Dinner is done and a lazy evening lies ahead at the diocesan guest house a laneway across from All Saints' Cathedral in Cairo. We gather in the living room along with fellow guests, two from England, two from New Zealand and, when understanding dawns that we are from Toronto, talk turns to the Vineyard Church and the Toronto Blessing.

It is the third time in three days that this has happened with different groups of expatriots in Egypt.

No one here seems to have heard of the CN Tower, the Blue Jays, our museum or our art gallery. But everyone has heard about the Toronto Blessing.

City of checkpoints

People in Nicosia, capital of Cyprus, describe the place as the last divided city in Europe. And indeed, it has been so many years since the Greek/Turkish conflict occupied headlines in North America that I had forgotten that all this was here.

But if you get a map of Nicosia in the British-influenced Greek part of the city, the streets and cityscape end at an imaginary line as though the northern, Turkish-occupied part did not even exist.

On a warm, sunny day, Ogé Beauvoir and I decide to venture across the "green line."

You walk down a narrow corridor flanked by barbed wire, guard towers and bullet-marked buildings. At the first checkpoint, Greek personnel inspect our documents, warn us not to buy anything in the Turkish zone, tell us to be back before dark and send us along. The second checkpoint is staffed by UN people who seem only mildly interested in who we are or why we're here; the third by Turks who greet us warmly, no doubt confident that we will spend a little money, the Greek warning notwithstanding. Near the first and last checkpoints are billboards with graphic posters depicting atrocities each side claims the other has committed.

The contrast between the Turkish part of the city and the Greek part is staggering. The first might be Constantinople, the second Soho.

People in Nicosia say that were it not for the presence of the skeletal UN contingent that remains, hostilities would almost certainly resume.

A visit cut short

We had scheduled four days to see the work of the Anglican Church in Cyprus, a length of time which, it soon became obvious, was grossly overestimated.

The Anglican Church in Cyprus is a tiny institution. There are only a few hundred Anglicans, pretty well all expatriots. Congregations here are swelled when a handful of visitors arrives.

The church maintains a healthy Mission to Seamen ministry in Limassol on the southern coast of the island but, apart from that and from catering to the religious needs of the expats, most of its work involves helping people who are not Anglicans but who somehow find the church's doors seeking assistance. Most of these people are refugees, trying to get from Cyprus to somewhere else.

Eventually, we decide to leave Cyprus a day early. Our Anglican hosts on the island had been exceedingly gracious and I worried about hurting feelings. But when we told the dean of the cathedral about our decision, he fairly breathed a sigh of relief. "Why, how very sensible of you," he said.

Tourist trap

It is early morning in Jerusalem, Monday of Holy Week, and the Via Dolorosa is crowded with tourists and with locals with things to sell them. On a slow trek along the street so packed with religious and historical meaning, we come to a place that was the birthplace of the Virgin Mary. My admittedly less-than-scholarly familiarity with the New Testament cautions me this cannot be so. But we pause at the place with due reverence and then move on. A quarter of a mile further along, we come to a shrine that was the birthplace of the Virgin Mary ... 20 shekels to get in.

It is thus with many of Christianity's holiest sites in Jerusalem. The place where something specific happened 2,000 years ago is at best educated guesswork, at worst a place so designated for the benefit of tourists who will part with a bit of money to go there and snap a photo of something holy.

A passport to fear

At a highway checkpoint manned by Israeli teenagers with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders, north of Jerusalem, I hand over my passport for inspection. The young man barely glances at the cover, hands it back and waves us through.

"What just happened there?" I ask our driver, puzzled at the unusually cursory inspection.

He chuckles. "It's a Canadian passport," he explains. "A lot of soldiers are afraid of Canadian passports because it is the one the Mossad loves to forge."

This becomes one of the highlights of my trip. For a brief moment, at least in that young man's mind, I might have been a fearsome Mossad agent.

 

Murky waters

On Palm Sunday in Jerusalem, we join about 10,000 people of many faiths at the Mount of Olives for the procession towards Gethsemani. It is a sweltering day and the route is shadeless. I stand at the side of the procession to take photographs and see a teen-aged Palestinian girl go to an outdoor tap where she fills a glass with murky water. We make eye contact and, with the warmest, friendliest smile, she comes towards me and offers the glass.

What can one do? I smile back, take the glass and drain it.

And suffer no ill effects.

Old wounds

An old man gasses up our car at a service station in Jerusalem. Conversation in the car while he works is light and jovial. Only the driver remains silent, almost reverential.

"I know that man," he says as we leave. "His son was the first to be killed in the Intifada."

Stress on the job

The Sabeel Liberation Theology Centre, a stone's throw from St. George's Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem, is looking for someone to work with young people. Until recently, they had the ideal person on staff, a young woman who was highly trained.

But she lived in Ramallah, a West Bank city north of Jerusalem and, like many Palestinians, lacked the papers to allow her proper, legal entry into the city.

Still, for several weeks, she managed to evade checkpoints and enter and leave Jerusalem clandestinely, each trip to and from work a nerve-wracking experience that took hours. One day she did not come any more.

Her former colleagues at Sabeel assume that the daily ordeal simply became too much for her to bear.

Heavy duty security

Everyone we met during a two-week stay in the Middle East warned us of the grilling we would undergo at Ben Gurion Airport when we left Tel Aviv. I'd had dreams about it, thinking of the notebook I carried with places, names and conversations all duly recorded.

It's not that we had done anything illegal; it's just that we'd had scores of conversations, mostly with Palestinians, and in West Bank cities such as Ramallah and Nablus where the Israelis would prefer visitors not go. The line between illegality and impropriety blurs in Israel.

The airport grilling, in fact, lives up to what we'd been warned about. Ogé Beauvoir and I are separated and interrogated for about 20 minutes, during which we deny doing any of the things recorded in my notes. Then our respective interrogators compare notes. Inevitably, there are discrepancies. Another long interrogation ensues about who we are, the nature of our work, where we've been, who we've talked to, our luggage, our flight arrangements, our passports and what we will do with what we've learned about Israel when we get back home.

It takes a sense of humour to get through that without breaking into a cold sweat, but a sense of humour is easy when so many of the questions we're asked are so ridiculous. The whole process, the interrogators remind us time and again, is for our own security. Indeed.

Eventually, a myriad of orange tags are slapped on our airline tickets and our bags and we bid farewell to Israel, feeling not so much as though we've left as that we have escaped.

As far as I can tell, everyone who goes through Ben Gurion undergoes a similar ordeal.