It’s a small world – it’s a saying that’s familiar to everyone.

Sure, it’s relatively common to go on vacation to Walt Disney World only to stumble across a fellow central Iowan in line for nachos. Or to go away to college and realize in a conversation with a new friend that you know the same people from a town back home that your school played in basketball.

Of course, nearly everyone has his or her own examples of “the small world phenomenon.” One of my examples deals with a native of Jordan I met last year at Iowa State. It’s a little complicated, but stick with me for a minute here.

I had become friends with an exchange student from Spain, who apparently knew of a guy from Jordan on his floor in Towers. The Spaniard gave his floor-mate, the Jordanian, my phone number.

I was a brand-spanking new freshman at Iowa State at the time. So I get a call one afternoon from this Jordanian fellow by the name of Fares. We got to talking on the phone and we soon realized we were interested in a lot of the same things. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, Fares and I became good friends.

It wasn’t until later that I realized that my family in Jordan might know his family in Jordan. Then I realized that the high school that he graduated from is the very same one at which my mom once taught.

A pretty cool coincidence, I thought. Here I am at Iowa State University, and through a chance meeting and a mutual friend, I met someone from a big city on the other side of the world who knows lots of the same people my family knows. He came from Jordan and I came from 30 minutes away and we met up in Ames, Iowa.

The latest example of the “small world phenomenon,” however, really got me thinking. On this current trip to Jordan, I started work at an English-language newspaper in Amman. I went to the office for an initial meeting with some of the editors this week.

The staff of the paper is almost entirely made up of Arabs, with a mix of a few Europeans of various nationalities and a couple of Indians. All of the staff obviously reads and writes English fluently, seeing as they run an English-language paper. However, I had yet to run across any Americans.

In the course of a meeting with an editor, he asked me where I was going to school. I replied, “Iowa State University”, fully expecting to have to repeat the name a couple times for clarification.

The editor, a Jordanian by the name of Samir, quite nonchalantly replied, “Oh, that’s where Amy graduated from.”

No way, I thought, he means Indiana or Illinois. He must have gotten the names mixed up. No big deal. I thought little of it. The conversation turned to other matters.

After a little while the door opens and in walks an American-looking woman and greets everyone in Arabic. Samir turns to me and says, “Here’s Amy now.”

“Hey Amy, you graduated from Iowa State, didn’t you?”

Before I knew it, I was talking about everything from Hamilton Hall and the journalism school, to Lincoln Way and Friley Hall. I couldn’t believe it.

See, this is the first American I’ve seen since I got to Amman three weeks ago. Not only that, she’s a native of Iowa, a 1993 graduate of Iowa State in the same program I someday hope to graduate from.

I’d say it is a pretty incredible coincidence that the only American I’ve run across so far is no less working at the Jordan Times, a big city newspaper in the Middle East, a continent and a couple of oceans away from Ames.

Wow. My world had just gotten a whole lot smaller.

I expected a New Yorker, Californian, Texan, or even maybe, just maybe, a Midwesterner. I certainly didn’t expect a small- town Iowan and fellow Cyclone. I guess it goes to show that the old adage “It’s a small world,” holds a little truth after all.

Omar Tesdell is a sophomore in journalism and mass communications from Slater, Iowa.