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GREENSBORO — Masoud and Annah have two goats.

They’re small goats, Nigerian dwarfs, with names we all can recognize — Ringo Starr and Lily.

Ask Masoud about them, and he’ll laugh. Then, he’ll tell you about his rooster named Windex after pulling out his cell phone and showing you a photo of Golden Girl, his egg-laying chicken.

“Oh, it’s the icing on the cake,” Masoud says, his voice rising, his clipped West Bank accent becoming more pronounced.

“People call me crazy. But it’s a good crazy. It’s just the simplicity of life, my friend. It’s beautiful. It’s nature. And it’s all a part of this beautiful circle.”

The circle. Masoud Awartani and his wife, Annah Laymoun, talk about that a lot lately.

On Thursday , Masoud and Annah will fly to Jordan, and for the first time, they’ll help volunteers from Greensboro’s First Baptist Church build a four-room cement block house with Habitat Jordan at the south end of the Dead Sea.

They’ll build it for a Jordanian laborer named Issa Dgamat and his family in a town called Ghor al Safi in the storied land of the Old Testament.

Then, the two will travel north to the University of Jordan, to find the bench where they first met in December 1981 , the place where love connected and later sent them across the Atlantic to start a life two decades ago in Greensboro.

Seeing that bench now — or really, the importance of seeing it — fits their new lifestyle. Just like raising tiny goats in their backyard.

It’s the idea of slowing down, taking stock, giving back and living healthy. They’ll talk about that forever. But you don’t need to hear that from Masoud and Annah. Just find the board beside the kitchen at Zaytoon, their restaurant in downtown Greensboro .

Then read.

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass — it’s about learning to dance in the rain.

Children are messengers we send to a time we will never see.

Being young is beautiful but being old is comfortable.

Masoud and Annah call it “Food For Thought.” They posted these pithy sayings after their family went through what Masoud calls “the biggest wake-up call.”

Stomach cancer.

For a month, in the summer of 2007, Masoud lay in a hospital bed in Winston-Salem and thought about life and death.

He lost 70 pounds and became a toothpick of a man as his wife kept a vigil beside his bed, barely sleeping. She held his hand and held back tears. She knew she had to stay strong.

“If it’s your time to go, God brought you here, and he’ll take you,” Annah told him. “But if you stay, I’ll make sure you have the healthiest life.”

Today, at 47, Annah holds a certification from Duke in integrated alternative health coaching and has helped turn her backyard into Slow Food Central.

There are 11 raised beds for vegetables and herbs, 10 chickens and eight mature fruit trees that bear apricots and peaches, plums and figs.

On the family refrigerator, written on lined notebook paper, is Annah’s prediction: The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.

“Read this statement! Read this statement!” Annah often tells her son Layth.

“Yes, Mom,” Layth responds, “I see it! I see it!”

Layth , a sophomore at Guilford College, wants to become a doctor; his sister Nora , a senior at Western Guilford High School, wants to become a nutritionist; Adam , an eighth-grader at Guilford Middle School, wants to be a scientist.

Their Muslim-American family has become the public face of Islam in Greensboro. And there’s no bigger spokesman than Masoud.

Surveys show Muslim Americans face distrust, discrimination, misinformation, even hate in their new country. Masoud hears that firsthand it when he stands in front of a local audience and fields questions like, “Why does the Middle East hate America?”

When that happens, he takes a deep breath and tries to explain Islam’s deep roots of peace and tolerance. Meanwhile, when he gets a chance, he talks to Muslim Americans about getting involved and reaching out.

It wasn’t always like that.

There was a time when Masoud lived fast and worked fast. He started at 5 in the morning and didn’t quit until 10 at night, as he steered a four-van business that delivered pastries to gas stations, restaurants and hospitals from Mebane to Boone.

And there was a time he was urged to go back home, back to the West Bank, where he once sold candy and cigarettes in a 10-by-20-foot store his dad called Masoud & Brothers Shop.

The request came after the surgery from his older sister, Hadia. She thought Masoud and his family needed to be closer to their roots, to recover, heal and start anew.

But she changed her mind. For three months, she stayed in Greensboro saw her brother hold court at temples, mosques and churches as well as at Zay­toon behind the cash register and at the Farmer’s Market, at Tables 143 and 144 .

“You are more needed in this city than you are back home,” she told him. “Stay where you are.”

Masoud knew he would. He came to Greensboro to study agricultural economics at N.C. A&T. Now 47, he sees this place as his place.

It’s his place for chickens, backyard fig trees and two Nigerian dwarf goats named Ringo Starr and Lily.

And now, it’s his place to leave for nearly a month.

He and Annah will help build a home in Jordan and go back to a bench, back to the place where a Palestinian teenager, bowled over by a girl’s beauty, asked his friends, “Wait a minute. Who is that?”

The circle. It’s about to be complete.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com