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I’m finally back in Nazareth for a little while after a busy summer in and out of the area working with various groups.

While I was gone, an article about the Jesus Trail went out through the Associated Press, which resulted in extensive coverage announcing the creation of the trail, including articles in CNN, MSN, and Yahoo. We’ve been getting a lot of attention via emails and others working with tourism since, and anticipate many people coming to hiking in the spring of 2009. We’ve also completed a printable databook with the help of our volunteers Nate and Matt which provides turn by turn directions and maps, including all facilities and points of interest along the route. More information on all of this is available at http://jesustrail.com. Make sure to check out the video and multimedia presentations made by AP.

I’ll let the photo albums tell the story of the past three months, showing the most recent first. Click on the thumbnails or titles to view the entire album of photos.

Nazareth Youth Venture 2008
I co-led a three week service learning trip with Hinke Loewen-Rudgers for young adults through MMN, splitting our time between Nazareth, Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

Check out the groups blog with journals and photos at http://nazarethyouthventure.wordpress.com/

Turkey

My time in Turkey was spent scouting a section of the St. Paul Trail for use with an EMU Cross cultural in Turkey and the Greek Islands for May 2009 with Linford Stutzman. My sister and brother-in-law, Jesse and Maria Rodriguez, joined Linford and I for some sailing and hiking, and then the three of us traveled together in Turkey for another week.

View the route of our hike below:

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Morocco

I assisted in leading a three week trip through Franconia Conference to Spain and Morocco, focusing most of my work on a week’s hike on the Camino Fisterra portion of the Camino Santiago in northwest Spain.

Below is the route of the Camino Fisterra hike:

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Spain

Barcelona

Sheldon and I traveled to Barcelona together and enjoyed a few days visiting the city’s sites, especially the Gaudi architecture. We were also able to connect with a friend living in Barcelona that I had met in Jerusalem with my parents in the spring, and she was happy to show us around the city.

London
Connecting with Sheldon Good at the Mennonite Centre, we spent a few days exploring the city and hanging out with folks at the center, including Sharon Kniss, a friend from EMU.

Since these trips have all finished, I’ve spent some time with Michael Blunk and Evan Parks who are with the EPIC Pedal Project, documenting stories of people they meet in Israel and Palestine as they travel through by bicycle. Check out there websites at http://epicpedal.org and http://epicpedal.blogspot.com/

And now I’m back in Nazareth, settling into a new room at the Fauzi Azar Inn and catching up on various projects from the summer. I’m trying to work more at learning Arabic these days and am looking forward to staying in one place for a little while and resting up.

Collection of albums from the last week of my parents trip and from EMU staying at the Fauzi Azar Inn.

The other night one of our neighbor’s houses in the Nazareth suk caught on fire, destroying everything inside. Fortunately, the stone buildings hold out pretty well in fire, but the narrow city streets do make it difficult for a fire truck to get close to the house. A makeshift fire hose was constructed using extensions of garden hoses until firefighters could arrive. No one was hurt, but the event shook up a lot of the neighbors, as they all know each other quite well.

Check out the blog from the Drape family from Seattle, WA. They stayed with us at the Fauzi Azar for a few days in December and are now in Asia, visiting friends in Thailand and Cambodia.

http://drapesonthego.blogspot.com/

Since Thanksgiving, everyone seems to have shifted, into the Christmas season.  Nazareth’s stores are selling gaudy red and green decorations, colored lights are being strung between buildings, and we put up a Christmas tree and lights in the main hall of the Fauzi Azar Inn.  The weather has been distinctly colder this week, and it feels good to put on a warm fleece and drink hot mint tea.

Lately, many news stories are coming out relating to Bethlehem, including a featured story from National Geographic on the current situation relating to the context of the Christmas story.  It’s a good article that identifies the various people groups involved in the immediate region, the lives of Palestinians and Israeli settlers, the changing demographics of Christians and Muslims, and the effects of the Wall that surrounds the historic city on three sides.  I’d strongly recommend reading this article and would appreciate hearing your feedback.

This week I officially began Arabic lessons with Reham, my teacher/tutor from Nazareth.  I’ve also been working a lot on the Jesus Trail website, and there is a basic version online at http://jesustrail.com.  Last weekend, we gathered a group of volunteers to come and help paint over graffiti on the market doors near our building in Nazareth (view photos).  There was also an Oud Festival in town, presenting a serious of concerts with traditional music, both vocal and instrumental (view photos).  My friend Eric Kennel will be visiting next week, and I’m looking forward to spending time with him. Click here to view all photos from November 2007.

For this update, I’m going to point you a variety of links, news
articles, and videos that relate to Bethlehem, the Wall and Christmas. 
The UK graffiti artist Banksy has been receiving a lot of press
recently from his recent exhibit on the Wall, and there are a serious
of links relating to him below.  I recently discovered LinkTV from one
of our guests, an independent global TV news channel for Americans to
be better informed about the world.  They aggregate local news channels
worldwide and present video from various perspectives integrated into a
single program.

Bethlehem 2007 A.D. - National Geographic Featured Story

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-12/bethlehem/finkel-text.html

For more local news on the ground, check out MCC Bethlehem’s blog: http://www.mccpalestine.blogspot.com/

Wall Art

LinkTV Mosaic on the Annapolis Peace Conference

http://www.linktv.org/mosaic/mir

I have heard very little about the Annapolis peace conference from local people here, as it seems that many see it as yet another peace initiative in a series that have made little difference.  The most visible news I’ve been seeing has from BBC and CNN, as well as some independent sources like the one listed above.  Most people seem to be saying that without Palestinian Hamas being an active part of the process, they see little hope in lasting peace.  The division between Fatah and Hamas affiliated Palestinians continues to be a huge challenge internally in both the West Bank and Gaza.

Comments are welcome as always…

The holiday of Thanksgiving is distinctly American and is definitely a foreign, yet curious concept in the Middle East. During a conversation over coffee one day, we learned that the Arabic word for Turkey is habash, not be confused with the nearby country of Turkish people. We had almost forgotten about Thanksgiving until turkey came up, and we decided that it would be a great idea to host a feast at the Fauzi Azar Inn, inviting friends, family, neighbors and guests. It seemed possible to find a gobbler locally, as Israel is one of the leading consumers of turkey worldwide.

Gaby, one of the staff at the inn, contacted our local butcher and we translated the important points: a large bird, no head or feet, pluck the feathers and make sure to leave the skin. Put the inside parts in a separate bag. After multiple phone calls and a bit of interpretive help, it seemed that we had come to an understanding. We found most of the vegetables in the market, with the exception of pumpkins for a trademark pie. We think the cranberries we found were fairly close, but not exactly the same.

Thanksgiving morning and afternoon became a cooking marathon. We took over the kitchen, chopping vegetables, mashing potatoes, and trying to prepare the 11.6kg (25.5lb) turkey to fit in our small oven which only had an arbitrary temperature gauge from 1-9. The neighbor women visited periodically, curious and probably a bit skeptical about how our cooking endeavor would play out.

As the evening approached an international and local mixture of around 25 guests arrived, representing Norway, Taiwan, Holland, Jordan, the United States, and Israel, Arabs and Jews included and welcomed. Excitement (and probably hunger) grew among the guests as we stretched out four tables across the hall, piling them full with so much food that we almost ran out of table space.

Our feast consisted of turkey, two types of stuffing, sour cream and garlic mashed potatoes, gravy, candied sweet potatoes, green beans, garden salad, red beets, tabbouleh, cucumber and tomato salad, stuffed grape leaves, chocolate cake and cranberry salad. Charles, a pastor living in Jordan who was visiting Israel with his family, blessed the meal and shared about the Thanksgiving story with our curious guests.

The first Thanksgiving was a time when the early colonies in America were struggling to find enough to eat and the Native Americans offered hospitality. It happened during a messy and often violent history as the colonialist mentality was taking root in Americas. The first meal was a multicultural celebration of sustenance and survival, a coming to the table together with gratitude despite the acknowledgment of a difficult narrative. It connected with personal experiences in the context of a region with a similar story. Even though we share a history that involves suffering, we also have the choice to come together and celebrate one that includes joy.

The meal was a huge success and conversation continued late into the evening. Our satisfied appetites were topped off with coffee, tea and chocolate cake, winding us down into a mutual state of satisfaction and rest. Our leftovers became two huge pots of turkey vegetable soup that we have been eating since.

View Photos

One of our guests at the Fauzi Azar Inn last week was 24 year old James Horrox, who stayed here for a few nights while doing his Ph.D research on Anarchism and the Kibbutz movement. He has a book coming out this spring, A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement, coming in 2008 from AK Press.

Here is an article summarizing some of the work he is doing: Rebuilding Israel’s Utopia: http://www.zeek.net/710kibbutz/

It reminds me a bit of some of the urban communal Christian movements in the USA, like the Simple Way, the Camden House, the Reba Place Fellowship and other New Monasticism movements. On Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Monasticism

Last Saturday, James and I went to the weekly candlelight vigil at the Church of the Annunciation. We walked with the crowds around the building, chanting and trying to keep our candles from burning their paper cups. When we entered the church, we hung around a bit longer before deciding that over an hour of repetitive ritual was enough for us.

Back at the inn, we stayed up late talking about ideas related to anarchism, communal identity, politics, sociology and religion. We discussed the early Anabaptist movement in Europe with its anarchist roots. I think the Kibbutz movement and anarchism are relevant conversations for Mennonites to engage when thinking about communal, counter-cultural living as a presence in the surrounding world.

It would be great to get some further feedback if anyone is interested in this conversation…

Maoz and I hiked up to Mt. Precipice, the spot where Jesus was believed to have almost been through off of a cliff after coming back into his hometown and saying that he had fulfilled the scripture (Luke 4:14-30). Mt. Tabor can be seen in the background, where Jesus is believed to have been transfigured before Peter, James and John (Luke 9:28-36). There are a couple of nice panoramic shots of Nazareth, showing the Basilica of the Annunciation and the Old City. If you look closely, you can even see the Fauzi Azar Inn!

View photos

We had a large, international Christian group of young adults staying with us this past week, keeping us booked full almost the entire week. One of the evenings, we put up about a dozen new signs helping people to find us in the maze of streets in the market. Most of them made it through the night.

View Photos

Most of my time during the past week has gone into developing the route for the Jesus Trail, a 65km hiking trail that will run from the Old City of Nazareth to the Mount of Beatitudes. Through a combination of drawing routes on Google Earth, analyzing Hebrew hiking maps with Maoz, plotting points on my GPS and then walking them to see if they are possible, I’ve been searching for the best possible hiking path through the conglomeration of modern cities and highways. The way Jesus would have likely walked for this journey is probably now Highway 77, so I’ve had to explore parallel routes to make it an enjoyable journey. These detours have brought me in contact with herds of free-range cattle, tires burning in garbage dumps, barbed wire fences, locked gates, as well as beautiful olive groves and orchards, billowing meadows and cliff-top views.

The purpose of the trail is to offer a hiking path that connects many of the places significant to Jesus’ life and ministry. The route, guide and historical information about the Biblical sites along the way will be available at http://jesustrail.com in the near future. This website will be a free and public resource open to anyone who wishes to learn more about Jesus’ life, explore the region via Google Earth, or become sufficiently equipped to come and make the trek. The Fauzi Azar Inn has already sort of become a central location for hikers in the Galilee region, so it is logical that our guest house could become a jumping off point to hike the Jesus Trail.

The trail passes through modern towns and historical sites including Sepphoris, Cana, Tabgha, St. Peter’s Primacy, and Capernaum. It also crosses over the Horns of Hittim and Arbel Cliffs which offer breathtaking views of the Sea of Galilee. A return option passing through Tiberias, the Jordan River and Mount Tabor is also in the works, which will loop travelers back to Nazareth.

Trekking the first half of the journey to the Mount of Beatitudes should take 2-4 days, and could either be done with camping in wilderness areas or seeking overnight accommodations. Spending a lot of time on the trails lately has been a good reminder to me that when Jesus had to go somewhere, he likely began a semi-serious backpacking trip. In a land of steep cliffs and more types of thorns than you could imagine, my tired feet remind me of the physical strength andendurance Jesus must have had through his everyday movement.

Located just five miles north of Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth are the ruins of Sepphoris, which used to be a bustling Roman city with beautiful mosaics and a large theater. The city was located on the major highway between Asia and Europe, where many trade caravans would have passed by on one of the ancient “silk routes,” trading spices, goods and stories from afar. Although this city is not mentioned in the New Testament, it is quite likely that Jesus would have passed through during his way to the Sea of Galilee.

I think it’s interesting to imagine how Sepphoris could have impacted Jesus’ life growing up in the small hillside village of Nazareth. In his early years, Jesus was likely the apprentice of his father Joseph, working as a builder (carpenter/stone mason), perhaps for the wealthy families down in the big city. Perhaps he encountered gentile traders and travelers from distant lands, befriended them, and learned more about their lives and perspectives in way that impacted and opened up his worldview.

The region of Israel and Palestine is often referred to as “The Land Between,” where travelers historically pass between the continents of African, Europe and Asia. During the past week, I’ve had the privilege of spending some time with volunteers from Nazareth Village, including Danny and Tara Kreider Yoder , friends from Eastern Mennonite University who have recently arrived. Yesterday, I was also pleasantly surprised to get connected through common friends to Benjamin Sheldon, a student from Gordon College studying at Jerusalem University College this semester who had worked last summer as a counselor at Spruce Lake Wilderness Camp. We went out for a late night shwarma and hung out at the Fauzi Azar talking into the evening. I’m always amazed by how many familiar connections are passing through this part of the world.

During the next week, I’ll be spending more time on the trail, trying to perfect the route before the winter rains begin and making a trip to the Jerusalem are to visit friends and Mennonite connections.

View photos from October 2007