Spring Break!

We were off the past 10 days or so for spring break, so I went to Luxor for 2 days and Aswan for a week (both are in Upper Egypt, or the south). I'm not going to post pictures this time, because I'm really behind on homework and a bunch of other stuff. Hopefully I'll have time later this week. I also have pictures from Alexandria to post.


Aswan was a pretty different experience. The region of Aswan and south of Aswan into Sudan was part of the Nubian empire, something I remember as a sidenote from our Ancient Egypt units in school. It's a shame that Ancient Egypt so often steals the spotlight, because the Nubian empire was equally as important and Nubians have a strong sense of being a distinctive people. They have different music, different architecture, different-looking people, some different perspectives on religion, and even a different language (actually several languages), although most people speak Arabic. I was totally ignorant of these differences before this past week, although I have Nubian friends from the Cairo Nubian Club, where I go to practice Arabic twice a week.

Anyway, long story short, spring break was a week of relaxing on the Nile, chilling in Nubian villages, and grappling with questions of race and religion and nationality (who were the first Egyptians? Who's a "real" Egyptian? Should we correct someone when they assume that shared skin color makes you "family" or is a sign of some sort of shared experience? Are people "brainwashed" if they try use lighter-toned makeup or straighten their hair? Is it fair that non-Egyptian Arabs can often get Egyptian prices but foreigners who aren't Arab can't, even if they live in Egypt? Who decides who is Arab and who is African? Are you religious if your religion is your cultural identity but not something you practice? How do you explain your beliefs to someone with very different assumptions?) These questions come up everywhere we go, actually, but more so on this trip, probably in large part because the group of AUC girls I traveled with was quite a mix. Our group consisted of three black, American Muslims, including one Somali-American who isn't a particularly observant Muslim but would like to be, and one girl who is experimenting with taking off her hijab and whose family is strongly involved in black community building in the States. We had one Eritrean-American charismatic Christian, and three other American Christians--from Methodist to kinda-Lutheran/Catholic to not sure--of European descent.

It seems strange for me to categorize us like this, but in Egypt that's often how people see you: skin, religion, nationality. Examples (these things aren't at all confined to Aswan, but they were more noticeable there): in the markets, people yell at the black members of our group: "My cousin! We are same color!" (this annoyed all of us, so finally I just started responding as if they were referring to me: "yeah, we are the same!"). Another example: we made friends with some vendors in the market place. They told us how they guess peoples' nationalities when they come in the store, and charge accordingly, because nationality indicates spending power. We started answering the question "where are you from?" with "min rubina--from our God", or "what do you think?", or trying on a different identity and pretending to be from somewhere else. Another example: Copts in Egypt have the cross tattooed on the inside of their right wrist, and people are not shy about asking what religion you are. "Religions of the Sky" are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; "religions of the Earth" are Buddhism, Hinduism, and other non-monotheistic religions.

Even the Aswanian landscape is complex--like the rest of Egypt, actually. One day, we relaxed on a felucca in the Nile, climbed out of the boat, past the palm trees and flowers and green stuff, and ran up the "beach", which was actually a huge sand dune marking the start of the Western Desert. Then we had to come down because our host said the wolves come out at sunset. I also learned firsthand about the impact of giant dams. The High Dam, built by Nasser, destroyed hundreds of Nubian villages and ancient monuments, changed the natural flood cycle of the Nile and the agricultural cycle, and changed the plant and animal life of the river.

A funny story:In Luxor, I lost my camera (or was pickpocketed...not sure). That was not funny. But the funny part, at least in retrospect, was the process of searching for the camera with two of my friends.

We go to Karnak Temple at noon-ish, having been told over the phone that the security people had found a camera. We check at the front security desk--no idea about any camera. A nice security man comes up to us and tells us where to go. We go to the security people at the temple entrance. No idea. We call the nice security man, who talks to the entrance people, who say they sent the camera to the tourist police, and no, the tourist police have no phone number. We leave Karnak and go to the tourist info place. No camera--they tell us to go across the street to the police office. We go across the street. The police speak very little English, and offer us tea while we wait under a dingy little shelter while someone takes off to some unknown place to ask some unknown person what's going on. They tell us to go to the other police office. We walk down the street to another office, where we ask two or three people what to do. We end up in a little office with a man named Muhammad who seats us on a couch while he calls a bunch of people and asks a bunch of questions, all in Arabic. Forty minutes later, he informs us that "the president" has the camera, but he's not in his office, so we should come back tomorrow. We assume that, given all the effort and levity involved in this process, "the president" must mean Hosni Mubarak, who will travel to Luxor from Cairo to give me my camera. We leave, excited to meet Mubarak the next day.

The next day we return to the police "station", where we sit on the same couch while one man gets a haircut and another man reads the newspaper for the entire hour and a half of our visit. Muhammad gives us tea, and we wait for 40-some minutes, chilling in the office, enjoying tea and hospitality and the peace of the morning, watching the progress of the haircut. Finally, with much ceremony and a very serious face, someone carries in a small, cardboard box, wrapped in twine, sealed with red wax bearing an official stamp, and carrying a long description on grey paper written in beautiful Arabic script. Muhammad slowly breaks the wax, unwraps the twine, opens the box, and brings out a camera that looks exactly like mine! I leap up, run to the camera...and discover that it's a slightly older model, with pictures of an older couple. I tell Muhammad it's not my camera, and he looks sad and points to the broken seal on his desk. He sends the camera away, and it returns a bit later, encased in its box sealed with a fresh, still-hot wax seal. I fill out a "police report", consisting of me writing some info on a blank piece of paper, which an old man then copies by hand into a giant, ancient-looking ledger. I want to say that it had a leather cover and heavy, parchment pages, but I think that may just be my imagination using the red sealing wax as justification for making me remember the whole experience as more mysterious than it actually was. In any case, I didn't get the camera back, and I never met the president of Egypt, but I did get to experience Egyptian bureaucracy, and I now understand why some people say that Egyptians are always frustrated. In a dictatorship, it's always the person above the person you talk to who's responsible and who has the answers, up and up and up until you reach Hosni Mubarak himself. My personal response to this was a mixture of semi-hysterical laughter, yelling, and peace in the face of powerlessness. What else do you do in such an absurd situation? At least most of the people we encountered were kind, and at least we were only looking for a camera, and not an imprisoned friend or relative. And that might be what my parents would have to do if I wrote this and was Egyptian.