Iftar at Amani's

Today the roommates and I went to iftar at our landlady's home in 6th of October City, about a 20 minute car ride Northwest of Cairo proper. Iftar is the meal traditionally eaten to break the fast during Ramadan, and it is common to invite friends and family to one's home or to eat at a communal meal (some of which are subsidized) at a mosque. Our landlady, who I am happy to say is very nice and easy to deal with, which is not usually the case in Cairo, had invited us a long time ago to come to her home for a meal and to meet her family. She lives in a beautiful, modest (but quite nice by Egyptian standards), white stone house which was actually designed, both inside and out, by her husband, who is a doctor. They grow olives, mint, and hibiscus at the house and have a pool and a quiet back porch with a wonderful breeze that, frankly, makes you forget you are in Egypt.

Her family was of course very nice and she has two married daughters, only one of whom we met, who like most upper class Egyptians her age is well educated and fluent in English. The food, shown below, was completely home cooked and delicious. And as usual in Egypt, they pretty much forced us to keep eating. I had 3 bowls of soup and 1 and a half plates of everything else and now I feel sick. It was well worth it, though.



We also had an interesting conversation with our landlady's daughter, Pakinam, and her husband, Ahmed, who is also well educated and fluent in English and who does advertising for Coca-Cola. Our landlady's grandmother was Turkish, and she gave her kids, Pakinam and Ingi, Turkish names. Pakinam asked us what we thought of Egyptian culture, on which I happened to have many opinions, so we all got into a discussion about it and it was very interesting. I won't go through the whole discussion now, but I wanted to share Ahmed's thoughts about American culture as he has lived and done business there. Ahmed said that Americans are generally very straight forward and helpful and they are willing to help strangers unless they are given a reason to mistrust them. I asked him for some negative impressions and he brought up an issue which I often hear Egyptians talk about which is Americans' ignorance regarding world affairs.

I think this is a fair criticism of American culture as there are way too many Americans in my opinion who know nothing about what is going on in the world and yes, who do not know where Iraq and South Africa are and whatever it is that woman said. However, what I do object to, and I don't think Ahmed really meant it this way, is when people from other countries call Americans ignorant as if they are more ignorant on average than people from other countries. That is ridiculous. Just because way too many Americans do not know where China is on a map does not mean that fewer Americans than say, Azerbaijanis, do not know, for instance, the square root of sixteen. It seems to me that Americans are often chastised for their lack of geographical knowledge. This is no excuse, but in the Middle East for example, geo-political issues are much more domestically salient than they are in the United States. It makes more sense that the average person in Beirut would know something about what is going on in Amman, for example, than an average person in Salt Lake City would know about what is going on in Guatemala City. What is happening in Amman is more likely to have an effect on someone in Beirut than what is happening in Guatemala City would have on someone in Salt Lake City.