Cairo, Egypt

 Coming to America, My experience Since Leaving Cairo                             

I’ve known Mino Henes for about a year now. He’s a friend of a friend…We oddly enough struck up a conversation due to his accent.  I wanted to know where he was from since the accent didn’t seem at all familiar.  It turned out he was from Egypt and had only been here a few years, but is now a naturlized citizen.  Aside from the accent he’s quite Americanized, so much so that I almost forgot about him when deciding who to interview for the migration assignment.  I met him at his apartment in Chandler for the interview.  Ironically he was cooking Mexican food at the time.  In between rice and beans we were able to discuss just why he came to America, how he came, and his feelings about the whole migration, then and now.  His story is parallel to those we’ve discussed in lecture and read about in several books.  While his story was very intriguing to me, his first response to being interviewed was that he had no story, and surely it would bore me to hear him try and talk about his migration experience.

            Mino:  When I look back and think about how I came to Arizona all I can think about is planes.  I had never been on a plane before coming here, and man were there tons of planes… I was born in Cairo, Egypt, the capital if you didn’t know that.  I lived there all my life until I came here.  I was 15 when we finally came over in 2000.  I came here on my birthday, now that I think about it.  It took like 24 hours to get here!  My dad worked for the United Sates Embassy in Cairo as a security driver, and had heard so many good things about the US, like better jobs, more money, better education, just a better life you know?  He decided along time ago he would move us here, it just took a while to get the paperwork figured out and approved I guess.  My family was also very involved in the church and had connections with a guy in Phoenix that belonged to the Immigration Support with the Orthodox church I go to now.  He helped my dad find a house to rent and set up a job before we got here. 

I don’t ask my dad why we moved but he tells us its for a better life, you know like everyone says.  I guess he wanted me and my three sisters to be able to get a better education.  In Egypt you must have a 99.9% in all your school work to go to a university, not like here, they don’t have colleges, or community schools to learn.  I guess if you have lots of money you can probably have a B in school or something. But if you want to go to medical school or anything like that you need a 99.9% for sure and you make your whole life studying like 20 hours a day! 

My dad already speaks English before we come over, and the rest of us didn’t know anything but a few words we learned from TV and maybe some from school.  I never spoke English out loud before coming here and it felt like forever before I learned how to.  I was a sophomore in high school when I got here.  That was a pretty hard year.  I got a job as soon as I could.   I got hired to be a furniture mover six months after we got here.  It was nice cause it helped me learn English to talk to people.  Things were harder at school because I was embarrassed to talk.  I knew so little and didn’t understand much for a while.  People would talk to me at school and I would all the time just nod my head and say yes, no, yes… (laughing).  It didn’t matter what they were saying, I would just keep saying yes and no!  It was better than telling them I didn’t understand.

I thought the first year was hard at school until the next.  After September 11^th 2001 the real teasing started, kids were pretty mean back then.  On the street I might get mistaken for Mexican or something but at school they knew I was from over there, even though I’m not from the Iraq or Afghanistan.  They were always saying something about terrorist to me.  That time was definitely the hardest part of my “migration”, as you call it.  I started lifting weights at that time.  I figured people would have to respect me one way or another, and my favorite thing to watch in Egypt was Wrestle Mania.  I got pretty buff, and it seemed to work, at least for the girls.  But mostly the girls all like my accent.  I don’t know, they don’t even care if you can speak any English sometimes as long as you have a nice accent.  Kids at school would always ask questions about Egypt, but they would say them like they heard them from the news or something.  One girl asked me how I got here, she was actually thinking we did not have planes or cars.  So I just told her I rode my camel here and I just parked him out front in the parking lot!  I think maybe she believed part of it.

If I could let Americans know anything about where I come from it’s that we’re not living in the caveman days, Egyptians are more modern than people think.  We have cars, planes and TV too.  I think sometimes when I go back to Egypt that Egypt is more Americanized than America!  There are lots of malls and McDonalds. The kids all look like American gangsters now with baggy pants n’ stuff.  I laugh when I see them.  There are a lot of TV stations and last time I went in 2003, I heard 50 cent on all the radios.  Cairo is a really big city.  It’s not just tents in the desert.  It’s more like New York City I think.  There are something like 40 million people there?  Too crowded for me. 

Before I came here I thought everything would look like the movies, like in Hollywood.  When I got a chance to look around I thought… it looks like the movies!  Well at least things looked nice, clean.  I was most shocked when I came to see all the cars.  There were so many cars… Egypt has a lot of cars too, but the ones here were huge and all going way fast! I got my license as soon as I turned 16.  My dad already taught me how to drive a little on the dirt roads outside the city in Egypt so it was easy.  The next most shocking thing was the girls.  In Egypt I went to an all boy school, so it was weird to go to school with girls for a while.  I’m not complaining though.

Currently I work at a wine warehouse distributor.  I just put my application online and I got the job.  I’ve had lots of experiences in warehouses since I been here.  I like it, I’m good at it.  I finished high school and went to college for a year and a half.  I’m planning on going back soon for supply chain management, hopefully…  

Like I said I don’t ask my dad much about how he thinks about it here or anything.  I do think he’s happy to be here, but also sad about being away from home.  All my family still lives in Egypt.  Egypt is a much slower pace place than here.  You work hard but you don’t work all day every day like here.  Back home my dad owned our house, his car and everything.  Here we rent everything.  In Egypt we had time to go to church a lot and spend time with our family and friends.  In America all you do is work so you can pay your bills and sleep ‘til you work again.  Life here is much more hectic.  We still go to church and I visit my parents a lot, but its different.  I dot miss it that much. I’m happy to be here. I don’t want to move back actually.  I think maybe my mom and dad might want to someday.  They go back and visit every year and are still pretty involved in the church back home.  I’ve gone back twice and I’m going back with my mom this summer ‘cause my dad can’t, he has to work! 

My parent do send money home to our family and church.  I don’t really know why?  We work hard and then they should work hard too.  They have jobs in Egypt just like here. I’ve been working ever since I got here.  I don’t know, but they do it anyway, and I’ve never seen any money from Egypt?

            My culture and history is still very important to me of course, isn’t everyone’s?  I don’t let that stop me from adopting American culture too.  We’re proud people, happy to be Egyptian.  I think I have done a good job at adopting American ways of life though too.  I eat hamburgers, I love to cook Mexican food, and I learned more Spanish than most Americans in Arizona.  My family still has traditional dinners and holidays but we mix it up too.  I listen to English music and Egyptian.  I speak English to my sisters a lot and Arabic to my parents mostly.  I have a lot of Arab friends here and we speak both.  It’s not hard to do, go back and forth, well not anymore…

            Backround statistics on Egypt:

• Nearly 100% of the country's 78,887,007 (2006 est.) people live in three major regions of the country: Cairo and Alexandria and elsewhere along the banks of the Nile; throughout the Nile delta, which fans out north of Cairo (Wikipedia).
• Net migration rate: -0.21 migrant(s)/1,000 population, 2006 est. (Wikipedia).

• According to online statistics “In the year 1996 and 1986, the growth rate had been 2.1 and 2.8 respectively thus suggesting that the current growth rate has diminished. There was a huge population shift during the period of 1960s and 1970s when there was an influx of migrants from the rural areas to the cities” (MapsofWorld.com).
• World Bank.org reports “Egypt came in the first place on the list of the top 10 remittance recipients in MENA in 2007, finds the World Bank’s Migration and Remittances Factbook 2008. Recorded remittances sent home by Egyptian migrants reached $5.9 billion in 2007, compared to $5.3 billion in 2006” (Worldbank.org).

Audience Reflection

Does Mino’s story of a crowded city reflect that of the statistics of Egypt?

Do remittances seem to be as important to Mino as they are to his parents and of the statistical findings?

How does Mino’s story mirror those of so many migrants around the world? Do they have much in common?

Analysis of the Interview/Migrant Story

Mino’s story has both aspects of a 1^st generation migrant but also that of a second, in that he came to the United States as a kid and is much more detached from his homeland than say his parents.  Aside form his job at the US embassy, Mino’s dad made coming to the US a reality primarily through the church connections he had made, not unlike the story of many other migrants of the world.  In Cathy A. Small’s book From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs, she explains the reasons for migration of Tongans to America and how migration affects both people back in Tonga and in the US.  She further discusses one important aspect of migration for the Tongans being that of the Mormon church that made it possible to for them to travel to the US, and the many connections the church made between the two countries.  Migrating to the United States as a teenager was a little hard on Mino, as seen in numerous migration stories.  High school can be a tough place for any kid, and not speaking the language and being a foreigner just makes it that much more difficult.  To add to the frustrations, Mino came shortly before the historical attack of September 11^th, 2001.  When Taliban extremist attacked the World Trade Center Americans  nationwide took out their anger on people they thought to be Muslim or somehow related to the middle east.  Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan wrote an impressive book on numerous stories told from the migrants perspectives, Crossing the Blvd.  The book shares the migration experiences of many people, all living within Queens, NY.  One story told from a migrant teenager named Mohamed gives us insight on the teasing he suffered after 9/11.  Mohamed, like Mino, came from Egypt.  While having nothing to do with terrorist acts, he too was criticized at school and called names.

In his story Mino desribes how different Egypt has become due to American trends, TV shows, popular music, fashion, and the all too famous fast food chains.  As he put it, Egypt sometimes seems “more Americanized that America”.  Many other countries have shared in this introduction to western culture.  Morocco has been greatly affected by tourism and can be seen entirely different from a westerner’s point of view, as David A. McMurray describes in his novel, In & Out of Morocco.  While much of the book discusses the effect of Moroccan migration to Spain, involving human smuggling and trafficking, McMurray does not neglect to reference how even far away countries like America have a great impact on Morocco and its people.  Moroccans are introduced to American ideals of capitalism through Marlboro and Disney in this case, while Mino recounts the effect of McDonalds and rap music on Egypt.

Learning a new language can be hard for anyone.  Moving to a new country not

speaking any of the national language can make life pretty difficult until you do learn the language.  Mino was able to learn English fairly quickly by most people’s standards, but along with his accent and still improper use of tense from time to time, it is noticeable that he was not born speaking the language.  He recalls being embarrassed to speak.

 English early into his arrival to the US.  Language is a powerful thing, as Amitava Kumar explains in work, Passport Photos.  Kumar gives examples of how language can empower and hinder those using it.  Language can be a huge barrier in cultures, as seen in her example of the store clerk from Korea who was addressed as a Chinaman.  The frustrations of learning a new language are in of itself tremendous, and in so many cases like that of Mino’s, native speakers have a way of making the experience much more difficult.

            Nina Glick, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton have written: Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, & Nationalism Reconsidered.  The piece of work argues a new perspective on the migrants and connections they maintain in the modern era of migration/international migration.  The book defines “transmigrants” as a new evolution of migrant, one that manages to retain religious, political, or familial ties with their country of origin, often traveling back and forth from their homeland to their new country of inhabitance.  Mino’s family, and in particular his mother and father seem to fit the mold of what these writers would call transmigrants.  They keep in constant communication with both their families and church back home.  They not only send remittances but also go back to Egypt annually to visit and submerse themselves in their cultural homeland.  Mino himself has a weaker transmigrant tie with his former home, but continues go back and visit when able.

Works Cited

Basch, Linda, Cristina Blanc-Szanton, & Nina Glick Schiller. 1992. Towards a Tansnational perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, & Nationalism Reconsidered. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Vol 645. pp 13.

            Kumar, Amitava. 2000. Passport Photos. pp. 18-19.

Lehrer, Warren & Judith Sloan. 2003. Crossing the Blvd. pp. 350.

McMurray, David A. 2001. In & Out of Morocco. pp. 136.

Small, Cathy A. 1997. Voyages: From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs. pp. 51.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Egypt

http://www.mapsofworld.com/egypt/egypt-population.html

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/MENAEXT

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