Sitting in a tire swing outside of our house in Utah, I watched my aunt come by one day not long before she left to go on a CASA program to study intensive Arabic for a year in Cairo. I would have been 10 or 11 at the time. We just moved to the United States from Okinawa. I was struggling with the culture shock having no real memory of the US except for a couple visits to family. She was one of my anchors mentoring me through a turbulent time while I was learning slang and how to get along with American kids. The stories I heard while she was in Cairo left an imprint on me. She came home, got married, now has two kids and still speaks both Arabic and Hebrew. Her particular stories didn’t stick with me as much as the idea that learning Arabic seemed like a good idea. Oh, and you gotta push if you wanna get on the metro.
That's when I started to get used to Cairo.
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