aud’acious

Bethlehem – Ma’an – “This is what my job should be about,” said Alistair Baskey, head of Cultural and Education Exchanges for the US consular office in Jerusalem, “not answering e-mails and phone calls.”

This week Baskey has been overseeing a group of four American teenagers from Utah and more than fifty Palestinian youth from Hebron, Nablus, Ramallah and Jenin, as they connect in a language and cultural exchange. “This is real diplomacy,” he said watching a basketball match between the teens.

The group is all part of a program funded by the US State Department that connects American youth with their peers in places as far away Tajikistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Palestine. The ongoing and primarily web-based events are organized by the Global Connections and Exchange Program in cooperation with Relief International Schools On-Line (RISOL). The program is multifaceted, and includes IT training for participants, cultural information exchange, and online Arabic lessons.

Majd Iwidat, a 17-year-old Hebronite, learned how to use several different software programs as he and his peers at a local community center put together an instructional video on basic Arabic for a high school class in Utah. His participation in the program has earned him more than just IT experience, however.

As a RISOL student Majd traveled to the United States, visiting Washington DC, Los Angeles and Seattle, where he met his peers from Afghanistan, Tajikistan and the United States.

K O, a 16-year-old American from Provo, Utah, was one of four Americans taking part in the program’s organized visit to the West Bank. Kathlene started learning Arabic when she was 12, after she discovered that it was the language spoken in Egypt, where she hopes to some day explore the ancient pyramids.

It was Majd’s video tutorials that helped K learn Arabic in her high school class of 13 students, under the direction of teacher A B. Ms B has brought the tools from RISOL into her language classrooms, to help her students learn what life is like in the countries where Arabic is spoken, and expose the students to the language in a real and interactive way.

While Majd joined the program out of his interest in computer technology, hoping some day to study computer science at Harvard, K isn’t sure what she wants to do with her knowledge of Arabic. “Right now I really just want to know more,” she said.

This is the first group of youth under 18 that the US consul has brought into the West Bank since 2001. “Security concerns” are preventing the group from visiting Majd in Hebron, and the young man will not be able to join the group during their tour of the Haram Ash-Sharif since he was not among the ten participants selected to receive special permission to enter Jerusalem.

Indeed, the reality of the situation – the group is followed closely by at least four security guards, has restricted access to Palestinian cities, and faces the restricted access of Palestinians to Jerusalem – is going to be part of the experience for the visiting Americans.

For the moment, however, the students do not seem too concerned about the political ramifications of their meeting.

Majd says that despite the impact that the United States has on his country, he is happy to meet good people from the area. K is enthralled with the ancient architecture of the old cities of East Jerusalem and Bethlehem. She was amazed to discover, upon entering some of the old buildings that “everything is new and modern.” She said that the trip has shown her “there is a different view on the inside,” of the homes, at least.

To the Mideast, With Love
[On Arabic lang. instruction at Provo High School in Utah]

by Brittani Lusk
Daily Herald
May 2, 2008
http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/264769/17/

Students at Provo High have friends in diverse places. International Baccalaureate students studying Arabic have friends in the Middle East and they’ve found that they’re a lot like themselves.

“At first they are different, but not as different as we thought,” said senior A E.

In order to give her students experience speaking the language with native students and a way to learn first-hand about the culture, teacher A B has students write letters to native speakers and video tape skits they write using vocabulary words and post them on a State Department-sponsored Web portal called the Youth Connect Worldwide Arabic Exchange. Then they receive comments from students in Palestine, and they can watch videos posted by Arabic students learning English as well. Until recently Provo was the only American School using the site. They have been joined by a school in Boston.

In one video posted by the Palestinian students, a girl with her head covered used a yellow ruler to point to the words on a giant screen that say “Most people like to hear music,” followed by the words in Arabic written in the English alphabet – “Mo’tham annas yoheboon sma’ al moseeqa.”

Provo students use vocabulary about school and daily life they had been given by the Palestinian students and wrote a skit about studying.

“Since we’re at school we decided to do school vocabulary,” said junior J M.

Another group made up a skit about their daily activities including getting out of bed, brushing teeth and playing soccer.

Reactions to the students learning Arabic have been positive and negative. Students said people have reacted to the sweatshirts they all have that feature Arabic writing.

Senior A F said people sometimes ask questions like “Does your sweatshirt say ‘terrorist’ or ‘I have a bomb’ or something?”

B said other people are excited that the students are getting the exposure, which she said they need.

“Because we are at war with Iraq it’s important for students to have an understanding of that part of the world,” B said.

F said she likes learning what Arab-speaking people are really like, not just how they are portrayed.

“It’s good to see the real culture,” she said. “It’s nice to break that stereotype that they’re all terrorists.”

To the U.S. Department of State, languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Farsi (Persian), Russian and Turkish are important for national security, and the government is increasing funding to get programs that teach these languages into schools.

Gregg Roberts, world language specialist for the Utah State Office of Education, said those languages aren’t replacing other languages taught in schools like Spanish, French and German, but that there needs to be more options available to students. In addition to national security, language skills are needed in the world’s economy.

“We don’t want to be left behind as far as the world. The world has global economy,” Roberts said.

Freshman J L said he enjoys learning to speak Arabic because he thinks it’s more entertaining than other languages.

“I think it’s interesting, and it’s funner than I would think other languages would be,” M said. L’s father is a professor of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University and his grandfather just returned from teaching at BYU’s Jerusalem Center. L said he sometimes cross references his Arabic with his grandfather’s Hebrew.

“There’s some similar words,” L said. “Some words are very different.”

In addition to Arabic, Provo high also offers Spanish, Latin, French, Chinese, German and American Sign Language. Lori Rich, Provo’s IB coordinator, said the school is thinking about adding Russian.

—

Intrigue Helps Fuel Language Studies [on Arabic lang. instruction in Utah public schools]
Funding boost means more students may learn Arabic, Chinese, Russian

by Ben Fulton
The Salt Lake Tribune
March 9, 2008
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_8509194

PROVO – It’s an accepted truth that speaking a new language requires that you first must listen. For the Western ear learning Arabic, that maxim reveals itself with almost every syllable.

Whether she’s running through a list of plural nouns, or placing her hand on her lower throat to help students locate a particular sound, A B is accustomed to asking her Provo High School Arabic students the same question time and again: “Can you hear the difference?”

To the layperson unfamiliar with Arabic, those differences are many, not to mention difficult. Where do you want to start? Arabic reads and writes from right to left. Whole canyons exist between its written form and spoken practice. Its dialects are so bewildering that both the CIA and the American Council For Teaching Foreign Languages rate it, along with Russian and Finnish, at the very top of languages taking the longest time and most effort to learn. The running joke about Arabic is that it becomes far easier to learn after your first 10 years of instruction.

Why, then, spend hours learning the finer points of Arabic script on erasable pads when you could be learning Spanish or French, languages requiring four times less the effort for proficiency?

As far as the 12 students in B’s class are concerned, Arabic is where it’s at.

Two were turned on to it by a family member in the military. One hopes to visit Egypt one day with her sister. Another became so swept up learning the language that his father ordered books and decided to study along with his son. For all of them, however, it’s Arabic’s exotic appeal that beckons.

“I may understand only half the words in songs we hear in class, but it’s still beautiful,” said 17-year-old A H.

For Utah lawmakers, who allocated $480,000 toward the study of “critical languages” in a surprise bill that passed the Legislature last week, beauty is beside the point. For them, the number of Utah students studying Arabic, along with Russian and Chinese, is crucial to the nation’s economic and national security. In prying open the state’s wallet to such an initiative, they’re also following the advice of the federal National Security Language Initiative, which also includes Farsi, Hindi and Korean on the list.

That money could translate into more Utah students versed in Arabic, and more opportunities for teachers such as B. Utah boasts a number of high schools offering Chinese, but only two high schools – Provo and Lone Peak in Highland, plus Lehi’s charter middle school Renaissance Academy – offer Arabic.

Even by those numbers, Utah far outpaces other states. Brigham Young University Arabic professor Kirk Belnap estimates that fewer than 1 percent of high schools nationally offer Arabic instruction, while 10 percent of universities and colleges do so.

More than six years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, those figures either surprise or appall. As director of the National Middle East Language Resource Center, created and funded by the U.S. Department of Education in 2002, and based at BYU, Belnap would like to see the number and quality of Arabic-language programs everywhere improve. His efforts, along with those of Maggie Nassif, the center’s assistant director, have been central to Arabic’s early start in Utah classrooms, said Bastian, who will finish her first full year of Arabic instruction at Provo High School this spring.

In the pipeline for a launch this fall is the center’s “Arabic Without Walls,” distance-learning program allowing anyone, high school student or not, to start study of the language.

“Arabs believe deeply that Arabic is the hardest language to learn in the world,” Belnap said. “But if you believe that as a teacher, you have a way of making that come true for students. One of our biggest challenges is helping students and teachers realize that students can learn a lot of the language if you believe in them. A lot of teachers tend to coddle students learning Arabic.”

The prospect of more Arabic in schools appeals both to those in government, who feel it serves national security interests, and those in education interested in bridging cultures.

“There’s a serious need to open kids’ eyes to the fact that people are people. A lot of people outside the U.S. think America is this awful place where people get shot in schools or restaurants, so it’s important for us to overcome the stereotype that all Arabs are terrorists,” Belnap said.

Gregg Roberts, world language specialist with the Utah State Office of Education, welcomed last week’s last-minute shot of foreign language funding, regardless of what Utah high schools choose among the federal government’s menu of “critical” languages. At the moment, he noted, Arabic has more foreign policy consequences than other choices, however.

“When the U.S. arrived in Baghdad, out of 1,000 embassy personnel only 33 spoke Arabic,” Roberts said. “And of that 33, only six were proficient.”

bfulton@sltrib.com

SB41

* If signed by Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., SB41 would provide $750,000 toward dual-immersion language programs, which includes $480,000 toward the study of “critical languages.”

* Twenty Utah high schools and junior highs already offer either Chinese and/or Arabic. The bill would enable another 40 schools to also offer Chinese, Arabic and Russian.

* In addition, it would help create 15 elementary school dual-immersion programs in Chinese, Spanish, French and Navajo. Beginning in kindergarten or first grade, students in the programs would spend half their time learning in English and the other half learning in the other language.

—

(I was quoted in this article)

(photo by Kenny Crookston)

Tara Westover stood on the rooftop of the world-famous Kings College Chapel in Cambridge, England, taking in the view of the entire city. In the air was a mixture of awe and sadness. It was a time of questioning, a time for saying goodbye.

For the past few months, Tara had been enchanted by the narrow cobblestone streets, too small for cars to drive down. She couldn’t help but take up jogging. It was too beautiful not to. She’d learned to love the monastic, Harry-Potter like atmosphere at the university where the typical divides between academic life, social life and church life melted away.

Little did she know, this moment-at the end of her study abroad experience at Cambridge-would not be the last time she looked out at the university. Little did she know, Cambridge was to be her future.

Growing up in Idaho with six older siblings, Westover did a lot of playing outside. Farming was more of a family hobby than a means of earning a living, but they grew different crops and had different animals nonetheless.

One of Westover’s older brothers went to BYU, the only sibling to do so. He encouraged her to seriously consider getting a college education.

“It had never occurred to me that I could do well,” Westover said.

She came to Provo young. Her 17-year-old self thought she wanted a career in music, but after taking American Heritage with Professor Richard Kimball, Westover decided that history might be a better fit. She worked as a teaching assistant for American Heritage classes and as research assistant. One-on-one time with professors suited Tara.

“You have them cornered and you can ask them anything,” she said.

Professor Paul Kerry recognized that Westover worked well with professors, but also felt comfortable disagreeing with them at times.

“She has opinions and takes a stand,” Kerry said.

It was in his History of Germany class that Kerry noticed Westover’s potential. The class required steady essay writing throughout the semester.

When she submitted her first assignment, Tara didn’t get the grade she wanted. She immediately came to Kerry and asked what she could do to improve.

“She has a competitive streak within her,” Kerry said. “It gives her a kind of energy.”

Westover was the kind of student who did some of the assignments for a class she was auditing, just because she wanted to. She was the kind of student who wrote 15-20 pages when only 10 were required.

“She was bursting with ideas,” Kerry said.

During her study abroad at Cambridge University, Westover enjoyed more close-knit work with professors through the British system, which supplements lecture classes with one-on-one teacher-pupil studies.

“I really can’t think of anything I didn’t like about Cambridge,” Westover said.

Audrey Bastian barely knew Westover when they moved in together last fall, but they quickly became close. Bastian vividly remembers one morning shortly after they became roommates when Westover ran into her bedroom, woke her up and said “Audrey! Audrey! You have to watch the presidential debate! How will we discuss it if you don’t?”

Westover inspired Bastian to renew her subscription to The Economist.

“I have to keep up with things just so I can talk to her,” Bastian said.

When Westover applied for the Gates Scholarship in October, she wasn’t expecting much. Only 45 students in the country receive the scholarship, many of them from Ivy League schools. The news that she was short-listed came as a surprise.

They told me that they’d like to fly me out, talk to me and scare me to death,” Westover said.

Before her interview in Annapolis, Tara went to Park City with her roommates to pick out a suit. Her friends were excited to be part of the process.

After trying on a few, they narrowed it down to two choices. One was feminine and frilly; the other was simple and classic. Westover chose the latter.

“It may seem silly, but I thought her choice was really telling about her personality,” Bastian said. “She doesn’t want to be overstated. She’s going for a prestigious interview, she’s clearly very intelligent, yet she wanted to remain comfortable and stay herself.”

A couple of days before Westover flew out for her interview, she sat on the bed with Bastian and talked candidly about her feelings about the future.

“It was important to Tara to not get so wrapped up in academics,” Bastian said. “She wants to use what she knows to help people.”

With her acceptance to graduate school at Cambridge in the fall, and her receipt of the highly competitive $37,000 scholarship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in February, Westover plans to study intellectual history and political thought. She sees a PhD in her future at some point, but for now has Washington Seminar to think about before heading back to England.

“She didn’t set out with the Gates Scholarship in mind as a goal,” Kerry said. “It shows that you don’t need to be hot-housed into these kinds of things.”

For Westover, the “implausibility of it all” is striking. She insists that by her own assessment and by her professors’ assessments during her first three years at BYU, every other student in the classroom was just as, if not more likely to be a Gates recipient than she was.

“Be careful about how you let people assess you,” Westover said. “Chances are… they are probably wrong.”

—

(I was quoted in this article.)

Summer 2000

STANDING IN HOLY PLACES

By Mary Lynn Johnson

On a mid-March afternoon in Jerusalem, there is not a cloud in the sky. Birds twitter incessantly, their songs overlapping and responding to one another, from tree to tree along the terraces of BYU’s Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies. The chipped limestone of the walls and pavement is bright enough to make you squint. On every terrace, recently pruned rosebushes are leafing out in soil fed by the black lines of drip irrigation hoses. The sun casts sharp shadows behind white plastic chairs and cedar posts. From the street below, you hear the strident horns of passing traffic. Sometimes children’s voices rise from the property just east of the center, where local Palestinians have made a dirt soccer field.

Every student apartment in the Jerusalem Center has a terrace balcony that faces southwest toward the Old City. In good weather students come out to read scriptures, to write in their journals, to hear the calls to prayer or the church bells that ring at certain hours, to watch the sun rise or set. At sunset the city seems to hold the golden haze of last light as long as possible before fading to a silhouette on the western skyline. “I really enjoy watching the sun set over Jerusalem every night,” says Justin B. Top, a BYU student who spent winter semester 1999 in Jerusalem. “I try not to miss it.”

Long after they return home, students remember that view. From the Arab village around the center to the gleaming roof of the Dome of the Rock mosque across the Kidron Valley, Jerusalem seen from that angle imprints itself indelibly on the memory. Center director R. J. Snow says, “I can’t look out my window without having a spiritual experience.”

THE HOLY CITY

I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord. Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem. —Psalm 122: 1–2

The Old City of Jerusalem is, for most American visitors, pungently foreign. Naked carcasses of beef and lamb hang suspended in open-air meat shops, and veiled women display mounds of vegetables along the sidewalks. Camels and donkeys may be parked alongside taxi vans. Five times a day the Muslim call to prayer comes keening from the minarets. And every Friday at sundown a procession of Jewish yeshiva students goes singing and dancing to the Western Wall to welcome the Sabbath. The religious and political passions of this land far exceed anything most BYU students have experienced firsthand.

“No matter what they dreamt this was going to be like, they couldn’t have imagined it,” Snow says. “We see students awestruck and wide-eyed from the day they get here until the day they leave because there is such an extensive variety of experiences for them.”

BYU’s study program in Jerusalem began in January 1968 when Daniel H. Ludlow, then dean of religious education, and his wife, Luene, led a group of 20 students to the Holy Land for a semester. The program grew steadily, and in 1979 LDS Church President Spencer W. Kimball announced the decision to build a permanent BYU facility in Jerusalem. Final approvals for leasing land on Mount Scopus (which lies just north of the Mount of Olives) were obtained in 1984; students moved into the unfinished building in March 1987, and the Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies was dedicated in 1989.

The center’s resources have allowed BYU to host more students (an average of 170 in each of five programs; about 810 a year) and offer them amenities their predecessors hardly dreamed of: air conditioning, laundry facilities, large lecture halls, computers and e-mail, and a cafeteria that at times serves such delicacies as hamburgers and doughnuts. Today’s students rightly realize that they are cared for exceptionally well. “We live in a palace compared to anywhere else in Jerusalem,” says Heidi Madsen, a Utah State University student from Salt Lake City.

Old Jerusalem is still bounded by the stone walls built in 1537–39 by Suleiman the Magnificent, one of Jerusalem’s early Ottoman rulers. (The “new” city, a Jewish portion that has sprung up to the west since the 1947 partition of Palestine, is far more modern.) Most of the Old City’s labyrinthine streets are too narrow to admit a car. Signs may be posted in at least five alphabets—Roman, Hebrew, Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek—and there are enough varieties of religious and ethnic garb to fascinate any young traveler.

“I’ve loved watching people of other faiths in their devotion,” says Afton B. Sessions, a BYU English major from Encinitas, Calif. “I remember the first time I went to the Western Wall I was in tears watching the men dancing to usher in the Sabbath.” With its polyphony of languages and faiths, cultures and costumes, the city is eclectic and intoxicating.

One of the first memorable experiences that comes to every student is the accurately targeted greeting of an Arab merchant calling, “Mormons, welcome!” The city’s Muslim and Christian quarters are full of street-side shops offering pottery, olive wood, textiles, and all kinds of souvenir trinkets for the hordes of tourists that flow along their narrow streets. Most shop owners are prepared to haggle in several languages, and they have also become adept at recognizing students from the center.

Then again, the shopkeepers must see groups of students several times a day, as they tramp by en route to the holy or historic sites on their syllabus. “Drive around in the city and you see our students everywhere,” says Matthew S. Chipman, a Church Educational System (CES) teacher from South Jordan, Utah, who taught at the center during the 1998–99 school year. “They are known, and everybody knows where the ‘Mormon University’ is.”

Located high on Mount Scopus, just south of Hebrew University, the center is an easy landmark. Its cascading limestone arches make it one of the most striking buildings in Jerusalem. And students need only 15 minutes to walk down the hill, cross the Kidron Valley, and enter the Old City. They tend to grow restless when schoolwork keeps them away.

“Someone told me that if I spend my entire time in the center studying I might as well just tack up a picture of the Old City on my wall in Provo,” says Adrianne Parker Murdock, a BYU nursing major from Salt Lake City. “So that’s always been my motivation—to get out and see it and hope to apply what I’m learning. It doesn’t do me any good just to sit here and not experience the whole beyond-the-book story.”

Most of the fear and some of the wonder of the foreign city fades as it becomes familiar. Though one never quite becomes careless, after a visit or two it is no longer unsettling to walk through a crowded bazaar. Though one never ceases to notice them, before long it is nothing extraordinary to see font-like ceremonial baths, or mikvot, at excavation sites. Though they always spark (and demonstrate) curiosity, it becomes commonplace to see young Muslim girls wearing school uniforms and white scarves that completely cover their hair. After a week or two in the center, many students hardly consider their daily opportunity to walk along the Via Dolorosa, the “Way of Sorrows” over which, tradition says, Jesus carried the cross.

“We walk down the Via Dolorosa and we say, ‘I’ve walked down this every day, and I haven’t taken a picture of it,’ although people travel thousands of miles to see this,” says Jennifer A. Johnson from Murray, Utah, now a BYU MBA student. “I need to figure out how to take this home—because eventually I can’t wake up in the morning and walk down the Via Dolorosa.”

A SCHOOL IN ZION

I will bring them, and they shall dwell in the midst of Jerusalem: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God. —Zechariah 8:8

Just inside the present walls of the Old City of Jerusalem stands St. Anne’s Church, so named because it is built over a grotto where, according to legend, Anne gave birth to Mary, Christ’s mother. Outside the church the ground opens into deep cisterns, now rimmed by metal railings. In Herodian Jerusalem this was the site of the pool of Bethesda, that pool by the sheep market where Christ healed a man who had been infirm 38 years (John 5:1–9). It is one of the few biblical sites in Jerusalem about which there is no uncertainty. Layered over the bedrock reservoirs are generations of newer stones—the crumbling foundations of late Roman-era baths, the myriad tiny stones of a mosaic, clean-cut chunks that were the pillars of a Byzantine church, window frames from what was once a Crusader monastery.

It doesn’t take long for most students to recognize the historical periods represented in those tumbled ruins. “History has never come to life like it has since I’ve been here,” says Caleb J. Beard, a BYU student from Renton, Wash. “It’s not entombed in the ancient stone ruin of a wall. Because the people are so connected to their history, it lives in their hearts today.”

Taught by BYU professors and local Palestinian and Israeli scholars, the center’s Near Eastern studies courses give students a whirlwind survey of the region’s geography, history, present-day politics, and cultures. The core curriculum also includes religion classes focused on the Old and New Testaments and introductory classes in Hebrew or Arabic. Semester-length programs offer elective courses on subjects such as women of the Old Testament, biblical concepts in Jewish practice, Arab family and culture, and the Crusades.

Some students, perhaps expecting a more meditative pace, are surprised by the rigor of the academic program. But before the semester ends, most can identify Roman structures, speak knowledgeably of significant historical groups—from the Philistines and Essenes to the Maccabees and Mamelukes—characterize important Jewish and Muslim holidays and doctrines, and spout off the successive occupations of Jerusalem.

“Sometimes from the moment I wake up to when I go to bed, every moment I learn something or I’m feeling the Spirit,” says Ashlee M. Ainge, a BYU communications major from Gilbert, Ariz. “And I feel so full of knowledge—more than I can hold all at once.”

Most students at the center are enrolled in the core Near Eastern studies/religious studies program. Every year there is also a semester-long intensive language program (Hebrew or Arabic, in alternate years) that admits about 18 students who share dorm space with the larger groups but have an entirely different curriculum. And every other fall Ricks College sends a group of student nurses to work in local hospitals.

The Ricks College nurses are just a few of the non-BYU students who come to the center. Though administered by BYU, the Jerusalem Center is actually a First Presidency project, planned and overseen by prophets and apostles. It draws religion faculty from BYU, Ricks College, and CES and accepts students from around the world. In a summer 1999 pilot program, for example, the center hosted 19 students from northern Europe. Dann W. Hone, a Jerusalem Center program administrator, says the center receives about three applicants for every available slot, and roughly 40 percent of those who apply are not BYU students.

Though a semester in Jerusalem may not relate directly to their majors, most students find it an extraordinarily enriching university experience. “This has been a great lesson in seizing the day and taking every opportunity,” says Melinda Holt, a BYU music major from Enterprise, Utah. “We try to get the most out of every minute here.”

TREKKING FROM DAN TO BEERSHEBA

Walk about Zion, and go round about her: tell the towers thereof. Mark ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces; that ye may tell it to the generation following. —Psalm 48:12–13

The center’s curriculum is coordinated so that as students discuss biblical events in their religion classes, their history and Near Eastern studies classes cover the same era or region. Whenever possible, their weekly field trips provide a tangible introduction to the places and texts they’ve been studying.

And the more tangible the better. At the Dead Sea, for example, after floating in the super-salty water, students may slather themselves with mineral-rich mud. Some, like Daniel H. Stewart, go the extra mile to capture the moment. “We take our Archeology of the Holy Landbooks all over the place,” says Stewart, a BYU history major from Henderson, Nev. “We went into the Dead Sea and read them—got a picture of us reading them and floating—and then we opened them up to the page that has the map and the article about the Dead Sea, and we dipped it into the water. It got really glossy when it dried; it’s really salty. So anytime we want to remember how the Dead Sea was, we can just lick it and remember.”

A typical field trip includes at least one destination called a tel, a Hebrew word meaning, in general, “a partially excavated pile of rocks.” At least that’s the definition students construct after they have spent hours riding to and tramping among the mounds of dirt and stones that are the remnants of cities like Dan and Beersheba, settlements that marked the northern and southern boundaries of ancient Israel. At some ancient sites potsherds are strewn like seeds across the soil. All of the historic places are, fundamentally, just rocks, as students soon discover.

Still, when linked with scripture, rocks can be inspiring. In the valley of Elah where David slew Goliath, students typically try to fling a few rocks by slingshot. They may use rocks to mark the dimensions of the tabernacle that stood at Shiloh. While at Mount Carmel, re-enacting the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal, they may build an altar with 12 stones. And in the Judean wilderness between Jordan and Jerusalem, while talking of Christ and His perfect responses to temptation, they can pick up loaf-sized stones.

For those who are on the right spiritual frequency, the rocks do not hold their peace.

“I can remember looking down at the Wadi Kelt, and the group had just sung and I’m thinking to myself, This is the spot where John the Baptist walked and where Jesus Christ walked to get to the Mount of Temptations. This is where the story of the good Samaritan took place.And everything came to life,” says Jonathan S. Gardner, a University of Utah business major from Centerville, Utah. “I remember coming home and writing that in my journal and just feeling overwhelmed. I felt as if I was right there.”

LIVELY STONES

Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house. —1 Peter 2:5

A dusty road through the Kidron Valley carries camels and chickens, children chasing soccer balls, heavy construction equipment, and the clusters of BYU students who walk down the hill from the center and cut through the Kidron, usually en route to Stephen’s Gate, the easternmost entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem. As students walk south through the Kidron, the Mount of Olives rises at their left. BYU’s Jerusalem Center stands behind them on its northern flank; at mid-mount an onion-domed Russian Orthodox church stands just above the Franciscan Catholic Church of All Nations—the traditional site of the Garden of Gethsemane.

On a typical Sabbath afternoon, between the set times for church services and dinner, students leave the center in small groups and walk south through the Kidron to Gethsemane, where a caretaker may admit them to a gated garden where there is long light, quiet grass, and space for meditation.

In the same Sabbath-afternoon time frame and with similar motivation, other groups walk around the north edge of Old Jerusalem to the Garden Tomb, where they read and pray and write. Watching the ever-present pilgrims file through the garden, students recognize the luxury of their time to linger and return. Though the spices and traffic of the Old City always beckon, it is the sacred sites that feel most like home.

St. Anne’s Church is yet another favorite Sabbath destination. Its sturdy, unadorned walls create acoustics fit for angels. And students from the Jerusalem Center come there regularly, hymnbooks and tape recorders in hand, to fill the stone church with glorious echoes.

Sacred music is an important part of the Jerusalem Center experience. Groups generally have scads of musical talent; often there will be a student or two who can play the auditorium’s pipe organ or compose music inspired by the Holy Land. In some semesters more than 140 students show up for branch choir practice in the center’s glass-walled auditorium.

“All the music adds a really nice dimension,” says Vaughn R. Kimball, a Weber State University biology major from Layton, Utah. “I’ve never sung so much as I have here.”

Hymns are also part of every field trip. On a bus headed for the mountain fortress of Masada, classes sing military hymns like “We Are All Enlisted.” In the wilderness near Jericho, after pondering the parable of the good Samaritan, they sing “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief.” They sing in churches and caves, on top of Mount Sinai, and beside the Sea of Galilee.

They sing Christmas carols under starry skies at Shepherds’ Field outside Bethlehem. And on the rocky hilltop of Bethel, where Abraham built an altar and Jacob wrestled with an angel, they sing “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

Nearly every student mentions spiritual growth as a primary reason for coming to the Holy Land. Many come expecting that a visit to a major site will be overwhelmingly powerful. And most of them do carry home sweet memories of the traditionally hallowed places. Yet they quickly understand that the sites are secondary—catalysts to spiritual growth, perhaps, but not the source of the reaction.

“The traditional spots are neat, and they’re beautiful,” says Matthew L. Pinegar, a BYU film major from Orem, Utah. “But the Spirit is with us already, and it can testify to us of these miracles anywhere. I think a lot of people have learned that it’s not necessarily being where Jesus was and seeing what He saw, but doing what He did and following His example.”

Still, he admits, there’s nothing quite like being there. There’s a lot to be said for traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho and thereby understanding for yourself why the “certain man” rescued by the good Samaritan went down to that city. Though they serve it with head on and eyes bulging, it’s pretty fun to eat a fish from the Sea of Galilee. And when you plant your feet on a pavement stone where Christ may have stood, He becomes somehow more tangible. Pinegar says he came to Jerusalem to gain some of the scriptural perspective Nephi had when he wrote: “I, of myself, have dwelt at Jerusalem, wherefore I know concerning the regions round about” (2 Ne. 25:6).

ON MOUNT ZION

They that trust in the Lord shall be as mount Zion, which cannot be removed, but abideth for ever. As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the Lord is round about his people from henceforth even for ever.
—Psalm 125: 1–2

On a typical evening at the center, some of the students are squirreled away in their rooms or in the library; some are writing e-mail. But others gather for a game of Trivial Pursuit on a landing, a study group in a classroom, or a trip by sherut (taxi van) to buy ice cream on Ben Yehuda street in the “new” city. There may be swing dancing instruction on the stage and aerobics, folk dancing classes, or basketball tournaments in the gym. Anyone is welcome at any activity, and a passerby never lacks an invitation to join the fun.

“It’s been very interesting being a part of this group,” says Adam P. Ash, a BYU zoology major from Mesa, Ariz. “They throw you together, and you don’t have any choice of who you’re going to be with. Yet sometimes I feel this is what God wants us to learn—He wants us to be able to get along with every kind of person.”

Whatever else it might be, the Jerusalem Center is a laboratory for building Zion, in the “of one heart and one mind” sense (see Moses 7:18). For all their diversity in age and experience, and for all their simple human faults, the students are fundamentally of one heart and one mind. Seemingly without exception they want to be good. They come to Jerusalem desiring to know more of Christ, and they help each other know Him.

“As I watch people in my classes, I see attributes and characteristics that I strive for,” says Shawn G. DuBravac, a BYU international development major from Alexandria, Va. “I think that’s one of the great advantages to living with so many people, so close. I live next door to my role model when it comes to love. And I live across the hall from my example of humility. And so as I’m in the city learning about Jesus Christ, I’m also witnessing all those miracles that He performed, in each one of us. I’m witnessing people who have humility like the child Christ talked about. And I’m witnessing people who live that new commandment and love one another and show that they are His disciples.”

It may be relatively easy to imitate Christ in the center’s setting. For one thing, the program eliminates many of the variables that typically divide people. Everyone’s meals and living conditions are identical. No one, typically, is fluent in the dominant local languages. Everyone has a calling in the LDS branch or a responsibility in the student government. Everyone travels to the same places and has roughly the same opportunities.

The program also eliminates many of the social distractions that might interfere with opportunities for service and growth. Though students sometimes come with a sibling or a best friend, no one has a pre-set clique. No one, except sometimes the children of faculty, has a parent to go home to. Though plenty of sweethearts get left at home and some people do, therefore, receive affectionate correspondence, no one ever has a “date.” Dating of any kind is forbidden, though groups often produce several eventual marriages.

Program policies definitely encourage group-mindedness—the students’ little apartments are shared by four people, and no one can leave the center without at least two companions. Concern for each other soon becomes instinctive. Whether sloshing through Hezekiah’s Tunnel, clambering in predawn darkness up the steps of Mount Sinai, or trudging up the Mount of Olives toward the center, someone always waits for the straggler.

“You’re never alone, and I think this is an amazing experience because of that,” says Audrey A. Bastian, a BYU history major from Provo. “I think, in the end, I changed because of the people around me.” Bastian came to Jerusalem for a semester in 1997 and returned in 1999 for the intensive Arabic program. On her first trip “we bonded so tightly that I was not only able to learn about this land and the Bible and religion, but I was able to put it into practice in a very close-range setting,” she says. “That was the magic of the program for me.”

CHILDREN OF ISRAEL

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy. —Psalm 137:5–6

Part of the luxury and the miracle of the Jerusalem program is the way it separates students from past contexts and gives them new peers, new understanding of history and scripture, and a new vantage point from which to see themselves, their home nations and cultures, their faith and their future.

“I didn’t picture it being as life-changing as it ended up being,” says Caleb Beard. “I think I’ll look back through my whole life at Jerusalem as sort of a pivotal event, and I’ll see changes that came about in my life because of it.”

For students privileged to spend time there, Jerusalem may change the very rhythms of the blood. They learn to feel new kinship with all the peoples of the earth, especially with the vigorous and watchful people who are the children of this land—the zealot and the agnostic, the urbanite and the Bedouin. “It’s the living part of the land that has taught me,” says Amanda L. Duncan, an international politics major from Richmond, Va. “It’s the people that have made me love this land.”

Students who fall in love with the city and its people catch what Tamee Roberts calls the Jerusalem bug. “Once you catch it you’re stuck. You have to come back, you have to do something with the Middle East. And, yeah, it’s like a disease.” Roberts, now a BYU alum from Sandy, Utah, first came to Jerusalem during summer term 1997. She wanted to return so badly that she arranged to do her student teaching at a Palestinian-American school in 1999.

If there are such things as archetypes born into the marrow of humankind, and if places can have that visceral magnetism, then Jerusalem is one of them. For centuries the city has been a lodestone for the faithful of every Muslim, Christian, and Jewish sect. It is one of the original places of pilgrimage. Allow the city to capture you and you will understand, if only superficially, the call of ancestry and homeland and prophecy that motivated the Passover mantra of diaspora Jews: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

There is nearly always at least one in each Jerusalem Center group who becomes a scholar of ancient things or modern problems, who returns to dig or write or serve. Dann Hone, for example, first came to Jerusalem as a student in 1973. Soon after returning home he was hired to help develop the program, and he has been with it ever since. Hone and his family lived in Jerusalem from 1985 to 1992, and though he now works on the program from BYU’s Provo campus, he tries to return to Jerusalem at least once every year. “We miss it over there immensely,” he says.

“It’s a curious thing about Jerusalem: One visit seldom satisfies a member of the Church,” says David B. Galbraith, a BYU associate professor of political science who lived with his family in Jerusalem from 1969 to 1988 and directed the program during the last 15 years of his stay. “All that we hold sacred and dear in history—so much of it has transpired in that land. So we’re not surprised that we are drawn there. Nor should it surprise anyone that we have a program to in a sense help us discover our religious roots.”

NATURAL FRUIT

He shall cause them that come of Jacob to take root: Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit. —Isaiah 27:6

The center’s magnificent auditorium opens onto what is arguably the best view in Jerusalem. On a clear day you can gaze from Bethlehem on the south to Nebi Samuel, traditional burial place of the prophet Samuel, on the north. Among the sweetest things students carry home in their hearts are that incomparable vista and other memories of light:The way the sun rises red over Sinai. Shadows cast by half-felled pillars at Capernaum. The dim interiors of ancient churches. Smiles from Egyptian children. The brightness of the center’s terraces at midday. Late afternoon light filtered through olive branches.

On Jerusalem Center grounds there is a biblical garden with olive trees, two olive presses, grapevines, and, built into the ground, a Roman-style winepress. Every fall, students crush their crop of olives into oil, which they consecrate for blessings. They also make new wine by wading barefoot in the winepress and tramping the juice out of the grapes. After which they drink it—part of their purpose in coming is to taste the land’s natural fruit.

There is much fruit to be had in Israel. From Jezreel to Jericho, students see groves of trees bearing grapefruit, bananas, figs, olives, dates. When their semester ends, students may take home these or other products of the land: olive-wood carvings, sandals, chocolate bars, genuine Dead Sea mud. But what they prize most is fruit of a more metaphorical variety—eyes that see, ears that hear, and hearts that understand.

By grafting themselves for a time into the soil and traditions of the Holy Land, Jerusalem Center students are nourished by the roots of faith still thriving there. They go home to widely varying plans and paths, but nearly all express a resolve to be fruitful.

“This is the first time I have learned how to live,” says Jasmin K. Rashid, a BYU public relations major from Midway, Utah. “This is what I am taking home with me. I don’t think any of us quite know yet what we have learned and how important this center is.”