Why are you here? Why have you come to Egypt?
It's usually the first question Egyptians ask once Egyptians figure out that I'm not a tourist. They're curious as to why an American would want to live in Cairo.
My answer-to study-is sometimes met with appreciation but usually bewilderment.
A friend of mine actually had a cabbie get angry at him when he said he came to Egypt to learn Arabic.
Why would you ever leave the U.S. to come here? Are you crazy?
Many Egyptians, particularly poorer ones for whom the concept of study abroad is an unfathomable luxury, are dumbfounded by the idea of willingly leaving the States, even temporarily.
Because in their minds, the United States is the land of opportunity, the streets are still paved with gold. Once, I tried to tell an Egyptian that in America that we have social problems too. But only a few lines into my we-have-poverty-too-diatribe he pointed out how utterly ridiculous I was being.
The scale is incomparable.
According to Al-Ahram-one of Egypt's most widely circulated newspapers-nearly 60 percent of Greater Cairo residents live in one of the city's ashwaiyyat, or slums.
Some quick math: 0.6 times 15 million (a conservative estimate) = 9 million.
That's nine million people living in shantytowns, many of whom don't have access to clean drinking water, toilet facilities or paved roads. Forced out of school in order to provide resources for their families, these slum dwellers get forced into menial, dead-end jobs. They're the people, like the enraged taxi driver who are rightfully incredulous at Westerners who have left the developed world behind.
But this isn't a poverty-a-thon. The same problems that afflict Cairo, affect Mumbai, Lagos and a whole host of other developing metropolises. There are lots of poor people in lots of places.
But this isn't about them; it's about us-about you and about me. It's about recalibrating our collective sense of self.
I always used to think of myself as middle-class American, and two years of being at Duke and seeing lots of other people who also thought of themselves as middle-class Americans, but who in fact had much more than my family solidified my feeling that I was somewhere on the middle of the totem pole. Maybe toward the top, but definitely middle-ish.
Wrong.
I'm filthy rich and you probably are too-at least in a global sense.
But this isn't a guilt trip; instead, it's the preamble to the answer to one of the most basic and important political questions about the Third World: if so many people in the Middle East hate America so much, why are they still lining up for immigration visas?
Everyone wants to be comfortable enough to lead a dignified life-no matter what their religion or language-and they know America is one of the few countries where that's possible for the average citizen.
I've had countless conversations with taxi drivers, fruit vendors and waiters in which they've told me-with a sort of subdued glee-that all empires eventually fall, and that America's time will soon come. But often those same people will ask me, right after they've told me America's doomed, how they can get a visa. The irony is remarkable.
It's a bizarre mixture of admiration and envy that fuels this peculiar form of resentment.
To be fair, though, many people in Egypt demonstrate a remarkable ability to separate the foreign policy actions of the U.S. government and the character of ordinary Americans-a sort of "hate the sin, not the sinner" mentality.
We can only hope that remains true.
Yousef Abugharbieh is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Monday.
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