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