Finding Home in Aswan

This afternoon I visited my new friend Amira. We enjoyed a meal she cooked for us, conversed in my broken Arabic, and watched an Egyptian film from the 1960s with her mother. In classic Nubian fashion, her family has a simple and clean house, with high rounded ceilings and open courtyards. It’s beautiful.

Amira and her mother (cutting okra, right) invited me to sleep over badda-bokrah (the day after tomorrow), to be a part of their family always, and host my own family if/when they come to visit this fall. I brought them cookies, as is the Egyptian custom, though I feel I’m the one who’s been given the gift. I feel I have been welcomed into Egyptian life in ways I have rarely been welcomed before. For the first time I feel that there is a place for me here. It brings tears of joy to my eyes, and silly smiles I could not hide on my walk home just now.

Moments before, as the small passenger ferry glided across the nile towards Aswan I was transported back to another city I felt at home in, on another continent… Geneva. I asked myself what triggered these feelings of belonging in each city, and realised it was that I felt accepted for who I was, despite my foreignness. It was the ability to communicate across cultures, to walk by the water and meet interesting people from around the world, to share a sense of humanness.

Today I feel I’ve finally made a breakthrough here… past people’s conception of me as ‘money’, ‘sex’ or ‘other’ to human. On the ferry I was chatting a little with the women around me, and it was comfortable. At the beginning one asked me for a pen (a typical thing to ask from a foreigner), and I obliged. A few minutes later when she learned that I live in Aswan she returned the pen - recognition of our common humanity, our common belonging here. I was moved.

As I walked home afterwards I was almost able to float above the hassling without notice, and dance along with the festivities in the ‘wedding district’ close to the flat. I feel I am starting to understand things, and am increasingly at peace with them. There will be times that I am judged, but there are times that I also judge. That is part of our humanness too. Hamdallah for moments beyond the judgments, for moments of belonging.