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By Bob Payne
As long as you are not part of an invading army, I've always found that making friends with the locals when traveling in foreign countries is not particularly difficult. You learn a word or two of their language--not enough to actually converse, but just enough to reassure them that you are, after all, human. You smile often, and you agree with any shortcomings they may have observed in whoever our president is at the time.
But keeping friends in other countries can be much trickier, as I discovered while riding a bus through the Sinai Desert. Visitors apparently do not often ride Egyptian buses, and perhaps for good reason. It had to be more than 100 degrees the morning we set out for the all-day journey to St. Catherine's Monastery, near Mount Sinai, on a bus with no air-conditioning. There were probably 80 passengers on a bus with 44 seats. Yet for the first hour the seat next to mine remained empty. Out of politeness, fear, or perhaps concern that I hadn't laundered my clothes during the previous week, no one wanted to sit next to me.
Finally a young man, perhaps braver than the rest, sat down and tried not to acknowledge my existence. When he seemed settled in, I pulled out my water bottle, sipped from it, and offered it to him. The gesture startled him, but he took a drink. A few minutes later he unwrapped a parcel, and offered me a piece of what looked like a family-size Fig Newton. After taking a bite, I smiled, he smiled, and we were buddies.
Soon it seemed all of the passengers had managed to circulate past our seat, sometimes more than once, to get a look at me. My seatmate spoke no English, and my Arabic was limited to "hello," "thank you," and "a room farther from the bomb blasts, please." But as he spoke to each passerby, I could tell that he was saying something like, "This guy's all right. We go way back."
I smiled at them all, and I usually got a smile in return. The only exceptions were the few women on the bus and the men I took to be their brothers.
Then, out in the middle of nowhere, the bus came to a stop. I looked out the window and noticed that we had arrived at a military checkpoint. I turned to my seatmate to see if I could tell from his expression what the checkpoint might mean...and discovered that the seat next to mine was empty again.
A soldier climbed onto the bus and--seeing me, the only Westerner aboard--walked slowly down the aisle to my seat. "Passport," he said, and I realized as I reached down into my pants to pull out my money belt that about 80 pairs of eyes were focused on me. It seemed my seatmate had abandoned me for fear that if I did turn out to be trouble, he might be associated with it. The soldier flipped through my passport, handed it back without comment, and on his way out signaled to the driver that we could go.
The checkpoint wasn't yet out of sight when my new pal was back. He smiled, gave me a thumbs-up, and, as people began to shuffle by again, took up right where he'd left off, as the authoritative source on all things Bob. In the Middle East, I mused, standing by your friends apparently doesn't extend to encounters with the military. Then again, I'm not sure my friends back home would act much differently when guys with big guns are involved.
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Illustration by Jason Schneider
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