Waterloo company organizes group tours tailored to Mennonites

Sometimes, folks wander into TourMagination on Willow Street thinking it's a regular travel agency with deals on Vegas junkets and Caribbean cruises.
It doesn't take them very long to learn better. "They soon know what we're offering doesn't really fit with what they want," says Wilmer Martin, president of the company, which specializes in organized tours for Mennonites.
There are no pictures of golf courses and sunny beaches on the walls of the little house that serves as TourMagination's office. If you're looking for that kind of vacation, Martin and his colleagues are happy to point you to another travel agency.
But if Paraguay, Romania or Kyrgyzstan is more to your liking, you're in luck.
TourMagination takes its clients to the world's most obscure places -- and to some that are less obscure -- to "build bridges among Christians and other faiths around the world and try to get people out of their normal box of thinking," in Martin's words.
TourMagination tours take in all of the tourist sights, but also fit in visits to sites of Mennonite historical interest and current Mennonite aid projects.
For example, a recent voyage tocinclu South America ded not only cand Iguazu Falls but visits to a leprosy ministry and a school for deaf children.
Tours to Europe make sure to stop at sites from the era of the Anabaptists, the precursors of the Mennonites.
Other tours, such as a recent trip to Antarctica, have less of a religious focus but still give travellers a chance to meet, talk and pray with fellow Mennonites and people of Mennonite background in their tour group.
Over a couple of weeks, travellers often form tight bonds. One group that visited Germany and Israel in 1990 still keeps touch, Martin says. Back then, TourMagination was a less formal organization operated part-time by people in the North American Mennonite community. The business was founded in 1970 by two employees of the Mennonite Publishing House in Scottdale, Pa.
Martin, an American who moved to Canada for Bible school in the 1960s, became more involved with TourMagination in the 1980s and 1990s.
He eventually purchased the company with his wife Janet and had to choose between the travel agency and his day job heading Habitat for Humanity Canada.
He left Habitat in 2000 and turned TourMagination into a full-time business. He says he made the choice after realizing how group travel can change people's lives and perceptions.
"I saw my calling is to build peace and bridges among humanity," he says.
Martin says travelling the world has helped him to understand that behind the machinations of international politics, people around the world share many similarities. He was surprised at how much the mealtime rituals he shared with Muslim villagers in Tajikistan reminded him of his own upbringing in Pennsylvania.
On the same trip, following the route of a 19th century Mennonite migration, an American traveller was disabused of his fears of Muslims by interacting with them in the mosques and markets of Central Asia.
"He came out of there a changed person," says TourMagination tour leader Ed Epp, formerly a vice-president at Mennonite Economic Development Associates. "He came out of there and said, 'Those are people.' "