Reflection.

With about 4 hours left in Cairo, I'm sitting on the balcony of our hotel room at the Marriott, looking out at the skyline over the Nile, and as much as I've been looking forward to going home in the past few days, I know that I'm going to be missing it as soon as I realize I'm not in Egypt anymore. I've said it a few times before, but in living in the same place for close to eight weeks, getting to know the people and making many new friends, this has essentially become a third home for me.

I’m having a really hard time deciding about how to go about condensing the past seven and a half weeks of my life into a reflection paper. It seems like I’ve learned and seen too much to put it into coherent sentences. I don’t think it ever really hit me that I was living in Cairo, waking up to the Nile every morning and going to sleep to the call to prayer most nights, just like it hasn’t yet hit me that it’s over and I have to go home now. I remember thinking, as we walked around Zamalek on that first day, that this was a place I could really love. There is so much life on those streets, there are so many things going on all at once, and all of that liveliness is an atmosphere that I’ve always craved. I felt right at home. I think a huge contribution comes from the fact that I’ve always felt at ease adapting to new living situations, but even without that, the hustle and bustle is a comfort for me. I don’t do well in rural situations. The day after our introduction to Cairo was the visit to the Pyramids. I do appreciate the beauty and significance of the Pyramids of Giza, but I wasn’t as moved by them as I had anticipated. The same goes for the Sphinx. My experience at the Sphinx was tainted by the amount of tourists that flooded the observation area. I understand that our group, in instances like that, qualified as a tourist group but these were a different breed of tourists and having to deal with the discourtesy, rudeness and general roughness of people like that put a blemish on that memory. It’s still something I enjoyed, and will never forget, but I expected a different kind of reaction when I imagined seeing both the Pyramids and the Sphinx. It made me feel jaded and unappreciative, looking at one of the few genuine beauties left in this world.

A huge part of this trip was our Arabic class. Being taught by Syonara, and hearing about the life of an Egyptian Muslim woman first hand was one of the most important aspects of this trip. There are things the she taught us both about society in Egypt and life as a woman that I don’t think anyone else on the trip could’ve possibly taught us. She also provided us with a sense of familial warmth. We called her our “Mama Duck”. She showed us where to get lunch on a tight budget, she invited us into her home and taught us how to cook traditional Egyptian dishes, she helped us work out problems all while teaching us a new language and how to adapt to a completely new culture. Without all of the time that we spent with her, I feel that there would be a gaping hole in our knowledge of what Egypt is and what it has to offer. Trying to learn Arabic, even though Syonara is a great teacher, was a serious challenge for me. Italian has always been my fallback language, and to try to think and respond to questions in a new language proved to be a daunting task, and I could tell whenever I threw an Italian word into an Arabic sentence without realizing, Syonara would get frustrated and have to bring me back. The emphasis on spoken Arabic in the class proved to be my downfall, but with help, I was able to recover. Even using simple words such as shukran, aywa, la, dilwa’ti [my personal favorite for no clear reason], “eh da?”, and “momken take away?” is something I will miss, though I’m sure they’ll slip into conversation every once in a while without me realizing.

I can’t really talk about my Egypt experience without talking about all the time we spent with our Egyptian friends, Omar and Ziko. I briefly met Ziko at the second Dialogue, when I heard him speaking Italian and immediately jumped in and said something so stupid and basic that he just laughed. I recovered, of course, by introducing myself, and we talked for a few minutes, but it didn’t go any further than that, and I met Omar through Bridget. In my honest opinion, just like Syonara, there are things that we saw with them that we would have never seen otherwise. Not that we saw anything so major, but just things like spending time in places that only “locals” [I hate that term] frequent and learning what the different horn honks mean that only real Egyptians would know. We also got to ask them things that we didn’t touch on in the Dialogue, and got to hear them speak candidly on issues that we probably wouldn’t have discussed in front of a moderator. Spending mostly every night with Omar and Ziko, and sometimes Sherio and Lyna is one of the brightest highlights of the experience, for me, and I will miss them all very dearly. It’s amazing how close a group of people can become despite the knowledge that it won’t last. We all knew that, eventually, we would leave Cairo and it would have to come to an end, yet we still let ourselves get so attached. I hope, one day, either they’ll come to visit us in Boston or wherever in the States they so desire, or we’ll be able to return to Egypt to see them. It would be a pity to let such a rapport die so easily.

As much of a disaster as the Service Learning Project started off to be, I believe that it really did end in success. When we had our first orientation at AUC and we were told that one of our tasks would be to pick up the trash that’s infested with snakes and scorpions, I seriously questioned my dedication and commitment to the program. I was relieved when that project was nixed. I ended up working to help catalogue the massive amount of products available from the knitting center. Although I’m glad no one had to pick up trash, I do feel that there were far too many of us. We were six people working on a three-to-four-person-tops job - one person to take the pictures and two to write down information for crosschecking purposes later on. We all took turns in each job just so no one would be left standing around the whole time, and I think our team ran pretty smoothly and efficiently. My favorite part of the whole thing was that one of the women, Fadwa, loved having her picture taken and took pictures with all of us. She asked if we would bring her back copies the next time we visited, and the smile on her face when we did was priceless. It’s always nice to make someone else happy when there’s nothing in it for you.

I want to conclude this reflection with a discussion of my two favorite days of the Dialogue. Chronologically first, on May 31st, Omar took eight of us back to Giza to go horseback riding in the desert. A friend of his is clearly very into equestrian and led us. The reason this horseback riding experience was more special than the other two was because the guys who rode with us, from the stable, let our horses, and even encouraged them, to gallop. That was one of the greatest feelings I’ve ever experienced. It felt so liberating to be riding a horse in the sunshine with no restraints. I was just totally relaxed. We had a freedom that we had yet to experience since we’d been in Egypt, and it was refreshing. Another reason this day is one of my favorites is because later that night, a few of us and Omar went to get dinner and had one of the more meaningful conversations of the entire dialogue. We talked about our first impressions of each other and then of how we Americans saw Arabs before we knew firsthand and how Omar saw Americans before he knew us. The things that we knew before and after were so vastly different, and we were all a little shocked at what our societies are teaching us, and just how false they can be.

My other most valued experience was being in Siwa. As much as it felt like a ghost town, I had never been in a place where women were simply not seen. In the two days that we stayed there, we saw maybe 4 women, all of whom were completely covered, face and all, as opposed to hundreds of men. It was eye opening to say the least. It is a very small, isolated town in the middle of the desert, so it’s easy to see how they can be still very old-fashioned and extremely conservative in their ways. It was even the first time that we could walk through town with just a group of girls without being harassed with every step. The desert trek, although causing the death of my camera, was also a huge highlight. I never though it would be possible to swim in the desert while still maintaining sanity but I now know that it is, if you know the right people. I never thought I’d go sand boarding in the Sahara, but I did. I never thought I would see the sunset over the desert, but I certainly did.

There are so many things that I experienced on this dialogue that I never dreamed a girl like me would get to do or see, and now that I’ve done them, I believe that my life will never be the same. After living in Egypt for nearly two months, in a completely separate culture than my own and experiencing new perspectives on various issues, my perspective has come to encompass all of the things that I’ve learned. I feel like being able to look at things from the points of view of both the west and the east makes me a better person in some ways. I also think that in enriching myself in other cultures, ones with more in a tenth of their history than in all of American history, I better prepare myself for things I may have to deal with in my life. I feel like a broken record, but this is something that will stay with me forever and I will always cherish and value my time in Egypt and all that I’ve learned from it. God, I miss it already.