Why is that dude looking into our car?
From my vantage point in the front seat, I surveyed the dusty streets, congested traffic, roadside vendors—and a figure gazing steadily in our direction, a knitted hat pulled low to his eyebrows.
He’s coming towards us.
Remembering a story my mom once told me about a night when two men tried to enter her car at an intersection, I checked my door’s lock. I’d known my ongoing mission to backpack 360° around the world in 180 days documenting Christian students’ experiences at secular universities might bring some misadventures. Still, I preferred that a carjacking not be one of them.
Click.
The car’s rear door opened from the outside. Simultaneously, a surge of adrenaline whirled me around to see the stranger himself leaping into the backseat! It’s really happening—we’re being hijacked!
But nobody else in the car seemed to care!
“Hi, Patricia!” the stranger waved.
“Hello!” I replied as if he hadn’t nearly stopped my heart. Nobody told me we were going to pick up a guy from church!
The situation I experienced in an Asian restricted access nation caught me totally off-guard. Initially, nothing seemed unusual about the living room where I sat writing; only the clatter of my keyboard sounded as I chronicled my ongoing mission to backpack 360° around the world documenting Chris...
Beyond the airplane Plexiglas, I watched the sandy sheet of scattered lights, miniature palms and whitewashed cubes below growing ever larger. Above the scene, a pale crescent moon hovered stark against the twilit sky.
Just like the crescent on the Islamic flag.
Suddenly, I felt the plane’s ...
It can’t be THAT hard, I reasoned, paddle in hand. I’d once managed to stand-up paddleboard (SUP) across a Canadian lagoon, so paddling around a man-made island on the Arabian Sea should be practically similar—right?
Ditching my shoes, I waded into the saltwater, stepped atop my noble craft, a...
