Christmas 2009 Trip, continued

We returned from Petra to delicious Christmas dinner leftovers and began planning and preparing for our next trip - Israel. The Miles - a family in Jordan that helps children with congenital heart defects - offered to take us with them into Israel for the week. Along the way we stopped at Gadara, also known as Umm Qais, and walked along an old Roman road nearby the place Jesus cast the demons into the pigs from the demoniac. After Gadara we all piled back into the nine passenger van and continued to the border between Jordan and Israel. We breezed through Jordanian customs and drove across the famous Jordan river into the promised land. There began our troubles. Two of our group, David and Jonathan, had visited Iraq previously where they taught English for a few months... this was apparently very suspicious to the Israelis. They held all of us up... for five hours! We sat in the Israeli customs office until hours after it had closed and played games, sang songs with guitar accompaniment, and prayed vigorously until one of the guards came and finally said, "At last, you are free to go." The vigorous prayer continued as it was now night and we had to drive through some potentially dangerous areas on the way to Jerusalem. We finally arrived at 1:00 in the morning and fell into exhausted sleep.

Throughout the next few days we visited some of the coolest places on Earth including some places Jesus walked, such as the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane. We also saw the Rock of Agony, Temple Mount, Western Wall (aka Wailing Wall), Garden Tomb, Sea of Galilee, King David's Tomb, Mary's (mother of Jesus) Tomb, Church of the Holy Sepulchre (shrine at Christ's tomb), Hezekiah's Tunnel, and the Old City - Arab and Jewish Quarter.

On New Year's Eve we youth (the six of us under 30 and over 10 went to see the celebrations on the infamous Ben Yehuda St. which has had its fair share of violence through the years. We escaped with our lives though were only a few feet away from a fatal stabbing; watching the police and military swoop in was actually about as exciting as the night got. There was remarkably little celebration it seemed, though there was a lot of drunkenness and a few street musicians.

On New Year's Day we made our way back to Jordan, taking a detour to En Gedi where David cut the robe of Saul. The border crossing into Jordan was actually pretty painless. They didn't care whether any of us had been in Iraq before.

Our remaining time in Jordan was spent shopping and enjoying the luxuries that are unavailable in Rwanda. We drove out to Makawir, the place where John the Baptist was held and killed, enjoying one more taste of biblical history before making our way back to beloved Rwanda.