February 8, 2005

Dear Friends,

We thank you for your prayers and the many expressions of encouragement to us in recent days and weeks. We know some of you are curious about how things are going, and different ones of you wonder about different things.

Have you been welcomed?

It is hard to express how welcomed we have felt here. Countless people on the streets have looked us in the eyes and told us we are very, very welcome in Egypt and that they are glad we are here. That has felt so good for all of us to hear. Our family spent one evening taking trolley rides through our part of Cairo, and when we got off one, before us stood a nice candy store. We went inside and were surprised to see boxes of candy, albeit large, apparently costing as much as Egyptian laborers make in two months’ time. After we picked one small piece for each family member, the owner declared that they were all free for us, as a gift from him, and he even gave us extras. He simply wouldn’t take our money. He even phoned his daughter, who speaks better English, in order to have her say hello to us in English and to explain the gift to us. He wanted us to feel welcome in Egypt. This is just one story, but it is indicative of how welcoming people have been. Everyone seems to want to help us find whatever we need, and there always seem to be people who have ample time to talk with us and assist us. Perhaps our favorite thing about being here is the love and kindness we have felt from many, many Egyptians.

How is the Arabic going?

In the first week Sherri and I have been able to practice Arabic with hundreds of Egyptians. Over a hundred of them have given us some kind of encouragement or a helpful pointer. I’ve been struck with how learning to communicate is, so far at least, less academic than social. (What a welcome relief after writing a dissertation!) Take, for example, what happened when I got a haircut at one of the ten or fifteen barber shops within two or three blocks or our apartment. During that 45 minutes, I was served tea and had five men trying to teach me how to speak Arabic. Not bad for about $1.75, and I even got a good haircut! Another great thing is that, unlike some places in the world where people are offended if newcomers don’t know the national language or use it properly, Egyptians honestly seem touched by our efforts to speak their rather difficult language. They constantly brag on us. Our doorman (“bowab”) told our landlady before she met us, “They are very friendly and speak perfect Arabic.” Sherri and I laughed from the bottom of our guts at this. Our Arabic is only getting started, and it really helps to have so many pats on the back for the little progress we’ve made. Every day Egyptians constantly encourage each effort we make. It’s refreshing.

How do you like Cairo and Egypt?

For me, it’s one of the most fun and exciting times of my life. It’s felt comparable to freshman orientation at Stanford, when I arrived at a radically different place from where I grew up in a little Kentucky town. We’re learning so much, so fast, that it cannot be anything but exciting. Cairo itself is the most interesting place I’ve ever come across. Sherri and I keep telling one another how much we love living here and how energizing and intriguing our new home is.

How are Clayton and Christopher doing?

For Christopher, at two and a half, Egypt is a land of choo choo trains (trams run in four directions within a couple hundred yards of our home), donkeys, fresh strawberries galore, camels, and very friendly people who give out lots of kisses and candy. Actually, the first few days he kept saying to us in his sincerest of tones, “This is not Egypt, Daddy. There are no camels.” While we’ve seen a lot of donkeys, we’ve yet to see a camel and I think we all geared him up a little too much for camel rides. Christopher was a little cranky the first nine days, mostly because sleeping here has been an adjustment for him. It’s mostly because of the time change, but the Muslim calls to prayer on the loudspeakers at around 5:15 a.m. play their part as well.

For Clayton, Cairo is a strange place, but he also likes it. The sounds and smells are far, far different from anything he’s experienced before. On the first day he reported, “Cairo smells like dust and cigarettes.” But the next day he announced, “Dad, I think I’m getting used to the smell,” and “I figured out that it’s not really cigarettes but just car fumes.” The sight of our boys draws quite a lot of positive attention on the street and in our neighborhood stores. It’s also a little hard on Clayton to have children speaking Arabic to him and mostly only being able to say in reply, “Mish fehim” (“I don’t understand”). One boy outside our building invited him to play soccer and within about five minutes declared to Clayton in the best English he could muster, “I love you!” We’ve yet to see another American or even Western child in our neighborhood, but that’s fine with us and seems fine with Clayton. He started school today at a school where the curriculum is mostly British (except for religion—Clayton is in the Coptic Orthodox Christian class—and Arabic language, which are both in Arabic) but the children are Egyptian or tend to be from other Arabic-speaking countries. The socializing on the playground and school bus happens in Arabic, so please pray for his adjustment and happiness there. He seems excited about the school. Clayton is also enthusiastic about the relationships he is forming with the rest of the children at the seminary and at our Arabic-speaking Presbyterian Church. The really positive things about Clayton’s experience are that he’s fascinated with all that’s new and that everyone has been very loving, kind, and welcoming. He doesn’t mind that many of the people we’ve met, including taxi drivers, his barber, and numerous elderly ladies, have given him friendly kisses on the cheek and want to touch his and Christopher’s blond hair.

How urban is your neighborhood?

I just now counted 103 car horns beeping within a single minute outside our flat at 11:15 p.m. This is normal. In fact, it’s such a steady hum that it doesn’t keep us from sleeping at all. Within a quarter mile walk we have at least three good-sized supermarkets, and hundreds of other little stores of all kinds, plus many thousands of families living in apartments that rise above it all. I think our immediate neighborhood is as densely populated as any I’ve seen in America, including Chicago and New York City. It’s very crowded but it’s such a friendly place that we love having so many people around us.

What’s it been like for your faith?

Invigorating. I’ve been meditating on portions of John 5, where Jesus says his Father is always at work and that he himself is working. Jesus says he can do nothing on his own, but that he does or joins what he sees his Father doing. We’re practicing “paying attention” to God in this new place and looking for what Jesus is and has been doing. We’re expectantly listening for how we can be part of God’s own activity among people here. In practical terms, what we’re actually doing with our time is getting to know Egyptians and welcoming them into our lives. I think that as we listen to them, we will discover what God is doing among them and how our family can take part in this.

What’s been the strangest thing?

Perhaps two things. First, the chasm between rich and poor, and how easy it is to rub shoulders with them all, astounds us a little. Despite being in a fairly nice neighborhood, quite a lot of people on the streets (a child selling bread, doormen, cleaning people, etc.) would be considered extremely poor by American standards. Yet these are some of the friendliest and most available people to practice our Arabic with. In contrast, we toured a tennis club about ten minutes from our home, and Clayton asked with complete earnestness: “Is this still considered Egypt?” There were only relatively wealthy Egyptians there, and within the walls the grounds were almost entirely green and clean and the people were all well dressed. Clayton said it seemed like America, not Egypt. The second thing is that even in such a bustling city, there are always people who have time for us. Laborers invite me to have tea with them while they take a break from their work. Neighbors take time to show us where to buy the best Egyptian food in the vicinity. There’s always someone, if not many, either not busy or just very willing to let go of an agenda and spend time with us.

Are you guys safe?

We feel very safe. An American man who lived in our apartment before us for 13 years was asked by his company to move out of this Egyptian neighborhood and into the American/European part of Cairo, where the security is extremely high. However, if there should ever be terrorist activity in Cairo, our neighborhood would be an unlikely sort of place for it since there are no tourists or other Americans or Europeans around. As we spend time in our neighborhood and elsewhere throughout Cairo, we feel extremely safe. Anyway, to my knowledge, no Westerner has been violently killed in Cairo for many years, and people on the street have been surprisingly positive about our being from America.

On the other hand, the chaotic traffic situation is somewhat dangerous. We already witnessed the aftermath of one serious accident in which several people apparently died. We feel vulnerable because our boys don’t usually get to wear seatbelts, since the taxis don’t have them at all in the back seat and only sometimes in the front passenger seat. It’s also normal here to put eight or nine people in a compact car. We do plan to get our own car, but we’re not in a hurry for this, because learning to drive here will be a challenge, despite Sherri and I having enjoyed driving in New York, LA, and Chicago in the past. Please pray for our safety in traffic.

What’s your apartment like?

Our “flat” is quite decent and in some ways even elegant. It has only two bedrooms and one bathroom, but the living area is large and so the space is about the same size as our house in North Carolina was (minus the yard, of course!). We can also see on each side of the tram tracks across the street from our building a long, thin stretch of grass. This view of grass is, in Cairo, rare. The cost of our apartment, a little over $300/month, is far beyond what most Egyptians could afford. We are thankful for such a nice place, and it’s also incredibly convenient for getting most everything we need within a few blocks. On the down side, the flat is a little way from the seminary, 10 to 20 minutes by taxi so far (costs between $1 and $2), but we still love the location. We also have lots of little adjustments to make in how we do home tasks. For instance, we have a tiny clothes washer by American standards—but at least we have one!—and no dryer. Clothes must be hung to dry about 50 feet up off the side of our balcony. The first time Sherri and I did it I felt dizzy and was concerned one of us might fall into the street! Dust also accumulates everywhere extremely fast. When I set my alarm clock last night, it was covered in dust and I instantly thought, “That’s impossible,” since I only took it out of the suitcase a few days ago. Even with all the windows closed, the curtains sometimes move because the wind blows in anyway, and dust re-settles quickly on everything. (By the way, I’ve been told by one of my superiors, “The whole country is dusty. You are ‘Dustin’ in Egypt.”)

How are things at the seminary?

We arrived early so that our boys could play with the Egyptian faculty’s kids before Clayton started school. But it turns out that they were mostly away on school break, so we spent the first three days exploring our part of Cairo instead of going to the seminary. Now that they are all back, we’ve seen a lot of them and it’s been a wonderful reunion with friendships we began last February and had continued through email. This is an exciting time in the history of the seminary. There is unity, and the leadership is young and full of anticipation regarding the seminary’s rapidly developing ministry. The Egyptian faculty and their families are really inspiring people to be around. In addition to spending time with them, we have had really good conversations and outings with the two other American families working with the seminary. They’ve been a huge blessing to us. Classes have not started yet, so we will have to share more about the students in a letter to come.

Have you seen the Nile or the pyramids?

We live just a few miles from the Nile and maybe 15 miles from some pyramids, including the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. On our fourth day in Cairo, we went sailing on the Nile with some of the faculty families and children from the seminary. It was incredibly beautiful, and renting the large sailboat (sailor included) only cost about $7 total (not per person). And on the way there we saw the pyramids in the distance. It was pretty exciting, especially for Clayton. At the same time, the drive to the Nile was the first time the boys went through some of the poorest parts of Cairo, including sections where maybe a couple million people make their homes in cemeteries, the place known as the “City of the Dead.” I think the scenes there caught our attention as much as anything else that day.

Anything humorous in Cairo?

There have been many, many situations where we’re trying to speak Arabic and everyone ends up laughing. We have laughed a whole lot here, and this has been really good for our family after all the stress of packing and moving. Once someone on the street “taught” us to call someone else a less than appropriate name, and everyone got quite a laugh out of that. In the first couple of days here, our landlady got angry with us because we never answered the door whenever she rang the doorbell. Finally, after calling the seminary to inquire as to why they had brought such rude people from America to her building, she raised the issue with us. When she rang the doorbell for us to demonstrate how it works, to her dismay, I still couldn’t hear it. We’re constantly hearing many, many sounds and it was blending in with everything else. Finally I realized that it makes the sound of a bird chirping! One problem with this is that our next door neighbor has parakeets, and the sound had been indistinguishable to us! We’ve now made up with our landlady and she’s even starting to have a loving grandmotherly presence in the life of our family. She even invited us to go on vacation with her this summer. By the way, she attends a church built in the 4th century!

Here are a few ways you can pray for us

• That God will lay a foundation for our long-term contribution to the church in Egypt.
• Adjustment to Cairo and bonding with Egyptian co-workers, friends, and new neighbors, both Christian and Muslim.
• Safety, including the long-term effects of the air pollution and especially safety while riding in cars or buses and crossing streets.
• Language-learning for all members of the family. This is a major focus of our first three-year term.

We feel profoundly blessed to have experienced so much so far in Cairo. Sherri and I love being here. The boys like it, and we are all adjusting. Thank you for your prayers and for all that you have done to make our life and ministry possible here.

Dusty, Sherri, Clayton, and Christopher