The Hill News

My family and I just returned from a six-week trek through Asia Minor, Egypt and the Middle East. We’re invariably asked what our favorite places were. The more I dwell on that question, though, the more I realize that it’s not the places that left a mark; rather, it was the interactions with the local folks I found to be most compelling.

In today’s flat (and flattening) world, we can’t hope to be “global citizens” without wide-ranging multicultural experiences. And we certainly can’t expect our children to do so either without exposing them to different culturesâ€"which is precisely why we brought our two daughters, Kelsey, 19, and Christina, 17, along for this eye-opening experience. Atef Boutros, our remarkable Egyptian travel agent, and I spent eight months planning our odyssey. My bottom line to him: Yes, we want to visit the sights, but it’s less about what we see than the people with whom we see it.

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