Familiar Face in an Unfamiliar Place

The summer after I completed the sixth grade, I traveled to Egypt along with my family for what was supposed to be a summer vacation. Although I was born there, I had not gone back since I was five years old and I was excited at the opportunity to see my cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents for the first time in years. We were planning on spending two months there, just in time to return to the U.S. before school started in September. In addition to visiting family and sight-seeing, we also needed to work on processing our applications to become permanent residents in the U.S. Unfortunately, that process took much more time than we had imagined and we ended up staying in Cairo for over a year.

During the time we spent in Cairo, I was placed in a British private school. I barely spoke any Arabic so I was exempt from taking three required courses that were taught in Arabic: Social Studies, Arabic Language and Religion. The remainder of my courses were taught in English. At first, I had a tough time adjusting to my new environment. For one, we had a very stringent dress code that covered everything from the type of burgundy tie we had to wear as part of our uniform to the color and type of hair accessories you could wear. Then there were the daily morning drills, where all of the students had to stand outside at dawn, in the midst of the heat and humidity, to sing the national anthem and do pointless physical exercises for about thirty minutes (sometimes longer if students misbehaved). And then there were the teachers.

I had one teacher who actually ridiculed my American accent, she said, "What kind of English is this, I watch Knot's Landing and Falcon Crest, that is not how they speak in America." And if that wasn't enough, corporal punishment was alive and well in this particular school. If you so much as irritated a teacher or wore the wrong color hair-band, he/ she could hit you on the hand with a ruler or make you stand up at the front of the class for the entire session or even the rest of the day.

However, now that I look back it wasn't all that bad, mainly because of one person. Ms. M was my math teacher at this school. Since I hated math, I decided that I needed more help in the subject and so she started tutoring me once a week on Saturdays. Once we started these lessons, I found out that she had lived in the U.S. (in the same state as we lived) for over twenty year before going back to live in Egypt. I had finally found a "familiar face." By that time, I had started getting a little homesick not knowing when we would return to the states again. I missed my friends, my school and my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (peanut butter at that time was not a hot item in Egyptian grocery stores). I found comfort in our Saturday lessons. Not only did Ms. M teach me algebra and geometry, but it was nice to talk to someone in "American English" again. Thanks to her, I was able to preserve my English language as well as refine my Arabic because she was able to translate certain things to me, better than others.

Thanks to Ms. M, I was also able to excel in math, one of my weaker subjects. In fact, when we finally returned to the states, my math was more advanced than other students in my grade level, so somehow I ended up skipping a grade and starting in the 9th grade as opposed to the 8th. Ms. M was someone that I could relate to and someone who helped me adjust in an unfamiliar environment.

By Amira Maaty