On Friday mornings, the city of Mafraq sleeps. It’s the first day of the weekend in Jordan; midday, men and boys will trickle to local mosques for prayer before returning home for lunch with their families. Usually, downtown’s grid of narrow, dusty streets is packed with honking traffic. This morning, shops are shuttered and cars parked.

For Laith Sahawneh, clinic manager at Annoor Sanatorium, Friday mornings are anything but quiet. In his office outside of central Mafraq, the landline rings. Text messages ping through his mobile phone. Pharmacists, doctors, and even patients pop in and out of his office, asking questions, seeking advice. Though it’s the weekend, the hospital for chest diseases is open for business, accommodating patients who work a normal Sunday-through-Thursday week.

“We want to serve as many patients as we can,” says Sahawneh, a Jordanian Christian.

With six exam rooms, a lab, and a pharmacy, Sahawneh tells me, clinic staff presently treat an average of two hundred outpatients per week. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, when Annoor established a phone-scheduling system to minimize crowding, admissions were more hectic. Sometimes more than one hundred sick people lined up at the hospital’s gate before dawn, Sahawneh recalls.

Patients come to Annoor – which means “the light” in Arabic – with chronic chest illnesses: asthma, pulmonary fibrosis, brucellosis, tuberculosis. They come from all over Jordan – and even from other Arab countries, like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen – attracted by the hospital’s reputation. Annoor’s doctors ask questions and listen to medical histories; they listen, rather than hurriedly diagnosing and prescribing. The staff treats their patients kindly, with love. Muslim patients accept prayers from their Christian doctors. Healing can be found at Annoor.

Sahawneh says that most of Annoor’s patients have visited multiple doctors already, without seeing improvement. Because of this, 90 percent of the cases that come through the clinic are very difficult to treat. Some of the worst are admitted to Annoor’s inpatient program, which hosts an average of fifteen at any given time. Most of these suffer from tuberculosis (TB), a bacterial disease that ravages the patient’s lungs “like a terrorist, bombing and fighting,” Sahawneh says. The disease, which in 2022 infected about four in 100,000 people in Jordan, can be treated through a strict regimen of several antibiotics taken over the course of six months.

Multidrug-resistant TB cases are even more difficult, some baffling the medical team – currently a group of six physicians from Egypt, Korea, the United States, and Britain. At times, healing seems preposterous from a human perspective. But miracles happen at Annoor – not magic, as some patients speculate. God intervenes on behalf of the sick, Sahawneh says, sometimes without the use of medicine.

“When you hear a request from the locals or the patients, you will say, ‘This is impossible, how can I do it?’” he says. “Then, in a miraculous way, the Lord opens a path.”

Near the men’s ward, a hallway leads to Nasri Khoury’s office. Stacked with boxes and unused medical equipment, it resembles a storage area. In the smaller anteroom, chairs circle a table packed with cups and saucers and plastic containers of coffee and sugar. Photographs of Jordan’s royal family and Annoor’s founders decorate the walls. A stack of Bibles is piled on one chair.

Khoury – better known as Abu Steve, after his oldest son – has witnessed God’s miraculous ways at Annoor since 1965, when the hospital opened in a 2,100-square-foot building in Mafraq. The town’s population was less than seven thousand then, with five cars and five televisions. “I counted them,” he says, a big smile on his face.

Khoury tells me about the hospital’s early years as he prepares coffee over a tiny burner fueled by isopropyl alcohol. Herb Klassen, Annoor’s executive director, later tells me that over thirty-five years of informal gatherings with male inpatients, Khoury has perfected the art of sharing the story of God’s love in the time it takes to make coffee.

While he is Christian and most of his patients are Muslim, Khoury sees God’s love as transcending those distinctions. “The angel came to tell us about a Savior, not Christianity,” he says. “We are here to give the Good News.”

Khoury grew up in Beit Sahour, a Palestinian Christian village near Bethlehem, and studied nursing at Baraka Hospital for Chest Diseases in Arroub, south of Bethlehem. There he met Aileen Coleman, an Australian nurse and midwife, and Eleanor Soltau, an American thoracic physician. Both single women felt called by God to serve the Bedouin, who often do not recover fully from TB because of poverty and their nomadic lifestyle.

When theological differences with Baraka’s leadership forced Coleman and Soltau to leave the hospital, they told Khoury they planned to one day start a TB hospital in Jordan and hoped that he would join them.

Shortly afterward, Coleman met Lester Gates in Jerusalem. A recently widowed farmer from Ohio, Gates was looking to start the next chapter in his life. He was inspired by Coleman’s vision for the hospital and came to Jordan to help get it off the ground. Initially intending to come for six months, Gates ended up staying for twenty-two years, building Annoor with his own hands and financial resources.

In the meantime, Khoury took a profitable job at a hospital in Saudi Arabia. When Coleman and Soltau informed him they had returned to the Middle East, he requested a month of vacation to travel to Mafraq. His employer acquiesced, but also purchased Khoury’s return ticket and refurnished his apartment on the Saudi hospital’s compound.

A few weeks later, Khoury knelt in his room at Annoor with Gates, who would soon become his spiritual mentor. Together they sought God’s will for Khoury’s future: return to Saudi Arabia, or stay at Annoor, where his monthly salary was just eighteen Jordanian dinar. God’s presence unmistakably filled the room, Khoury says, assuring him of God’s direction.

“I took the plane ticket and burned it,” he says.

By the late 1960s, Annoor needed a larger facility. Gates and Khoury borrowed the hospital’s vehicle and drove until they found the piece of land that God had shown Gates in a dream: twenty-five bare acres just outside of Mafraq. When they asked Annoor’s gate guard about the land, he informed them that it belonged to Mafraq’s mayor.

Khoury felt reluctant to approach the mayor: What right had he, a young nurse, to ask the community’s leader to sell his land? But the next day, when Khoury explained that Annoor was hoping to purchase a piece of land for a new facility, he didn’t even have to ask.

“I have one,” the mayor volunteered.

Annoor acquired the land for just two thousand dollars. Right away, Khoury says, Gates started planting trees like crazy – eight thousand pine trees donated by the Jordanian Ministry of Agriculture, hundreds of olive and fruit trees. “The more trees we plant, the more souls will come to the Lord,” Gates reasoned.

When the government insisted they would not find water on the property, Gates insisted otherwise. They drilled on the spot God showed him and hit water. Since 1973, when Annoor moved to its permanent location, the hospital has operated on water from its own well.

“It’s so beautiful to walk in God’s ways,” Khoury reflects. “When we walk in God’s ways, he arranges everything.”

Now ninety-four years old, Coleman lives in a one-story limestone house tucked between the olive trees Gates planted. Bougainvillea and plumbago flowers grace her patio. From an armchair in a spacious, light-filled living room, she greets me, wearing a black thobe with blue embroidery. “This is what I’m going to be buried in,” she remarks good-humoredly.

In 2024, on the occasion of his silver jubilee, Jordan’s King Abdullah II honored Coleman with a silver medallion recognizing her more than fifty years of service in the Hashemite Kingdom. Even now, she continues to serve the Bedouin, visiting families in their tents twice a month though she is wheelchair-bound.

Coleman began her ministry in Sharjah, in the present-day United Arab Emirates. When she moved to Bethlehem to work at Baraka Hospital, she learned the importance of long-term disease care and fell in love with the Bedouin. She spent decades becoming as Bedouin as possible to reach the community with God’s love, and has been a foster mother to at least nine Bedouin children.

The key to serving them physically and spiritually “is loving them, and not trying to change their Bedouin way of life,” she says. “We’re the ones who have got to change. It took me a long time to realize that.”

Because of its openly Christian witness, Annoor has earned the local reputation of “the preaching hospital.” A popular Bible-based film plays continuously in the clinic’s waiting room. Five evenings a week, inpatients can choose to attend meetings where hymns are sung and scripture shared.

As one of Annoor’s founders, Coleman has been embraced by all, in spite of religious differences. In the 1970s, during a civil war that pitted the Jordanian regime against the Palestinian Liberation Organization, a local tribe pledged protection to Coleman and Soltau and their hospital. When Coleman was in a near-fatal car accident in 1996, fifteen Bedouin men donated blood. The late King Hussein himself paid her hospital bill.

When I ask Coleman what brings patients, volunteers, and doctors from all over the world to Annoor, she answers simply. “Love,” she says. “We love them.”

While we’re walking to and from Coleman’s home, Heather Klassen, Herb’s wife and Annoor’s director of nursing, tells me about the changing face of TB in Jordan. When she came to Annoor in 1984, most of the inpatients were Bedouin. But current statistics from Jordan’s Ministry of Health indicate that more than 50 percent of TB patients nationwide are Syrian, Bengali, or Filipino.

“We now have very few TB inpatients that are Bedouin, and for that reason, we have other outreaches,” she says.

For twenty years, the Klassens staffed one of these outreaches, a clinic in Ras An-Naqab, 185 miles south of Mafraq. This location – which overlooks the vast sands of Wadi Rum – was opened in 1990 at the encouragement of Princess Shareefa Zein, a cousin of the late King Hussein who has supported Annoor’s work among the Bedouin from the time she heard of it in the late 1980s.

Today the Naqab team serves twenty to forty patients every Friday in clinic. On other days, they visit Bedouin in remote areas, providing support for families with children who have disabilities and palliative care for those who are dying. They also run an income-generating workshop for local women, using sheep wool and camel hair to spin and weave using traditional methods.

“I want to show forgotten and desperate people that God really cares for them as a loving father,” says the Dutch nurse who leads the Naqab outreach.

From 1999 to 2019, Annoor operated a clinic in Ruwayshid, a town near the Jordan-Iraq border. Now, twice a month, a small team of hospital staff drives 125 miles from Mafraq to Ruwayshid to follow up with former patients. Along this route, they also visit families in their homes – whether tents or brick-and-mortar dwellings.

Her favorite part of her job, says the Norwegian nurse who leads this outreach, is the chance to visit children with disabilities in their homes, to encourage their mothers, to educate patients about breast cancer and diabetes, and to offer prayer.

“We want to see the people transformed,” she says. “We want to see the dysfunctional families transformed. We want to see the drug addiction come to an end and the kids with disabilities treated right and included and not hidden away.”

In 2013, Annoor acquired an unusual piece of equipment that enabled a third outreach: a twenty-five-foot mobile dental clinic, originally intended for use in North Korea but marooned in Dubai. Eventually, the truck was sent to Mafraq, where it serves inpatients and communities lacking local dental care.

On Saturday morning, I meet a diverse group of volunteers beneath the palm trees outside the clinic: two dentists, one Mexican and one Ecuadorian; a Syrian dental assistant; a Chinese nurse; a Lebanese-British man; and three Jordanians. They read Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:40: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” After a brief prayer, the team loads into two vehicles and drives east.

The rising sun bleaches the highway to Zimla, one of several remote communities the dental team serves. After about thirty minutes the road turns to dirt. On either side, low shrubs grow between scattered chunks of basalt. A man herds his flock of sheep, backdropped by tents. Orchards appear on the horizon – olives, apricots, peaches, and persimmons – and then the dental truck, parked near a black and white striped tent.

After greeting the queue, the team enters the truck to prepare for the day’s work. The dentists can treat two patients at a time. A third can wait inside, giving volunteers the opportunity to interact and show God’s love.

“God will do his work,” one of them says.

Outside, two young women invite me into their family’s tent. Sitting on rugs covering the dirt, we chat while drinking tiny glasses of sweet black tea and swatting flies away from a baby. I feel the infectious joy I’ve observed in Annoor’s staff this weekend, the love that motivates their service among people often invisible to broader society.

As TB rates in Jordan have diminished since the 1960s, Coleman’s dreams for the future are undimmed. She envisions households of Bedouin spreading the Good News in their own communities.

“I have seen some of this beginning,” she says. “To God be the glory.”