 "Photo: Deirdre Offenheiser '11")
 "Photo: Deirdre Offenheiser '11")
Six a.m. Sunday morning finds me repeatedly pressing the snooze button for the alarm on my phone, willing its shrill rendition of the March of the Sugar Plum Faeries to stop so that I can sleep for a few more minutes before getting dressed and take the seven a.m. bus to my campus in the desert. I’m finally motivated to get up by the fact that I chose this routine.
The housing form that I submitted to the American University program in Cairo (AUC) last spring, in which I listed my preference for the dorm off-campus, guaranteed me a 45-minute morning commute to my 8:30 a.m. Arabic class. Once settled on the bus, bleary-eyed with Arabic vocabulary or political science readings opened up in my lap, I stare out the window as we leave the diplomatic community in which my dorm is situated and pass over the bridge across the Nile towards AUC’s two-year-old campus in the developing suburbs outside of the city.
I arrived in Cairo for the first time this August with two suitcases and very little sense of the time of day. I was eager to make the most of my one semester abroad by seeing as much as possible, and went out exploring with new friends during the first couple of days of our orientation. We quickly found that there was no end to places to visit. Egypt is saturated with history and it’s startling that you can pass by the café where Gamal Abdel Nasser planned the revolution and view the jewelry that King Tutankhamen hoped to bring to the afterlife in the same afternoon.
In addition to seeking out Cairo’s famous tourist sites, we set out to get to know the city by checking Anthony Bordain’s website for restaurant recommendations and testing our limited colloquial Egyptian Arabic with taxi drivers and waiters. Hina coyis. Here’s good. Ayza izehza maya kabir. I would like a big bottle of water. After a short period of time, we found that new situations were not so daunting as long as we expected to get lost a few times and were both respectful and persistent in trying to communicate.
My fair skin and light brown hair make me somewhat conspicuous here. In certain Cairo neighborhoods I find myself walking down the street to a chorus of “Welcome to Egypt!” sometimes in a variety of different European languages. This attention was strange at first, as I am mostly unused to feeling like the other—albeit a welcomed other. Though I’m fully committed to improving my ability to communicate in Arabic as well my understanding of the history and politics of the region, I’ve become used to the idea that this feeling of relative otherness is a part of living within another culture. In Egypt, I will always be an unveiled Western woman.
Most study abroad students’ desire to further explore Egypt and the Middle East is facilitated by a two-week break mandated by the Egyptian government to reduce the chance of spreading swine flu. AUC students exploited the suspension of classes by traveling to Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan, among other places. I planned a trip with a group of nine friends to Siwa in Lower Egypt (counter-intuitively, Lower Egypt refers to Northern Egypt and vice versa, as these terms refer to the direction of the flow of the Nile) and spent two days and two nights on a safari in the desert.
While in Siwa we visited and drank tea with a Coptic couple whose 12-year-old son turned over his wrist to reveal the cross tattooed beneath his palm and explained that his sister wouldn’t get one because she was afraid of needles. On another day, when we were sitting in the center of town, we were reminded of the far reach of American popular culture when a teenage boy in a traditional galabiya approached us to show off his cell phone ringtone—the rap song “Cyclone.”
Though we had a positive experience during the break prompted by preventative measures for swine flu, the government’s proactive attitude may complicate this semester. Sneezes and minor illness are viewed with some suspicion in Egypt this fall. A friend who visited the AUC clinic to see someone about a red vein running along one side of her eye was puzzled when the attending nurse began to ask her whether she had experienced various seemingly unrelated symptoms. Was she constipated? Did she have a headache? Was she feeling feverish? Once the nurse established that my friend did not, in fact,have swine flu, she assured her that her eye was nothing to worry about and sent her home. This episode illustrates the widespread anxiety over the idea of the spread of this disease.
The threat of H1N1 and the possibility that our Central American-born pandemic may further disrupt the academic year colors university life and sits quietly in the back of most people’s minds, the proverbial elephant in the room poised to knock over the furniture. AUC recently reported its first positive case of swine flu and reacted by suspending the infected student’s classes for one week. If multiple cases emerge, the administration may be forced to close down the entire university for an extended period of time.
The highway that cuts through rows of aging apartment buildings topped with armies of satellite dishes all tilted the same direction and a collection of billboards advertises soft drinks. Long stretches of empty desert finally give way to the road that encircles the new city growing outside of Cairo and passes rising shopping malls and housing developments. At around 7:45 a.m., the first bus pulls into AUC’s parking lot. Though I’m by now used to this trip, I continue to try to be open-minded and prepared for new experiences each day. As we were reminded by our Bedouin guide in Siwa, “You never say no in the desert, you only say okay.”
Be the first to comment on this article!