I am not your monkey.

Those of you from SPU recognize this as one of my primary guiding principles through that institution—even if it was occasionally threatened by my tendency to be too nice in the moment, requiring me to backtrack later out of commitments I never wanted to make in the first place.
Nevertheless, at the end of the day, I have always been able to sleep well, knowing that I answer to no one else. I do what I want.

Today, I restate my claim to all overambitious Egyptian mothers, would-be wallet thieves, and opportunistic boys in alleyways: I will not do your bidding, I will not be swayed, I am a fierce, independent woman. I am not your monkey.
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Overambitious Egyptian Mothers

Allow me to introduce you to yet another stock character in Egyptian society: overambitious Egyptian mothers. I had encountered them a few times already, but had escaped unscathed. Example:
Once, I was walking home to the host family in Maasara, looking all business in my suit and shades. Only a few meters from my building, a neighbor woman holding a baby stopped me. She wanted to introduce me to her baby. “Uh, hello there, child.” She then introduced me to her 8 year old son standing beside her. “Good evening, little boy.” I waited for a moment, trying to see what it was that she wanted. She didn’t leave me hanging. “And these,” she says with a dramatic sweep of her arm, “are my two other sons.” Standing across the alley were two guys, maybe in their late teens or early twenties. Ah.
Now, I can appreciate that for a poor Egyptian woman, I represent a walking Green Card and infinite bragging rights for her family. I nodded politely but a bit coldly toward the teenage sons, bid farewell to the mother, and continued walking home. Nothing ever came of this little encounter, except that the 8 year old boy would yell my name whenever I walked by. No harm done.

Yesterday, I met a much more formidable match who promises to complicate life for the coming weeks. I was sitting at my computer at work, putzing around on the internet as both of my directors were out of the office just then, and I hadn’t been given anything to work on. In fact, my whole office was empty—only another intern was with me, and she was messing around with a sudoku from the daily newspaper.

A woman in her late 40s, with bleach blonde hair, gobbed black mascara, and bright pink nails came to the door. She greeted us in timid English. Now, people stop by our office all the time to socialize or discuss a point of business with my other co-workers. I always smile, greet them, and turn back to my work. I did the same with our new visitor, whom I had never seen before. She kept hanging out in the doorway, though, trying to start some chitchat. My fellow intern was feigning intense interest in her Soduko and left me to face her alone.

As soon as I turned back around, her heavily make-up’d face lit up. Apparently, she had seen me in the building before and had asked around until she found out which department I worked in. She was so excited to meet the American intern. She loves America. She rattles off a list of relatives living there and the cities that she’s visited. She shows me pictures of America on her camera phone.

The other intern raises her eyebrows in concern. What is this woman doing here? She knows better than to attract attention around a crazy person, though, so she pretends to go to sleep on her desk. I’m not sure exactly how to get rid of this woman, who works in another department upstairs and is definitely my superior when it comes to the pecking order. And aside from being an American stalker, has yet to state her purpose in tracking me down--though I suspected I knew exactly why she was here.

“And you know, my son works in America—he works for Boeing in Seattle.” Bingo.
She shows me a picture, which was taken somewhere near south Lake Union. Seeing a picture of my beloved gloomy city lowered my defenses a bit, I’ll admit.
“He’s coming back to Egypt tomorrow for a two week visit. He’d love to meet you.” I’m sure he would.
“He loves American girls, with their blue eyes, but he’s too shy. He wants to marry an Egyptian girl, but he’s never here very long.”
I see. With blue-eyed Egyptian girls in short supply, I see that I’m the next best thing.
“He would love to meet you. Perhaps you can give me your phone number?”
Over my dead body I can.
But what to say to another employee at work? Plus, she has me trapped in my own office—I can’t very well invent an excuse to get up and leave.
I settle by giving her my email address instead, claiming (as is true) that my Egyptian cellphone generally gets terrible reception.
“By the way, you’re not engaged, are you?”
I groan inwardly.

It took me going upstairs with her to her office and drinking a cup of tea to finally be able to shake her off. During the latter part of our conversation, she sensed my unease and decided to start talking up the other fine points of her family—a family she seems to hope I’ll want to marry into. She started insisting that I meet her daughter, too—as well as inviting me to travel with her family to Sharm el-Sheikh over the weekend.
Her daughter looks like an Egyptian Paris Hilton and apparently does advertising for all of the major designers in Egypt. This woman apparently fails to realize that her daughter—who was educated in the states—would take one look at me and realize that I was hopelessly middle class. What would I possibly talk about with someone like her?

As with all of my co-workers, being American has launched me into an Egyptian social stratosphere that I don’t actually belong to. My friends at work regularly vacation in southern France and have an entirely designer wardrobe financed by their parents. Living on a budget of $200 USD a month here (which includes rent), as I am, is outside of their comprehension.

In any case. I can tell that our blonde, opportunistic friend is going to give me a run for my money on the “not your monkey” front—if for no other reason than that she can stop by my office any time she damn well pleases. Agh.

Speaking of engagements—hardly 24 hours after my conversation with our blonde, conniving friend, I received another serious marriage proposal. This time it was from a co-worker at the language center where I teach in the evenings. The office staff there is all very fun—young, lively, with a wicked sense of humor. I don’t have that much time to hang out with them though—I teach for 6 hours straight the evenings when I’m there, with no breaks in between. So aside from a few minutes before and after my classes, I’m mostly with my students.

The fact that I’ve interacted with him for a whole of 20 minutes in my life hasn’t deterred the office manager, however. He told another one of my female co-workers that he wanted to get engaged with me. She asked him if he was serious—he said he was. She told him he was crazy—he said ok, but that he wanted her to talk to me right then and there.
I was in one of the classrooms, frantically prepping for 6 hours of class and trying to soothe some vicious stomach cramps I had been afflicted with all day (so much for my experiment with drinking the local water!). I had about 15 minutes or so until class.

My friend sat down. Ahmed wants to marry you. What?? She asked me what I thought. Framing my question in a way that would make sense to the culture, I told her that my parents would not approve of the match. Ah, she said. No problem. I will tell him.
Right then, Ahmed knocks on the door, bringing me a cup of Nescafe that I had asked for. He looks breathlessly at my friend, who shakes her head no. He looks back at me, smiles, and leaves the room. He didn’t seem shaken in the slightest.
“Is this going to be awkward between him and I now?” I ask her. “Oh no, don’t worry about it,” she assures me.
True enough, when I leave that night, things seem normal as normal can be.

At home later that night, I relayed the day’s strange events to my roommate E. E. started laughing—she had been proposed to that night by one of her co-workers at another language center, too. While popping the question, he had apparently also asked her if she was a virgin or not. E. balked at the bluntness of the question—especially since she had already made it very clear that she would not be marrying him anyway—and they ended up arguing and spending a good half hour in total silence.
i'm glad my proposal was at least less awkward than that!
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Would-be Wallet Thieves

Hardly an hour after I had finally escaped the overambitious mother’s office, I left work for the day and headed to the neighborhood of Maadi, where I have Arabic class. I went to the downtown metro station, which is only 50 meters from the front door of work. I opened my purse—which was stuffed full, as usual, with papers, food, water bottles….anything and everything. I paid the 1 pound ticket. I went over to the wall to get my iPod out and put my money away, safely away from crowds who might reach into my purse. Egypt is extremely safe—but precaution never hurts, right?

I go through the turnstile and wait for the metro. Now, at this point, I can’t remember if I zipped my purse shut again or not. By the time I boarded the train, though, I know that my purse was zipped shut. It was so crowded that I actually ended up hugging my purse to create more space for people to stand around me.

6 stops later, I got off at the Maadi station. I had forgotten my pencil at home, and my Arabic teacher always throws a fit if I use a pen. So I mailed off a letter at the post office next door and headed to a stationary store to buy a pencil. It was then that I opened my purse… and realized that my wallet was gone. Gone. I began tearing through the contents of my purse, emptying them out on the floor in the vain hope that it might have been tucked underneath something else. Nope, it’s not there.

I contemplated throwing an inner temper tantrum, and check myself—getting upset won’t help anything. I sigh, and ask the employees what the best thing to do is.
I went back to the metro station, where a police officer is always stationed. Maybe they can see if I just dropped it at the downtown station, or if someone has returned it. I meet a man in the police office named Ayman—he speaks pretty good English, and takes on my predicament with interest. After calling around to a few different metro stations, he says that we need to go to the police station to file a report.
Really? The police in Egypt are famously 1. Inept 2. Corrupt and 3. Inefficient. Whoever has my wallet is long gone, I figured. How could the police find it, even if they wanted to?
Ayman says it will be good anyway to have a police report, just in case later problems with identity fraud or the like arise. Alright, alright. So we get on the metro, and ride two stops to the Tura police station. I’ve never seen anything like this: once we arrived at the Tura station, we didn’t exit—we more or less jumped off of the platform and walked in the sand along the tracks for 200 meters or so, over garbage and broken glass and the like. To our left was a brick wall with tree branches growing over the top. The trees were hiding the entrance to the police station, which suddenly appeared behind a tall black gate in the wall.

A guard was standing behind the gate, and at first, didn’t look like he’d let us in. Ayman talked to him and after a few minutes, he reluctantly opened the gate. Inside this small compound, police officers are milling around, looking at us curiously. I hold my head up high and walk in (wearing heels and my whole daily work getup) like I’m about to give orders, rather than file a report. Whatever happens, it’s going to happen with confidence.

We found an officer sitting in an office; I told him what happened through Ayman’s translation. After 15 minutes or so of questions back and forth, he sent us upstairs to a second office. The man here was definitely higher ranking than the first. He reads English well enough but can’t speak it with much proficiency, so he has me write my statement out in English. We spend at least 45 minutes with him. Then he sends us upstairs to a third office. A man was sitting behind a dusty, cluttered desk, not wearing a uniform. I really have no idea who he is—if this were about anything more important than having $15 and my drivers’ license stolen, I wouldn’t be trusting much of anything to him.
There was a poster for some American muscle car on the wall behind him, along with an evil eye and verses from the Qur’an. He had Ayman help him translate my statement and took all of my contact information.
In all, it had turned into a 2 hour ordeal. Aside from Ayman being a fairly pleasant assistant, I felt that it’s mostly been a pointless exercise.
Nevertheless, I did what I could—found the police, filed a report. If I got my wallet stolen, I’m not going to take it laying down.
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Opportunistic boys in alleyways

As soon as I left the police station, I got on the metro to head to Maasara, where I would be attending a wedding with my host family. I was still keeping an even mind about the whole wallet thing—there are hardly any places to use credit cards in Egypt, and I can cancel them, anyway, so that’s not much of a risk. I’ll need to re-order my drivers’ license and health insurance cards, etc. And I was sad to lose the wallet itself, which I bought from a market in Madrid and have a special affinity towards. But my passport was safe at home, and there was no permanent harm done—just inconvenience.

I was musing over all of this, trying to think of the exact contents of my wallet to think through what I would need to replace. I was deep in thought. I wove through the dusty streets in Maasara (no wonder I had the black lung, I thought—Maasara really is much dustier than the rest of Cairo) and through a small alleyway that connected me to the street my host family lived on. In this alleyway, I passed a 10 year old boy and his older brother. As I passed them by, the 10 year old boy reached out and grabbed my arm.

I stopped. Men are NEVER supposed to touch you here, and really, never do. Even in the most crowded metro cars or sidewalks, men and women take special care to navigate around each other—even if the men have no problem catcalling at you at the same moment. I’ve never actually been grabbed in Egypt before—on my arm or anywhere else. And he picked a bad time to do so.

Now, I fancy myself a born-again pacifist—but, as my critics will readily point out, the label doesn’t mean much since it really has never been tested. And in that moment, as I whirled around to face this wide-eyed little boy, I swear that if he had been a few inches closer I would have smacked him upside the head. Luckily for all of us, he had already scooted past me. “Go away!” I yelled in Arabic, the fiercest phrase I have in my limited arsenal. I didn’t feel any better.

The wedding took place on a tiny dirt street a few blocks away from the family’s home. Green, red, and yellow light bulbs were strung between the building, and a velvet throne had been placed on a platform for the bride and groom. Um Hani, our host mom, had done all of the cooking for the event. We were very excited. As the men were dancing and the women trilling, my phone rang.

It was my boss. He said that a woman called him, saying that she had found my wallet. His business card is the only thing in my wallet in Arabic, which is why she had contacted him. She was going to bring the wallet to work in the morning.
Praise God. Now, if only I could find a way to un-cancel my credit cards…..

Midway through the wedding, after we had all stuffed ourselves with Egyptian-style lasagna, kofta, and some half dozen bottles of fanta, the women all went inside to have our own dance party. My host sisters pushed me into the middle of the circle. “Watch the American belly dance!” And—alright, for a good cause I’ll do it—like a good little monkey, I performed my role as my family’s show-and-tell.

Whew. Holding your own in Egypt is not easy to do.