Bad Ambassadors

And Then We Met Gamel...

"We have a newish friend (Egyptian) called [Gamel] who speaks pretty good English. One night we took the tram home from the city centre and some lads approached us asking our nationality, and because [Gamel] dresses similar to us and looks not very Egyptian, we passed him off as an Italian! We even introduced him to our boweb (doorman) as Luigi. This was really funny because he was pretending not to understand the Arabic, while we were translators translating when [Gamel] knew perfectly well what they were saying. Also it is good if they insult us thinking us unable to understand as 'Luigi' will tell us!"

4th letter home to Mum

Gamel was the moral antithesis of Ahmed but loveable nonetheless. We were at our local bakery, browsing the confectionery on display when we crossed paths with him for the first time. Gradually our attentions switched from the mouth-watering creations in front of us to this short man with a neatly trimmed moustache and goatee, who'd waltzed in and begun to banter with the owner in Arabic. He wore a tight white T-shirt, black jeans and trainers, a more casual look than the formal Egyptian fashion of the time. The baker introduced us to him in broken English; there was a degree of contrivance to it. 

Afterwards, Gamel gestured at the owner, grinning. "He looks like a monkey, but don't worry: He is very stupid and cannot understand. I tell him I'm telling you he is a great baker."

The owner's expression was dead-pan.

Before long, we had agreed to meet Gamel again. As he parted, he reached behind the display cabinet, pinched a slice of cake and ran off with it saying in English, "Don't worry; I pay him Tuesday." The owner chased him out of the store, but you got the feeling that they liked each other and that he'd do this sort of thing every day.

The baker returned shaking his head. "Gamel big trouble!"

We laughed.

So we met Gamel again and agreed that for being our guide of Alexandria, we would in return improve his English. By ourselves, Ben and I could cope perfectly well, but having someone around like Gamel made things run so much more smoothly: People wouldn't hassle us so much; touts wouldn't tout so much; we wouldn't get ripped off so much, and everyone was more understood with him about. Meeting Gamel was definitely a change of pace and direction in our year abroad, but, at times, his charisma and humour blinded us to his transgressions.

Gamel soon reinvented himself as our Italian friend − thus was spawned Luigi. It was a daily charade performed in the company of other Egyptians. The idea was that we'd speak to people in our pidgin Arabic, and he'd pretend to only understand the English when we translated back to him. He insisted we'd benefit from this as they'd be lulled into a false sense of security, talk freely in Arabic amongst themselves, and then he'd be able to alert us to any suspect agendas. Of course, this was rarely the case. The Egyptians we met were invariably genuine, and this turned out to be a vehicle for Gamel to insult people. "He smell like a donkey, yes, Stuart or Ben?"

Even our boweb was subjected to the same treatment. This eventually backfired, however, as our boweb saw Gamel go into his father's house one day. He made some inquiries and discovered that Gamel was indeed Egyptian, and then, I'm sure doing it in his eyes for our protection, launched his campaign against Gamel. The boweb's children would ride their tricycles around the lobby chanting, "No Luigi!" The boweb would try to warn us in Arabic when we were by ourselves, at length. Of course, we got the gist of what he was saying but feigned ignorance. It was a messy situation to clean up, and it left us looking very naïve, which was the preferable option to letting him know that we were in on it from the start. In the end, we told him that we had forgiven Gamel for his crime to avoid him becoming barred from coming round. We even had to stage an apology in which Gamel received an earful.