Arriving in Egypt

Coming into Cairo after so many hours of travelling was an experience.  As the plane bumped and rocked its way to the scariest plane landing that I’ve ever experienced, I looked out over a city that looked like dusty lego blocks stretching far into the distance.  When you fly into an airport in New Zealand, you see grey, green, and often blue as many airports are close to the coast.  Here, the city is brown, the desert around it is brown, and the air moves with a dirty shimmer.  Outside air conditioned places the heat palpably wraps itself around you, making your clothes feel tight and heavy.  On the way to Rosie’s house I noticed people wearing jeans, long sleeved tops, head scarves.  I guess you get used to the climate, or might be feeling cool if you came from even warmer climes, but I’d just come from the beginnings of winter in New Zealand, and the heat was overwhelming.

We arrived at Rosie’s early afternoon, and I put Hana straight down to bed.  I’d thought to overcome jetlag by staying up all afternoon and having an early night, but the toll of over 24 hours of flying won through and I napped the afternoon away.  I let Hana sleep; it was the least I could do after such good behaviour on the plane.  She was so good that I didn’t begrudge her her jetlag wake up time of 2am in the morning.  I discovered, after thinking and planning to manage myself so I didn’t get jetlag, that it was irrelevant in the face of an unspoken truth: that if your child has jetlag, then YOU have jetlag.  I could easily have slept until morning, but Hana had games to play and stories to tell after sleeping for 12 hours straight. 

Hana was not the only one up at that time, as I found out at 3am in the morning when my attempts at snatching pockets of dozy sleep were thwarted by a call to prayer, by a committed caller who sounded odiously virtuous at being up at that hour and took great delight in letting us all know we should be too.  I've learned to hear for the differences in the various calls, and to appreciate the beauty they might contain.  I've especially learned from Rosie to see the calls to prayer five times a day as a reminder of my own faith and the fact that as a Christian, I am called to pray constantly, without ceasing.  

Its dusty, and dirty, and noisy, and busy, and crowded here and I love it.