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About a week ago, I had spent my first night home from Cairo. It has gone by really slowly… and it really doesn’t feel like a week since I departed from some people I love so dearly.
Since then, I’ve been adjusting to life at home. I think it has actually been harder to come back than it was to go live in Cairo. I don’t know why that is, maybe it’s because of the fact that I have to own what is around me as my own, and things get personal… hm.
I’ve become more concious of things around me, such as the cleanliness of America. It’s amazing, actually… no really. I don’t know how we do it. After being in Cairo and experiencing those sidewalks, I would seriously eat pizza off of the sidewalks of Mill Creek. It almost scares me how clean it is, but I guess it just shows our ability as Americans to organize and fix things. And the amount of wealth we have. I don’t know what about the Egyptian government doesn’t allow them to have people who consistently empty out trash cans on the street, or even PUT trash cans on the street. Or clean the squatty potties at the Giza stop (THAT was an experience to remember… lets just say I could TASTE the air it smelled so bad in that bathroom).
I’ve become more concious of my spending habits and I’ve realized how much I hate to want and need things I don’t really need. Because here’s the thing… I could most definitely splurge a little bit, and satisfy that craving to buy just a little something. But then I go home and everything else I see around me is screaming at me that I need more, when I don’t. It’s like a really bad relationship. I’ll never be happy if I were to give in to this. I pray for this part of my life… and that I stop craving material gratification.
Lastly, it’s been SO HARD to mentally juggle all of the different parts of my life. In Egypt, I did a couple of things and that was teach, live, love, sleep and eat. But they all stemmed from one, i guess you can call it, hub. Here, I have like… SEVEN different “hubs” from which come many different spokes. I have to slowly process the tasks of my life, and decide when to do them… its what they call, multi tasking.
MAN. I just realized I just touched on like… three of the biggest parts of American culture: luxury, materialism, and multi tasking.
So yeah. Right now I’m just trying to find my place in America, because I feel like an outsider… and I feel like I belong in a foreign country more than this one. But that’s OK! Because, I’ll figure myself out 
xo
m
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Here I am. I’m sitting on my bed, about the size that I shared with two other people while living in Cairo, Egypt for the past ~6 weeks. I’m currently a little daunted by the fact that i have to get up in the morning and actually have to make a CHOICE about what i want to wear. i have more than two shirts to choose from! and i dont know how i feel about that. even the choice to open up my itunes library had to be pre-planned and internally processed…
tossing toilet paper into the toilet is also strange. so is drinking water from the faucet…. and the silence that surrounds my neighborhood is slightly unnerving. the air isnt full of honks, cats howling, vendors yelling, the call of prayer…
however, adjusting to life back at home has been easier than i imagined. which is a huge blessing, because usually im incredibly grumpy and i hate America for a full day after my arrival. thats not to say that i wasn’t effected by the ditzy teenage girls on the plane with their hot pink blackberries and raunchy cosmo magazines… ANYWAYS.
im also a different person upon arrival. my hair is a little lighter, my skin a little darker, im five pounds lighter… those are probably the things you might notice superficially.
but cairo changed me. it really did. its funny, i didnt really realize how much it changed me until i got home and started seeing the ways that different things would rub me in a way that was different 6 weeks ago.
let me just give you an idea of how i was living:
i was living in a suburb called Maadi with five other people. one of those people was Kellie, my amazing partner in Egyptian crime. girl, you rock my world (“people watching people watching meeee…. its a reciprocal relationship!!!”). three of those was a Christian family from Eritrea, Salam, Dibora and Natu. They have a father and one more brother still in Eritrea, and they are all Christian. Then lastly, but NOT least, is Aisha. She is half Eritrean and half Sudanese and she’s incredible. She’s a Muslim woman with gumption but also a heart of gold that i miss everyday.
We all lived in an apartment. I shared a room, and shared a bed (which was basically two full [maybe a little smaller] beds squished together) with Salam
and kids, and Kellie. Aisha had her own room. i had NO personal space, except for the porch which i mentally claimed as my own. and it helped.
I took bucket showers. meaning, i had to fill a bucket, and sit in the bathtub with a pitcher and pour water over my head. sometimes water worked, sometimes it didn’t. bucket showers also aren’t the most thorough… i got rashes on my legs from the dirt and sweat that would cake on. however, they’re quite refreshing when you get back from a busy day walking around the city.
I washed my clothes by hand, and dried it all on a line. which was fun. can’t say its a thorough as a washing machine, but it got SOME of the grime out.
i drank a lot of hot sweet tea, and ate a lot of bread and not a lot of fruits and veggies. i probably had fruits and veggies 2x a week. which took a toll on my bowels. poor poor bowels… they took quite the blow this summer.
the average temperature during the day was between 90 and 100 degrees. which means i sweated a lot…. i haven’t sweated more in my entire life. it was gross, but i was actually able to adapt to the heat pretty well. right now in the states, my body is still adjusting to not being in such heat. i still complaing when its 80 degrees and im uncomfortable, but i didnt seem to complain in egypt as much. i think my host mom complained more than i did.
physically, i was usually exhausted and hot (like i already expressed). it made it hard to do many things, like serve, because you’re already so worried about keeping yourself going through the day. i can say that there wasn’t a moment on the trip when i was 100% comfortable. i mean, there was always something that bothered me… maybe it was that my feet were exceptionallly dirty, or i was pressed up against five other egyptian women on the metro, or it was just hot. its not that i didnt enjoy myself, because i absolutely did… but its just part of the experience.
egypt, in a nutshell is… dusty, chaotic and wonderful.
I would go back, i really would. its a beautiful place that challenges you and enlightens you in so many ways.
I heard someone say one time, that when you go into another culture, the most important thing to do is go in with a posture as a learner. That you, don’t know anything, and the people around you are going to educate you on how to go about this city efficiently and not offend people. I tried my hardest to do that, and I realized I did learn a lot, so I wrote some stuff down. And I’m here to share that with you, at least some that
I wrote down. I’ll also share a list of things that I like about Egypt. That’ll be later.
What Cairo Taught Me
1. SMILE at strangers, be friendly.
The women in Egypt are quieter… than me. haha. They aren’t the types to burst into laughter on the metro about something silly… they just calmly sit, sleep, and stare. This was something that really got to me, because I’m and incredible friendly person who wants to be best friends with everyone, and when I got this stand-offish vibe from the women, it was disheartening because I wanted to connect with them. But I remembered a quote that said something about how smiles are a universal language… and its true. I had to kind of “one-up” the friendly factor, and it helped. I soon learned I could crack the quiet, stern faces of these women with a quick smile. I hoped it would help them seem me as open and as an American who cares for the people around her.
2. How to properly cross a street.
Holy moley. I was mortified when I had to first cross a street in Cairo. Imagine this, a street with cars going about 45-50 mph, about four lanes of traffic and drivers who hardly look at the road while they drive. The way you gotta think is FROGGER. Or what I often did was stealthily stand behind an Egyptian man, who was also waiting to cross the street, and just follow him. Fearlessly. You just have to DO IT. No second guessing yourself being two things will happen 1) you get hit or 2) drivers get mad at you at yell at you in Arabic, which is never nice.
I honestly could cross 1-5 with the street-crossing skills I got in Egypt.
3. The mechanics of a toilet.
I never knew you could flush a toilet by pouring water into the bowl, really… never knew that. I also never have had to open the lid on the tank and pull some random string inside to get my business to flush… Each time you used a toilet in Egypt, there was a different way of flushing it. And if you were a newcomer to a certain toilet, a crash course was typically necessary on how to flush the toilet. I will never take high water pressure, and a properly flushing toilet for granted. I have some funny stories about toilet-flushing problems, which I will not share on here…. but do ask me to tell you about them.
4. Trust and distrust in your community.
I saw both of these. In the Sudanese and Egyptian community, there was a certain trust that blew me away. People would freely give me their phone numbers and addresses after speaking to them for 5 minutes. And I thought to myself. “What makes you think that you can trust me? How do you know that I’m not going to march on over to your house and steal all of your prized possessions?” But the bottom line, Egypt has a collectivistic culture. Which means that my stuff is your stuff. Everyone is family, they fight in the open, they laugh, share water (it was quite common for strangers to ask me for water… which I would freely give, but it definitely was something to get used to. And I thought about how the people of Seattle would react if I asked them for a sip of their latte…). It’s a beautiful thing, really. I find that these kinds of cultures only exist where need is greatest. Cairo is poor, it is. But this poverty creates a huge family, who rely on eachother more than anything… because they need eachother. In America, we are all self-reliant… we fair well with just being on our own and buying our own water if we are thirsty. I guess to a certain extent its OK to be independent, but the trouble comes when we stop looking and recognizing the people around us and the need of our family, friends and strangers surrounding us.
In Egypt, there are racial tensions between the Egyptians and Sudanese. It breaks my heart, and I pray that this country will soon be reconciled. I experienced this first hand within my host family. Basically, Salam and her kids felt like they couldn’t trust anyone around them because they had been hurt so many times. They wouldn’t even let an Egyptian into their house because of the fear of what they might do… Salam wouldn’t even travel alone. I didn’t even want to tell her about the Egyptian friendships that I made because I feared she would think that I was taking sides, or would scold me and tell me that they were bad people. In all honesty, they were good people. I whole-heartedly believe that there are good and bad people in both groups. But, I could feel that Salam felt almost suffocated in her own community. I wish she would know that the Egyptian man who lives across the hall from her is a warm-hearted man with a wife and a kid, and he offered us water or food when we were sitting on the dusty groud outside of our apartment, locked out. I’m a fixer, and I will be the messenger if I need to in order to mend a relationship. But I couldn’t do it, because the problem was so deep.
5. Education is IMPORTANT.
I taught English in Egypt, and it was SO fun. I’m seriously thinking about doing it after I graduate… I don’t know where, but I will, hopefully. But I realized how importance it is for the children of these suffering nations to get an education. It gives them hope for the future, and self-worth. I pray for the the kids that I taught, and that they will be able to go far in life, go to college, and become something they have dreamed of. I saw so much potential in these boys and girls, and also thought about their broken past and how they are the future of their nations, and they are the people who can change their broken nations. I heard this story from China, and how during times of hardship in a certain city, the people would resort to education to give themselves some sort of the self worth because their government was taking away everything around them. However, the only thing the government couldn’t take away was their knowledge. And its absolutely true!! And I can help! How awesome is that?!
Bottom line:
Jesus loves Egypt. Its a place we all should learn from. In fact, we all have things to learn from the people who have less than us.
I hope to return to that beautiful dusty place.
- Marsha
