Alissa, in Egypt?

After eating my second Ramadan "breakfast" in a series of four in a row that I have been invited to this week, I have the sense of being a calf fattened for slaughter.

Friday night was spent with several of my co-workers in a poor neighborhood near the pyramids. The table was heaped with meat, soup, bread, salad, and plates of this fantastic sticky coconut dessert. Despite the Egyptians' best efforts, however, my stomach remains obstinately too small to possibly digest everything they pile onto my plate. Happily, the family on Friday was eventually convinced with my cries of "I'm full! I'm happy! Please, no more!" and they let me stop eating before my stomach ruptured.

Last night, however, they would not take "no" for an answer. Visiting the family of a beloved female co-worker (Sally, a feisty and complex character with impeccable English, who would be a natural friend no matter what country I encountered her in), I was made to eat the following over the course of two hours:

Dates in hot milk, 2 large pieces of rabbit, lentil soup, a garlic leafy soup, meat turnovers, cucumber yogurt salad, rice with pasta mixed in it, grape leaves stuffed with rice, eggplants stuffed with rice, homemade pita bread, 2 scoops of ice cream, pancakes soaked with corn syrup and filled with whipped cream, 7-up, fruit juice, and Egyptian tap water (so far, so good on that front).

"Full" doesn't even begin to describe it. The mix of excruciating pain from overly-full bellies and pleasure from eating delicious food with friends is all part of the joy of Ramadan.

On another point, which I am soon to relate back to my tales of digestive festivities:

Many of you have asked me, "Now, Walter, you're the kind of girl who's always hung with the guys, who has had no scruples about wearing mini skirts on a Christian campus, smoking cigars, or hashing out politics over a beer. You've been rankled by relatively softcore gender roles pushed in certain Christian circles. What in the world are you going to do in a Muslim country with conservative and explicit gender roles?"

Now, depending on the person who's asking, I might instead counter by busting myths about gender in Egypt—how women attend university in droves, work as professionals, drive and dress with more freedom than most in the West imagine when they think of majority-Muslim countries—implying that gender is hardly a constraint to me as I go about my daily life.

Now, that is somewhat true. On the one hand, gender roles here are different than what the West assumes. It's also true that as a foreigner and a Christian who appears to be "upper class" within the society, I am not held to the same standards as most Egyptian women. Without Egyptian parents to keep an eye on my honor, I freely associate with Egyptian guy friends, walk about by myself at night, and shrug off questions about my marital status without too much worry.

The truth is, though, that all of these things stack against my reputation here. Even with the extra dispensation afforded to me by the culture for being a foreigner, I'm sure that our door man thinks that we're running a brothel upstairs, and without a doubt there's more than one circle in Cairo that considers me a "bad" woman.

Sally and I spoke frankly last night about Egyptian standards for women, and the conflicting set of expectations that I face as being both a foreigner, but a woman who's living here for the long term.

Sally has a university degree and works full time. Nevertheless, she must come straight home from work, isn't allowed to meet up with girlfriends outside the house, and can't even discuss male colleagues in front of her father without creating problems. I had invited her to come to my apartment before, but she wasn't allowed to go. Sally's parents are overly strict, even within the Egyptian context, but the attitudes underlying their rules are absolutely the norm.

As Sally described it: unmarried women should mostly stay in the house, be quiet and obedient, and help with cooking and cleaning. Once they're married, they should stay in the house, be quiet and obedient, and do the cooking, cleaning, and childrearing. In this view, there's not a lot of incentive to permit your daughters to run about in the streets, especially with the risk of shame and poor reputations that could be acquired in the process.

In another example, my 16 year old host sister was recently embroiled in a small-scale scandal. She was in the street with two girl friends from school. One of the other girls began talking to a boy that she knew that drove by in his car. Someone from my host sister's church saw Sara standing near a girl who was talking to a boy in the street, and began spreading rumors that Sara was a "bad woman." Never mind that Sara herself wasn't actually talking to a boy, or that talking to a boy in the street is something even worthy of scandal. It was enough that Sara and her mother had to go and confront this church member in the attempt to set the record straight—lest the family's reputation take a hit or Sara have difficulty getting married in a few years.

In contrast, while eating "breakfast" with several male co-workers on Friday (and the only female coworker in attendance), I smoked in front of our host's Egyptian family, crashed an all-male coffee shop on the street, played pool, took a boat ride on the Nile with some guys friends well after midnight, and stayed up with them until 3am at a park near my house, swapping stories from the Bible and the Qur'an. And it felt great.

While timid to push back on gender norms when by myself or with other foreigners, all of the doors are open when accompanied with Egyptian guys. Whenever I nervously ask them, "Are you sure it's ok for me to do this? There aren't any other women here." They shrug and tell me not to worry so much. Easy for them to say. Their honor isn't on the line.

While my reputation might take a hit, no one will say anything to me so long as I'm with Egyptian men—even as I sit with the lone pair of ovaries in the middle of a crowded all-male café. I have to admit, it feels pretty fantastic to be able to occasionally be "one of the guys" here still in Egypt. I wasn't sure at first if it would ever be possible to do so in the Middle East.

My recent and mild rebellion has been part of a pendulum swing reaction to the culture, to be sure—from my "Pollyanna" post a few weeks ago to my road trip to Alexandria with our guy friends last week. The biggest challenge in adjusting to the culture here is to battle out the war for your mind. What is cultural sensitivity, and what is selling out your identity? How can I be Alissa, in Egypt? To what extent should I internalize the culture; to what extent can I push back against what I don't like?
It's a question to wrestle with every day.