Kristine

I lived with Kristine for two weeks in a brothel in Seville. She would often yell down at breakfast from the third floor mezzanine to ask how I liked her tomate, the crushed tomato and olive oil drizzle on toast that is a staple there. I always yelled that I loved it, and she would pull her head back contentedly. The pinch of coarse salt made it heavenly.

Two of her three kids were adopted, from Peru and Colombia. She doted most on Esmeralda. Kristine herself came from Denmark, and whenever she described her husband, who split his time there and with them, researching and teaching Spanish history, her voice shook. On my last night, she shared that though the house’s past had made it affordable when they first moved, they were now on the brink of collapse. Her eyes filled with tears as she speculated they might need to sell upon his next return and abandon Spain. Airbnb had been a last ditch effort to hold on.

She said in a former life she had been a mosaicist, moving to Italy once in her twenties solely to study the art of assembling irregular and particolored stones into larger overall images, patterns, and statements. Her fingers grazed the blue and white azulejo tiles behind the stove as we cooked sopa de ajo, an art Arabs left that traveled even to Mexico.

Z

When my ex-wife’s dad divorced her mom and fell in with hippies, I learned all kinds of things but mainly, how to live life with open arms. He introduced me to Z, sitting outside a trailer in Oklahoma.

Z used to head an accidental commune centered around an old farmhouse he bought. “It was an experiment without consciously trying to have one, in group consciousness and the 60s and you know just living off the land. Twenty-five of us lived in chicken coops and smokehouses and anywhere we could, man, and packed into that house. And there was the greatest harmony and cooperation I have ever seen.” He and his band just wanted a place to make a lot of noise practicing without bothering the neighbors. They found utopia.

One time they played the Celebration of Life Festival, “our Woodstock,” on an island in the Mississippi River and had to take a ferry to get there. “It had this kinda Biblical look and feel, that we were about to cross the Jordan and enter the Promised Land.” On the first day, an apocalyptic storm blew over the stands and killed someone. When Z’s band took the stage, black clouds threatened again, and the promoter got nervous and shouted for everyone to run for safety. But Z stepped forward with open arms to confront the storm.

“And I just kinda instinctively turned and started singing, ‘Om.’ And I got my arms up and everybody on stage is om-ing and these tens of thousands of people are singing om. And that thunderstorm split in half and went around us. We rocked the house.”

Mordecai

Some part of me hoped I would get Jerusalem Syndrome when I moved there. Some larger part dreaded I would. Most of me wanted to make it a clever metaphor in an essay.

For centuries travelers to the Holy City with no signs of mental illness have lost their minds and thought themselves the Messiah or fixated on some religious obsession, even (or maybe often) turning violent. The psychosis usually dissipates soon as they leave.

My third month I felt pressure. An intensity in the way people speak in Jerusalem pervaded me, as if they needed to unburden themselves, and I started to take on that need. Because I’ve chased listening so intently the past few years, it slowly dawned on me that I was dangerously open to these nervous outpourings and maybe I should step back. I wondered when I called home if I was talking faster, listening anxiously to myself.

In Mahane Yehuda market, Mordecai smiled and I asked to interview him for my podcast—and photograph him (I’d been lusting after a portrait of a well-endowed Orthodox beard but never knew how to break the ice). He said he was born in Senegal, had lived in Los Angeles, Washington, Paris, Brussels, Rabat, and Oslo, left his wife and kids there to come to Israel to understand the will of God, and that in the desert, God gave him the mission of publishing a long lost letter he found in the sand, which, with the help of the Israeli government, he had done. He smiled again and handed me a copy of a book in Hebrew. He said now most of all he wanted to get his message out that we have to bring the bones of Rabbi Nachman back to Israel, then pulled out a guitar and sang “Hey Jude” in Hebrew, changing the chorus to “Na, na, na, Nachman, Nachman, Nachman!”

My girlfriend in Jerusalem saw his eyes in the photo, looked at me, and said, “Joe, please be careful.” I bought a plane ticket to Chicago for a ten day leave soon as the Embassy gave me permission.

Carmen

The first thing Carmen said to me in Honduras was, “Oh, you’re from the U.S.? Maybe I should join one of those caravans and go.” 

She stepped up to the scale and poured her latest bag of coffee into a suspended bucket. The finca’s engineer called out its weight, and the manager noted her pay in the account book. He tipped the bucket and sent the red caturra cherries rushing into the darkness of the hold where they would be pulped and then dried in the sun below.

The next morning at dawn she taught me how to pick coffee cherries—grasp between thumb and index and twist so the tiny stem remains and produces again. I stopped once I realized I was ripping off stem after stem and just observed her. Perched on the slope of the mountain, she sped through the tree with total concentration, apart from the occasional shy smile when I snapped her portrait. At harvest peak, she can pick 30 lbs. a day and earn 73 lempiras for every bucket she fills, or $3, almost twice the average for a finca in the Botija Mountains. San Lazaro Coffee uses donations to pay a fairer wage and encourage women like Carmen to dream.

A dream inspired my great-great-grandfather Jürgen to move from Germany to Chicago 106 years ago. Why can’t Carmen?

San Lazaro is hurting right now and could use the business. Buy their coffee or donate—or at least follow them to see more of Carmen—here:

https://sanlazarocoffee.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sanlazarocoffee/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sanlazarocoffee/

Strength

The first time I lived outside the US for a year, I went to China to try out teaching. The English names my students had chosen delighted me—Science, Smile, Sense, Vivian, Apple, Mud, Try. Somehow Sweaty, Clot, and Pussy ended up in the same row. I wondered what the lone boy in a class full of girls must have decided about himself to become Revolt. But Strength fascinated me the most.

He dissolved into giggles every time he spoke English. Muscular and bouncy with energy, he radiated confidence in Chinese, so I knew the nervous laughter was actually a sign of some deep will power. I wanted to be like him, so I declared that my Chinese name would be Lu Xun, after the famous writer. Another student guffawed that he was George W. Bush then.

Just before the year ended, Strength came to me after class, slid a scrap of paper onto my desk, and said, haltingly, “Write your name, please.” I scrawled my signature. He squinched his face at it a moment, then turned the paper over. “Um. Again.” This time I printed “JOE VOIGTS” in sloppy block letters that were squiggly but legible. He left satisfied.

On my last day, Strength materialized from the group of students who came to say goodbye and presented me with a gift. Another student explained that in China, instead of signing official documents with a pen, everyone carries their own personal stamp and ink. I opened the box and saw my scribbled handwriting converted into the red rubber bottom of a stone stamp. Strength beamed.

Soon as I was alone, I stared at the misshapen name trying to decipher who in the world I even was and what impression I was leaving in China.

Much later I tried out “Seph.” Didn’t stick.

Alyuska

The hardest I ever pushed myself to overcome a fear was in Havana. Allison and I picked our way past crumbling buildings one steamy Christmas morning, past spartan grocery stores and volatile street soccer to a dance studio where my new teacher sized me up. 

She stretched her shoulder blades and kicked her legs, tossing her head side to side. I stiffly mimicked her, not sure what else to do, timidity tensing my lips into the grimace I could never seem to undo whenever I got embarrassed. Allison was determined to salsa, and I was determined to please her. But I was also curious to know Cubans like Alyuska. 

Named after a Russian princess, she said, in some mysterious vestige of Soviet influence, she wrapped her hair up in a bandana. Her partner Herson opened the bay window to let a breeze into the studio and said to just walk, marching in place in front of Allison, flashing his smile. He said all dancing is just walking, walking is the basis of rhythm, just to find the beat and take steps. I pitied Alyuska, who spoke little and whose occasional flourishes showed just how much she was tamping down her ability in order to match a beginner who could only as yet walk. From her glances I imagined that she pitied me more but appreciated that she hid it well.

After thirteen hours of lessons, I could do every move Alyuska taught me and went to a club on our last night bristling with nerves. As the music started, I took Alyuska’s hand and looked down. “Don’t look down,” she said patiently, resting her other hand on my shoulder. I couldn’t look up as I listened and listened and listened. I made a false start. “Look up,” she said again. When I did, I caught a man watching me from the dance floor, a bottle poised at his lips. He shook his head and drank the beer to smother a scornful smile. I stepped back from Alyuska. She nodded and spent the evening next to me while Allison danced with Herson.

Mohamad

The first time I met Mohamad was in a garden in Greece. He squatted to show the wild garlic he had planted. He pulled up two slender dark green leaves and handed me one to taste. Orange netting encircled the patch of bared soil in the hope of keeping boars out. He scrolled through pictures of his five sons on his phone, and his face flushed with pride. I was shocked to learn he and I were the same age.

The second time I met Mohamad was in a hotel in Ireland. He told me that when his sixth son Yousef was born, the taxi driver who took them to the hospital snuck him a congratulatory bottle of Jameson afterwards. So a few nights later I snagged the opportunity to take him for his first Guinness. We stuck out like sore thumbs at the Marine Bar, the busy local pub with nightly trad music. The accordion player by the fireplace stopped when we sat at an empty table, and an older woman against the wall sang out alone in the sudden silence. Everyone nodded into their beers as she drew out each word slowly of the story of a young boy’s first broken heart. 

When she finished, an old man pounced on me from the bar, pointing his finger, “Have you a song in your heart then?” My face flushed, and every part of me wanted to say yes, but I haven’t conquered that shyness yet. So he turned his finger to Mohamad who pointed back unexpectedly. The man gaped in astonishment, then shouted, “I know you!” Mohamad beamed back, “I know you!”

The third time I met Mohamad was in the garden in his backyard. His greenhouse had tamed Ireland’s wild unstoppable greenness into neat rows of flourishing vegetables. Mohamad squatted to pick garlic and his sons moved through plucking weeds. When I left, Yousef waved.

Aazhang

“Tonight we will sleep together.”

The man sitting naked across from me smiled and sweat poured from his face into his teeth. His arms stretched the width of the bath and through its violent bubbles I saw his toes extend toward me. Of course I said yes.

There’s a ritual to Korean bathhouses. I would start in the charcoal room, set my head on a wooden pillow in the darkness, wait for sweat to rise out of me like all my concerns, and listen in on the harshly whispered conversations of the middle-aged women surrounding, imagining their confessions. Then I would sit in a Finnish sauna lined with fragrant cedar, then a steam room laced with menthol and then nude in the segregated baths on the men’s side: warm then cool then hot then cold then scalding. Pulling a rope that tipped a bucket of ice water over my head, I would scrub every part of me ruthlessly in the full heat of a shower with a pink abrasive towel. My skin tingled with joy. For $7 you could overnight.

Aazhang and I fell into rhythm that night in Andong, making the rounds together before finally speaking. He had traveled from the Kingdom of Bhutan to perform in the International Mask Dance Festival as a cultural representative of his government, a dancer. He announced that as his friend, when I visited Bhutan they would waive my tourist tax of $300 per day. He was grateful to find someone who spoke English.

We toweled off dripping, put back on our baggy uniforms and found a space to share on the heated marble floor of the communal sleeping room. Its warmth rose into my back, intensifying the euphoria of my blood vessels having expanded and constricted in the alternating baths, and I fell deeply asleep. In the middle of the night I found a woman perpendicular at my feet. I scooched back until my head touched someone else in the dark. The collective snoring lulled me back to sleep.

I woke before Aazhang and left the jjimjilbang without a goodbye, sure I will meet him in Bhutan. And the morning air of Korea’s “most spiritual city” kissed my skin.

Selma

An hour after we met in a train station in the far southern heel of Italy, Selma led me through a small opening in the brush at the edge of an abandoned park, skirting the warning signs and locked gate. At the end of a tunnel of leaves we emerged in a clearing with a broken stone bench. “I don’t know why they close this beautiful place,” she said and bent to pick up a feather in the grass before we sat. We almost couldn’t hear each other over the cicadas pulsing as the sun went down, but I detected French and Arabic smoothing the sound and rhythm of her accent.

She had come from Tunisia to volunteer helping migrants from Africa integrate in Italy. Her name meant “peaceful” and she said MLK was her hero. A few weeks earlier she had persuaded another girl in the program, a volunteer from Macedonia named Maja, to hitchhike with her to Rome when they missed their bus. “It was not easy, but it was an amazing, an amazing experience,” she said, emphasizing the second “amazing.” At 6:00 am they were at an empty gas station trying to sleep when a car showed up with a Moroccan guy covered in scars and another covered in tattoos. He even had a black teardrop under his eye. “These guys were looking, for society, like criminals.” 

Maja was terrified but Selma followed her instinct. They got in and the guys took them straight to the train station. “They bought for us tickets to go directly to Rome. And they didn’t want to give us even their number to pay them back. They said no, never. We have sisters. We have cousins. They stayed with us six hours. They brought for us food, water, everything.” Selma twirled the feather. “Yes, and this teach me that never, never never, judge the person with scars. You can’t know what this person needs.”

That night she glowed while Maja told her side of the story, also beaming, and they and the other volunteers at their shared house invited me into their “strange family.” When I left, Selma gave me a necklace with the feather and two beads, one of which fell into the River Liffey in Dublin.

Dominik

One cold December night I was walking through Berlin with a poet when he stopped and pointed at the ground. “Do you know what this is?” I knelt to examine a gold plaque embedded in the pavement with a name and two dates. 

I first heard of Dominik from our mutual friend who told me they once played a pink guitar on a bridge in Bosnia singing together. Two girls on the other side of the bridge crossed to join until the call to prayer rang out from the minarets in the town and they stopped to listen and watch the moon. He said Dominik moved to Berlin to become a poet.

Dominik knelt beside me and read the name and the dates on the plaque. “There’s this German artist,” he explained, “who has dedicated himself to finding every home owned by Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust. He puts a marker in front of these homes with the name of the owner and their date of birth and death. He calls them ‘stumbling stones,’ ‘stolpersteine,” because when you see them, you stop.”

Our breath clouding the cold air, Dominik told me he stopped crying at a pivotal moment in his childhood and never shed tears again until as an adult, he visited Auschwitz and what was locked inside poured out again in grief. Every time we have spoken since, he directs my gaze to some essential he has gleaned from the welter of experience that alters what I see next, some revelation that trips me up, makes me stop.

Haval

At the now defunct for-profit Solex College in Chicago, during a break between classes, Haval showed up at the urinal next to me with his head shaved. We were colleagues but had never spoken. I had been jealous of his dapper suits and lustrous black hair so I said, “Nice haircut.” His eyes flashed, and he responded, “I just came back from Mecca.” I knew I’d found a brother.

As we got to know each other, I learned he had assisted the U.S. military in Iraq, his home country. When that made him a target for extremists, he left, sought asylum, and found himself getting a master’s degree in English in Kentucky on the long path to citizenship. 

Handsome, always the best dressed at our college, skilled, and beloved, Haval taught me to play classical music during moments of reflection in the classroom to open up emotion, creativity. Now whenever my students free write, I put on “Clair de Lune” by Debussy, whose rises and falls mirror narratives, life, I think.

I asked why he’d gone to Mecca. “I needed to go. I felt someone was calling me.” He explained that the umrah is a purification. For his pilgrimage, he put on a white cloth that symbolized equality and walked seven times counter-clockwise around the Kaaba, the black cube at the center of Muslim prayer from all over the world. It felt like heaven. Wishing I could go with him some day, I asked what he brought back to Chicago from Mecca, and he answered, glowing, without pause, “Love.”

Eli

Thrilled by my oven in Jerusalem, I baked chocolate chip cookies when my neighbor invited me to dinner. Eli is a professor of Jewish philosophy from Belgium with an accent slowed by his thoughtful spirit. I timed it so I could bring them fresh from the oven next door and ring the bell. He winced thanking me and disappearing into the bedroom with them. I realized I hadn’t researched at all what Shabbat means. Even my making food was not kosher, let alone after sunset, let alone dairy. I think I made every classic error that night, even asking for a selfie. Eli politely responded, “Um, well, we don’t use electricity on Shabbat, so no.” Then he smiled and produced a shiny bottle of brandy with a yellow pear inside. “Welcome to Jerusalem, my friend.”

A month later I grabbed pear brandy for Eli in Vienna. His eyes lit when I rang the bell, and he took me straight to his sukkah, a shelter he built in his backyard to celebrate the Jewish holiday where we talked Kafka, and he cradled the bottle admiringly. “You know how they do this, no? In Austria, they hang the bottle just when the bud appears, so that the pear grows inside. So there are these magical trees hanging with bottles as if they were some kind of bottle tree.”

A week later at his synagogue, I found everyone out on the street. I was the only person wearing jeans and made some excruciating small talk before finding a place to plant myself at the edge of a dancing circle. Then an arm from the crowd squeezed my waist. “Joe, you came!” Eli laughed delightedly. “What, did you think you could come without dancing?” And he pulled me to the center where another arm wrapped my shoulders, and we ran and jumped around a huge scroll, cradled and bouncing in someone’s arms.

Breathless at the edge again, Eli said they would celebrate all night. Annie Dillard says, “I cannot ask for more than to be so wholly acted upon … so in the clustering thick of things, rapt and enwrapped in the rising and falling real world.” For me to be where they love reading so much they … dance? What even is life?

Amin

I hunted Amin for a week after watching him trundle up the slope of our green valley on a collapsable bike, his knees jutting comically akimbo as he strained to ascend the driveway very slowly past our hostel and up further into the mountain where I knew there was a meadow in the forest. Allison and I were spending two weeks in the village of Fügen in the foothills of the Alps in Austria, and I wondered what could possess a man to ride such a tiny bike up such grueling slopes. Our host Eliška said all she knew was he was from Singapore.

Between teaching classes and twirling in the meadow like I was in The Sound of Music, I managed to interview the Japanese family spending a year traveling the world fulfilling the promise Hitoshi made his wife when they got married, the empty-handed Belgian gold digger Orry whom I will forever love for teaching me the word for the smell of soil stirred by fresh rain, “petrichor,” and the anthropologist Eric who witnessed his friend fall into a voodoo trance in the Dominican Republic. Haus Sonneneck was fertile hunting grounds for stories.

It wasn’t until the last night that I caught Amin as he folded his bicycle and I followed him into the common room with all the wooden skis on the wall. He had thin facial hair and a nervous smile. He said that he was a trance DJ but had just quit because of his Muslim faith. He felt guilty about all the drugs his lifestyle included and had made the hard decision to cut his passion, music, out of his life so that he could get closer to God. He had come to the mountains for rebirth.

In a quavering voice he said he played his last show a week before, a festival in the jungle in Sri Lanka. He didn’t tell anyone his plan to quit, not even his friends, and as he looked out over the crowd, tears just streamed down his face the whole time.

Carlos

The sixth time I crossed the border between Argentina and Chile, it closed without explanation. The bus’s engine idled for hours but when the driver shut it off finally, I stumbled with the other passengers out into the blinding snow and vivid sky of the Andes, shielding my eyes to stare up and down the line of vehicles waiting to cross the mountain pass. Someone had scrawled on a rock in dripping paint, “Las fronteras son un invento”—“Borders are an invention.”

After waiting eight hours, at night, the driver turned the bus around and made a crackling announcement. I had to ask my seat mate to repeat it for me, still struggling with the Spanish: we were heading back to Mendoza to stay in a migrant shelter and it would cost 45 pesos. Weeks before, I had forgotten my debit card in an ATM for the first time in my life and was traveling on a careful cash budget for this visit to Buenos Aires. I was en route back to Allison in Santiago. I had just 45 pesos in my pocket.

Carlos said he traveled up and down the spine of the Andes collecting folk music. He was a student from Chile. He had long black hair, a thin mustache, and foggy glasses. He bought a drink at Subway in Mendoza so I could sit and use their wifi to contact Allison. In the stairwell of the migrant shelter, before we slept on a stained mattress together, he played me a song on his reed pipe.

The bus set off for the border again at 4:00 am. The black sky blueing revealed the jagged silhouette of the Andes, and Carlos drew five lines on the condensation of the window, then notes, composing a bar of a song. I saw the blue Andes at dawn through his music. He smiled sheepishly.

We waited all day, and then, just as inexplicably as it had closed, the border opened.

Bertrand

When Bertrand said “la grolla” a hush fell over us. He disappeared and came back with a wooden pot, carved with grooves curving up to six pouting spouts off the top and a little round lid and ball knob. Allison and I came to Bordeaux for wine, but what lingers is the warmed grappa, coffee, and lemon he poured into la grolla that night we spent sharing its contents. He rubbed sugar along its rim and lit a blue flame that flew in a circle and vanished.

We took turns sipping, watching each other’s eyes close and open with knowing smiles. Days before, we were strangers. He and Anna were our Airbnb hosts, chefs who’d fallen in love in Australia. She came from northern Italy where la grolla is a mountain ritual. Anna taught me to throw sea salt over the sautéing onions of risotto. Coarser salt absorbs their moisture, slows the sautéing. I’ve never not done that since.

When la grolla rounded again to Bertrand, I noticed his tattoo, a Celtic knot of triangles, M.C. Escher’s Penrose triangle. “An impossible object,” Bertrand said. “A reminder that I can do anything.” He was almost too wonderfully French to bear with his accent and hair pulled back, a black and white striped shirt, and suddenly open face. As he told his story, I saw for the first time just how much younger he was.

He grew up with epilepsy. He was told he could never travel. So he just decided to. He set his mind to it, spent his adolescence saving money, and then just went to Australia. “The amazing thing is, I’ve never had a seizure or taken medication since,” he said.

I want a grolla with eight billion spouts.

Travis

I wanted to know every story on our trek to Machu Picchu. The American in his fifties had taken up hiking in honor of a late friend, and Peru was his first time overseas. We sprinted the Inca steps together, chomping coca leaves. There were the Star Wars prop makers I fawned over and our guide who called the orchids little dancers. Travis was elusive, taciturn. He and I finally sat down on stepped ruins in a valley, but a rainbow interrupted our conversation.

We arrived in Machu Picchu at the final sunrise exhausted and exhilarated. There’s really nothing to say but llamas. Beauty. Green.

On the other side, we descended at midday into tourists arriving by train or bus and in that swarm at the ticket stand I found Travis one last time. I realized he was the first U.S. soldier I had knowingly met in my travels. I asked if Iraq changed him. 

“Oh yeah, for sure. I don’t know what people think about war and all, but fifty percent is just humanitarian, building infrastructure, building schools, so they can walk on their own feet after we leave. I think I gained a lot more empathy than I had prior. In one particular village, all the local kids would come around and ask for candy, you know, just assuming we had loads of that. And there was one little girl in particular that always came by my vehicle. She wasn’t too picky or anything about it. She always just stared. And a couple months into our deployment, you know we’re back in that town, and the kids are following as usual. I remember one of my buddies bought a bunch of candy bars and he started passing them out to the kids and I remember that we finished and we were walking back to the truck and as I’m leaving I feel this tug on the back of my jacket, so I turn around, and it’s that little girl. It’s the one that I gave the candy bar. She actually split it in half, and she was handing it to me you know so …” He cut off, overcome with emotion, could barely finish. “So that was pretty special.” And we just stood there crying.

Ole

We hiked ten hours to Trolltunga in Norway, waited in line for two to take selfies, camped shivering, and came down to the village of Odda in a fjord looking for coffee and wifi. I had to teach a lesson to a surgeon in Japan. All I could find was an empty bar on the shore. Ole gave me a table and even brought a free coffee in the middle of my lesson with a smile. Yet when I asked afterwards if I could interview him for my podcast, his face clouded and he disappeared until I left, only the second of just a dozen to ever say no. That, more than anything, changed how I see people. Most connect. The few who don’t have their reasons.

Dorje

I saw Everest on the horizon as I was digging through a side pocket of my pack on top of a bus in the cinnamon wilderness of Tibet. Everest stood above the other peaks like a blue cuspid in a row of teeth. I knew the shape by heart. Even at a distance it chilled me with fear. I found the Imodium and clambered back down into the bus. Allison had buried herself in the back seat under a pile of fleeces. She couldn’t even eat. No one among the dozen passengers spoke English, so I couldn’t tell how much longer till we would cross the Himalayas and arrive in Nepal, but the smile next to me revealed a gold cuspid. Dorje had his hair fastened up in a chignon with a turquoise brooch and wore coral earrings. Sticking out of his backpack and tapping me with every bump in the road was a lifeless black hoof.

When we did begin the ascent, night fell and snow. We passed one outpost of cement shacks where another bus had spun out of control and been abandoned. Ours began to fishtail wildly in the deep drifts on the road—the Friendship Highway from China to India. Then there was nothing. Just sheer white drop on our right, grey rock face to the left. We held hands as the driver lit a cigarette, narrowed his eyes, and careened toward a curve on the ice-covered road with seemingly no traction. I accepted my death.

The bus got stuck half an hour later and a couple freed their baggage from the netting on the roof and took off on foot in the darkness. I asked Dorje frantically, “How long?” with gestures. He flashed ten fingers along with his calm smile. I looked to Allison. “Think he’s saying ten minutes?” I threw our bags off the roof as the bus reversed then lurched away back in the direction we had come, its taillights disappearing and leaving us alone in dark silence.

After our first hour walking, the couple’s tracks disappeared. After two we ran out of water. After three, I noticed dirt under my footsteps and looked up instinctively. At the top of the black sky was an almond-shaped gash of stars. After four, we saw the glow on the horizon that was Zhangmu.

Hanan

“Welcome, welcome!” Hanan shouted over her shoulder as she swept out of the tent over to her impromptu fire. Allison and I sat and Yousef brought forks and clear plastic cups of water. Their oldest held an infant, their youngest, across the table. Hanan returned whispering welcome welcome with a pot she set in front of us, and we all peered through steam at plump zucchinis. “What’s this?” I asked. “Mahashi,” she smiled. “It means ‘stuffed,’” Yousef added with a raised finger. I opened one and found rice and beef redolent with cinnamon. Yousef flopped down pita bread the width of my torso. He noticed the package of figs I brought, held them up, and frowned. “Not necessary,” he said. “Please.” His voice was deep and resonant and squeaked when he laughed. 

Hanan didn’t eat and her face grew serious. I asked what she studied. She said Arabic literature and smiled again. Her favorite poet was Al-Ma’arri from Ma’arrat Al Noaman, who wrote, “There is always a little light in the darkness.” She made silly faces at the baby.

I took Yousef to the Acropolis in Athens despite the rules. Residents were not allowed in cars, but I wanted to give him a day away. We found a halal restaurant in the Plaka for lunch, and when I went to the restroom, Yousef paid for the meal. When I protested, he just laughed.

Our last night together, Hanan opened up as we drank clear plastic cup after cup of tea. She was pregnant when they escaped Syria and took a rubber boat to an island and then were brought by the military to the camp. When she saw the tent where they would wait for the EU to decide their fate, she confessed that she didn’t want to have the child. She became depressed. They had thought they would connect with family in Germany. No official said it outright but she knew they would have to wait in Greece and she would have to give birth in the camp. “But,” she said, and her eyes lit up as she played with his fingers, “when he came, he was my light.” He smiled up at her smile. “Now every morning we wake up in the tent an hour before anyone and we speak together in our own language.”

Jackie

Israel was my 70th country, so I landed with just about as much certainty as humanly possible that some good was about to happen, just brimming with optimism. Still, kindness surprises.

Jackie and a driver from the Embassy took me straight to my new apartment in Jerusalem. From there we walked through my new neighborhood as she pointed out the best falafel, the beloved cinema, and the paved-over railroad that would become my new running path. She shopped with me for my first groceries so I would have what I needed when businesses closed the next day for Shabbat, my first—some pomegranate and tahina, coffee and zucchinis—and on the way back, she mentioned offhandedly that there was a former leper colony on the corner that was now a pub I should check out.

Then she led me to the edge of a valley of cypresses for my first glimpse of the Old City. Jackie got quiet as I teared up, understanding. She said, “You’ll come have Shabbat dinner with my family, won’t you?” Sitting with her children, one who works for the Red Cross and another an art therapist, and her husband, a painter, eating my first “soup almonds” and realizing they were some of the first Israelis I had ever spent time with sealed one of the warmest welcomes of my life, the kind that made me invite everyone I knew to stay with me, the kind that spreads—what I took, above all, from Jerusalem.

Once, she set aside an old book for me that was to be discarded, on Dorothea Lange, the photojournalist, saying, “I thought of you, Joe,” and I knew I was known.

Life moves fast. Just months later when her cat passed away, we sat in her favorite wine bar half-sobbing, half-laughing. When her husband passed away, I watched her hold each of her friends tightly at the funeral, one by one, and set an almond blossom on his casket. When my program was canceled and I came home to my parents suddenly, during the first of many nightly walks with my dad, he asked, “How’s Jackie doing?” and I cried. I was struck that friendship can move fast too. And kindness astonishes and spreads. And I love life.