Memory and time are capricious subjects. As this semester comes to a close, I find myself grappling with conceptions of time. I still have another semester and potentially a summer here in Egypt, but I feel as if time is slipping through my fingers and memories are flowing like hair in the wind behind me. In total I have now spent the majority of six months in the Middle East (specifically Jordan and Egypt), and it astounds me the amount…
Trigger warning: sexual assault 7:18 a.m. EET November 9, 2016. A moment in time I will never forget. The moment I realized that he had won the election. I may be in Egypt at the moment, but I was every bit a part of the election. I slept an hour, maybe two that night. The time difference did not stop me. I sat on the couch in my apartment and let the waves of emotion crash over me as I…
Taking a deep breath, I dove below the surface, letting the cerulean blue enshroud my body. As I looked to my right, my eyes took in the beauty of a coral foundation teaming with life; as I looked to my left, I observed the entrancing waters of the Gulf of Aqaba. Yet everywhere I looked, dozens of bubbles and my clunky snorkeling goggles distorted my perception. My mind was brought back to my childhood dreams of being a mermaid and…
If only the walls could talk… In the famous museum of Cairo and the ancient temples along the Nile from Luxor to Aswan, not to mention all the other archeological oases, I can only imagine the millions of stories the walls could share. Yet, the tale they would tell today would undoubtedly be the lack of people appreciating the wall’s history. Within my first minutes in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, I looked at some of the earliest samples of…
Before I made my new home in Egypt, I consistently received two reactions to my decision to study abroad at the American University in Cairo. One reaction was excitement for the pyramids using ancient Egyptian history as a symbolic feature of the supposed life in Cairo. The second reaction revolved around questions of safety, especially coming from my home community. Growing up in and around San Bernardino, California for almost my entire life before Vassar became an unswerving component when…