The room is small and windowless, buried deep in one of Washington D.C.'s labyrinth office buildings. The man delivering the sermon at the front of the room is Arab, in his late fifties, and grey-haired from the top of his head to the tufts on his knuckles. “Nowadays you have all these feminists, but you see them and they do not practice the modesty,” he is saying. “What does the Qur'an say about the adultery? It does not say 'do not do the adultery'. No. It says 'do not come close to the adultery'. And how do you come close to the adultery? Through immodesty...”

In the front row, a young man is staring glassy eyed at the khateeb while his fingers nimbly manipulate his prayer beads. Off to the side, a long-faced man with a jet-black beard is slumped against the wall and has fallen asleep with his arms crossed over his chest. A trio of men in expensive suits eye the door and the minutes hands on their platinum wristwatches. And in the shadowed compartment toward the back, two young women see their own thoughts reflected in the other's face, and for a moment the hardness in their eyes softens as they share a silent, commiserating smile.

--related to me today by an anonymous Muslim woman who may or may not be my wife

I feel like everything I needed to know about being a decent human being I learned from Sesame Street: be nice, share your toys, don't make generalizations or assumptions about people you know nothing about, try to put yourself in other people's shoes, be nice, etc.

And yet the implementation of Sesame Street wisdom continues to be a struggle for all of us.

I guess it's natural to compare every new place you go to some other place you've been before. I'm here in Guatemala, in some obscure city in the countryside, and I can't help thinking how this arid highland landscape could be parts of California, how these colorful storefronts on narrow streets could be in Bangladesh, how these chilly evenings and lingering twilights could be summer in Montana, this chemical smell of smoke and car exhaust could be in Cairo, these small farmplots of vegetables could be in Palestine, and the concord of children's voices and the sounds of play coming from the nearby school could literally be from anywhere.