It was the best of times and the worst of times. That is how my home stay went last week. All 30 of us were placed with different families all over Cairo to stay for a week. Some were with wealthy Christian families, some were with cultured Muslim families who knew English, and others like me, were with poor Muslim families who knew only Arabic. I had actually requested to be with a poor, Muslim family who knew no English, because I wanted to see the real Egypt and also work on my Arabic skills.
So the first night, I went to my family’s little flat in Barageel, a poor borough in Cairo. Where I lived, it was all dirt streets, sheep and goats all over the place, took tooks (the Egyptian form of a rickshaw) donkey-pulled carts and Egyptians in conservative Islamic dress (it is jokingly called the Islamic Republic of Barageel for its conservative Muslim residents.) My family was a 36 yr old bank worker named Yasir, his wife introduced to me simply as “Mama”, and their two kids: 7 yr old boy named Fahat, and a 2 year old girl named Shahat. A funny side note is that the two kids names mean Jaguar and Canteloupe and Fahat loved to act like a Jaguar! They didn’t speak a word of English, so over the course of the week my Arabic got a lot of practice. Traveling across Cairo was also a daily adventure. I took rickety microbuses and sometimes even hung out the door just to get a ride during rush hour. I loved this part!
Their flat consisted of two rooms, one of which I slept in and the other was the bedroom for the rest of the family. The bathroom was simply a hole in the floor and they didn’t own a stove. We ate our meals on the floor. Even though I consider myself an adventurer, over the week it became kind of hard to live in this poverty. Using a hole for a bathroom was only fun the first time, eating with our hands on the floor lost its amusement as well. Also the conservative Islam made it really hard for me to interact with the mother. She mostly stayed in her room with the door closed while the rest of the family hung out with me in my room. The boredom was crushing as my Arabic ran out and so our conversations were pretty limited. Most days I had class in Agouza, but two days I spent all day with the family and they slept all day while I basically twiddled my thumbs. That part killed me, because I don’t deal well with the boredom, and when it came time to say goodbye I was ready to return to normal routine. The thing I learned most about my little average Egyptian family and others like it, is that there is a serious lack of ambition. The children are not pushed to excel in school, they don’t ever want to leave their poor neighborhood or save and try to change their circumstances. They are simply content with their poverty, which was hard for me as a Westerner to understand.
The next day we visited the Arab League. It is basically the Middle East version of a regional United Nations. 22 countries are a part of the Arab League and we were able to meet with the chief of staff, Hassam Yusef. He is famous as the #2 guy in the Arab League and is often on American talk shows and in the news. He spoke with us on a range of topics from the Israel/ Palestine conflict, Arab unity, democracy, the role of the US in the Middle East, Iran and the shifting of power in the region to how the Arab League functions. After our meeting with him we got a surprise invite to sit in on the 3rd International Day of Non Violence summit at the Arab League. We watched and listened to ambassadors from all over the world contribute ideas on how to apply the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi to today. Believe it or not there were some who thought that non-violence could never work today, while others had a vision of a utopian society where everyone laid down their weapons. It was very interesting to watch!
We just got back from Siwa, an oasis town in the Sahara desert. One of our friends lives there and studies in Cairo. The town has a beautiful little micro culture from the isolation. They are Berber or Africans who were on pilgrimage to Mecca and stumbled onto the oasis and built a town. Siwans are extremely conservative Muslim and their women are completely covered in public with no inch of skin showing (which actually looks scary with black hoods over their faces.) The first day we visited the temple of the Oracle which is famous because Alexander the Great made the trip to Siwa to hear his future foretold by the Oracle there. We swam in a cold spring and rode bikes throughout the Oasis and then watched a sunset from an island in the salt sea in the desert. The salt is so concentrated in this body of water that we could literally float effortlessly. It was such a cool feeling!
The next day we went out into the Sahara desert and sand boarded down sand dunes. All of us guys wrestled around and enjoyed the fine sand. Our Bedouin guides took us to both a cold spring and a hot spring in different locations. I watched the sun set over the desert and then we went to the Bedouin camp where we would sleep for the night. We listened and danced with a Siwan band. Then we slept in the Great Sand Sea, the Sahara, and it was one of the most magical experiences of my life. This trip was the best weekend trip we have had so far.
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