Blair L. Gleed 

During the summer of 1977, after completing our 16th year of teaching, Diane and I decided to take our first out-of-America trip.  We joined over 200 other teachers and spouses on a three week educational tour of “The Lands of the Scriptures. 

Thrillingly we visited Italy, Egypt, Jordan, Damascus, Palestine, the Sinai mountains and Greece.  All of these beautiful places left us with a feeling of walking through a fairytale land of sorts,  Do people actually live in the picturesque towns and come into daily contact with majestic monuments to man’s glorious past? 

However, the monuments which created a unforgettable, indeed haunting memory for me were trips to the west bank and Jerusalem Museum. 

The true meaning and scope of the term “war” had not really hit me until after spending a few hours in the museum and walking on the west bank seeing in person the ravages, fortifications and national monuments erected on site with names of those that never returned to the happiness of families and other loved ones.  A reminder of two of man’s most poignant monuments to his own inhumanity. 

I shall never forget the realization that swept over me as I saw those monuments; and the pictures of a previous encounter with inhumanity to millions of human beings thirty years earlier.  I saw the pictures of pitiable starving people, faces contorted with disbelief and despair, emaciated bodies wasting away for reasons they did not understand. 

Here I was, a healthy 39 year old who never had known any real pain or deprivation, face to face with pictures and scenes showing how millions of human beings had met such a fate. 

What had they done to deserve so wretched a fate?  What had I done to deserve so pampered existence?  For me this experience was the beginning of a whole new phase of my education and personal growth.