Riyadh on my mind.

There were expanses of gleaming, grey-veined white marble in every direction, the carpet was an endless flow of green, and everywhere there were men in white thawbs, the traditional garment worn by Arab males. King Faisal Conference Hall was vast, but served as a highly functional home for our conference. All around me the men wore flowing Arab headdresses, red houndstooth ghoutras ringed by the black bands of the igaal. For the hundreds of Arabs attending the conference in Saudi Arabia, the scene was probably like many they had witnessed before, but for someone like me, born in Brooklyn and reared with stories of the Holocaust and the founding of Israel, it seemed surreal. All about me were symbols that I had learned to fear and people I did not know.

As Editor of Physical Therapy, I had been invited to attend the First Conference of the Saudi Benevolent Association for Disabled Children. The invitation had come out of the clear blue, and almost until the minute I boarded the plane I wondered whether my very "Jewish-sounding" last name would lead to withdrawal of the invitation. My visa application asked me to state my religion, and I answered truthfully--Quaker. But I still wondered. As I later found out, I should not have worried. Members of our group had written "Jewish" on the application, and their invitations remained--and once in Saudi they were treated magnificently, as we all were. All of us who attended the conference were flooded with impressions and carried back memories that shall never leave us. Even as the months pass (the conference was in early November 1992), these impressions remain vivid and stir thought and reconsideration.

Our main speaker on the night of the opening ceremonies was HRH Prince Salman Bin Abdul Aziz, Governor of Riyadh, and the security for this event was impressive. Impassive guards stood at the entranceways with submachine guns hanging from their shoulders. Men walked about in flowing robes trimmed with gold brocade. That surrealistic quality was reinforced when the women in our group were ushered into a separate lecture area. There were many dignitaries present, and among them was a man whose hands showed the unmistakable signs of neurological deficits--the palmar arches were lost and the hands flattened. Clearly this man had quadriplegia, and he was a VIP. But who was this distinguished man in the wheelchair? He seemed to be getting special treatment, and I wondered whether he was a member of the Saudi royal family. He was not. He was the French Minister for the Handicapped. A simple truth revealed can never be forgotten, and the remembrance of this man's hands and the universality of his deformity will always be with me. His hands were no different from those of a Saudi, an Israeli, or anyone else with the same injury.

Touring the Benevolent Association's school, I saw children who could have been in our own facilities back in Illinois. By slapping his outstretched hand, the children playfully gave "five" back to the Catalonian physician who now lives in Houston, Texas. The women who scurried to avoid visitors because they needed time to cover their faces reminded us we were indeed amid a different culture, but the Palestinian teacher who talked proudly of her students reminded us that, in spite of the differences, commonalities abounded. Her pride and enthusiasm were just as I have seen elsewhere.

Among the many papers I listened to in Riyadh was a plaintive plea by a Syrian physician for the rights of persons with disabilities. His paper, filled more with rhetoric than data, was presented from the heart and concluded with the following quotation: "The most esteemed person God beholds is the most pious amongst you." As the physician noted, this was an Islamic dogma "that draws the distinction between people: It is their deeds that count, not their handicaps. The true handicap is the blindness of the heart and the desperation of the soul." To hear these sentiments from a Syrian--a people who are represented as among the most militant in the Middle East--touched me deeply. In my journey to Riyadh I had traveled further than was possible through a 14-hour plane trip. In Riyadh I remembered the refrain from a favorite song, and in my mind I heard it over and over again: "When love leaps out like a leaping star over thousands of miles ... not miles, walls, nor length of day, nor the cold of midnight can hold us apart ... swifter than wings of the morning are the pathways of the heart . . . "(*)

My visit gave me no false illusions about a world filled with love and brotherhood. In this new age where superpower struggles no longer bring us to the abyss over competing economic systems, nationalism promises to keep people in conflict and in the process provide us with new generations of war victims. As members of a profession that rose like a phoenix out of the ashes of war, physical therapists can take unique comfort in observing the common humanity of us all. We all suffer similarly when hate, war, disease, and accidents take their toll. In his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven immortalized Schiller's almost-forgotten poem, "Ode to Joy," in a romantic attempt to bring out the finest of the human spirit. Since that week in Riyadh, the words have new meaning for me: "Your magic unites again/What fashion harshly separates/All mankind becomes brothers/Where thy gentle wing tarries."

Amid the mystery and magic of our daily lives, I am reminded that the magic that reunites may not be in the glorious but rather in the mundane--in the sight of a child hugging a teacher or in the vision of a man with quadriplegia raising a misshapen hand in a faraway land. Our profession is simultaneously blessed and cursed, We witness the price of division and the magic that unites. (*) From "Thousands of Miles," lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, music by Kurt Weill, a song in the play "Lost in the Stars," a musical adaptation of Alan Paton's novel Cry the Beloved Country (New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Co).