on growing up.

Merry Christmas, my friends! 

I hope that all of you were able to find moments of love and thankfulness over the past few days, regardless of the circumstances of your holiday.

Now, I have a thing for milestones. Give me any achievement, magnificent to mundane, that I can sort of use to demarcate my time on this globe, and I feel a whole lot happier. Maybe it's just a way to kid myself into feeling in control; maybe it's just a history major tic. 

Since graduation (another milestone marker), I've been celebrating each identifiable step towards adulthood, no matter how big or small. From first time I shelled out the cash to buy my own international ticket to Egypt, or successfully filed my income taxes (though on a Collision Clinic Carstar income, that didn't actually involve very much...),  or took time off work to watch the birth of my host sister's child, I've felt that much more like I just might have a bit of the independence, foresight, and maturity to begin to handle what lives throws at us.

Still, it was clear to all that I had some major deficits. The kitchen, for instance. Until I can emerge from that accursed room without burns on my hands or ruined food scraped into the garbage, no one will be calling me up to host Thanksgiving anytime soon. Or general hygiene, perhaps. When you think that a layer of clothes on your bedroom floor is a cheap alternative to carpet, you're probably more at a 13 year-old level than a 30. Also, when you've had a layer of Egyptian perma-dirt on your feet for 2 weeks and counting, you'd better just count your blessings that your boyfriend probably is rocking Ethiopian perma-dirt on his feet, too, and won't be immediately disgusted. Or at least, you hope so..

But coming home for Christmas, I suddenly felt myself emerge from my adolescent cocoon into the role of "adult child." I have to say, it's a much nicer state to be in, even if it involved waxing a bit domestic. Christmas Eve morning, my family was all in a rush to get the house clean for a Christmas party and the arrival of my sister and brother-in-law. In an earlier time, this would mostly involve my parents bribing, cajoling, and demanding with exasperation that we please pitch in with cleaning up the basement, washing dishes, vacuuming Christmas tree needles. As the years progressed, my whining diminished proportionately, but more in the role of obedient child than contributing adult. 

This Christmas eve, I woke up early (jet lag has turned me into a ninny. I apparently readjusted to American time, but somehow to the West coast, rather than the Midwest. I now go to sleep at 10pm and wake up at 6:30), cleaned up my boxes in the basement, made Christmas cookies (using a rolling pin! Take that, dark gods of the kitchen!), watered the Christmas tree, did the laundry, and did two loads of dishes.... all because I simply noticed that it needed to be done. 

And then, in the greatest miracle of all: I made a lasagna. 

The perk of having adult daughters in the house is that we've all now progressed to the level where we can have quality female time in the form of half-day spa packages rather than a trip to Dairy Queen. Yesterday my sisters and my mom went to get massages, facials, and nails done (courtesy of a Christmas present from my dad...thanks, dad!)--and let me say that, while I am delightedly content with my simpler, cheaper life in Egypt, massages are pretty terrific. I won't complain.

I am getting soft during my stay at home, though. Kilos of Mint M&Ms, mountains of Christmas cookies, and liters of eggnog have added a bit to the waistline; the ability to instantly access my car or the internet or American food at any moment I so desire has in one week melted away my mental and physical toughness that's taken 6 months to cultivate in Egypt. I feel like a monk fudging his vows.

Emails, text messages, and even a phone call Christmas morning from my Egyptian friends have done a lot to keep me grounded, though. It's easy to simply run away from those relationships once you're on home soil and an ocean and a Sahara away. They're keeping me honest. I'm going back to Egypt, and that will be a good thing. I'm glad to be able to store up all my observations of this transition to better prepare for when I'm leaving Cairo for good.

In the meantime, there are cookies to be made and casseroles to be baked (ha-just kidding. I can do it, kind of [ok, so the cookies were burnt on the bottom, big deal], but that doesn't mean i like it any better) and I hope that you are all likewise enjoying your time off. Merry Christmas, wa kula sana wa intu tayyibeen. 

Abraham.

It occurred to me tonight, as I basked in the warm (partially alcohol induced) glow of a Christmas party with old friends--all in the name of preparation for the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ--that I neglected to blog about the Biblical figure that got this whole Prophetic ball rolling.

In the beginning, there was Abraham. (In the end, there were Arab-Israeli clashes in Bethlehem and fistfights in the holiest church in Jerusalem--but anyway, politics are for another day.) The story goes that Abraham lived somewhere out in the desert, possibly in Iraq. He was minding his own business until God came to him and told him to pack up and start traveling, no destination or questions asked. Abraham obeyed. Then God promised him that his descendants were going to one day form a great nation. Great--Abraham was pumped. Only, the years went by, and there was no junior to carry on his name, much less spring for a DIY throne kit. Hmm. Finally, when Abraham and his wife are nearing 100 years old (give or take), his wife gives birth to a son. Ah. See, God provides, right? Only, then God commands Abraham to go up on a mountain and sacrifice his son. Hmm.

In this great story of faith, which is the cornerstone of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Abraham reluctantly agrees to do God's will, in spite of God's promise for descendants and his own love for his son. He has the knife raised and is about to do the deed--when God stops him, says, "Well done," and gives him a sheep to sacrifice instead.

(Of course, I'm not doing this justice in the retelling. Consider checking Soren Kirekegaard's "Fear and Trembling" for much more thoughtful treatment of the story. Or, you know, the Bible for the original)

This is the monumental moment in human history to commemorate. For better or worse, Muslims commemorate it with a country-wide sheep slaughter. Beautiful in its symbolism, it is unfortunately a bit smelly in practice.

The deal is that for every family that can afford it, you need to sacrifice a cow, or a sheep, or a goat, or maybe even a camel. Then, on the big day, you go down to the butcher shop (which has been doubling as a small farm for the past few weeks, with a whole barnyard of animals tethered outside) and watch your family's animal be slaughtered.

The problem is in the math. 20 million Egyptians in Cairo = 4 million families = 4 million simultaneous ritual sacrifices. They do their best to keep it hygienic, but navigating Cairo that day required sidestepping piles of sheep heads and small pools of blood. Here's a pile for the skin, another pile for the intestines, another pile for unidentifiable white blobs (fat?), another for the feet...

I spent Eid al-Adha with my dear friend Sally and her family. Normally she meets me at the metro station, and we then take a tuktuk to her house. On a beautiful, crisp and quiet winter morning, we decided to walk. Egypt had woken up early to pray on this holy day, and now were inside with their families, or gathered around the local butcher shop for their sacrifices. Walking gave me a chance to observe this all up close. Now, in truth, the day was not as gruesome as I had been warned. I had imagined a sacrifice in front of each family's home, with blood running ankle-deep in the streets--not the case. The decision to do all the slaughters at the butcher's was a good call.

The butchers were working furiously. Slaughtering a cow (or sheep, or goat, or camel) is no easy task, either. Holding the animal down, cutting its neck, removing the skin (which starts by making a cut and then blowing into it to whoomp, force a bit of air between the skin and body to make it easier to cut off. Genius, but whoever does the blowing comes up looking like they, well, just made out with a piece of raw meat), cleaning it, cutting it--and here they were, hour after hour. Sally said they work all day, then sleep all week. I would never want to see another sheep again.

I must say, that watching pens of cute little sheep all lined up for weeks before the holiday reminded me more of live nativity scenes than a foreshadow for the ritualistic bloodbath to come. I sort of felt an urge to rescue the toddlers all dressed up in their cute little sheep costumes at my church's Christmas pageant, lest they accidently be mistaken for an Abrahamic sacrifice....no, no, Timmy, now is not a good time to be walking around in that adorable little sheep fleece...

Later that day, I watched the entire process from start to finish from Sally's window. A cow was standing in the street, complaining loudly as it got a clue about its ultimate and approaching fate. We watched the men take it down, bleed it, prepare the meat, and then distribute it to the family and the poor who were waiting for a charitable portion of their own. I think it's the first time I've watched something sentient die. Part of me wanted to keep my innocence about death ("meat comes from the grocery store, right?"), but I made myself watch the whole thing, never turning my head away. In the end, death didn't actually seem like that big of a deal. The cow was alive, but now it's meat. That's ok.

What wasn't ok was what ended up on my plate that night: little sheep hooves and beef chitlins. The worst part was that the chitlins were actually delicious, but I feel barbaric for admitting that. Even though I enjoyed them, I wouldn't let myself eat more than a few bites. Just too weird to think about. The little sheep paws were a little unnerving, too. Apparently the English word for this delicacy is: "trotters." Cute...but then, actually not really at all.

Despite some new and jarring experiences, the whole of Eid al-Adha was deeply peaceful for me. It felt very quiet and holy to take a few days of rest along with 80 million Egyptians across the entire country (much less with the 1 billion Muslims worldwide who were celebrating along with us) to commemorate a story that we both hold in common. Perhaps there is hope for a unity between these fractured faiths.

In any case, a moment to reflect upon Abraham and Muslim-Christian unity felt appropriate as part of our Christmas preparations. For well over two billion humans on the planet, Abraham and Jesus are both precious names and inspiring figures. Somehow, I feel renewed and reassured by that. Christmas blessings for us, one and all.

The saga of the Christmas Tree.

What was that I was saying about life at home being mundane?

Welcome to the adventures of the Walter sisters in the frozen tundra of Chicago. I hear that Seattle is calling it the "snowpocalypse." Charming, except that it was -26 degrees today in Palatine. We win.

I would like to say, though, that living in the Pacific Northwest and Egypt for the past 5 years is enough to make me lose my midwest cred. My sister and I went out in the arctic freeze to finish our Christmas shopping today. Terribly ill-equipped for Chicago winters after turning my closet Seattle-hipster-esque, my converse sneakers kept my toes from going numb for all of 2 minutes, and I had an Islamic hijab wrapped around my throat like a scarf to try to keep me warm. My Chicago-native little sister? -26 degrees, and she wore a knee-length cotton skirt. No pants. No longjohns. No parka. I was owned.

Tragically, my parents are out in Seattle (my homeland away from home) for the weekend, braving a Seahawks game in the snow out there. A family that freezes together, stays together, right?

Right before my dad left, as I was dying from the stomach flu and buried under a mountain of blankets (which seems to be the posture of the month, thanks to two cases of food poisoning and this recent funk), he suddenly remembered that it was December 20th, and we had no Christmas tree. Whoops. "Hey, liss, do you think you and Lauren could go pick up a tree this weekend?"

Sure, dad, once I'm able to stand without doubling over to retch into the snowbanks.

Feeling better the following morning, though, the challenge was on. Here we are: a 16 year old and 23 year old, both 5 foot five and uh, not about to intimidate any linebackers anytime soon, and it was our mission to find a 7 foot tree, tie it to the roof of my mom's minivan, get it down, and screw it into the christmas tree stand. The Christmas tree stand, I should mention, that my dad accidently left outside before the last big snowfall. Read: buried in an unidentified location under a foot of snow somewhere in the front yard. This was going to be epic.

Bracing ourselves with a cup of hot chocolate, we scraped off the seagreen mini-van and skidded down the icy streets to downtown Palatine, looking for the Christmas tree lot. When we arrived, there was no one there. A dozen or so trees were laying on their side, the untouchables of the unwanted Christmas trees. Peculiar. 

As we trudged through 6 inches of snow to examine the fallen Christmas trees (again, in my converse sneakers...not doing the trick, I'm afraid), a woman emerged from a heated trailer/office thing. Oh, you mean most people have bought their Christmas trees already, before December 20th? We have 15 minutes to buy one or they're gone? Right....ah, that one looks good.

What normally is an hour long ritual of comparing branch thickness, fatness, general shape (pear is nicest, I think), color, and feng shui, we settled in about 15 seconds. A man came by with a hand saw. "Do you want a fresh cut?" he asked me.

"Yes. No. I mean, I don't think we need one. Do we? Um, whatever you think. I've never bought a Christmas tree before," I blurted out like an underage kid in a liquor store.

A man in an autographed (?) blue coat held together by bits of duct tape walked up. I think he was the owner. Happily, he gave us lots of advice (yes, fresh cut), instructions (boiling water in the stand the first day, 7-up after that), and strange pointers (wait to decorate until the second day, when the needles apparently all lay down?). 

The first man sawed off the end of the tree then lifted the puppy by himself and started walking it towards our car. Hmm, uh, we didn't bring any rope...Lauren, can you try to put the seats down?

Looking entirely incompetent, we finally managed to wedge the tree into our backseat. Safely back in the car with Christmas carols blaring on the radio, we giggled. $20 and 5 minutes later, we had bought our very own Christmas tree. 

The next challenge was unearthing the tree stand. We surveyed the frozen landscape. The front yard was coated in an even layer of new, uninterrupted snow. Why my dad put our Christmas tree stand outside was beyond me. Near the garage door, I saw a small lump. Perhaps that was it. We boiled a pot of hot water and started pouring it around the snow until a piece of it emerged. Eureka! Treasure hunting in the snow. New holiday tradition, maybe? I went to get a shovel to start unburying it, but totally wiped out on a patch of black ice in the process. Ok, this was actually starting to get old.

Once the snow was cleared off, we realized that it was actually frozen to the ground and filled with ice in the center. Three pots of boiling water and lots of hacking later, we finally broke off all the last bits of dirt. Now, the unhappiest half hour of the entire year for the Walter family is setting up the Christmas tree in the stand. It always includes lots of near-swearing, unnecessary shouts of precautions to watch out for that picture frame or that window, lots of contradicting shouts to move it further to the right or the left. Knowing that the task must be formidable, I was a little nervous. 

Lauren and I went back to the van to unwedge our tree from the back seat. For a hasty selection, it's actually quite attractive--nice, fat, and pear shaped. Just how I like 'em. We carried in the tree and set it in the stand. Lauren held it as I shimmied along the floor under the tree to reach the screws. Four screws tightened. We stood back to check out work. Perfect. Done. 4 minutes flat--take that, dad. We celebrated with Jimmy Johns and Chinese delivery (my sister, ever the picky eater, ordered a cheese sandwich. Not even toasted or grilled. Just two pieces of cold cheese on bread. Lauren, c'mon, I could have made that for you--I have some culinary skills!)

Thus ended the saga of the Christmas tree--we decorated it last night and it's now standing plump and pretty in the corner of our living room. Christmas wishes to you all--I hope you're keeping warm!

On American microbes, and other Egyptian-American differences.

Dear readers.

Despite my recent food poisoning spree in Egypt, I would like to posit that American germs (fittingly, in an 'up-by-the-bootstraps' capitalist country) are much more aggressive than their Middle Eastern counterparts. I don't know if it's the crumbling economy that's making our patriotic microbes so gung-ho and desperate, but I do know that every time I return to the USA after a stint abroad, I get leveled by some mean little virus every time. When I came home from Egypt 2 years ago, I was laid out by a spinach salad for a week. Now, you could say, "Alissa, but isn't that because that spinach salad was your first fresh fruit and/or vegetable in 4 months?" Details, my friends, mere details. 

Yesterday I woke up at 3am--after a trifling 72 hours stateside--with the stomach flu, courtesy of my little sister. 7 hours on the bathroom floor, 6 episodes of the BBC's "The Office", 18 hours of sleep and 5 pounds later, I'm once again back on my feet (minus some occasional and bizarre gurgling sounds from my belly, but they've yet to manifest themselves in any scary way). American germs be damned. I'd be happy if I'm never that sick again.

The past few days have just melted together, like the delectable cheese of Chicago stuffed pizzas...(of which I've eaten 3 pieces since coming home). Now, this is the nature of vacations in general, but I'm having a hard time demarcating time. I can't hear the Muezzin's call to prayer slink up to my window, counting off the hours of the day. My roommates aren't here to bustle around at their appointed hours after coming home from work, grad school, or Arabic class. The propane tank vendor can't wake me up at 6am every Saturday by banging on his cans in the street. (Ok, so I don't necessarily miss that!) Rather, the days just sort of gently drift by me, unaccounted for. 

Actually, I suppose this is exactly the sort of vacation I was looking for, one where I didn't need to be thinking constantly about how I was going to meet my needs: feed myself, clothe myself, clean myself, shop for myself, navigate the sidewalks and the traffic, communicate, dodge the screeching cats. Two brimming refrigerators and an overstocked pantry (why do we have so much food??) sit here like ripe figs for the picking. I can just sort of help myself to whatever I want, whenever I want it. Bizarre. Luxurious. Bizarre. 

Not to be a total glutton, I have spent the past few days doing more than munching: playing viola, plunking out the 4 songs I know on the piano, reading George Orwell's essays and Salman Rushdie's 'enchantress of florence', preparing Christmas gifts, making phone calls that don't involve 15 second delays on skype, going out to Caribou Coffee with old friends. Writing an analysis of chapter 31 of Huckleberry Finn for a T.A. at Cairo University I forgot to do before I left Egypt... 

As much as the normalcy of life in Palatine has been very welcome after 6 somewhat frazzling (though lovely) months in Egypt, I'm grateful that I'll be returning to the bizarre and mundane adventures that come with life abroad. I always think back to my saga of the Tetanus shot...true, if I stepped on a nail in America, I would have a much better idea of how to take care of it, and could have done so with less hassle (but paid a lot more!). But you just learn a lot about yourself when you're dependent on strangers and a shared set of 30 vocabulary words, and in the end, you feel like you've lived just a little bit more.

Now, I don't want to become one of those weird ex-pats-for-life, who become so addicted to that sense of adventure that they don't realize 1. they've completely romanticized their host culture and generally look like doofuses as they live from "cultural moment" to "cultural moment" and 2. they've completely lost the ability to live a normal life and connect with people back in their home culture. I'm leaving Egypt, and if all goes well (isa) I'll be in grad school in the fall. The more I'm away, the more I really love America. Like, the real, daily life America, not the romantic paintings of bald eagles and VFW parades. I miss knowing all of the different subcultures, I miss the inordinate love of "family values" in my native Midwest, I miss sitting around kitchen tables or reading local newspapers or going to hipster concerts or simply having the same general worldview as the person I'm talking with, I miss making jokes with an American sense of humor. 

One thing I forgot about, though: Americans seem positively neurotic compared to Egyptians. For better or for worse, Egyptians have a very, "If you can't change it, laugh about it" attitude. The ideal of having youthful beauty your entire life is non-existent. The high point of most Egyptians' day is to be able to go home, put on your pajamas, and just hang out with your family all night. Certainly my foreigner friends and I are immune to other social pressures that exist, simply by virtue of the fact of being outsiders. But because Cairo is so crowded and so ineffecient, Egyptians spend most of their time trying to avoid stress, rather than create it. 

At the local Safeway a few days ago, my eyes were riveted to the magazine rack by the check-out line. "Oh my God," I thought. "We're freaking out." As an entire culture, we are freaking out all the time. What if we're late? What if we're old? What if we're ugly? What if we're fat? What if we're not funny enough? What if we don't make a good first impression? What if we're not thinking one step ahead? What if we're stagnating?  The stakes seem really high. 

Now, a lot of Egyptians would gladly trade in their relaxed lifestyle for a functional economy that actually allows them to do more than sit at home, but provides enough career jobs to open up their futures. Our neuroses function in part to keep us competitive, which keeps our economy working (well, until recently), which in the end, we've decided is worth the mental stress. It's anyone's call. But perhaps why I enjoy life abroad--aside from a glut of bloggable moments--is the lack of pressure, and especially the lack of pressure I have as a foreigner. I don't have to impress anyone, because I'm operating outside of their social script. That being said, I already impress most people, by virtue of my citizenship and English skills. It's an easy life, if you can get over some of the daily hassles. 

Now, I'll leave you here, gentle readers, so that I can get back to enjoying my Christmas holiday at home. I'm going to hope that my stomach bug is indeed gone, and go splurge on another American favorite: eggnog. 

Out of Africa

Dear readers. I am writing to you today from the blissful quiet of my parent's house in Palatine, Illinois--the beautiful state of corruption, cozy fireplaces, and 1 degree windchill. It was a chilling 10 degrees last night as I flew into O'hare--with food poisoning, I should add. I thought I was the queen of bad timing already when I last had food poisoning while getting a tetanus shot in the bum. Try attempting to keep down a bad BLT sandwich while waiting interminably for your plane to taxi to the gate and the "fasten seatbelt" sign go off. For those of you concerned about my dignity: yes, I did make it to the bathroom in time (just barely), and did not have to avail myself of the vomit bag in my seat pocket. Still, it wasn't exactly the entrance I was hoping for after waiting 6 months to see my family.

I don't like air travel very much. It's not the cramped seats or the noxious recycled air, it's that transitions happen much too quickly. You enter the airplane in Africa, you exit in Chicago. It tweaks me out. The nice thing about international travel, though...is that you do have a long, long time to process the change. 28 waking hours, to be precise. Leaving Cairo for America does prompt a number of thoughts and reflections, however, reflections that were fueled by a selection of depressing indie/hipster music and scandalousy few hours of sleep over the past 72 hours. Here are my thoughts, as recorded in the Heathrow international airport, in no particular order.

-Ponds. Who ever thinks about ponds? But here they are—dozens of them, wet and squishy, settled into the marshy English fields. Strange to have forgotten about ponds. I can safely say that ponds have not crossed my mind once in the past 6 months.

-Grass. Lots and lots if it. Wide open fields with nothing but grass. It's almost unimaginable coming from the crowded city of Cairo, which itself is sort of a shock of civilization in the middle of the harsh Sahara. The grass outside of the Heathrow window is the frozen, half-yellow kind, too. I haven’t seen that since last Christmas in Chicago. It reminds me of home. These are my first two thoughts as we fly into Heathrow: ponds. grass.

-Open spaces. Open, green lots surround the airport; wide, immaculate white tiled hallways dwarfs the handful of travelers waiting for the airport transit to arrive; floors and floors of slender escalators and pristine hallways zig zag for miles as I walked an Egyptian woman from one terminal to another. Massive, massive amounts of space everywhere. It seems regal, but unnecessary. It’s cozier to be crowded.

-“Don’t Buy Anything.” Remember that the British pound makes everything literally 10 times more expensive than Cairo.

-Unfinished business. My friend Farek the taxi driver announced to me this morning that he and his wife are having a baby. My host sister Gigi called me at the airport terminal, crying. Foreigners make for fickle friendships; we’re always coming and going, while our Egyptian friends remain. For better or worse, I feel hopelessly tangled up in the lives of some half dozen Egyptians. I worry about them, I fret over them, I think about what they’re doing at this moment or the next. Six weeks is a long time to be away. It’s easy to run away from Cairo, but it’s hard to leave. I spent the first 3 hours of my plane ride crying with a bloody mary in my hand. I don’t know what I’ll do come July. Best not to think about it yet.

-First taste of bacon in 6 months (airport refrigerated BLT sandwich, £1.75)—good, but the taste was unfortunately obscured by too much mayonnaise. (Note: upon later reflection, likely the source of my gastronomic troubles at the O'hare baggage claim).

-Diversity. After 6 months of living in a fairly homogenous Arab society, it’s refreshing to see other nationalities and ethnicities (So, so many Indians everywhere! It's such a treat to have a new culture to interact with for a change). It’s not too strange, either; I remember upon returning from Ecuador, I was always shocked to see any non-Hispanics for a few months afterwards. Not today. 

I was startled to see a Hasidic Jew, however, before I remembered that I’m no longer living in an area steeped in the political sensitivies of the Arab-Israeli conflict. There aren’t many (any) Hasidic Jews in Egypt.

-The “Cadbury Turkish,” despite its intriguing name, is mostly a disappointment. Turkish delight meets chocolate bar? Hard to pull off, even for such an ordinarily delectable chocolatier.

-It’s too easy. After 6 months of daydreaming about easy social interactions, Starbucks, and central heating, I’m suddenly feeling a little let down now that I have it all at my fingertips. There’s something about doing x daily life activity in Egypt that makes life exciting, more of a challenge. I couldn’t have written two-thirds of my blog posts from anywhere else in the world. When in America is going to the pharmacy an epic adventure? Or how often is riding public transportation or having a simple conversation with a co-worker noteworthy? Living in a country where you don’t speak the language or completely understand the culture can be tiring, but it’s also thrilling. It’s wonderful to be coming home to visit my family, but I don’t think I’m ready to leave Egypt yet. There are many more adventures to be had.

-Being able to see out. Cairo may not have any true skyscrapers, but neither does it have any single-story buildings. The whole city is 5 stories tall, everywhere. It’s strange to be able to see above the top of buildings, and see open green spaces in between. I can think of only three times in the past 6 months when I was able to get a view of any kind: at al-Azhar park in Cairo, in Dr. Holt’s 11th floor apartment, and while driving on the highway overpass to and from the airport.

-Surprisingly, it’s not strange to be able to eavesdrop, nor is it strange to hear/speak English everywhere.

-Girls with short, dyed hair stick out to me.

-A group of four Muslim women—three in abaya, one in nikab—is very comforting in its familiarity. I may have left Egypt, but there are many Arab Muslims traveling through Heathrow. I don't feel too far away yet.

-I feel in a very helpful mood. I saw an Egyptian woman from my flight wandering around a bit lost as she was trying to make her connection. I bounced over to her and offered to walk her to her gate, all the while chatting her up about life in Egypt and where she was traveling to (Canada). It’s so nice to finally be the one who knows what’s going on—and, having received so much hospitality over the past half-year, I’m eager to return the favor.

-I was careful to hand passport control my papers with my right hand, not my left, in order to be polite. I also found myself eating my bacon sandwich (haram anyway, so my social niceties are moot) with my right hand, too.

-Christmas decorations are really nice. Christmas sales are overwhelming.

-White chocolate Starbucks mochas are divine, even for £3.05.

-It’s foggy out—but that’s not the strange thing, exactly. It’s that it’s a damp fog. Cairo has been pretty cloudy lately (they apparently call winter the “season of black clouds” in Egyot). But it’s that things look damp, like it might snow, or like it recently drizzled.

-I’m suddenly worrying that someone might steal my wallet. After all, I’m not in Egypt anymore. I’m not as safe here, strangely enough.

-A reasonable expectation of toilet paper in every bathroom—and the ability to flush said TP down the toilet instead of throwing it in a wastebasket—is a surprisingly welcome luxury.

-I haven’t slept in 3 days. This isn’t helping the transition, and may or may not have something to do with why the tears were flowing as much as they were this morning on British Airways flight 154. Still, the thought of meeting my dad at the airport in 10 hours makes me giddy. I forget the time has passed in the meantime, though; my mother’s breast cancer, my dog dying, my little sister learning to drive. The push of time is beautiful, but it can bring a little ache with it, too.

-I suddenly have an urge to call everyone in my address book. I forget that I’m not actually in the U.S. yet, and don’t have my American cellphone with me. My Egyptian cellphone is worthless here, so it looks like I’m alone with my blog in the meantime.

And those, my dear readers, are my first thoughts out of Africa. As for my first thoughts in America, waking up on a spring mattress with a sprinkling of snow outside, and my family drinking legit American coffee at the kitchen table--let's just say, life is delicious.

A Christmas "family" newsletter.

Merry Christmas from the girls at 6A el-Diwan!

In an inexplicable outburst of cheesy warmfuzzies this holiday season, our apartment decided it would be a good idea to write a Christmas “family” newsletter…I suppose it was only natural, after we already signed up as a “family” for our church mailing list. (That wasn’t my idea either). Now, I claim no responsibility for this endeavor. I was commissioned to write this as punishment for not emptying the bathroom wastebasket at regularly appointed intervals. My mistake.

For the past 6 months, we’ve been living in a grand social experiment, a Bonhoefferian trial in pluralistic community. You may think that Julianna, Becca, Kirsten and Alissa went off to Egypt for an epic adventure, a graduate degree, work experience, or because they just really ♥ anarchical traffic and ear-splittingly loud Arab pop music…. Nope.

The real reason the four fierce women of el-Diwan came together was to ask the question that has haunted mankind since the dawn of time…

What happens when you take a Calvinist-indoctrinated SoCal English teacher, a vegetarian Quaker personal assistant from Ohio, an evangelical-Catholic-half-Christian Seattle-ite political research intern, and a Baptist southern belle Texan studying refugee studies—and throw them all into an apartment in Cairo, Egypt?

Such ecumenical and cultural co-existence is not for the faint of heart. Communal living is for the bold, but these women are bolder still. After many postmodern moments of “tension” and “dialogue,” our apartment has found its commonalities over which to bond—including spontaneous country music sing-a-longs, refined white sugar in Diabetes II-inducing levels, sweet potato vendors who wander through the street with portable ovens, eating stanky Egyptian cheese sandwiches, and an Egyptian host family who smothers us with love and lard.

If I must say, our apartment has become a little famous. Yes, famous with the neighbors as the apartment of strange and beautiful foreign women who do Bollywood Burn aerobics in (accidental) full sight of the neighbors… Now that you mention it, we’re also famous for trying to get our Egyptian friends to try unspeakably odd American food (Chai tea? Hot apple cider? Yellow curry?! You want me to eat what?!)… There was also that one time we baffled our Egyptian host family by attacking a perfectly good pumpkin with knives when we made Jafar the Jack o’Lantern…
But, thankfully, we are also famous as being a group of women ready to make Egyptian friends, open ourselves to new experiences, and try to live as generously and authentically we can in our adopted homeland.

Yet with each of our separate interests and occupations, each of us has developed our own survival tactics to navigate the boisterous and colorful city of Cairo—a city that inspires as much love as it does irritation.

Julianna
Cairo is known to frazzle. With 20 million people, 50 million stray cats, and a few million too many cars on twisting, narrow roads, things don’t always happen in an orderly fashion. Cairo met its match in Julianna, though. Armed with diet Seven-Up, sugar-free instant coffee (disgusting, if you were wondering) and McDonald’s $1 chocolate sundaes, she can create order out of Egypt’s worst chaos. If God needed a personal assistant during creation, he would have called up Julianna.

Julianna has been working as a personal assistant in a corporate communications firm. Though she has been known to order cats (ota) for lunch instead of tomatoes (oota), she has otherwise dazzled her office with her abilities to track invoices, manage projects, maintain the water cooler, arrange the flowers, keep the absent-minded office boy out of the manager’s war path, and entertain greasy cars salesmen on company business trips to the Red Sea (ok, we weren’t that sympathetic…after all, she gets flown to Red Sea resorts for all-paid work trips)—all while maintaining the delightful disposition Julianna is famous for.

The downside of living with an top-notch personal assistant? Occasional and unannounced purges of Kirsten’s empty water bottle and used Q-Tip collection. Plus side: getting summoned to McDonald’s with text messages saying “I need a chocolate sundae now or someone’s going to die.” Hey, we can all use a chocolate sundae break.

Kirsten
Our resident laidback, Southern Californian, God-made-germs-invisible-for-a-reason roommate with a knack for mishaps in the kitchen, Kirsten’s mission has been to experience everything possible during her year in Egypt. And if that includes spending the night at a crack house in Alexandria during a “weekend getaway to the Mediterranean Sea,” so be it! All in the name of living life to the fullest.

Unable to extricate herself from the irresistible lure of the tulips, windmills, and wooden clogs of her Dutch-dominated Calvin College, Kirsten somehow wound up finding the only Dutch NGO operating in Cairo. At her internship, Kirsten has been copy-editing translated articles from the Egyptian press and brushing up on her Dutch conversational phrases (“Vin harte gefeliciteerd met je verjaardag!” Happy Birthday!) while simultaneously waging a war against the elevator muzak Christmas carols blared by her officemate.

Kirsten moonlights as an English teacher to help pay the bills. Not content with simple sentence diagrams, she has been known to play “Truth or Dare” with her students and has amassed a startlingly thorough collection of Islamic missionary tracts from her more zealous pupils. Inside and outside of the classroom, Kirsten has displayed a stunning talent for attracting bizarre characters—characters that defy description even here. From the mopey and heartbroken banker friend, to a girl she met on the metro and went to the zoo with but can’t pronounce her name properly, to an affable college dropout… she has some strange stories. But whereas most foreigners prefer to keep themselves at a distance, Kirsten has dedicated her tenure in Egypt to making herself at home.

Becca
If troubles in life drive some people to drink, the American University in Cairo has driven Becca to fine dining. Endless reading packets, inane French professors (“What iz zis, Rrrrebeca? Your computer iz dead again? Sacrebleu!”), and a Mac that has turned its face to the wall to die—not once, but twice—has left Becca with only one thing to say: Dammit to hell.

If Egypt teaches you anything, it’s fatalism. Maybe your computer will revive itself like a veritable Lazarus from the tomb. Maybe you can somehow muscle your way through a reading packet the size of a small baby—a reading packet, we should add, that’s full of “really depressing shit” (Becca's words). Maybe your classes will actually talk about something interesting and on the assigned subject matter for that day.
Or maybe it won’t. It’s all in God’s hands.

In the event that life goes nothing according to plan, one must be ready to self-medicate. Taboula, Hardee's, Pyramids, Kazaas, Chilis, On the Border, Cilantro café, and Spectra—when taken in proper doses, go a long way towards relieving the stress that accumulates from graduate school in Cairo.

As our resident Southern Belle, however, Becca braves the frustrations with elegance. Lesser mortals would turn to cheetoes for stress-eating. Not Becca. Wrapped in a white terrycloth bathrobe with a glass of wine in hand and the softest hair in all of Egypt, Becca can churn out 20 page papers while wearing high heels and snacking gourmet. After all, what is refugee policy when compared to the stunning inefficiencies of Egyptian bureaucracies—including at the American University? Becca doesn’t even break a sweat. The pay off for looking so good while studying so hard? Free brownies from the cute waiter at Cilantro.

Alissa
My illusions of heading off to my AL internship as an intrepid pant-suited intern were dashed the second I realized that pant suits and 100+ degree weather are a sweaty combination. Scaling down a bit for present realities, I’ve spent the past 6 months writing reports on the American election and writing love letters to Nod. In fact, to the chagrin of my roommates, most of my time in Egypt has been spent talking about Nod. I’ll try to spare you the same fate here.

Rather, the bulk of my time and efforts in Egypt have been spent being the scrubby Middle Child of the apartment—trying endlessly to ying everyone’s yang, feng everyone’s shui, keeping the internal balance of the universe somehow always at peace. From Julianna’s cold war against Kirsten’s mountain of water bottles to fearsome Sarah Palin vs. All That Is Good conversations in the living room, this is no small task. Mostly I try to dodge bullets by simply dodging all responsibilities—those mugs in the sink? That trash can in the bathroom? They’ll take care of themselves if you just leave them, right? No confrontation necessary… which is how I found myself writing this newsletter in the first place. Passive-aggressive antics only take you so far, children, so take note of that. Your mother is right: your roommates will resent you for it someday.

Still, Egypt has been lovely—Work at the AL has been fantastic, I adore my English students in the evening, and—if all goes according to plan—all of my graduate school applications will be finished by the time you’ve read this. Top that off with travels to the Red Sea, Saharan oases, and Jerusalem, and a girl just can’t complain. And with 3 completely unique, crazy, and endearing roommates to accompany me on the adventure? It’s an embarrassment of riches.

Even now, as I pack my bags for a Christmas visit home, I find that this motley crew of fierce and independent (and completely idiosyncratic) women has nestled its way into my heart. I may be too Swedish to spoon with my roommates, but they’ve managed to weasel their way past my defenses regardless. Ok, so maybe this newsletter wasn’t actually my punishment at all—ok, ok, I admit, it was actually my idea.

So Merry Christmas to all, our friends and family. Our disastrous kitchen, perpetual “Cairo coughs” and early onset of Type II Diabetes are evidence that you are sorely missed in our lives! Still, while there is no substitution for our loved ones, we have managed to make a bit of a home for ourselves in Cairo. Our apartment is home to a bit of a bizarre family, but it’s a family nonetheless.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Years from the girls on el-Diwan,
Julianna, Kirsten, Becca, and Alissa

In which Alissa apologizes for being unbearably dull for the past 4 days.

Gentle Readers.

I am not dead. Just scrambling to meet deadlines before I touchdown in snowy and anarchical O'Hare airport in 10 days. I'll be back, and with tales to tell of nibbling sheep hooves, gulping down chitlins, and sidestepping ritual animal sacrifices in the street. 

In the meantime, when an Egyptian man tries to make you eat fig cookies out of his hand while touching your thigh and telling you that you're beautiful, it's probably time to break your solemn vow to pacifism.  

Lessons learned from Egypt this week.

Until my last application is submitted... be well, my readers.

hard truths.

Gentle readers, 

I write to you now awake, alert, showered, and acceptably clothed for the first time in 3 days. I've spent the past 72 hours with some kind of flu-ish funk ("flu-ish funk" being as close as my medieval concept of medicine and the body can get to diagnosing whatever minor viral calamity just went blitzing through my system). 

During these chicken soup filled hours, I had much time to meditate upon my experience. Some pearls to cast before you, dear readers:

-After spending a good 18+ hours in bed, you begin to develop a very complex love/hate relationship with your sheets.

Indeed, the entire cosmos, all of your entire existential reality, is suddenly encapsulated within two flimsy piece of cotton and a fuzzy blanket smelling of moth balls. One minute you're perfectly cocooned, the next, tangled and overheating. Now your limbs exposed to shivering. Now somehow perfectly situated again. And on and on as fever dreams keep you tossing around. It's exhausting. For now, I don't know whether to thank my bed for all the rest and comfort it's provided, or if I never want to see it again for the rest of my life.

-Sawdust mattresses are not for the faint of heart. 

While my back learned long ago to brace up and take it like a man on these hard and lumpy devices, this marathon of sleep-fests is more than the average mortal can sustain. I can't verify this, but I've heard it said that it is actually possible to break your ribs simply by laying on one for too long. 

-It's not them, it's you.

Now, when you live with 3 other women, it's easy to start thinking that that mountain of papers on the dining room table, the stack of sticky plates in the sink, and the over-flowing trash can really aren't from you--I mean, maybe a little bit, but everyone's made a contribution to the mess, right? I'm a decently clean neat person, kind of...and hey, I remember cleaning at least two of my own dishes after breakfast this morning. 

Not much fun to be around yesterday, my roommates took off to hang out with our host family in Maasara, leaving me with the apartment more or less to myself for the past 24 hours. That's when I realized--it is me. When they left, the garbage had been emptied, and a mere sprinkling of spoons and cups were at the bottom of the sink. Somehow, I now find myself cleaning up no fewer than 18 (counted) burnt matches from next to the stove, washing two towering stacks of plates and cups (how! I haven't eaten anything!), and generally trying to do damage control before any of them return home. 

Nope, sorry, Alissa. It's not them. It's you. 

-One should not go out into public at the height of one's flu-ish funk, or people will think you're stoned. 

True story. 

On Friday, a tragedy of timing placed the worst of my pale-faced feverish blech at the exact hour of a dear friend's wedding. My friend kept calling to confirm that I'd be coming. "Yes, yes, I'll be there," I assured him from beneath a pile of blankets.

"Are you sure you'll be ok?" My roommate peered under my dome of covers to ask me.

A half hour before the affair, I dressed myself and sat beneath my covers to keep warm. I found myself inadvertently staring off at random objects in the room. At one point, the floor actually seemed to be moving. "Whoa," I thought. "This is starting to get trippy..." I should note that I was not actually under the influence of any medicine, so this can't be chalked up to too much nyquil. 

The wedding was taking place nearby, just the next district over to us. The district of Sayda Zeineb is as delightful and colorful as possible--1,000 year old mosques crumble elegantly like dried flowers, bustling market places light up at night with colored strings of lights, vendors sell homemade mango ice cream drive-up style to cars passing through the hopelessly tangled alleyways, and pens of doe-eyed sheep stir restlessly in preparation for the big feast happening on Monday. 

The problem for our cab driver was precisely that tangle of alleyways that is so charming in theory, and so impossible to navigate in practice. Streets have names only informally; cars' passage is only an after-thought function of the roads. Tea shops and shwarma stands encroach onto the dirt path instead, as neighbors walk to visit and do their shopping.

Luckily my roommate was in the cab to help negotiate this Cairene version of Mr. Toad's wild ride, because I mostly sat with my cheek stuck to the glass of the window, staring at the bright lights with my mouth hanging slightly open.

Our friend told us to get in the cab by 6:30. We arrived at his aunt's house by 7. Making a long story short, the bride and groom didn't arrive until after 9pm. We spent most of our time sitting on folding chairs in an empty community center listening to loud Arab pop music, while I stared at the floor, turning progressively paler shades of white. I left it to my roommate to explain to everyone that no, I wasn't comatose or smoking hash, just sick.

1 minute after the couple arrived, we went to find our friend to give our congratulations. As soon as he saw us, he stopped. "Alissa, you are very sick. Come, I am getting you a taxi."

Wait! I just waited 3 hours to see you! 

nope. 3 hours to wait, 30 seconds of conversation, and I was en route back to my bed--my sawdust mattress and my sheet-scape reality. And so the vicious cycle continues. 

An open letter to Cairo.

Dear Cairo,

Please leave my lungs alone. I know you have a lot of sand in the vicinity. I know that you have an impossible dust problem, too, and not even an army of swiffers could defeat it. I remember with gratitude that every week until now, I have swept piles and piles of air-borne dirt and dust off of my floor and given thanks that I've managed to dodge any serious lung funk over the past five months.

But now that you've finally gotten the best of me, please stop. I admit defeat. I cry "uncle." No mere mortal lungs could ever stand up to you forever. My naivete has passed.

But coughing up a half year of pulminary encrustation hurts. So please, darling Cairo, leave my bronchioles alone.

Sincerely,

Alissa

to begin christmas.

I just rang in the Advent season by attending a Christmas concert at our church. I had the feeling, though, as I was contentedly listening to the string quartet and the choral arrangement, that I was in a real-live Stuff White People Like blog post. Kind of eerie.

The Christmas concert reminded me of SPU's famed, tacky, but irrationally endearing "Tradition" night. More specifically, I was thinking back to last year's Tradition, in which Tommy Castle and I performed with Patrick Hickey.

I'm searching for the right words right now, but coming up empty handed.

I thought I'd simply say his name, so that those of you who knew Patrick could remember him right now, too.

That night at Tradition, Patrick, Tommy and I performed a Christmas poem together...sort of a poetry slam meets ambient rock with Christmas tree sweaters.  A video of it is on Patrick's facebook page... though I can't tell you what emotions just hit me when I went to his page to see it. It's not a place to go lightly. 

Sigh. But simply as a Christmas poem, I thought I'd post it up. It seems fitting. The text is below; the audio is on my poetry slam facebook page.

and then God sings i love you i love you i love you

This is a story of the great interruption,
When God tightened up his bow hair, tuned his strings,
and took his place with the second violins to play in his own eternal symphony.
This is the night when God slipped itself into a single cell that doubled, quadrupled, quintupled into a fleshy, embryonic cluster that soon was to form God’s son.
God’s self.
God’s image in our image in God’s image again.

And we are terrified.
And as our skin stretches and our bellies swell, God is bursting from our pores into the world, into our blood, into our time.
When we press our ears against the womb, we hear the heartbeat of God.
God, the beaming mother, with bruised breasts and sore hips, this insecure newly wed—
with a sloppy, mucous PUUUUSH has birthed himself into our wet and trembling hands.

This strange child,
this red and squinting face, with piercing cries and violent kicks, these grasping hands—
the tiny back and chubby legs that curl against our breast,
that fill this warm, safe silence as we sleep through a bitter and black night,
with the straw scratching at our ankles and sticking in our hair—
this strange child beats with 5 billions hearts
and breathes with 10 billions lungs
and walks in our countless tired footsteps, he is living
our hopes for a spark of divine connection.
he is living our lives, exhaling our disappointments, dancing in our weddings and bat mitzvahs.

And we come.
as shepherds and kings, professors and janitors, the unimpressive, the dazzling, we all come.
we come because we are terrified at the depth of space, afraid of the Cold Nothing.
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the lord my soul to keep
and if I die before I wake
I pray the lord my soul to take.

We spend our nights idly fantasizing, quick falling asleep, so that we never, no, never consider
that we are always just one moment away from the final Dreamless sleep.
the great no more. the quiet seduction of oblivion.
We were terrified of our loneliness.

until now. in this misfit family huddled on the street corner, we dare to imagine God is looking out at us from beneath his baby blanket with his dark, round eyes.
We hope, we must hope, that God has wrapped himself in our great and ragged skin blanket and that it fits him perfectly,
that he fits us perfectly.

Yes, tonight God has burst forth from our bellies and sung to us from the skies, he has cried and kicked against us, he has torn our wombs and filled them, he sings
I love you, I love you, I love you.