Caught in the cross currents.

It was a flood from hell. Poisonous snakes, pushed out of their holes by raging water, sought refuge on dry earth crowded with traumatized people. People were bitten. Three died.

Politicians handed out food to flood victims long enough for a photo opportunity, then the flood relief convoy packed up the food and went to the next photo-opportunity village.

Food rations, stored carefully for the winter, were ruined. Crops were destroyed.

It was in the smoldering, above-100-degrees-Fahrenheit, humid heat of summer 1995--during the Pakistani monsoon--that the organization I work for, Catholic Relief Services, got a call for help. The director of the agency asking for aid planned to drive to a flooded area outside the ancient city of Multan. Someone on our staff had to go and see the flood damage before we applied to our Baltimore headquarters for an emergency grant. I volunteered to go.

But what I experienced that summer was different from the typical humanitarian experience to which I had become accustomed. It was a South Asian experience to its very core. It was like sitting down to a curry-saturated meal and sweating over the spices, mouth burning to a point of discomfort but still asking for more.

Riding along the diesel-exhaust polluted, pothole ridden roads from Islamabad to Multan, I learned that there was a boat engine in the back of our vehicle.

"Did you pack two-cycle oil?" I asked, as if everybody knew what two-cycle engine oil was. "You know," I continued, "the kind of oil you need for a boat motor. It's like what you use for a motorcycle if it's a Yamaha or Suzuki."

"No, we didn't get any oil. We didn't know we needed it," replied Sarwar Bari, the director of the agency named Pattan, which in Punjabi, the language spoken in the Punjab province of Pakistan, means "river crossing."

But my way of crossing rivers obviously was not their way of crossing rivers. They had never used a motor.

Pulling the motor out of the back of the Toyota all-terrain vehicle, I felt a jolt of excitement. As a boy, I'd spent many a summer on Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks in fishing and ski boats. When I opened the back of the vehicle and saw an Evinrude outboard, it was like momentarily going home. To carry it was like touching America. To put it on the boat, pull the starter cord, hear the engine idle, and see the smoke from the exhaust bubble out of the water was like being back at the lake.

Pattan had bought a fiberglass boat and this Evinrude to make flood relief more efficient. With me there, "Mr. Know-How-to-Use-an-Outboard-Motor," we navigated from rooftop to rooftop, delivering hygiene packs of soap (to prevent scabies) and chlorine (for purifying drinking water). Drinking unpurified flood water, which many of the flood victims were doing, often results in cholera, causing extreme diarrhea and dehydration, a deadly combination especially for young children and babies.

Whenever I turned off the engine as we approached another group of stranded flood victims, one member of the Pattan staff paddled us gently to our destination. I learned that he was their "boatman." And, as the day wore on, I sensed that he didn't like this white-skinned Westerner invading his territory and doing his job.

I kept taking swallows of mineral water out of one-and-a-half-liter bottles that were working as greenhouses in the hot sun. I started getting severe stomach cramps, and so it was time to teach the boatman how to operate the Evinrude.

The boatman didn't speak English. I didn't speak Punjabi. He understood how to navigate a human-powered vessel in current-filled water probably as well as anyone Mark Twain ever wrote about. But he didn't have a mechanical mind.

He was perplexed by the Evinrude. It made him feel inferior and insecure. Yet he wanted desperately to be the captain of his ship again. He wanted to understand how to operate the engine, however difficult it might be.

Shifting the engine into forward gear, we idled our way through the water as I showed him how to use the hand throttle. He learned quickly how to accelerate and decelerate. But he couldn't grasp the concept of a transmission, of having to put it into neutral to stop the boat.

We approached a housetop covered with hope-filled, ill, hungry people. He turned us toward the top of a partially submerged tree. As the engine was running and still in forward gear, he grabbed the tree and hung on for dear life, holding the boat still. His face is still vivid in my memory. It was the face of a man who, however awkwardly, was trying to understand something foreign, different, uncomfortable.

But I didn't view him with compassion. No, I was frustrated.

"Take it out of gear. It's still in gear," I yelled, an absurd thing to do in light of the language barrier.

The rest of the afternoon, I tried to be a bit less impatient and a bit more instructive. But there was a techno-cultural-language divide from which we suffered for the duration of the day.

There was a village that eked out an existence on an island in the middle of the Jhelum River, one of the main tributaries that forms the mighty Indus. The entire village was underwater.

The current in the Jhelum was strong. We decided to try to reach the islanders early the next morning. would operate the Evinrude. We planned to take hygiene packs and food and would transport back anyone who was already severely ill.

I was feeling better the next morning, thanks to some antibiotics and some Pakistani tea filled with water-buffalo milk and saturated with sugar. I was anxious to get into the water and to the flooded island village. But I was also a bit nervous about crossing the fierce current of the Jhelum.

Then, when we got to the boat, I saw that the starter cord was broken. The boatman must have tried to use the boat after I'd left. I figured he'd had the choke pulled the whole time.

"Is there a mechanic around? Or can I get some tools somewhere?"

"There's a town about 10 kilometers from here. We'll see if we can find a mechanic," said Bari.

We jumped into the Toyota and eventually talked the son of a motorcycle mechanic into letting us borrow his father's tools. We raced back to the boat, carried the engine to a shady spot, and placed it on the bench of a roadside tea stand.

As I took off the top cover, unscrewed the starter pulley, rewound the recoiling spring, I was a spectacle for all the tea drinkers to see. Crowding around me, they stared as the frustrated Westerner got his hands greasy by working on an alien apparatus that was rumored to be used to make a boat move through the water.

I got it fixed. The rope was shorter, but it recoiled properly so that I could pull the starter time and again. We carried the engine to the boat.

I pulled and pulled, dripping in sweat, for close to half an hour. It never started. For some reason, the spark plugs didn't seem to fire.

Bari compassionately pulled me away. "Don't worry about it Joe. We'll get it fixed somewhere."

"But what about the people stranded on the island?"

"We'll figure out another way to get there," he said with an assuredness I found hard to accept.

I took a plane back to Islamabad that evening to quickly fax in a request for an emergency relief grant. I called the Pattan office in Multan as I was finalizing the request. I learned then that they had rescued the islanders. The boatman, my reluctant apprentice, had managed to get a traditional Pakistani boat across the dangerous current.

I'd traveled in those kinds of boats before. They're like something you could imagine on the Sea of Galilee during the time of Christ. Solid wood. A paddle as a rudder. Poles for pushing it through the water. A small cabin where the cook prepared food. A rope for a donkey team to pull it up river. A crude sail to take advantage of the wind.

Although he may have been unable to grasp the mechanical concepts behind the outboard motor, he was clearly effective with that to which he was accustomed. I imagined him at the helm of a huge wooden boat, thrusting his pole into the river bed, letting the current toggle the boat toward the islanders. Back and forth. Back and forth. He made it. He was a master of his boat.

This boatman of the Islamic East rescued those islanders. He had done it his way. I had tried my way but failed.

This story of the different boats has become for me an illustration of the difficulties we encounter when we who grew up in the Christian West try to understand Muslim culture, and vice versa. We try to understand their faith, to appreciate their kind of vessels. They try to understand and appreciate ours. Somehow we have to overcome our zealous fixation on our own vessel to heaven. It doesn't mean we should believe what we believe with less intensity. But we have to appreciate what people of other faiths know. What they grew up with. How they've learned to survive spiritually.

If we're patient, we can learn from each other. Living and working with Muslims has taught me that if you take your faith seriously and want it to influence your life, you have to pray regularly. Devout Muslims pray five times a day, prostrate on the ground.

I have also learned from Muslims that fasting, if done in the right spirit, is a powerful discipline, allowing one to lighten one's physiological load in order to focus more intensely on matters of the spirit.

All religion--not just Christianity-can foster dignity and integrity. I came to see those two traits as constituting at least part of the wealth to which Christ referred, the kind the world cannot destroy.

In the other direction, I'd like to think that some of the Muslims I encountered were enriched as well. Some of them became less inclined to stereotype my religion and culture as being sexually promiscuous, pleasure-seeking, and violent.

It would be disingenuous to downplay the clumsiness and frustration that are often a part of interfaith encounters. I recall extending my hand once while greeting a woman. She looked at me with a pained expression and turned away. I'd forgotten that Muslims believe that adult men and women should not touch each other unless they're married.

Some of the Muslims I met linked Christianity to Western civilization, tying Christ to the modern-day materialism of the West, to the CIA, and to nuclear weapons. When a conversation got to that stage, I often found that the only thing I could do was to walk away.

Yes, interfaith understanding can be difficult and awkward--as difficult and awkward as me trying to learn how to navigate their traditional boat, to toggle my way across raging waters; and as difficult and awkward as the Pattan boatman trying to learn how to operate an Evinrude.

When people try to understand and appreciate another faith or culture, we have to see it for what it is, with all its difficulty, with all its awkwardness, as when the boatman idled down the Evinrude, grabbed a treetop and held on for dear life. He was trying to learn. It was awkward. Confusing. Perhaps a bit embarrassing.

But if we let each other's wisdom ooze into us--like good South Asian curry does, with our mouths burning and our eyes watering--we will enrich our spiritual lives.

By Joe Bock, Catholic Relief Services' country representative to the Jerusalem/ West Bank/Gaza Program.