Facing The Desert: The Emotional Toll of Living in Egypt
Suddenly, something has happened to me
As I was having my cup of tea
Suddenly, I was feeling depressed
I was utterly and totally stressed
Animal Instinct by The Cranberries
Exactly five years ago today, I had the incredible opportunity to visit the Great Pyramids of Giza. My dream of studying Egyptology came true. Here is a reflection on what living in Egypt meant to me and how it transformed my life.
I am taken back to walking up and down the historical, colonial, upper-middle-class streets of Zamalek, the island that separates Cairo from Giza. I’m wearing typical Egyptian attire: jeans with the excess denim folded up to my ankles, a plain button-down shirt, and sandals.
Zamalek is known for being the green heart of Cairo. Surrounded by the Nile, most of the trees in the city are found on this island. They help lower the temperature, making the weather more bearable. Most embassies and foreign offices have a presence here.
I walk along محور ٢٦ يوليو (Corridor 26 July) and spot what seems to be one of the very few American chain cafes in the city. I enter Dunkin’, and it immediately transports me back to the Western world, with its perfect air conditioning, familiar donuts, and iced lattes. I sit at the bar, facing the glass window that looks out onto the street. I have a view of people passing by. I notice a well-dressed man carrying a folder, a man in جلابية, (galabeya), the traditional Egyptian dress, and a white, blonde tourist couple — probably from Europe. I don’t see any children.
I’m entertained by the thought that most people commute here and don’t actually live on the island. I wonder how far they live and how different life is in their neighborhoods compared to the exquisite boutique stores and American cafés on this side of the city. I see the microbuses, their drivers shouting out destinations so passengers know where they’re headed and can catch the right bus.
As I reflect on all this, I notice that the purpose of most people coming to this café is to relax with friends or family. I’m the only one with a laptop out, writing; no one is reading a book as I might have expected. There’s an Egyptian coffee shop around the block where I’ve seen more people engaged in academic activities, but it reeks of cigarette smoke.I have yet to find a café where people work on their laptops or read; academic activities don’t seem to be common in Egypt.
I take the bus back to the apartment, heading to the hypermarket in Sheikh Zayed. “Setta u nus,” the passenger next to me says. Six pounds and fifty piasters. I hand over the money, and he passes it to the passenger in front of us, who then hands it to the driver. This is the common way to pay the fare. One passenger usually becomes responsible for collecting the fare from everyone, giving change if needed, and then handing the full sum to the driver. Outside the big grocery store is a thirty-foot model of a shopping cart.
I walk on النزهة (El Nozha) avenue for about twenty minutes until I reach شارع ٤٨ (Street 48), where I live.
The next day, I walk along البوستان (El Bostan, “the garden”) towards Americana Plaza Mall. The British-owned chain Costa Coffee serves as my refuge from my feelings of discomfort. As I look around, the scene feels sad, desert-like, lifeless. Few trees adorn the streets, and everything appears bleak and unappealing. These feelings make me feel alien to this country — the heat, the sand, the unfinished buildings left mid-construction, the lack of places to study. Life in Egypt feels so hard. From the weather to having to communicate in Arabic when buying bread or عيش (ʿaysh, literally meaning “life”). This is the country that feels the least similar to the world I come from. I’m still not entirely sure what makes life in Egypt feel so burdensome, like a daily struggle to get up and exist in this desert.
The desert is a symbol of death. Nothing grows in the desert. There’s no water, no life. Ninety-six percent of Egypt is desert. Life only exists along the Nile. I guess I think about death every time I pass by the pyramids on the microbus on my way to downtown Cairo. I appreciate the view of the pyramids from afar, across fields of agriculture, as the driver speeds so fast that I become afraid we might collide.
The desert is a place of contemplative reflection. I think that two places allow for this. The ocean, with its infinite water, and the desert, with its infinite sand. Both with infinite nothingness.
“It makes me lonely, it makes me very lonely,” says the lyrics to Everything I Said by The Cranberries. The desert makes me tired. My mind lingers on feelings of displacement and loneliness. My heart is grieving — the loss of not meeting expectations, of life being harder than I thought it would be. I could spend hours at the Giza Necropolis contemplating the pyramids. The wind, the sand, the heat — all take me back more than four thousand years, to a time when people grappled with concerns about death, how to live one’s life, what matters, and why, viewing this life as preparation for the next. The resemblance between the questions faced by ancient Egyptians and my own gives me goosebumps.
There was a constant feeling of defeat and disheartenment, a sense of discouragement to continue, as if turning away would alleviate the suffering. My experience in college wasn’t much different. The pain I felt while studying for my hieroglyphs class or my art and architecture of Ancient Egypt course seemed to add another dimension to the overall pessimistic and heavy burden of living in Egypt.
I didn’t want it to be this way. I did enjoy reading and learning about Ancient Egypt, but there’s a difference between knowing historical facts and physically experiencing them by entering pyramids, temples, and tombs — even getting inside a sarcophagus. In twenty-first-century Egypt, the sacred met the mundane. The emotional burden of being at these archaeological sites was draining. It took a toll on me, and I needed long periods to recover after each visit.
I came on my own, not as part of a study abroad group. I didn’t anticipate the level of isolation I would experience or how profoundly my mere presence in the country would affect me. I had heard from others that Egypt isn’t for everyone, and I can confirm that. It requires a lot of energy to separate emotions from the experience, to distinguish between the academic knowledge I was acquiring and the practical adjustment to living in a very different society.
Five years later, I still don’t fully understand or grasp the impact that seeing the pyramids for the first time has had on my life. Egypt has an allure that draws me in, but I know it won’t always feel good. It calls some of us to study the history, art, and language of the ancient Egyptians, but it comes with a cost — a mental and emotional toll. Not everyone is ready for it. I thought I was. I prepared as much as I could before arriving in Cairo, but I found that it was my courage that allowed me to move forward and avoid getting trapped in the depths of depression that come with studying and contemplating death.
