I wrote the following shortly after returning to Cairo in the fall of 2010. It relates my reflections after my first trip to Torah -- an area about nine miles south of downtown Cairo. Once largely agricultural land, a prison was built there in the early-twentieth century. Now the area near the prison has become a garbage village. Half-built apartment buildings that were left as hollowed-out brick structures are now home to the Zebaleen (garbage collectors), who bring the city’s trash to the area, and live there, sorting through it and supporting themselves on the recyclables they can exchange.
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It hasn't even been two weeks in Egypt, and yet I feel like I've been here for much longer. Part of me feels live I never left, and another part of me feels like I'm seeing things anew. There is something powerful about returning to a place. I feel such a stronger sense of myself. When I think back on how I felt a year ago, I remember a sense of excitement, a raw energy, but underneath that enthusiasm was a kind of weariness. Cairo can make you weary. But I think the internal depletion I felt last year came upon me despite being in Cairo, rather than because of it.
We carry ourselves wherever we go. We cannot experience a place without also contending with the internal dynamics of our own minds, hearts and souls. All the emotions, the feelings, the history--they are a kind of baggage. They become a set of rules, driving our reactions. Because of them we so often react to things that physically are not there, but remain all too real because we brought them with us.
Sometimes, however, your self protects you. I had this sensation yesterday. It is like being enclosed in a bubble, and within that bubble was “home.” At the time I thought of it as “America”--associating with it my own sense of comfort, familiarity, and access. My physical surroundings, however, were total poverty--the cave-like structures of an apartment complex in Torah where the building project was never completed. These bear brick buildings have been converted into a garbage village, where the Zebaleen sort recyclables, and live amongst the trash. Babies without diapers amidst discarded cans of tuna, edges sharp and raw. Razor blades, broken glass, flies--so many flies.
I could see all of these things, but it was like part of me could not access them. To actually process them would have been too much for my meager psyche, and so instead, my self enclosed formed a kind of forcefield defense. Perhaps the self forms this protective barrier because such profound inequality, disorder, and difference are too much to process. However protective that sensation of enclosure might have felt, though, it also carried the sensation total uselessness.
What did I do to be born into a middle-class, white, American family? Nothing. How, then, can we get our minds around the inequality we seem to have no control over? If you have an answer, please let me know. The only thing I can think to do is attempt to write honestly about my own struggles with it.
What is the appropriate response? If I did nothing to be born into my current position, then it would be faulty and ridiculous to feel guilty for my own existence. This privilege is not a 'fault', but it is uncomfortable in the face of so much need. It is humbling, if not humiliating -- what can I do but to walk humbly? Conscious of my inexplicable privilege, and willing to help address the needs that confront me -- a drink of water to the thirsty, food for the hungry, clothing and shelter for the cold and naked, a friend to the lonely. Perhaps that is all any of can do, despite the positions we are born into.
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