Ismael - Part I

Occasionally Stacie and I have mentioned something about our good friend Ismael, an Arab taxi driver who lives with his family on the Mount of Olives. In fact he’s probably our best friend among the locals here. The following contains three stories involving some of our recent experiences and interactions with him…and his family. Wish you could all meet him somehow, someday.


We hadn’t seen Ismael in a while, at least six weeks. A couple times we called asking for a ride and he was unable to drive us, so he sent a friend. But the timeframe in which we hadn’t seen him seemed to be increasing and we started to wonder, “Did we do something wrong? Or somehow offend him that we don’t see him anymore?” This is quite unusual. Then in early January we were touring around the country with friends, and while standing in Herod’s Palace-Fortress of Masada in the Judean Wilderness, my phone rang.

It was Ismael!

I didn’t answer it because reception is quite bad up there and didn’t want to interrupt what we were doing at the time. When we got home that night, I called him back.

Although his native language is Arablic, he’s also fluent in Hebrew and his English is greatly improving. He loves it that we have been studying modern Hebrew, and so we try to have many of our conversations in Hebrew. Neither person speaking their native language in order to communicate with each other. Although most of our following conversation took place in (broken) Hebrew, mixed with some broken English, I’ll translate the gist of it into English for the benefit of my readers. ☺

“Shalom Ismael, how are you?”

“Everything’s good, how are you?”

“Good, thank you. You called me?”

“Yes, I called to see how you are. I haven’t seen you and Stacie in long time. Are you angry with me?”

“No no no no no, we are not angry, we have much grace.”

So a couple times we called for a ride, he couldn’t come, and he was simply calling to say hi. To say hi, make sure we weren’t upset with him (peace between us) and to tell us he missed seeing us and wants to see us again soon. Our conversation ended in English.

“Thank you for calling Ismael, its good to hear your voice again. We’ll see you soon.”

“Say hi to Stacie for me.”

“I will, Lahitraote (goodbye).”

“Lahitraote.”