From the Airport

Loyal Readers: this is NOT the end of my Cairo blog. I still have more stories that need posting, and more "final" thoughts. Stay tuned.

(excerpted and adapted from a letter to Ken)

0430 EET, Cairo International Airport, in possession of a valid exit stamp from the Arab Republic of Egypt

So I guess this is the end of my semester abroad. It ends like it began—sitting in an airport with people going to the same place as me. And I guess I should start figuring out what I learned from this adventure.

• I learned I can do a whole lot on my own. On my own physically and emotionally. The knowledge that AUC really honestly didn’t give a darn what happened to me or any of the other study abroad kids and that I had to figure out things for myself was simultaneously terrifying and liberating. (But if it was a test, I think I passed.)

• I learned that when it really (I mean really) hits the fan and the floor falls out from under you, you have your friends to fall back on and really you can’t count on anything or anyone else. We became a family here, not in the mushy sense (although emotionally we became close in the veritable relationship pressure-cooker that is study abroad), but in the sense that we have to take care of each other. And so we did. We had nobody else and we relied on each other. And we did okay. We took each other to the hospital, we sat by each other’s beds, we administered IVs (or at least threatened to), we held each other as we cried, we celebrated birthdays and triumphs and we mourned losses. Together.
  

• I learned that Egypt is a beautiful, beautiful country. It really is. It’s dirty, crass, poor, corrupt, twisted, inefficient, crazy, polluted, loud and unmanageable (at times), but it can also be stunningly, breathtakingly beautiful. It really truly can be. Watching sunsets in Luxor, just about everything associated with Dahab and Mt Sinai, looking over Cairo from the Citadel, Muhammed Ali mosque, the bright, loud, kitschy absurdity that is Khan el-Khalili—parts of this country are spectacular.

• I’ve learned that I love being an American. I love our values: hard work, cleanliness, honesty, honest hard work and a hard day’s labor, being self-made, not being complacent. It makes me proud—more proud than six months ago by far—to have these instilled in me and to live by them. The more I lived in a country so different from those, the more I became convinced that those values are RIGHT. Patriotism—not mindless flag-waving and thumping of a red, white, and blue chest but real love of your country and what it stands for—means a lot more than it used to. I love our society. No, that’s not true. Parts of it I still detest. (Although for all their anti-American = anti-Westernism = anti-consumerism and anti-materialistic culture bluster, Egypt is just as consumer-oriented as the US.) But I can’t wait to walk down the street without getting ogled or yelled at or hissed at or offered things or grabbed. America has women’s rights A LOT better figured out than Egypt. Politically, as well, I watched Egyptians lose political and social freedoms we take for granted—without caring. American political apathy is a favorite target of critics both foreign and domestic, but it can’t hold a candle to the apathy I saw in Egypt. (Look for more on that later.) I love American people. We are good people, we are. The Godfather starts out with the line “I believe in America.” And after my Cairo adventure, I believe in America more than I ever have. I also do rather enjoy the power that comes from holding an American passport. THAT one saved my tail a few times. But for better or for worse, yes: I’m an American, I like it, and I like America.
  

1032 EDT, an airplane south of Greenland and east of Canada, a good 32000 feet off of the ground.

The computer map says something like 3.25 hours until I land again in the land of the free and the home of the brave. I can’t wait. The plane is freezing cold and my mouth has that nasty “dead possum” taste from trying to nap a little bit. My shirt is wrinkled, annd my legs ache like crazy from the sunburn and the sitting.

A final Cairo story, not quite in Cairo but equally informative:
At Frankfurt Airport, one girl bought some Bacardi Superior at the duty-free and proceded to freak out about how she was going to get it back to the States after it was opened (you can’t take opened duty-free alcohol on the plane), since we were sitting in McDonald’s in the terminal sketchily sipping and making covert rum and cokes (since we didn’t want to corrupt any children, although there were very few). I had the solution: the tiny complimentary Lufthansa water bottles are no longer filled with water and are stowed in the ziplock liquids bag. Made it through the security checkpoint (which was frighteningly thorough after months of Egyptian “bag checks” and “security”). I’m bringing it back unopened as a point of pride: .2L of Bacardi Superior rum, even though the limit for any fluid in the bag is technically .1L. Got one over on the man. That’s something about me that’s different: I look for ways to get past the man. Constantly.

How else am I different after this adventure? Well, I may not be the best judge of that. Perhaps you should tell me. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say that I am much more confident and independent that I was in December. I can get lost in very sketchy places alone late at night and successfully get home after three cab rides. I can handle men who can’t handle guns toting AK-47s every fifty meters and pointing them at me as a joke. I can handle terrifying military checkpoints where people are being beaten BECAUSE of my presence.

I speak Arabic better, too. That’s for sure.

Am I more “Egyptian?” Probably not. I still shower daily and love it. I'm still Catholic. A glass of tea does not require any sugar at all, and anything more than two spoonfuls is overkill. I still work ridiculously hard at life and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But maybe I’m a little better at recognizing what I can and can’t control. Maybe I know a little better what’s worth fighting for and what’s not. Samuel Huntington (from whom I read a good bit this semester) sums it up well: Faith and family, blood and belief, are what people identify with and what they will fight and die for. (Huntington, "If Not Civilizations, Then What?" Foreign Affairs, 72:5.)

There’s a phrase I learned this semester; it’s not Egyptian but Muslim (and honestly it’s very much anti-the Egyptian mindset):) توكّلتُ على الله tawakeltu 3la-Allah). It means “I trust in God,” but with the connotation of “I have done my part, I have done everything I can, it’s in God’s hands now and I trust Him.” And it works.

Horses under the Stars

Desert sand at Giza, by day, is much like beach sand in the Mid-Atlantic. It’s finer, blows much more easily, and is approximately one part dirt to two parts sand, but is generally a similar color. Minus the waves.

But I’ve never seen the desert at five a.m.

We get up early, meeting in the lobby at four thirty. We’re all a bit dazed and move slowly. We hail one of the lone cabs still out on the streets (his comrades will be out en force in an hour or so), and ride to a stable at the edge of the desert.

Giza (real Giza, not the urban area to the north) exists solely for tourist purposes. As Matt guides the cab driver to M.G. Stable (they all use two letters for their stables…never sure whether they were initials or just random alphabet soup), men in the street jump in front of our cab. The driver squeals to a halt each time (the Cleopatra cigarette in his mouth never wavers) as the men open the doors on our cab, assuring us that they have horses. We ride horses? Oh yes they have good horses, best price. No, no, we say. We are going to another stable. We begin driving with them still running after our cab. One chases us for almost two blocks. The driver seems amused by the whole deal.

M.G. Stable is at the end of one of many unpaved roads. Across the street is a concrete wall eight feet high topped by a fence another twelve feet high. On the other side is sand. Tethered to the graffitied wall are camels. Lots of camels. I hate camels. A one-eyed man in a dirty gelabiyya and turban is seated outside smoking a hookah with a young boy, maybe four, sitting next to him. A young man in western dress greets us, and shows us one of the stables. The horses do not seem to appreciate the sudden awakening that comes when he flicks on the overhead lights, but they soon calm and seem both friendly and relatively well-cared for. Relatively is, of course, the key phrase. The horses’ condition was something unseen in America (not like I’m an equestrian or anything, but the number of sores on these horses was a good indicator. As was the fact that the last time I saw hip bones that jutted out that much I was looking at a BBC article on Milan’s Fashion Week.), but better than some of the animals I’ve seen reluctantly toting fat American men in shorts and calf-high socks around the Pyramids. We say we’re all four qwayyis, which means okay, riders. Please recall that I’ve never actually ridden a horse. But it’s better than getting stuck with the donkey lying on its side in the dirt courtyard.

We mount our trusty steeds (mine is gray and named Loof) and ride south along dark, silent streets towards the desert. It’s about ten minutes of some of the poorest homes I’ve seen in Cairo. As the one street ends, we make a right at the mosque (similar to turning right at the Crown station for Baltimore natives), ride past a home with two camels tethered in the tiny front courtyard (the camels don’t quite fit in the courtyard), and a cemetery. After another few minutes, everything disappears from our left side. We’ve hit desert.

Desert sand at five in the morning is silver. Pure silver. The navy blue sky above is lavishly full of stars, which rain more silver down on the dunes which roll out in front of us. “Lavishly full,” of course, is another relative statement. On any given night, I don’t see stars in Cairo. One if I’m lucky, but the light pollution, air pollution, and general smog/dust/sand combination make celestial observation something reserved for trips far from the city lights. But this early morning we are far enough from the city lights and surprisingly without haze (for the moment), letting us drink in silver overhead and silver below the hooves that move with grace and a solid certainty across the sand.

We start to ride up a wide, steep path between dunes. It’s not easy. If you’ve never ridden before (really ridden), there are four horse phases: walk, trot, canter, and gallop. Walk is easy. Trotting is a quicker walking with the feet picked up higher, while cantering is like a jog. Trot and canter are ridiculously hard to seat without looking like a complete idiot. You can grip the horse with your thighs and pray to stay seated. You can “post,” which is pretty much anticipating the horse’s up-and-down and overcompensating by standing and sitting ahead of the game. Alternately, you can just bounce like an idiot. I’ll give you three guesses which one I did. (Although in my defense I got much better at the first two in the course of two hours.)

Then, there’s galloping. We have a general handle on my equestrian skills, so there’s little surprise that I managed to look like a fool on Loof’s back. But I did manage to hang on. You can tell when a horse moves from a canter to a gallop because cantering is rough. The horse does it because it’s an easy pace, but the style is unnatural. When a horse moves out of a canter into a gallop there’s a lot less bone-jarring going on (for you and the animal). The strides become fluid and natural, the legs stretch out and the jarring becomes more of a rocking. Horses have no feeling in the hair in their mane and tail. So I hold the reins with one hand and weave the fingers of the other through Loof’s mane, twisting my hand into the thick hair, more to reassure myself than to truly prevent being thrown.

The first time a horse breaks into a gallop, you stop breathing. Terror grips your chest so tight you forget everything but the certainty that you are looking at the last things you will ever see. Moving so fast on something to which you are only tenuously attached directly contradicts several self-preservation instincts. After a few seconds, you become aware of your knees around the horse’s middle, your hands (which are freezing. The desert at night is very cold, even in May.) holding ancient, cracking leather reins and woven through coarse hair, and you manage to breathe a little. Then, due to the combined effects of speed and the dust/dirt/sand kicked up by Loof and the horse no more than six feet in front of him, your eyes stream tears as the wind whips hair all around your face. And slowly, you realize that you are smiling. Not only that, you are grinning like an idiot. Galloping through the desert before the sun even hints that it will rise, you smile up at the stars and laugh.

After an hour of riding around the dunes, exploring down and across a wide, unpaved access road and power lines that stretch endlessly through the desert, you ride up a hill to Medinat al-Sahara, Desert City. It’s quite a city, really. A three-sided structure of concrete blocks about four feet tall is the size of a full bed. Two blankets are across the top, and two men lay on a pile off quilts inside, slightly curled. Just outside this little “tent” are a fire pit and a man with no upper teeth, who asks how many teas we will have. We each have a cup of tea. He grabs four glasses, about the size and shape of juice glasses, and puts two scoops of loose ground tea and five scoops of white sugar into each glass, then pours hot water over it.

The desert is still cold, even though the sky is turning orange, and the too-hot glass feels good on stiff fingers. The horses, too, appreciate standing still. Young Egyptian men break the silence by tearing up this dune and zooming around on ATVs that were once shiny silver but have been dulled to a flat gray. One almost runs me over. Three times. Of all the dunes in the Sahara…. The cloyingly sweet tea tastes good as the sky turns even more orange, and the east turns rosy red. The haze is too thick to see the actual sunrise (this happens a lot in Egypt), so we watch the sky light up as if on fire for a few minutes.

We ride back around the desert for a while, before the two hours we negotiated with our guide (the man in western clothes) are up. We turn north, back towards Cairo, and find ourselves in what can only be described as a narrow, shallow canyon between dunes. The horses take a hint and flick through the trot and canter, wasting little time in getting to a gallop. We race, the horses enjoying the pace just as much as we are. The four horses weave in and out of each other, refusing to back off the pace. And we begin to yell, out of the sheer fact that moving that fast on an animal that powerful is something so beautiful that you can’t use words. Luke, who owns horses of his own, yee-haws. I ululate (although badly), which is a tribal sound women make to express extreme emotion—sorrow or joy. Matt “ya”s to his horse, which is going the fastest of any. Even Mary whoops.

The horses take the roads—now moving with early risers (it’s seven a.m. on a Sunday)—slowly, and we get a little separated. I greet an old, old woman, all in black with deeply creased skin, who returns my greeting and blesses my beauty. I’m flattered in a way that I never am when men on the street whisper unsolicited comments about my beauty.

As we get closer to M.G. Stable, more camels appear. A car (a new-looking Audi, who knows how it got to Egypt, let alone Giza) has bottomed out on an unpaved road. A crowd of about fifteen stands gawking. Including a man in a suit I can only assume is the owner and his well-dressed wife. Why they were driving like this at the edge of the desert in a dirt-poor neighborhood I don’t know. Another woman, all in black, walks along the road alone, carrying on her head a huge metal bin of food ends and other waste. She sees an empty spot on the road, takes the bin off of her head, dumps it in the road, and turns around to walk home.

We return the horses. Loof seems ready to eat. Or sleep. Or do something that doesn’t involve a girl bouncing around on his back while he’s trying to run.

As we walk to get a cab, a boy of about six, his sister who looks eleven, and their mother walk alongside us. I start talking to the boy. His name is Abdelrahman and his mother is taking them both to school this morning. The sister, she whispers to me that her name is Salma, is lucky. In poverty a girl’s education is often low-priority, but she is still going to school. I wish them luck as they walk towards another small mosque that doubles as a primary school.

We fight rush hours traffic taking the cab back, and celebrate a morning among the dunes with a ridiculously large breakfast at Café Tabasco—real American pancakes (you can taste the Bisquik).

Ride in the desert under the stars. Gallop. Yell. I promise you’ll feel alive.

The Land of the Free

Back home. More to follow.