I'm getting back in the groove after a long Christmas/New Year hiatus. Our fantastic trip to Egypt is being beautifully documented by Molly on her part of the blog and I may or may not get time to write from my perspective. I've been uninspired to write lately but her descriptions bring back great memories of our family's journey back in time.
Spending time in another Muslim country gave me better perspective of Arab nations in general. It would be easy to have a skewed notion of the Arab world by only seeing life in Kuwait with it's 2 tiers of high class, and No class. Egypt is an interesting blend of the Middle East and Africa where Islam is King, but Christians seem to be well tolerated...I say that, but just after we came back there was an incident of 7 Christians being killed near Luxor over an earlier alleged rape of a Muslim girl by a Christian man. Tensions there brew around the edges of the tourist destinations but the tourism police were everywhere to secure our well being and keep us from straying into areas of danger.
While poverty here is limited to the areas where Third Country Nationals live, poverty looked to be much more the norm in Egypt. As Molly describes, being viewed as the wealthy foreign tourists everywhere we went was very uncomfortable to me. This prevented much genuine interaction between us and the people we were meeting which always saddens me.
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