A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a story is worth a thousand pictures.  

• On a visit to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, I left the rest of the group in the hotel one evening, and walked down the street for half a mile. I had dressed down. I sat back from the pavement and watched the world go by. A mixture of unfortunates and ordinary people passed me with hardly a glance. After an hour, an old man approached me with a stone in his hand. I felt very uneasy but he placed it in my hand with a smile. To this day, I do not know the implication of that act, but it taught me that looking, listening and getting close to life as an individual can give you experiences that the rest, remaining in a group, missed out on.
   
• In a scene, almost from the film Lawrence of Arabia, I was entertained with several others, to a meal in a Bedouin tent near the River Jordan. The hospitality of the Arabs was enormous and, thinking that the meal had ended, I wandered off to look around outside.  Leaving the settlement in the 4x4, I realised that, in my impulsiveness to satisfy my own curiosity, I had caused unthinking offence and this remains a source of embarrassment to me even now.
   
• Once, as a passenger on a mini-bus driving into Hebron on the West Bank in Palestine, the window next to me disintegrated. Looking down, I saw a stone the size of a tennis ball on my lap. I knew this was a potentially dangerous area to be in and realised that we had been attacked. Reversing out of the town quickly, we saw that the bus had a Hebrew inscription on it to which the Arab stallholders had taken exception. This senseless lack of attention to detail, when booking the bus, caused an incident which proper planning could have avoided.