It was dust and unfinished brick tenements. Garbage City was everything I'd seen in pictures and videos only in 3D with a bit of an added stink and a million more flies. Yet underneath the piles of garbage and dirt was a burgeoning, efficient, joyful community of people crowned at it's head with the ethereal Cave Church - stone crosses and carvings emerging out of the massive, jagged edge of a sandstone mountain. A priest had begun this back in 1969, following his calling to minister and take care of the people of Manshiyet Nasr, a displaced group of Copts from Upper Egypt.
A tour of this small city set apart from the hustle of Cairo showed a slice of daily life. Children ran everywhere, scruffy and laughing, and their elders sat on crates or bins, eyes a bit surprised, hands barely ceasing the motion of sorting trash. We were an anomaly, mostly pale skinned and streaming through their midst like water through oil. We were seen from every nook, cranny, and upper window, the children excited to try their five words of English: "Hallo, welcome, what's your name?" This place leaked joy.
Amid the chaos, we saw the organization, the different families responsible for plastics or aluminum or tin, the small businesses lining the main drag - a street that blended in to all the others unless one took a closer look. There were shisha cafés and fruit stands selling yogurt parfaits and sugar cane juice. Small children dodged the endless succession of pick-up trucks loaded to three times their height with bales of trash; mangy dogs skulked around looking for scraps; older children drove through the melée on flat carts pulled by donkeys. And from the guest house roof, the skyline was dotted with countless pigeon coops - boxy tree forts only accessible by a series of ladders from rooftops that housed small herds of livestock, chicken and goats. When the sun crested the mountain in the mornings, the birds danced and dove in its light, a winged ballet against the blue. When night fell, roosters crowed oblivious to the absent daylight, and mules brayed in indignation. They kept us from sleep in tandem with biting insects and air conditioners that rattled through the night. I wouldn't have had it any other way.
This place taught us the true meaning of the word flexibility.The only thing that happened regularly and on schedule in this land without clocks or agendas were our mornings in the largest of the Cave Church auditoriums - a daily exercise in feeling small, our diminutive bodies dwarfed in the rocky chasm, the sky endless overhead. It was the beginning of the extermination of our pre-conceived notions.
At the orphanage, we were as verbal as we dared even though we were standing on opposite sides of a language gap. Fortunately, love crosses borders without even having to go through security and within half an hour, it was as if we'd always been there. They sought us out at every turn, eyes searching our faces, hands reaching for ours, every smile a reminder that we were family despite never having met. We had been asked to come play, and like every child waiting on a sleepover guest, their excitement was tangible as they showed us their domain. Paintings of cartoons danced on the walls and the classrooms boasted colored pictures and low tables scattered over Eastern carpets. The sun was hot and the flies persistent, but we were in a children's oasis, a place where they learned what it meant to be served and loved through kindness and attention. For a few moments, we were allowed to be a part of that and it left none of us unchanged.
Of course, a trip to Egypt is hardly complete without a visit to the pyramids and a ride atop a humpy-backed camel. Our last day was chock full of sightseeing: the most intense souvenir hawkers I've ever seen in my life, huge triangular piles of thousand year old stones, a trip to a Bedouin fragrant oil tent, kisses with the Sphinx, more shisha smoke that I could handle, and a rather interesting dinner cruise down the Nile where we all starred in the Egyptian version of Wedding Crashers. I understand now, after a solo performance of one of the wedding guests in Egypt's version of So You Think You Can Dance, why they usually don't, and my head is still in knots over how such a conservative culture allows for belly dancers who wear what amounts to a negligé. Despite the idiosyncrasies, the land and the people in it crept into our hearts and stayed there. Egypt is not easily forgotten, and this world that creates its own pace taught all of us a little more of what it is to be human.
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