Cairo Airport
When 9/11 happened, my life was changed for over a decade. I spent all of my energy trying to understand fundamentalist Islam by traveling the Middle East and living with the kinds of people who espoused violent intentions towards non-Muslims. It was one of many adventures in my life, but it was the most important.
In 2003, after studying Arabic for a couple of years, I grew frustrated with how difficult it was to learn the language and hopped on an airplane to Cairo to study with Western converts to fundamentalist Islam. It was a life-changing experience that gave me an accelerated introduction to a culture I had only read about in the news.
Like most of my trips, I didn’t do any of the normal planning and wound up arriving at Cairo International Airport with no clear idea about how I was going to make it to the Institute. When I finally found the person who would take me to my new home, I was shocked into the reality of the decisions I’d made.
I pretended that I knew what I was doing as I made my way through immigration. When they spoke to me in Egyptian Arabic, I paid attention to their hand motions and eye movements to figure out what they meant. I kept my passport in plain sight so they could point to it or grab it when they needed to. I pieced together what words I could as I moved past immigration: “mukhrij” means exit, so I followed those signs. After being stamped and waved past all the necessary checkpoints, I reached the outside.
It felt sticky and dark.
There were a few taxis lingering for a fare, but most of the people on my flight had already been picked up by their relatives or drivers. After a few moments a man slowly approached me. He didn’t smile and he didn’t speak English. I could tell he was trying to utter the words “American” and “Alexander” so I smiled broadly to break the tension and showed him my passport. He grabbed my bag and walked off toward the parking lot as I blindly followed him. As we approached his car, a woman emerged from the front seat and quickly moved to the back seat.
She was covered all in black. Hands, face, feet, everything. There was nothing visible. The only time I had ever seen a woman dressed like that was on TV, and it was usually with people who were celebrating 9/11. Time began to slow down, and I could feel my breathing get shallow and quicker. My legs grew heavy and my feet felt like they were growing roots into the asphalt parking lot. I looked left and right to scan for any other people that might be able to help me and I yelled at myself, Getting into a strange car in a strange land with a man who doesn’t speak English and forces his wife to wear that thing is a bad idea, an idea of epically bad proportions.
I just kept moving, fueled by senseless passion. I opened the passenger door slowly and sat down while reaching for the seatbelt as if I were going out partying with my buddies back home—my body was moving in slow motion but my mind was spinning in circles. The driver hopped in the car and took off like a bat out of hell. We sped along darkened roads at breakneck speed. I was surprised to notice we were on a four-lane highway with light posts, dotted lines, and shrubs for decoration. It looked more like the long, uninhabited road out of Denver International Airport than whatever I expected Cairo to look like. All three of us sat in silence as I tried to get myself together and plan for whatever was going to happen to me.