Egyptians' Refreshing Kindness

Their hospitality is both winsome and disarming.

After reading my first essay on how insane a place Cairo is, one of you (hi, Alli) joked that I should never work for the Egyptian tourism board. That is accurate! My goal is not to make you view Egypt in any particular way, positive or negative. My goal is simply to tell the truth—to help you feel the reality of this place, to understand it implicitly. Cairo, like anywhere else, has good and bad in it. I’ve already told you some of the bad things, so today I’ll tell you one of the best ones: for every jerk, scammer, and nut job, there’s a least one person who would give you the shirt off his back, no questions asked. I’ve felt that generosity of spirit many times now; here are a few of them.

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Once Nick and I were walking near Tahrir Square after stuffing ourselves with cheap, delicious koshary. I suddenly found my path blocked by a power box smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk, exposed wires sticking out left and right. There wasn’t enough clearance to walk around it. The curb was about a foot off the ground, and next to the curb was a puddle of indiscernible depth. I would have to jump off the curb, over the puddle, and into the road to continue on my way.

At the very moment I leaped, a group of teenage girls was walking by. The one closest to me, who was chatting on her phone, extended her arm to break my fall. I didn’t see what she’d done until I had already stuck my landing. “I think she was trying to help you,” Nick whispered as we walked on, and I called out a lame shokran, thank you.

It was a small act of kindness, but a profoundly thoughtful one. I was so touched that a completely random person—a teenager, no less, who had appeared to be absorbed in her teenage world—would be looking out for me, a stranger, a foreigner.

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Picture yourself as a traveler in Egypt hundreds of years ago, long before urbanization. You are crossing the desert on foot (or, if you’re lucky, the back of camel) over blistering sand, with no shade for miles around. After days of exposure to the elements, you come to a settlement. You ask for food, water, shelter. A refusal could be a death sentence. The settlement’s denizens know this; their harsh geography morally obligates them to help. They welcome you with open arms, they feed you, give you a place to sleep.

Modern Cairo, of course, is not quite so desolate. But it’s a desert of another kind—a desert of indistinguishable buildings and unnamed, labyrinthine streets. You could easily lose your way and end up wandering for hours in the blazing sun, arriving at your destination hungry and parched. Without help, you might never get what you need or make it where you are going.

So Cairenes look after their neighbors and their guests. They lean on each other in times of need. In Egypt, when someone comes to your home—no matter if they are a friend, a family member, an acquaintance, or hired help—you must, at the very least, offer them tea. Perhaps their journey was hard, and it is only right to give them relief.

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Cairo is brutally hot and dusty in the summer, the sort of weather that calls for ice cream. Just the other day, when the thermometer hit triple digits, Nick and I stopped at a gelato shop for frozen treats. A trio of high schoolers sat next to us as we ate on the bench outside the store.

One of the girls rose suddenly and disappeared. She returned a few minutes later holding the hand of a child no more than six years old, hair unkempt and clothes filthy from sitting on the ground, parents nowhere in sight. Without a word, she marched the little girl into the store and bought her an ice cream.

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If you walk the alleys and roads of Cairo, you’ll notice water bowls tucked into corners, little mounds of kibble strewn across the pavement. These are for the cats and dogs who live on the street. It’s a communal responsibility to feed them and to give them the occasional scratch behind the ear. 

At one of my favorite neighborhood boutiques, a street cat came inside with her litter of newborns—tiny, skittish things with white and orange fur. While I browsed, the shop owner called a vet to ask about check-ups and vaccinations for the kittens.

Cairenes look after their non-human neighbors, too.

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At some point during the six months we waited for our car to arrive here, Nick and I hired a man named Ahmed to drive us to the commissary. It was the first time we’d met Ahmed, but he was friendly and talkative, and seemed to enjoy our questions about Egyptian culture. Nick and I were especially curious about sporting clubs—green oases in the middle of the city where Cairenes spend time with family and cheer on the professional teams fielded by the club. We asked Ahmed what they were like.

“My family have been Al Ahly members for years,” Ahmed told us. “Call me anytime, I’ll take you with me.”

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The forwardness of these sorts of offers (which I believe to be completely genuine) leaves me stunned and consternated, and I wonder what this says about me. Am I so closed off, so mistrusting of others, that I am suspicious of kindness?

I have no good answer, other than that I was raised that way—to assume strangers are guilty until proven innocent in order to protect myself. That’s just how American women have to navigate the world. When I am invited somewhere by someone I don’t know, a little voice in the back of my head says maybe this person wants to murder me.

Because of that little voice, I haven’t accepted such invitations. But I am learning, with time, to see them for what they are: acts of generosity without subterfuge.

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I once had a friendly Uber driver, Ibrahim. Ibrahim did his best to chat with me while we sat in gridlock on the smoggy Nile Corniche, despite his limited English and my nonexistent Arabic. He was intent on telling me what he insisted was a famous Egyptian joke, which he promised would be the funniest thing I’d ever heard. 

He was able to stumble through most of it. It was a story about an Egyptian man who goes to England for medical treatment, bringing a relative as a translator. Ibrahim’s vocabulary failed him just as he got to the punchline, but instead of giving up, he decided to call a friend, an older woman whom he frequently drove around and whose English was very good. She gleefully translated the rest. 

“You won’t really get this joke because it’s in Arabic, but it’s so funny,” she said. “It’s funny because the doctor took five minutes to say something in English, and the Egyptian translated it all in just one word.” We had a good laugh, and she ended with this: “If you ever need anything in Egypt—anything at all—just call me. Seriously. I’m like your mother.”

I’m like your mother.

I never did call her, but I cannot forget what she meant by those words: that as long as I am a guest in Egypt, I will never have to wander the desert alone.