Homestay Experience

This past week was MESP’s homestay week where we each live with an Egyptian family (usually Muslim) and do our best to practice our Arabic, learn about their culture, and engage in their family life. Everyone has their own stories of language barriers, cultural misunderstandings, and the challenges and joys we faced.

My family consisted of the father and mother, a 21 year old girl named Samar who works in a travel agency and the 16 year old brother. I really wanted the week to be filled with good conversation about our beliefs and cultures and to feel like a part of their family by the end of the time. That didn’t really happen though, and for whatever reason, I had great difficulty trying to engage them in any level of conversation. I was moved to a different family for the weekend in order to get a more fulfilling experience and was warmly welcomed into the new family, which was such a blessing.

Some experiences from both these families include: playing lots of games and teaching them card tricks, going to buy the daily bread and watching some of it fall on to the filthy ground near cow intestines and then eating those same pieces for breakfast, eating and eating and eating everything put before me, having for breakfast a huge bowl of sweet milky pasta, sitting on the ground around a low table for meals with the whole family digging in with our hands, sharing a bed with my host sister, having a dance party with tons of little girls, meeting the aunt’s husband who has a second wife elsewhere and then being asked if I was engaged because he needed a third wife, watching the little girls dress up in their mother’s niqab (face veil) just as I used to put on my mother’s high heels and then having them put it on me, watching a Turkish soap opera dubbed in Arabic every night, and much much more.

I really wish I could have had conversations with these people about their perspectives on life, but it ended up being more of me coming to my own conclusions based on what I saw. I experienced true hospitality, I saw people devoted to their faith, I viewed the extensive propaganda that pervades the homes, I saw families who cared deeply for each other and parents who worked tirelessly to provide for them, I saw and heard about the poverty that pervades so much of Egypt and then experienced the huge discrepancies of wealth with the upper class. It was definitely an unforgettable experience.