A desert experience

Learning another language is an intense, strenuous and often emotional struggle. At times it has seemed like I am loosing my mind. The last couple of weeks I have found myself muttering strange words for no apparent reason. The other day while waiting for a taxi I heard myself repeating the phrase in Arabic, “the door of the house”, “the door of the house”! Again while out exercising another evening I again caught myself muttering repeatedly the word zawuja, zawuja, zawuja, like I was possessed or something. I only stopped when I saw a group of young boys looking at me. The word actually means ‘wife’ in Arabic. Hopefully no-one got the wrong idea that I was on the lookout for a second one! After experiencing this a number of times I felt that it was time for us to take a short break so that my brain could de-fragment thus enabling all of the new words to settle and the loose bits of my brain to come back together again. Well that was the plan with Humpty Dumpty too, wasn't it, but it never did happen!

So, after 6 intense weeks and with over 400 Arabic words floating around in my head we headed off into the desert to see some of Jordan’s treasures. We did the tourist thing and went to Petra, which for those of you without a set of Encyclopedia Britannica, it is a 2000 and something year old Nabataean city of tombs carved into the rock cliffs and made famous by the Indian Jones film. It is truly an amazing place. However, the most memorable aspect of the trip, for me, was an early morning trek up Mount Haroun to visit the final resting place of Aaron, Moses’ brother.

I went alone (for some unknown reason none of the rest of the family wanted to join me!), with a Bedouin guide who called himself Khalid, with the gold tooth. He shouldn't be confused with his nephew, Muhammad with the gold tooth, whom I had met the day before! The trek was a three hour journey up a long valley and then up a very rocky mountain on the back of a mule. It was an exhilarating, but painful experience, partly because all that separated me from the steel framed saddle was a thin blanket and also because my guide insisted that we trot our mules for the entire journey. To insure that this happened Khalid with the gold tooth rode directly behind my mule; close enough so that he could whack it every so often with a little whippy stick and mutter some thing which was only intelligible to him and his mule. The stick and the mutter did the trick and my butt is a living testimony to the fact, as it is still raw one week on!

As Khalid with the gold tooth was muttering and whipping I kept thinking about the Old Testament story of Balaam and the donkey and expected the angel of the Lord to appear at any moment and let us have it for animal torture. Fortunately, we made it to the top before this happened.

On arrival at the grave site, which is literally on top of Mount Haroun and is now enclosed in a small mosque, I found myself quiet emotional and somewhat overwhelmed. I remember just kneeling down and thanking God for Aaron, and asking God to make me a useful servant like him.

I think Aaron actually gets a bit of a raw deal in history because of the golden calf incident. If I only had one golden calf type incident on my record, I'd be a fortunate man. But I like Aaron because he was willing to serve a higher purpose than his own agenda, such a rare thing in life. He reminds me of the character Sam in The Lord of the Rings. Without Sam, Frodo would never have been able to complete the journey and dispose of the ring.

Maybe this is one of the marks of a true servant leader.