Alexandrians

As promised, here is the sampling of mini-biographies of people who I met in Alexandria, Egypt. The Nile Cruise and Cairo editions are yet to come, and after that I´ll finally tell you a bit about Sevilla, Spain, where I´ve been since January 20.

I met Constance, an Irish-American Christian with much more spunk than one would expect from an eighty-one year old woman—even with her red hair—at the American Women’s Association’s weekly Monday morning coffee meeting at the nearly abandoned Portuguese club in Alexandria. She grew up in Texas and met her husband Alfie, an Egyptian, while she was doing postgraduate studies in nursing at college in California. After they married they moved to Prince Edward Island where they purchased a resort hotel which they operated for decades. She taught nursing for a while at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, but now spends most of her time in Alexandria. Her husband was back in Canada on business while I was there, but she was perfectly at home in the city by herself. In fact, when I saw her a few days later at the Bible study which Gail led and she adamantly stated that she would never “submit” to her husband, I nearly got the impression that she preferred it that he was gone for a few weeks.

Gloria, an African-American Christian, moved into a nursing home near her home in southern California when she was eighty years old and was soon bored out of her mind. She had heard the same stories from the other residents at least one too many times when her daughter Catherine came back from the International American school (at which she is the principal and teaches Social Studies, History, English, and probably something else that I’m forgetting) in Alexandria to visit. After hearing Catherine talk to some of the other residents about the low cost of living and myriad of activities and opportunities in Alexandria, Gloria decided that she would rather live in Egypt than the nursing home. Within a month she had packed belongings and moved to Alexandria, where she has lived in an apartment for the past five years. She lives fairly independently with the assistance of a housekeeper, who prepared a scrumptious spread of Egyptian desserts and tea for the women’s Bible study which I went to at her house, and a driver, who brings her at least one social event every day of the week. When asked if she was concerned about the lower quality of health care available in Alexandria as compared to California, she said that she was satisfied with the life she had been given and was ready to die whenever her time came.

I met Gina, a Muslim woman in her thirties who is originally from California but now lives in Alexandria with her Egyptian husband, at another social meeting of American women in Alexandria. She questioned Lizzy and me about the best way to prepare her children for the SAT, the standardized test which they will need to take for entrance to an American university. She’s hoping that her son, who plays basketball every evening from 7 pm until midnight, will one day play in the NBA, or at least earn a basketball scholarship to college in America. But first he has to earn a spot on the A team. She’s concerned because her daughter is no longer as interested in becoming a cardiologist as she is in being a wife and a mother, like her mom. I appreciated her concern for her children’s welfare, but sympathized with her a little less when I realized that her children are only 14 and 13.

Charlene grew up Brooklyn, NY and taught English in France and Saudi Arabia before moving to Alexandria seventeen years ago. For the past two years she has taught elementary school students at Schutz American School (which Lizzy attended). During the two days that I observed in her ESL classroom she worked with a compliant sixth grade Palestinian boy, a tremendously defiant fourth grade Turkish girl, a giggly group of third graders (two Egyptians and one Palestinian), and a comical third grade Italian boy who knew essentially no English when he arrived at the school last August. Charlene told me about her frustrations with living as in a country in which she receives “Welcome to Egypt!” greetings as she walks the streets, even though she’s lived in Egypt for nearly twenty years and speaks Arabic fluently. She complained about the closed nature of the culture, the prevalence of corruption, and the increase of fundamentalist Islam. Her goal is to move back to the U.S. with her husband (an Egyptian) and their four school-age children within a few years, ideally somewhere she can teach English and her husband can either continue practicing law or teach Arabic. Nevertheless, she offered the give me advice on where to go and what to look for should I decide to teach English in the Middle East after I graduate.