The aspect of Egyptian culture that has stood out to me the most since I arrived here--and made me wish there was a bit more of it in American culture--is the friendly, open generosity that people display. At school, for example, no one eats anything alone. If you have a sandwich, you tear it in half and offer a piece to your friend. Bags of chips and bottles of water are more or less communal property, and even individual pieces of chocolate can be broken into smaller and smaller pieces to make sure that all your friends get a chance to try it. One of the people who exemplifies this generosity most, along with the friendly openness of Egyptian culture, is Fatma, my bus director.
Bus director is a job that has no equivalent in America. It is an exclusively female position, whereas bus drivers here are all men. As far as I can tell, the director's task is to keep the discipline on the bus and make sure that every student gets to and from school safely each day, and also to provide assistance to the driver in finding new students' homes and creating the most logical route. This can be executed in a number of different ways. The director of the bus I take to Arabic class if constantly in a bad mood, and sits slouched in her front row seat, texting on her blackberry and occasionally looking up to yell at any student who's become too loud, or offer the driver advice, which he ignores. Entirely on the opposite side of the spectrum, there is Fatma, who makes the ride to and from school one of the best parts of the day.
I suppose she's technically Ms. Fatma, but no one actually calls her that; she seems too close to the students for much formality. Every morning, she uses her own mobile to call each and every student on the route five minutes before she reaches their building, to tell them to come down, so they don't have to stand waiting for fifteen minutes on the street for the bus to arrive, or to keep things moving if she's early. Unlike other buses, which leave students behind if they aren't waiting on the street, I don't think Fatma has ever left anyone behind, although we've all been late to school a few times because of it. She is constantly in the center of students' conversation, laughing and teasing along with them, although she is always ready to keep the discipline with her long fingernails that dig into troublesome students' wrists until they repent and plead for mercy. She also knows how to throw a school bus party like no other.
The first time I was introduced to Fatma's bus breakfasts was at the beginning of the year. I showed up on Thursday morning in my usual tired I-should-not-be-awake-before-seven daze, and was awoken from a half-sleep partway through the hour and fifteen minute bus ride to find all the students crowding towards the front of the bus, talking with an excitement rarely seen in the morning, swaying into each other with the movement of the bus. As an exchange student, I was given the honored status of being shoved through the crowd to the front, where I fell unceremoniously into a front row seat as the bus jerked forward. There I found Fatma, seated precariously on the ledge that divided the body of the bus from the driver's cab, with a wooden tray half the width of the bus set on her lap, loaded with a feast. Large plates of fuhl (Egyptian beans) had been layed out next to stacks of tamiya, cold seasoned eggplant, onion, and gergeer. A shopping bag sat next to her, filled with eish balady (badly transliterated; that's Egyptian flatbread, it's not really like anything you can get in America, so I can't give you an English word) that was being passed--and tossed--out to students.
As we wove through Cairo traffic, Fatma and the tray swayed dangerously back and forth between the two halves of the bus. Whenever we stopped suddenly or she was overcome with laughter, Fatma would throw out both arms to grab a pole on her right and the boy seated to her left, who would grab hold to keep her from toppling over entirely as her entire top half disappeared into the cab behind her, the tray on her lap miracolously managing to stay upright.
I, naturally, was urged to try everything, which I did with relish, and eat, and eat, and eat some more. Fatma offered me something that looked a bit like a piece of onion, and, unsespecting, I took a large bite like everyone else around me was doing, to find that it was, indeed, a large slice of plain raw onion. Not wanting to appear rude by, say, spitting it out and throwing the remainder out the window, I decided I was obligated to finish it, possibly a mistake given that my throat was still burning after my second piece of bread.
When everyone had eaten their fill--or, in many cases, more than their fill--the remainder of the food was carefully covered in plastic and replaced in Fatma's shopping bags and the newspaper gathered from the tray, and out came the second course of any good Egyptian meal: soda. Out came bottles of pepsi with a thin ice crust on top, that had appparently been frozen to keep the September heat from rendering them undrinkable, and two grubby plastic cups of dubious origin, one of which was filled and passed to me, along with half a box of gum that was dumped into my hand as I was trying to show Fatma that I already had some. The other cup was passed to the driver, while the bottles were handed around for the other students to drink from.
Our driver was so occupied with his soda and the spirited conversations going on behind him that he missed the turn-off to school. With typical Egyptian driving style, he decided to remedy this situation by putting the bus in reverse and backing up down the highway to where we were supposed be, apparently following the logic that he wasn't driving the wrong way so long as the front of the bus was pointed in the same direction as the rest of the traffic. So back we went, with Fatma dangling out the door, acting as the eyes of the bus and a sort of traffic flagger, waving wildly at cars behind us to alert them that we were coming, and they'd better get out of the way if they didn't want to get hit by a bus full of overstuffed teenagers.
We arrived at school in high spirits, long after the bell had rung. The pepsi was returned to its bags, the cups shaken out and stowed away, presumably in preparation for another use, and students went to retrieve their bags, to go attend just another day of school as if the breakfast had never happened.
