I had to go out this morning to run some errands. We have been on midyear holiday from school and I needed to pay off my credit card and buy some groceries. I decided to walk to the bank which is only about 25 minutes on foot. My route to the bank takes me through a market called Soloman Gohar. I like this market... it has everything and anything a household might need. It was very early in the morning and since I was in no rush I was able to spend some time pricing the different vegetable carts and shops, absorbing the atmosphere around me. The gentleman in this photo was busy making pillows for a bedroom set. He's quick, and I am sure he made several sets today. I take this route home every afternoon from school. The mornings and the afternooons in Soloman Gohar have a completely different rythm. In the afternoons it is very crowded with people, cars, carts and donkeys, people shoving and arguing their way through their purchases. In the mornings, people are amiable, smiling and there is an air of gentle calm. I saw the woman who works on the street behind my home parking cars near the Kuwaiti Embassy. She had purchased a huge cabbage and was carrying it on her head along with several loaves of bread in a plastic bag. I greeted her when she passed me and her little boy kept smiling at me until he turned the corner. I saw an American woman who works for a school here in Cairo. We stopped and chatted for about 20 minutes and then I moved on towards the bank. I couldn't help but think about those two women during my walk. Two women, from completely different cultural backgrounds, living the same life style, both poor, both struggling to raise their kids, both primary income earners for their families. Everyday I see the Egyptian mother parking cars near the Kuwaiti Embassy beside my home. She's very tall, slim, and carries herself in a way that is almost elegant. She is attractive, and with some new clothes, I am sure she would pass for some of the higher class Caireens in any five star hotel lobby. She always has a smile on her face, moderate voice in dealing with others, and always looks clean. Her son is always playing near her, but I have never seen him misbehave. He is quite and mannerly. Her husband is there too...always sitting in a white plastic chair, smoking his cigarettes and drinking his tea. He doesn't even look like someone she would be married too. He is unkempt, dirty and looks uneducated. I have never seen him get up out of that chair and do any work in all these years. Only his wife. She as an Egyptian female, growing up in the socioeconomic class that she did, probably feels she is doing ok. She is married, has a son, makes some money, and her struggles are not unlike her neighbors, her sisters, or even her mother's. Perhaps to some degree, she is better off in many aspects than others of her class level. I don't know, and I would surely never ask her. I respect her, and I admire her resiliance and integrity. The American teacher....well, it has never ceased to amaze me with all the stories I hear or the women I have met in all these years here in Cairo, how any Americans growing up in the United States of America with our freedoms and the right to choice, would choose to come to Egypt and live like the Egyptian mom I just spoke about. A friend and I were talking about this the other day and her experience with these types of women has been more than mine. She thinks if you are going to end up marrying some poor, uneducated Egyptian, and live in a poor district of Cairo then you should have stayed in the states, married some poor, uneducated nobody, moved into the projects and lived on state aid. For sure you would be living better there, than here. I tend to agree. If I had a penny for every story I have heard about women coming here, falling in love with some poor Egyptian man, someone like the guy in this picture, getting married, immediately getting pregnant, and then realizing that the "love of their life" turns out to be the "biggest mistake of their life." Stories of women buying homes, thinking that they are going to be building lives with the men they love, and then getting kicked out, only to realize that the home was bought and purchased with her money, but in his name. Women who have married these men, and never knew that they were a second wife. Women who have had money stolen from them, their children stolen from them, and their lives destroyed. And there are many, who stick it out, because they don't know what else they should do, don't want to lose their children, and have no other choices. Some do make it out, but many stay. I feel empathy for these women, but I am unable to build friendships with them. I have nothing in common with these women, even if we share the same nationality. I completed my errand at the bank and on the way home I greeted the Egyptian mom and waved to her son. I realized in the lift on the way up to my flat, that I had lost respect for the American mom I had chatted with today in the souk. Her choice to stay in the situation she had described to me earlier was illogical and incomprehensible to me. I felt sad and guilty that I could so easily dismiss her and discount her right to choice. Was it right for me to judge her based on her choices? Was it really correct for me to impose my standards of success upon her? I don't think so, but I still could not help but feel the way I did. I will see both of those women again, perhaps on the street, maybe at an educational conference. The outcome of these meetings will always be the same for me. I will admire the one that is striving to do her best with the social class that she has been born into, and I will always be congenial but reluctant to engage the American, who I feel threw away all the priviliges it is to be American, right to choice and the right to personal success.
Until next time,
A Woman of Egypt