruins of an 11th or 12th century town that flourished under the Ottoman Turks, a 6th or 7th century church and a Roman theater, circa 2nd century. This juxtaposition of cultures, peoples and histories helps one realize the richness of Jordan’s religious and cultural history.

 

Climbing to the heights of Mount Nebo after traveling southward along the 5,000-year-old King’s Highway, visitors of any age are likely to feel very young - and very small. From this pinnacle, Moses is believed to have looked out over the Promised Land. Today, visitors to a platform in front of a church at the site may now look across the Jordan Valley to the rooftops of Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

 

But, dining in Amman, a city rich in diverse cuisines and nightlife, you feel like you're in the middle of just about any cosmopolitan city. Traffic is heavy and erratic, making simply crossing the street an adventure. High couture and classy venues are plentiful, but so are glimpses of poverty.  

 

Riding horseback into Petra, you enjoy the legacy of the Nabateans, an industrious Arab people who settled in South Jordan more than 2,000 years ago. It isn't hard to imagine how the Nabateans dominated trade in ancient Arabia, sheltering caravans of Indian spices, silks, African ivory and animal hides.

 

In Jordan, it isn't unusual to go from the 5th or 6th Century B.C., or even earlier to the present day. In today's Jordan, you will also encounter projects designed to better the lives of women and children. There are workshops, artists' factories and other examples.

 

You'll meet people working to build bridges of interfaith understanding. You will meet others undertaking private and public partnerships. The latter are designed to strike the difficult balances between encouraging both tourism and historic preservation and fostering sightseeing without destroying wildlife, sun-splashed landscapes and a fragile ecosystem

 

This was the country, the part of our increasingly global world, to which I’d been able to introduce my students. I had a chance to take them inside another culture, an experience so much like the ones I had as a religion writer and editor and a voyage offering insights and new truths like the ones I tried to convey in my book, “Four Women, Three Faiths.” It may sound arrogant, but leading the trip was my small contribution to interfaith cooperation and cross-cultural understanding. I’m not trained as a diplomat, but being a journalist, especially one writing about religion, is often like being a cultural anthropologist. You immerse yourself in another culture to gain people’s trust, to really understand who they are, how they live and what they believe. Then you pull back and talk to others about what you heard, saw and learned. Before you write, you universalize it and pray (if you’re of a praying turn of mind) that you convey at least a little of how one is transformed by such an adventure.

 

I knew I had accomplished just a little of what I’d set out to do on this trip to Jordan as I talked to a student some days later. “You know, “ she said, “every stereotype we had in our heads when we went to Jordan proved to be wrong. The things that we thought were true usually weren’t. The reasons we thought were behind people’s way of dressing or worshiping or living were only half-truths. We saw their world and we understand it in a new way.”

 

Amen.