The Italian Hospital is nestled at the crest of a steep rise overlooking the city of Al-Karak, Jordan, surrounded by the remnants of a crusader castle, its crumbling walls a reminder in sandstone of the region’s many conflicts. From this vantage point raids were once launched on passing Muslim caravans. On the roof of the hospital’s adjoining convent at dusk, Alessandra Fumagalli, C.M.S., leans along the parapet. Before her a purple and rust sunset breaks the line of a mountain in the near distance; the fading light falls across the small houses and scrub desert below. Far to the west, the sunset sparkles across the surface of the Dead Sea. Sister Alessandra surveys the sleepy valley a moment. “At night all the homes on the hillside light up,” she says. “It’s so beautiful, it looks like Christmas. You can see why Jesus wanted to be born here.”
Sister Alessandra’s perspective is indeed beautiful, but the view is hardly the only compensation she derives from her work among the poor in Karak and its surrounding villages, so far from her native Italy. She describes her mission as a satisfying, silent evangelization of doing, for and among her Muslim neighbors. Like the crusaders before them, this handful of Comboni sisters keeps watch over the people of Karak, but they offer an altogether different Christian presence among their Muslim neighbors.
Christians are only a tiny percentage of Jordan’s population, but Sister Alessandra says it is important to her to live in Jordan. “People from Europe and the United States are surprised to see Muslims and Christians living and working together, [but] this is even the aim of our operation, why we love to be here. Not only to provide health care, but to show that we can live together.” Her work speaks about God without speaking about God, she says. Six other sisters join Sister Alessandra in keeping the hospital going, as other Comboni sisters before them have done since 1934.