Author: Robin Chartier

We are here at my parents’ house in Santa Cruz. It was a long day, but we made it. All the flights were good — as good as an 11 hour flight can be with a 7 month old baby sandwiched between 2 men, right? Because we weren’t booked on the flight until 11pm the night before, we were paired up, but separated from each other on the plane, all of us in center seats. But all the kids were great travelers and I couldn’t be prouder of them.

I am about to crawl in bed to sleep off the past few days of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion. I promise there are more stories to come and I keep thinking of so many things that I wanted to blog about Egypt, but never had time to share. For now I’ll just share a picture from this morning.

A little background: I had spent most of the night packing, the entire morning waiting for a shuttle, then a bus to the airport, and sat at the airport in numerous lines for hours. Finally made it onto a plane, but then sat on the tarmac until we took off at 7:00pm. Then we arrived at this beautiful, luxurious hotel in Athens. Gorgeous bathroom with a soaking tub and steam shower, hardwood floors, a feather bed over the mattress. Ah, if this is refugee status, I think I can cope. I imagined waking up at 10am and enjoying the amazing hotel breakfast and maybe a little sightseeing in Athens before catching a late afternoon flight out. Then Josh broke the news that we had to leave for the airport at 4:00am so we could get the early flight to Frankfurt to catch the 10am flight to SFO.

I was able to crawl into bed at midnight, but I couldn’t sleep because I was too stressed about how crappy I was going to feel when I had to get up at 3:45. Those “hurry up and fall asleep because you only have 3 hours and 17 minutes until you have to get up” thoughts really don’t promote peaceful sleep, you know?

 

So this is me not being a happy camper at 4am. And it was freezing. Ah, Athens, I hardly knew ye.

So, bye bye Miss Egyptian Pie
Drove my Pajero to the wadi, but the wadi was dry,
And the band of cops were drinking mango juice and chai, singing. . .
this’ll be the day that I die
this’ll be the day that I die

It’s a good thing I didn’t have internet the day they called and told us that we had to evacuate because I would have just posted a blubbery ode declaring my love for all things Egyptian.

I hate that we had to leave today. I cried. A lot. And then I cried off and on all morning when we were saying goodbye to Madiha, who also cried and hugged and kissed us all like we were family and asked, “why are you leaving now? Things are getting better.” All we could say was, “They say we have to go. Enshalla (God willing) we will come back.”

 

(Can you believe how tiny she is? She’s a miniature Superwoman!)

 

The irony for Josh and I was that as we were being driven to the airport in a huge caravan of embassy people (There were at least 300 evacuated today) other people were out gardening, jogging, and shopping. It was a beautiful, normal day in Egypt. And if I don’t stop talking about it, I’ll probably start crying all over again.

Thank you everyone for praying for us. When it was all going down we were praying for wisdom for what to do — whether to stay or go, and we prayed that God would make it clear. He did. So right now I’m in a beautiful hotel in Athens, but I’m deeply missing this view from my bed.

 

Tomorrow we leave Athens at the crack of dawn, fly through Frankfurt (totally making sure I have a jacket this time), and then to SFO. Happy to be seeing family again, just wishing they were coming to us instead of us coming back to them.

To be a successful driver here in Egypt, you have to treat each encounter with another vehicle (or person) like a game of chicken that you are determined to win. If I were driving, I’d be frozen in one spot — afraid to move for fear of hitting someone. I would want to go and then second-guess myself and hesitate and in that instant the opening in the street would disappear. Successful drivers here are arrogant and self assured with the attitude of “no one’s going to hit me. Y’all better move out of my way cause I’m coming through and I’m not stopping!”

Riding with Josh is like listening in on a conversation between him and every other driver on the road: “Oh no, don’t even think about inching ahead of me buddy” or “Are you going? Never mind, I’ll just drive around you” or even “No, I’m not backing up. You back up.” Yes, that’s the conversation he had today. We were driving home down one of Maadi’s many narrow streets that although they are 2-way, are only wide enough for 1 car because there are cars parked on both sides of the street. We were 1/2 way down the block when another SUV turned onto the street and started driving toward us. She had room to pull over to let us pass and then misjudged how much room she had and ran into a curb. I guess that made her mad cause then she decided she wasn’t backing up. And Josh wasn’t backing up. There were 3 dudes in the street yelling at her to back up — because the way the cars were positioned, she was in a better position to make space for us to pass, but she refused.

She kept gesturing for Josh to back up, but he had thrown the car in park and wasn’t going anywhere. It was about a 5 minute standoff with cars starting to back up behind her when she finally caved and pulled part-way into a driveway so we could go around her and then we were back on our way. The entire time Josh stayed cool and casual and just kept shaking his head saying, “I’m not backing up.” If I had been driving, I probably would have caved and then would have proceeded to scrape the cars on both sides of the street all the way to the corner.

I never was good at chicken.

So if any of you were following the news about Egypt you saw that there were thousands of protesters all over downtown last night. I’m sure you probably know more of the details than we do since Egypt blocked Twitter, shut down access to Facebook for a while, and wasn’t showing much on the news.

When I signed back into Facebook this evening many of my Egypt friends had posted notes to their families saying, “Thanks for all the phone calls and notes of concern. We are fine.” Hey! I didn’t get any phone calls or notes of concern! What, were you all too busy watching J-Lo and Steven Tyler on AI? Or for those of you not related to me, were you busy watching the State of the Union address? Just teasing. I know we are well loved.

So last night things looked like they were going to be a Very. Big. Deal. The protesters were going to stay out all night, fast food places were providing free food, people in the area were unlocking their wifi connections so that people could still report from the square since Egypt had shut down cell phone service in the downtown area. Well, we woke up to nothing. Around 1 am the cops moved in to shut down the sit in. They unloaded tear gas, rubber bullets, and beat sticks on the crowd and they chased them all off.

A point a friend of ours made was when people are desperate and protesting because they are financially destitute, they can’t afford to protest on a work day because they need every pound they can possibly earn to survive. So today was business as usual. We’ll see if anything picks up again over the weekend.

In the meantime, life in Maadi is normal. Josh and the boys are at basketball practice, I have self-defense class tomorrow morning, and we’re still waiting on our shipment and our car. Josh and I were laughing because there was an interview on the news last night with one of the Ministers of Foreign something-or-other and I asked, “Those aren’t the people who have to clear our shipment, are they?” Yep, sure enough. So even if our shipment makes it from whoever has it to the Ministry of Foreign blah-de-blah, I’m sure this event isn’t helping to get our paperwork approved.

I wanted to post 2 pictures of Josh and Camille watching the news together — Josh watching, Camille sacked out on his chest, but I can’t get anything to upload. I’m just going to blame it on the Egyptian government.

**** They just restored Twitter and now I can post pictures again. Maybe my problem was related. And according to Twitter and youtube videos, people are out protesting again.