Married to a Bedouin

“‘ Where you staying?’ the Bedouin asked. ‘Why you not stay with me tonight – in my cave?’ He seemed enthusiastic – and we were looking for adventure.”

Thus begins Marguerite van Geldermalsen’s story of how, in 1978, a New Zealand-born nurse came to be married to Mohammad Abdallah Othman, a Bedouin souvenir-seller from the ancient city of Petra in Jordan.

She made a home with him in a two thousand-year-old cave carved into the red rock of a hillside, became the resident nurse and lived like the Bedouin.
Marguerite learned Arabic, converted to Islam and gave birth to three children.
Over the years she became as much of a curiosity as the cave-dwellers, with tourists including David Malouf and Frank Mc Court encouraging her to tell this, her extraordinary story.”