It's a small world after all....

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You know that song about everyone being famous when you live in a small town? (Miranda Lambert) Well, the funny connections of being from a small community never cease to amaze me...even in Tunisia!

We have gone our entire trip without seeing an America. We jumped for joy if we could even find a poor soul who understood a little street English. We ran into 2 Canadians who were a bit snooty and pretended they did not understand English (so we counted them as EuroTrash). The locals have assumed us to be French, Italian, Spanish and even the occassional Deutsch (argh!!). On mutiple occassions, I have even been told I am Arab. So you can imagine our delight when we spotted a young couple in the hotel lobby who informally passed our "is that person an American?" test.

We continued to size them up from a far and then Kyle approached the wife.... Are you sitting down? The woman was from TOPEKA, KANSAS! I kid you not and it only gets better. Her and her husband are both K-State fans who attended classes at Manhattan Christian College and KANSAS STATE! They know people we know and we know places they know.

At first the man said he attended a small Christian college in Manhattan (like we had never heard of it) and we pointed out dad and mom's house is about 4 doors away from MCC campus. Dad also mentioned Renee, his co-worker, and her husband attended MCC and the man remembered them!The coincidence of the whole thing was almost too much to handle!

After meeting them, we emailed home so Grandma and Grandpa could tell their Zeandale ministerand MCC Professorthat we ran into a couple of his former students and in the meantime the woman called her brother-in-law on the MCC Staff and he told her he knew dad from work at Big Brothers Big Sisters!

The funny thing is, they are not even tourists. They live in Tunis and run a travel company. (They were in the hotel celebrating their wedding anniversary.) So I guess we have not met any other American tourists, but how fun to share a little piece of home.

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