When I opened the floaty blinds in my hotel room, I looked across the traffic circle to the huge white stone hotel built apparently by an Iraqi associate of Saddam's who is rumored to have stolen millions of dollars of his money. I flipped on the TV, featuring an Al Jazeera International program on how hard it is for women in Israel to get a Jewish divorce, and the top news of Gaza Palestinians standing off against Egyptian riot police trying to close the Rafah border between Egypt and Gaza, and in the morning, using bulldozers to break down a new opening in the barrier walling them off, and hordes of people crossing through.

This morning, when I needed to buy a charger for my dying cell phone and the Amman shops my driver and I went to were closed, a taxi driver across the street pulled his charger out of the car and gave it to us for a couple dollars. How he figured out the situation so quickly and generously decided to offer his seemed part of a kind of communal local culture of sharing that also included driving between the lanes and making left turns across the incoming traffic, without even a honk or hardly a brake from the oncoming traffic. Beyond the small towns, we flew down the military highway, passing checkpoint after checkpoint. Sawahike Ameriki - American journalist - the driver would tell the soldiers. And they'd peer through his window at me in the backseat, and wave us through. At the border, I filed onto a bus with Arabs, Jews, Israelis, Jordanians, American and British, and we made our way across the half mile to the other side, interrupted by a couple more passport checks and a stop by a young female soldier using mirrors to check the bottom of the bus for bombs. After which, our busload emptied out and filed through Israeli security. In the entrance to the Israeli side of the border crossing with Jordan hangs a black and white framed photo of Israeli prime minsiter Yitzhak Shamir and the late Jordanian King Hussein, who in 1994 made the peace treaty that brought more peace and prosperity to two lands where the people do not necessarily see much eye to eye, except the benefit of such an agreement. "We very much need peace," my Jordanian driver told me, as a Syrian truck pulled ahead of us, full of Jordanian cucumbers and tomatoes.