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Loitering is Key
7/5/09
The team has moved in with our host families and most have started teaching this week. Marsha and I are living with Salam, a Christian Eritrean woman with two kids, and her Muslim roommate Aisha who is half Sudanese and half Egyptian. Both were born in Sudan.
I've found the key to Cairo: drinking tea and loitering.
On the second night of our home stay, on the balcony under the stars and the mosquitoes, I had tea with Salam. And over a cup of sweet tea she told me her story.
Salam was put in prison in Eritrea for a couple of months for being Pentecostal and holding a Bible study in her home. When she was let out she decided she had to leave the country or next time she would be imprisoned for life.
Children over five years and adult men cannot leave the country because of the war. So Salam took her four-and-a-half-year-old daughter Dibora and baby Natu and came to Cairo. She has been living here for two years, struggling to hold a job and take care of her two kids at the same time. Only by the grace of God has she had a place to live and food to eat.
All this she told me over a cup of really sweet tea.
Now about loitering. Loitering is a way to sit and experience Cairo from a different perspective.
From my seat on the corner stoop, I can take in the sights, the smells, the sounds. I've come to recognize that there are different kinds of beauty in this world. Cairo is beautiful. The buildings are run down, peeling, dusty, and I love it. They each have character, just as the people do. I love the colors of the hijabs on the women that float past me.
There is life and color and texture in this beautiful, dusty city. And there is fire and joy beneath the veils. Sometimes I talk to Aisha, and I can't believe all that fire is hidden beneath a veil when she leaves the apartment. Aisha, whose name means life.
We loiter. We drink tea. Liz learns Arabic from her host family. Bess asks her Sudanese friends to tell her about their tribes. Jayana plays basketball with the kids. Melissa teaches them to play the ukulele.
We are finding the keys to Cairo -
the keys to making friends, hearing stories, sharing burdens, building bridges, and loving one another.
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