A few thoughts about Egypt

To all who are still checking this regularly enough to discover new posts:
Here is the latest edition of my newsletter. I've decided to post these on-line, since the more technologically savvy would probably rather read them here than having them clog up the ole in-box. Anywho, hope you all enjoy it. :-)

親愛的弟兄姐妹們,
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Greetings in the Name of the one who calls us out of the darkness and into his glorious light! Much has happened in the interlude since my last newsletter. At that point, there were still roughly three weeks left in our semester before Chinese New Year, and I was going through one of the worst periods of culture shock that I have yet experienced. Culture shock hits everyone a little differently and at different times. For some, culture shock takes its toll the first day in a new place; for others, it strikes after the first month; for still others it may take half a year. I typically go down somewhere around month five of being someplace different, but that’s just me. The way in which culture shock manifests itself also varies from person to person. I get really growly. I don’t want to speak Chinese because it reminds me I’m not at home; I don’t want to speak English because it reminds me of home—and that’s just painful. Same with food. And people. And everything. The phrase “Meiyou ban fa/ 沒有辦法” (literally “no solution/no way to handle the problem”) comes to mind, but there is a wide assortment of solutions that people try: some people throw things; others set their hair on fire; still others get really depressed and lock themselves away in a room for a week or two; some people find the nearest restaurant serving Western Food and alcohol, walk in, and proceed to consume whatever amount of each they need to take the edge off their homesickness; some people simply freak out, get on a plane, and go home. Me? I very calmly anticipated what my state of mind would probably be by the middle of January already last October. Then I happened to read the blog of a friend working in Egypt this year. And then I bought a plane ticket to visit said friend.
It seemed completely ludicrous at the time, but something told me it was the right thing to do. As the semester dragged on and on, especially after Christmas, I decided that it was a stroke of pure genius. There was no way I was going to go home, and I needed a break from Taiwan. God provided the resources and opportunity (sold car = plane ticket; two and a half weeks off for Chinese New Year = vacation time!), I had a good friend living there who would know how to get around and what to see, and I’m told that I’ll only be young once. Plus, it’s Egypt. Well…why not? So, although I would love to take this opportunity to explain the rich traditions associated with Chinese New Year here (I’ll sum it up by saying it’s like a combination of Christmas, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, and spring cleaning—Chinese style—all squashed together into about two weeks of festivities. It’s a poor explanation, I’ll grant you, but it will have to suffice for now due to space and time limitations), I’m going to opt to share with you some of my experiences in Egypt instead. As Monty Python would say: “And now for something completely different…”

The plane landed in the part of the desert near Cairo where someone thought it would be a good idea to pave a couple of landing strips and a put up a terminal building. Nothing looked familiar. A few of the passengers from the plane were speaking English, but that was about it. No one was speaking Chinese. I liked the place already.

I managed to obtain a visa, exchange some money, and get through immigration without too much incident, although associating uniformed Arab men holding guns with my security was a new trick for this prejudiced American. Chagrinned with my own narrow-mindedness, I vowed to break myself of the notion that the Middle East is a violent, scary place, filled with violent, scary people. Toward that end, I picked up my luggage, found my friend Jay, and we headed out from the airport.

The first five minutes on the bus toward Cairo were all I needed to assess for myself how much I didn’t know about the place. I looked around. Most of the people were men, although there were a few women. I noticed that almost all of the women save one or two were wearing the hijab (head covering). Meanwhile, Jay quietly started explaining things. The majority of Egypt is Muslim, and virtually all Muslim women save the very wealthy cover their heads when they go out. However, somewhere around between ten and twenty-five percent (depending on whom you ask) of Egyptians are Christians. So, if you see a woman without a head covering, chances are she’s a Christian. Interesting, I thought.

After getting settled and grabbing some dinner, Jay and I headed out to the Coptic Cathedral where the Coptic Pope was scheduled to speak that night. I had heard only the vaguest of references to Coptic Christianity before arriving in Egypt, much less that they had their own pope, but it’s not everyday that you get to see a pope, Coptic or otherwise, so I looked forward to hearing what he had to say. We walked through the gates of the Cathedral (there’s a wall built around it for protection) past armed guards and into the outer courtyard which was buzzing with activity. Jay explained that the Cathedral is a safe haven for many of the youths around Cairo. They go to school all day, where the study of Koranic Arabic fits in nicely between math and science class and where social interactions between Christians and Muslims are, by culture and by choice, minimal. After a long day of studying, they come to the Cathedral to meet with their friends, hang out, maybe go to an English class or some other activity there, and to not feel so different, so conspicuous, for a couple of hours.

Jay went over to a small stand and bought some bread. It was Christian bread, he explained.

Christian bread? What on earth was “Christian bread”? What did that mean?

After seeing my quizzical expression, Jay gave me a short introduction to three of the many breads of Egypt. The first he spoke of was Christian bread. Christian bread, which is sold at the Cathedral and some churches, is a white bread, round and flat, about the size of a small plate, with a cross stamped into the top. Only Christians eat it. He also explained that Muslims have their own bread, which is round, flat, and about the size of a tea saucer. It’s a slightly denser white bread and is eaten mostly at festival times, especially the month of Ramadan. Only Muslims and clueless foreigners eat that. Egyptian bread (the Arabic word for which literally means “bread of my country”) is a big, thin wheat pita, again about the size of a plate. Egyptian bread is the main staple of the people there, so everyone, clueless foreigners and all, eats it. (After trying all three, I decided that Egyptian bread was my personal favorite.)

I was starting to get a small feel for how deep the divide is between Christians and Muslims in Egypt, an awareness that would continue to grow throughout the week I was there. Jay and I finished our Christian bread and headed inside the Cathedral. Our white faces granted us automatic admission, but they were checking everybody else’s wrists at the door. Coptic Christians in Egypt receive a tattoo of a cross on one of their wrists while they are still infants, a cross they will bear for life. So, while female Christians in Egypt can be known by their lack of a head covering (and the tattoo), Coptic Christian men are hardly less conspicuous since a simple glance at their wrists will declare their identity.

We walked into the middle of Pope Shenuda’s address. The foreigner area, which provided ear pieces with English translation, was all the way in the front. This was slightly embarrassing since we were late and had to walk in front of everyone, but it afforded a great view of things, for which I was thankful. The Pope was giving a message about staying strong in the faith, following Christ, martyrdom, etc. Wait, martyrdom? What the…oh yeah, that was a possibility here. Understand, it is not illegal to be a Christian in Egypt, and it isn’t like there are death squads out to get Christians or anything; however, persecution is not uncommon. Equal opportunity employment does not have the same place in Egyptian society as in America. If your potential employer is Muslim and you’re a Christian, suddenly your chances of getting the job become a lot slimmer. You want to build a church or a Christian school, hospital, or a center for a Christian organization? You had better be prepared to wait, since, somehow, the paperwork for putting up those kinds of buildings always gets hung up in the bureaucracy. Meanwhile, a new mosque has gone up on the site across the street in half the time it took you to get your permit. And it is very illegal to proselytize (the gateman at Jay’s apartment was fired merely on the basis of a sketchy rumor that he was trying to convert Jay to Islam, regardless of the fact that he was doing no such thing). The bottom line: when passions are running high, and when it comes to religion in Egypt they’re always running high, stuff happens. The commitment to being Christian must be one hundred percent; sitting the fence is simply not an option, and you only need glance at your wrist to be sure of that.

Later that week, Jay and I decided to travel to a small town in upper Egypt (“upper” refers to up the river, i.e. south of Cairo). Jay had a couple of friends from his organization working there, and he thought it would be good to get out of the polluted haze of Cairo to see a different side of Egypt. So, we hopped on a train and three hours later hopped off in the sleepy little town of Minya. Besides Jay’s friends and a chance to get away from the noise and the fumes, there were also some really old tomb paintings up on the bluffs nearby that we both thought sounded like they were worth checking out.

Minya was a wonderful change of pace. The sky and the air were clear, and a horse or donkey pulling a cart of vegetables was a common sight. Overall, things were just a lot slower. I was told that Minya was a better example of the “real” Egypt than Cairo was with the all its noise, pollution, crazy traffic, and crowded streets. It certainly was different than what I had experienced so far, a difference I found delightful.

We checked out the tombs, which were amazing, even after 4,000 years. (It’s absolutely mind-boggling to me that the colors could still be so bright after such a long time; I don’t care how dry the air is!) What was equally as interesting to me though, was hearing about some of Eric’s (Jay’s buddy), experiences in Minya. If my understanding is correct, as you go up the river in Egypt, the proportion of Christians increases so that the further south you go, the more Christians there are in each town. That being said, the contrast between Christians and Muslims is just as sharp, if not more so, in the more conservative smaller towns as it is in the bigger cities. In Minya, for example, all Muslim women cover their heads. Eric also shared one story of some Christian neighbors of his who went across town to buy chicken simply because that butcher was Christian. Never mind that there was a Muslim man selling chicken just around the corner from their home. The Christians have to stick together, stick to the Christian team.

At first, going across town to buy chicken when there’s a butcher next door sounded pretty ridiculous to me. But, as I thought about it more, I could start to see how things might come to that. Every day, five times a day, the call to prayer issues forth from every mosque in Egypt calling the faithful to prayer. The call from one mosque rises up and mingles eerily with all the other calls to produce another sound in itself—a five times a day reminder that Christians are not in friendly territory, and a sound for which Christians have developed a strong dislike.

Still, no matter how much both parties might want to simply be rid of all interaction with the other, Christian-Muslim encounters are unavoidable. Christians and Muslims share the same country; they both eat the Egyptian bread—the “bread of their country”; and they both proudly claim the nationality “Egyptian.” However, the above example vividly illustrates how far people are willing to go (literally) to support their respective faiths—while, incidentally, excluding the other. For an Egyptian, religion is in every part of life. Religion is so engrained into one’s identity that objectivity towards that subject is out of the question: it is the lens through which one sees the world. Going the extra city blocks for dinner is not so much an intentional exclusion as it is the natural thing to do.

This presents a very challenging situation for everyone, the foreigners living and working in Egypt not excluded. And it is especially thorny for those interested in furthering the Kingdom of God. In the West, religion is largely hands off, and everybody is supposed to be left alone to do their own thing. For me, while I would care that the guy who owns the supermarket down the street isn’t Christian because I would rather that person know the love of Christ, that fact that we don’t share the same faith is not going to stop me from giving him my business. The kind of polarization that exists in Egypt is almost unfathomable to me. I’ve grown up being told that I should take Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech seriously. “I have a dream that [people] will not be judged by the [color of their skin/hijab/cross on their wrist/gender], but by the content of their character.” The knee-jerk reaction is to storm in and tell people they’re wrong and need to change.

Which brings me back to my culture shock. The conviction that I’m right and that this is your culture’s problem and you need to change is at the heart of all culture shock, whether it’s in Taiwan, China, Egypt, or anywhere else. It’s the root of sin: the desire to have things one’s own way. And while I think we can all agree that every place has its problems and things that need to change, the change that needs to come is not one brought by people, per se. What’s needed is healing and wholeness, not a rearrangement of the old problems, and there’s only one source of that kind of healing that I know. All creation groans in expectation of it—the ultimate healing and redemption that will be brought about through Christ.

So what am I to do about it? It’s an extremely pertinent question. The problems of Egypt, Taiwan, or most anyplace other than your hometown probably seem really big and really far away. However, I feel it would be a grave error to think that distance will necessarily prevent us from having an impact in these places. Granted, you can’t just drive down to Taiwan or Egypt for the weekend, but God holds these and the people of every nation in his heart. And when we are close to his heart, the distance is not so great as it first appears. The Body of Christ has the unique opportunity to come together in fervent prayer and intercession for one another. Prayer is the first action. I am firmly convinced that the wonderful relationships that are in place and still forming every day here in Taiwan and the ministry opportunities that keep happening are a direct result of all the prayers being offered up on behalf of this mission.

Christians in Egypt need your prayers. Christians in Taiwan need your prayers. Christians everywhere need your prayers. I realize that if you’re receiving this newsletter, you’re probably already praying for your brothers and sisters in Christ around the world. Still, it’s never a bad thing to be reminded how important those prayers are. As far as what’s next, from prayer, God leads to action in different directions. True, it’s not always easy to know what action to take, (I don’t know how to go about solving most of my own problems, let alone the problems of other peoples and nations) but I do know Christ, who is quite literally the very embodiment of action. From Him, worthwhile action will naturally be forthcoming.

I came back happy to be in Asia again. I was excited to understand what people were saying and to have some idea of what was going on. And to find once again that as inevitable as culture shock is, the worst of it also inevitably passes. The time in Egypt was amazing. It was refreshing, interesting, and, well, really fun. All vacations should be that good. Still, I seem to be the most plugged into the part of God’s heart that’s in Asia, and it was good to get back.

Speaking of which, that brings me to another bit of news. I have decided to extend my time with LCMS World Mission through at least next year, but rather than remain in Taiwan, I feel that God has called me to mainland China. So, at the moment, I am deliberating between two different opportunities to work there: one in a city called Jiangmen in Guangdong province; the other in the city of Wuhan, which is in Hubei province. Needless to say, your prayers are much coveted as I myself pray about this decision.

May His peace and joy keep you,
Anna