Last night we had a dinner for a friend who lives in a Middle Eastern country. She has been in the States since Thanksgiving and leaves next week for 'home.' I was a deep honor that she would drive this distance to spend a couple of days with us.

We reminisced about old times and she brought us up-to-date on her life abroad. Living there for two years but having a decades old relationship with the area she shared a unique perspective on her life and the current situation in the country.

She and a roommate share a house in the city. The long narrow yard boasts fig and pomegranate trees and, most unusual, grass. At the street side of the property a corrugated wall serves as a barrier to the street and also a framework for the guard house. Guards are posted in the gatehouse 24/7. The house is a series of rooms one right after another. One must go from room to room to room to get to the far end of the house. Two women doctors had lived there before. They gave up the house and sold all the contents to my friend in very short order and left the country quickly. My friend said it was like stepping into someones life: food in the pantry, clothes in the dryer, sheets on the beds.

With walls 2 1/2 feet thick, every window has a window seat. The walls are mud bricks and the roof made of mud. When it rains sometimes mud oozes down the walls. Once a year the roof has to be re-mudded; during a real heavy rain the house could, in theory, dissolve. During a sand storm fine particles of sand settle on every surface. The inside is western except for one room which has cushions and carpets on the floor for entertaining nationals.

It is a rugged, war-torn country and has been for decades, yet the photos of scenery and the portraits of the people are filled with beauty. People are trying to make the best of a dire situation, out daily looking for the sustenance for their families, making no eye contact in case there might be danger. Children find pleasure in simple things: a Matchbox car, new pads of paper for school, a toothbrush.

My friend does not venture out of her home by herself. Even on the one block walk to her office she is often escorted or driven. She keeps a 'go bag' in her closet, filled with essentials for travel if she were to have to evacuate the area quickly. Trips to a mall, a movie theater or the local Starbuck's happen only in her imagination and memory.

I'm writing this because I thought that in writing my thoughts down it would help me understand her DNA, what stuff she's made of that would cause her to leave the comfort of her parent's farm in Ohio and travel half-way around the world (As an aside, this is not the first time she has done this, having spent nearly a decade in a former Soviet Union country).

Her answer is fairly straight-forward when asked. The people in this city need hope, hope for today that food and medical care can be obtained and hope for tomorrow, that their children will be able to go to school, that health concerns will be a thing of the past, that the streets will be safe for all to walk. In short they hope for peace in their time.

Most do not know what peace is exactly, since four decades of war have devastated the area. But hope believes in that which is not seen, it longs for what has never been experienced. Hope dreams and sees what might be.

We all have hope. Some of us hope for a good grade on a test; others for a promotion or a happy marriage. Few of us reading this spend any energy on hoping for clean water when we turn on the tap; few hope that there will be no bombings in the neighborhood during the overnight; few have to hope for the safe return of a child or husband who has walked the two blocks to the only store that remains open because of riots and fire. In comparison what most of us hope for is very puny indeed.

My friend wings her way east again to deliver hope.

And that's what I think about it.