I'm Back!

Hi again! I've had a roller coaster ride of a time since my last blog post. It's gonna be hard to remember what all happened, but I'll give it a try.

My sister Ali visited me over Christmas and it was awesome. She got to help me in the preschool and I got to show her around Cairo. We went to the Pyramids, the Cairo Opera House to watch The Nutcracker with some friends, a major souvenir shopping district called Khan El Khalili, and the city of Alexandria for Christmas Eve. That was the city where there was a bombing of an Orthodox church on Christmas Eve, but luckily we left earlier that day and weren't in the city when the disaster struck. We went all over the city and took pictures, and also toured a real castle. We went with one of my Egyptian friends and had a great time. We also had an interesting experience getting to Alexandria. We missed our train and ran so long and so fast to try to catch it. We didn't catch it and I was so out of breath I thought I was going to vomit. Luckily we caught a public train but it was very packed and smokey with a bunch of guys staring at us the whole time. But we got there after a couple hours and when we came back we caught the regular train that we had paid for thankfully. Ali got to meet all my preschool students and also helped me out with our preschool Christmas party. She was Santa and the kids loved it!

After western Christmas we had a vacation because Christmas in Egypt is in January. We took off a week from preschool. I stayed in Cairo to have some time alone to relax and also to get some work done. It was a pretty relaxing and nice week. Once school started up again I was ready to get back into work again. We took our first field trip with the preschool kids. The parents of one of our preschool students offered to take us to the zoo. They were able to borrow their church's microbus to transport us. We had a great time and the kids were really excited to go to the zoo. It was a really fun day for us.

The big event in January was the demonstrations that took place in Egypt. As you probably know, the demonstrations impacted me greatly. Not that anything happened to me or anyone I knew, but because of it forced me to leave Egypt. I'll try to recount my experiences of the demonstrations in another post though, so this one isn't too long.

Thankfully I was able to return to Egypt at the end of February. My first day back in preschool was amazing. There was a surprise welcome back party for me, and it was so endearing. The kids sang me a welcome back song and they were each holding a sign with a different message on it for me. Then we had pizza that the Healthy Life Center made, and people from the office came over to say hi to me. There were signs all over saying Welcome Back and We Missed You. It was a really special day.

Life went back to normal after that. I brought a lot of stuff from home for preschool and it was fun to unpack and organize it all, and also see how excited the kids were for the new things. I had to work really hard after I got back. Nobody had looked after the preschool money while I was gone so I had to finish collecting the January money, figure out how much everybody owed for February based on when they started coming back to preschool (Manal and Ranya opened the preschool a couple week before I came back and worked on their own, with the help of Karin sometimes), and then take the money for the current month, March. I decorated the room for the theme of the month for March was is spring. I organized things that had gotten disorganized while I was gone, and I did a lot of cleaning. Finally things seemed like they were the way I wanted it. Then I still had a lot of planning to do for the day to day activities.

All in all I'm so happy to be back. I've had a couple interesting experiences throughout March. The first Friday after I got back I spent the afternoon at Anita's house. They had met Egypt's U.S.A. Ambassador a couple months earlier, and he wanted to spend some time with their family. He came over to their house for lunch, and Anita invited me to come as well. It was very interesting spending lunch with an ambassador, and it was a pretty cool opportunity. He was really friendly and pretty easy to talk to.

Last week on Friday Karin invited me to go to her friends' home. I had met this couple at the Christmas party Karin and Pastor Llew had. They are a British couple who know Pastor Llew and Karin from Britain, and they both ended up being missionaries in Cairo. They are Anglican and work at the All Saints Anglican Cathedral in Cairo. They had invited Karin and Pastor Llew over for lunch and a movie, but Pastor Llew was away that weekend and Karin didn't want to travel there by herself because it was a ways away. So she asked me to come along. We took the metro and met her friend Helen at the other end when we got off the metro, and she took us to their apartment. There were a lot of people there, and they were all so friendly. I think most or all of them were Anglicans who were either working for their church, the British Council, or doing internships. Almost all of them were British. It was so nice to meet so many fellow Christian missionaries. I was struck by how many genuinely good people there are in the world. They were really kind and friendly people. There were also a lot of families with children there, which made it even more interesting. We ate falafel sandwiches for lunch and then watched the movie Invictus which was about Nelson Mandela and the South African rugby team the Springboks. It was really good and inspiring to see how a leader of a country could make such a difference.

Last Sabbath I went to Bert Chang's house for Sabbath lunch. Bert is an Asian man who married an Egyptian lady. They live here for a few months out of the year I believe, and I think the rest of the time they live in US. I'm not completely sure though. They asked a bunch of people over and we had a good time. They have a nice apartment in Heliopolis, only about 15 minutes away from my apartment if you walk.

This Sabbath has been nice and quiet. I played piano for church last Sabbath and also today. Tonight I'll probably do some preparation for school tomorrow and the week ahead. It's so good to be back in the swing of things. I love preschool, I love Egypt, and I love being busy and 100% invested in a job that I enjoy.