I go to Cairo with two doctors, two community organizers, another journalist and a filmmaker. We pick up water purifiers to take to hospitals and call ourselves a delegation. We pay the US embassy $30 each for the privilege of signing an affidavit that releases the embassy from responsibility for our lives. (The US embassy has become increasingly persistent on this point. I remember in 2003, before the signed affidavits, how we used to call the embassy from the middle of invasions, and how a less-than-friendly voice on the other line would inform us we had gone to a place under travel advisory and they could do nothing for us.)
Then we take the taxi six hours SE. The road: flat buildings, disheveled concrete, bright paint fading slowly to sand. Outdated billboards and the desert, pale and constant. A pit stop at an outdoor stand, with a refrigerator, a few tables and a shelf of sweets, where the owners learn where we are going and gift us bottles of juice and water.
And then we’re on a bridge, new white metal shooting up from a clean bed of concrete: the Suez Canal. Five years ago, a man with a potbelly and a gun identified this historical site to Mohammed, who identified it to me, as we rode in the back seat of a speeding white car, with three armed men, in the opposite direction, toward Cairo. I nodded, nauseous on a road that stretched six hours without a checkpoint, with a desert that extended farther than I could walk, with the place I had just left, maybe forever. The guards were people we had paid off so Mohammed wouldn’t have to follow the normal Egyptian protocol for Palestinian men 15-50. The normal protocol for this demographic was, you join other individuals of your demographic in the Egyptian checkpoint until you number 60. Then they put you on a crowded bus and take you to a room in the Cairo airport called the deportation room, a dirty carpet with a few chairs, where you stay until armed guards come to escort you to the gate. This is so you won’t try to live illegally in Egypt.
The bridge is long, and now we’re on the other side, driving down, back toward flat road and flat buildings. Five years ago, our armed escorts parked by the side of the road for a dinner of soggy rice and fish. They looked away as they put us back into the car, and Mohammed whispered in my ear, “They expected you to pay.”
The temperature cools as we reach the end of the road and turn into the town of Al-Arish, a cluster of pale concrete and splashes of orange paint. Five years ago, six hours NE on the same road, I stood in the Cairo airport lobby, arguing with our Egyptian guards at the airport, whose Egyptian accents I couldn’t understand, as they took Mohammed away to the deportation room even though we had paid them not to, yelling (stupidly, ineffectively, with incorrect grammar), I’ll go with him. I’ve been living with Palestinians for the past ten months, I think I can handle sitting with them for a few hours. They took him away of course, and I stayed up all night in the unheated January airport, watching men and women covered in white make their way to the gate to board planes to Mecca, the guy selling gum at the convenience mart telling his friend, “There’s the girl who can speak Arabic but not understand.” (Read on …)
1) Sunday, 5 April 2009
2) Monday, 6 April 2009
