In 1995, when I was eighteen years old, I began a gap year overseas. My experiences in Egypt were character-building to say the least, and I have many fond memories of attempted muggings, freight hopping, jumping off moving buses, being stranded in...
"This week our best friend (Egyptian that is) has left us as he is going to live in America permanently. I am sure we're gonna be a bit lost without him as we went everywhere with him. He'll be in New York and so has said that I can visit him at any time.
"The day before he left, we were walking through our area of Seouf when we saw 2 young men on a motorbike roaring past with a police car hot on his [sic] heels. They turned left down a side street and so we decided to follow. When we got down the street, we found the bike lying on the ground. One of them had managed to get away, but the other had been caught. By this time, the events had drawn a crowd. When they got the man (about 20 yrs old), the policeman started beating him. They punched him in the face, and one of them even karate kicked him in the mouth. As well as this, some old man from the crowd came out and started whipping the boy with a thick rubber tube. And the language coming from the policeman was terrible. After this, they stuck him in the boot of the police car and drove of [sic] with him!
"It was then that our friend [Mahmoud] turned around and said to us – 'This is the reason I want to get out of ****ing Egypt!' It seems that everyone has the desire to leave the country."
9th letter home to Mum
"Amrika! Amrika!" Mahmoud had been dreaming of America all of his life, and we were his passport. "Will you help me, Stuart and Ben?" How could we not? After all, he'd been our guide of Alexandria, along with Gamel, so we felt a sense of obligation.
Help meant catching the slow train to Cairo one morning. Mahmoud intended to travel with Haithem, so it was the four of us. The first thing we did when we got there was to catch up with a friend of theirs. This was not an essential part of the plan, so it niggled that we had got up at 5 am just to fit a farewell in. The guy was tinkering on his car in the street when we got there. You could see the pyramids in the distance, and I remember being blown away that someone could be doing such a mundane task with that view in the background, rather like reading a newspaper in the presence of the Queen.
We arrived at the US embassy at about midday. Mahmoud was jittery and paced back and forth as he waited to go in. In his pockets were our passports and a fictional itinerary. It outlined the sights that they intended to see during a two week visit to New York City with us. It was fictional since we were not actually going with them, at least not at this point, plus they fully intended to breach the conditions of the visa and stay for a year or two. Neither of us liked their scheme, and we had tried to persuade them to be honest about it, but they insisted that they would have more success this way.
The interview was supposed to go for about half an hour, so we were surprised when Mahmoud came back out after having been in their only five minutes. He'd been instructed to return our passports at once, which he did before disappearing back inside again. Ben and I spent the time fretting about our role in all this. Essentially, we had endorsed a lie.
Forty five minutes later, Mahmoud strutted out again, grinning cockily.
As we were leaving Cairo, a sand storm rolled in to envelop the city, turning the place a blood orange. It was an incredible spectacle to watch, and thinking about it now, I can't help seeing it as foreshadowing, like a Shakespearean tragedy, the trials that Mahmoud was to face ahead in the New World.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
