Suleyman's House

If these entries seem choppy and rough it's due to lack of time...there are so many things I'd love to write about and explore but time's limited. Likely I'll add to and edit all of these at some point.

Also, there is apparently a feedback/response section of this blog I don't know how to get to. Either e-mail or leave comments, those are the only things I get. Thanks!

Suleyman, the Senegalese student I met at St. Andrew’s, invited Julia and over to his house for a traditional dinner cooked by his mother. He lives alone with his mom downtown Cairo by The Palace of Abdeen, Quaf Abdeen was a Turkish occupier of Egypt in and he built his palace as an exact replica of the dsklf palace in France.

The cab found the place easily and we waited on the corner until we saw Suleyman, easily distinguishable due to his height, striding toward us.

We followed him through the park adorning to the palace, down a side street and up the stairs of an old building. People stared and I spoke words in Arabic I didn’t know..but that was nothing unexpected.

We entered a neat albeit sparse apartment. His mother was sitting on a couch watching Senegalese TV, via satellite.

Though she insisted she spoke little English, it was much better than our Arabic and when she wanted to she was perfectly capable of getting her ideas across.

They served the Egyptian pastries Julia and I brought and cookies and then she brought out a huge platter of different fish with vegetables and spices. We ate with spoons, directly from the platter in the traditional way. We were sitting in the living room, all huddled around the plate and his mom kept placing choice pieces of fish in front of us. I tried to eat as much as I could which was not nearly enough—if someone doesn’t eat we say they don’t like the food, she said to me. I assured her over and over it was delicious. “Wad,” I said, I promise.

The whole time we ate Akon, he’s Senegalese, and Chris Brown played in the background. They’re very nice, Suleyman said repeatedly. My favorite. I kept thinking about past dance parties.

It was one of the strangest juxtapositions of culture I’ve encountered.

Morgan Heritage is another one of his favorite artists I don’t know. When he left to play it for me, Julia and I followed. The music had been coming from an old PC in a bedroom with two beds he shared with his mother. His was distinguishable by a Michael Jordan poster which hung above it, the sole decoration on the wall.

He was open and welcoming. He took out a t-shirt from his dresser—Bob Marley, the same picture as on my backpack, he said. He showed us pictures of his sister, Aisha who’s studying biology in Senegal. He played us music and said he’d make us a C D of artists we didn’t know.

Julia and I were discussing it afterward. While all outsiders here, as a fellow African he has a different sense of entitlement than we do. While we try to absorb all the differences and love Egypt for them, he compares the traffic, noise and nonchalance of the city to the community life in the-not-too-far-away Senegal. While we resist judging with all our might, because we often don’t feel we have the right to do so, he doesn’t hold back.