21 May 2007

Friends,

5:45 a.m. The alarm goes off. I roll out of bed and into my jeans and sneakers. I do my best with my bed head. My 14-year-old son Charles is deeply asleep in the room next door, accruing energy to grow that last inch to six feet tall. Within minutes I am out the front door of my apartment and down into the street.

I have found that from 6:00-6:30 a.m. is the only time I can reserve for meditation and exercise. They take the form of a walk around my neighborhood. The streets are full of trash but the air is still cool. Wild cats skitter out of mounds of trash and trash dumpsters as I pass. The only people about are the bowabs (men who maintain the common areas in an apartment building and run errands) wiping dust from the cars and the zabaleen, or trash collectors. Mostly Christians, the zabaleen live in garbage communities in metropolitan Cairo. They come by truck or donkey cart to collect trash. They take it back to their communities, where the women and children sort through it to find anything of value for recycling.

I realize the streets are especially empty.  No school buses squeeze me off the street. Egyptian public primary school has ended, and preparatory and secondary school students are immersed in studies for the examinations that decide their grades and their future.

From the beginning of June until mid September Egyptian children will be home for the summer. Per the 2006 census, 32 percent of the Egyptian population is under 15. That’s 24,473,736 children. At the beginning of June they will begin reversing their schedules—sleeping until noon or 2:00 p.m., then going to their recreational clubs or out into the streets from 8:00 until 2:00 a.m., when the temperature is coolest.

I pass an empty lot that for years has served as a major neighborhood trash dump. It is now cleaned out, and the construction materials—bags of concrete, reinforcement rods—are stacked about. Out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of the man responsible for guarding the site. He is rolled in a blanket, asleep on the ground.

As I turn the corner at the end of my street, I can see both the mosque and the Orthodox church. One of my CEOSS colleagues was engaged to be married in that church in the formal ceremony used by the approximately 10 percent of the population that is Christian here in Egypt. At the next corner, in an almost completed apartment building, I hear Islamic prayers broadcast on the radio. The bowab must be listening as he goes about his morning routine.

The street I am on now is lined with flame trees, their brilliant orange blossoms covering the tree tops. The screech of thousands of sparrows competes with the Islamic prayers. I pass the local Islamic Language School—empty and quiet. I hear the noise of traffic on the main streets that define the boundaries of my neighborhood. I turn at the next corner and pass a couple of restaurants before arriving at Central Almaza, the local telephone central office, a landmark known to all Cairo taxi drivers. “Where do you want to go?” they ask. “Heliopolis, behind Central Almaza.”

In a minute I come to the garden which, since late March, has been a fairytale flower bed of six-foot pink and white hollyhocks. It has been a delight to see them in this country where arable land is so limited and greenery so sparse. No rain. All the water comes from the Nile. Today the hollyhocks are gone. They were starting to get old, and the gardener has cut them all down. There is a rustle of palm fronds falling. I spot the gardener, turbaned and grinning hugely, up in a palm tree, trimming it. We exchange greetings. “Where are the hollyhocks?” I ask. “They will come again next year, ensha’alla,” he replies.

Now I am in the final stretch. I pass the fuul vendor. He has set up a makeshift table of slatted boxes and is serving fuul, the Egyptian breakfast of cooked and mashed fava beans, to a small group of early risers. Next is Zaki’s “supermarket,” a small neighborhood grocery store, where the young men working the cash register and helping the customers always have a smile and a cheerful greeting. Even when I telephone the store for a delivery of bottled water or laundry detergent or Pepsi and gummy bears for Charles, I can hear the smile in the voice of whoever answers the phone.

Finally, on the corner before my building, the vegetable vendor and his two sons are artfully arranging vegetables on a wooden cart—tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, carrots—they all look fresh and delicious, and the colors and textures attract the eye.

In the front door and up the stairs, I kick off my sneakers, wake Charles so he can shower and dress before his school bus picks him up at 7:10 for the 30-minute ride into the desert to the international school he attends.

My few minutes of solitude and peace are over for the day. In an hour I will be in the crazy Cairo traffic, driving to CEOSS where the pace is always hectic.

I am grateful for the moments of meditation and exercise, for time to reflect on God’s goodness and love in sending me to this place. Egypt can be aggravating and exhausting but it has claimed my heart. Who would have expected a farm girl from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to end up in such a place?!

The 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 158