An exchange student.. exchanging.

         I had always liked classical music: Bach, Mozzart, Beethoven, Satie, and the rest of them. I had never gotten a CD or a cassette and actually listened to it, but it always caught my ears, and I knew what it was. I officially started listening to classical music in the U.S. At my host home I found a group of CD's and I recognized Satie. I would listen to the soft smooth music under my yellow lamp while studying, or reading. I really felt it was such a fine piece of art that I was enjoying, and music in Heaven must be something of that kind. 
        
         So, I expressed the desire to go to a classical music concert. I wanted to see how they all harmonized those sounds together to make this piece of Heaven. Coach Heine, a teacher and a football coach at Catholic High, knew about that, I don't remember how exactly but I am sure it was via Kay Barre. Coach Heine and I had a very special relationship. He never taught me, but we got to know each other and he knew where I was from and he knew that I spoke some French, he knew I loved it too,so he always pretended I was French not Egyptian. So he would scream at me in the hallways, at the top of his voice going like " Hey Sharkawy, How is France?" or " D'y'all got snow in France?" or just a simple "Bonjour". We had never really talked but those hilarious conversations that we had in the hallways with everyone laughing at us was all I needed to love the guy. He offered to take me to a classical music concert, and I was ecstatic for that. It wasn't easy though to actually get that Coach Heine, the football coach, who coaches those male teenagers that flood the fields with their sweat and testosterone, could actually like something as fine and as artsy as classical music.

       I dressed up for the big night, I wore my tuxedo and since it was March so I had to wear a coat, which was extremely elegant, and also extremely borrowed from kris, my host father at the time. Then I had my glasses that had red web-like net on either side, which many people told me was pretty cool. Coach Heine picked me up with his van and we were headed downtown. I don't remember exactly where the concert was held but i remember it was such a chique place indeed, and worth all the dressing up. So many people were dressed up, men in tuxedos and women in beautiful gowns. What I managed to know later that night, that I was sitting in Coach Heine's wife's seat. He had season tickets basically and she had refrained from coming so I took her place.

       I was surprisingly bored just sitting there looking at the orchestra play, and I wished very much I had a book to read or something while having the music as background. During the recital I had seen Miss Hunter, my beautiful math teacher at Catholic High. So in the break, I went to her and said hi and she was very surprised when she saw me there. I bet her thoughts were something like that " what brought this Egyptian Barbarian to this fine concert!?". Anyway, she was the one who told me the deal about Coach Heine's wife. She took me outside where we chatted a little, then she introduced me to that gorgeous lady that a couple of minutes ago had played in the orchestra. Right after that, she teased me that she got me to know some very beautiful, and sophisticated women, that I would have never been able to know without her help.
     
        The concert ended, I liked it very much and I loved the atmosphere of it all. We started to head out, Coach Heine and I, when a wonderful thing happened. We bumped into Sarah and her family. And yes Sarah is not her real name. Her mother, Marisa, was a friend of Linda 's, my host mother. So she recognized and said hi and I introduced them to coach Heine. Sarah's mother offered that I hang out with them, that we can all have a cup of coffee someplace nice. I was ecstatic about the offer for a reason. The reason was Sarah. She was this gorgeous girl, with long blonde hair running down her back and has cute freckles on her face. She had this exquisite gown on and the most delicate shal on her shoulders. What attracted me so much was that I had heard about her and her family. I knew she has studied French since middle school so she must speak pretty decent French, which just attracts me like a moth to a flame. Also, her mother had lived a couple years in France. French sophistication was present in the family.
        The funniest thing happened when the waiter asked me what I wanted, and then he said, " you know sir that you can't have any alcohol". So I just went like" Dang, that's too bad",  the man didn't know I was muslim and I can't have any alcohol even if I was fifty years old. We talked about many things, I asked Sarah's mother about France and I was all ears to the beauty of even the stories about that country. Sarah and I talked about both of our schools, she was in Mount St.Mary's,  which was like Catholic High's sister school. We discussed how bad it was that Catholic High only had two french courses while Mount had four, and I told her that I would love to come to Mount to take French four, and she laughed hard at that, Mount was an all-girls school. I could smell Sarah's scent from where i was sitting, it just pierced my nostrils with the sweet smell. That night was just amazing. I went to a classical music concert and then got acquainted with the representatives of the French culture in the mighty state of Arkansas, Sarah's family, the Speck-kerns.

The Arrival in Little Rock,Arkansas. Part II

       We landed in the, I always call it that, the mighty state of Arkansas. Of course the girls and I were expecting someone to come pick us up from the airport. And she was there my wonderful liaison, Mrs. Barre, also a Spanish language teacher at Catholic High my host school. Kay Barre was a blonde and always had a very characteristic scent that I still have in my nose till now, that when she would pass by anywhere at school I would know Miss Barre was here, a very attractive scent. She greeted us and we went to get our bags, one of mine was a bit late. She drove us to the hotel where we were supposed to have our arrivsl orientation. In the car I was looking out the window watching how beautiful my host state was, so green everywhere. It definitely earns its name, The Natural State. We reached the hotel, and there I saw the AFS people that I was going to deal with throughout the whole year They greeted us with "welcome to America" and all that other jazz. I went to my room, rested, changed my clothes, swam a little with Miss Barre's son, Michael, and then went back to my room.

      That night I roomed with three other boys, Mark Guill from the Philippines, Toby and Max from Germany. Three wonderful gentlemen that I was very honoured to have met. Toby and Max totally destroyed my stereotype about Germans being dull and serious, because they were one of the most lively, funny and friendly people I ever met. Mark, the phillipino, was this amazing dark-skinned kid, and we became friends right at the second we said hi. The room that the four of us shared only had two beds. Thing is, in Egypt, boys can sleep next to each other on the same bed pondering nothing of homophobia, basically because the concept doesn't exist in our heads much. But I had always thought that just the idea of sharing a bed with a guy was horrific to Americans or Europeans. But I was stunned at how okay the idea was to the Germans, apparently I had been mistaken.

           Jane, my future host mother for the first month and a half of my stay, ran the orientation. Earlier, I had my first encounter with Jane. Kay introduced us to each other, and then it happened. Jane gave me a hug!. In, Islam it was forbidden for a grown man to have physical contact with a woman that was neither his wife nor his kin. That's why I was so taken aback by her action, and I couldn't hug her back from the surprise. That moment was to be a landmark in my relationship with Jane Martin. Jane, this sweet caring loving woman that took me in her house to live with her wonderful family for the next month and a half, and later another two months, and then later took me in her heart as her Egyptian son for as long as we both will live. Jane is my first American mother, and an eternal resident of the chambers of my heart.

      The orientation was almost boring though, which had nothing to do with Jane Martin, but because, the whole content of the orientation was covered a thousand times in our orientations in Egypt. And I was very proud of AFS Egypt because of that.

The Arrival in Little Rock, Arkansas. Part I

          First of all, what I am about to talk about is my first days in Little Rock, AR, not my first days in the U.S. To be able to clearly remember that I had to get back to the journal that I had written at the time, which now proves immensely useful. In the Washington, D.C. Airport, I was waiting my flight with two Indonesian girls. Mir'atul ( short for Mir'atullah, a beautiful name) a little dark and beautifully veiled girl. And Ermy, a bit taller than Mir'atul, and at the time, more friendly, and slightly lighter in skin tone, and also very beautifully veiled. You can only imagine what state we were in. The last night in D.C. was very consuming , we had so many lectures and activities to attend and we slept very late, at least I did, for reasons that will be mentioned later. We were all consumed, exhausted, and whatever other synonyms of tired that existed, they are all relevant. Not just that, still jet-lagged from four nights ago. Everyone was very tired from speaking English all the time, which was the mother language of none of us.

         The three of us were given our ID's, Boarding passes, and everything else that should help us travel from Washington D.C, to Houston in Texas, to Little Rock, Arkansas. I hadn't looked at the map before we were told that we are going to lay off in Houston Airport, but when I did, I found out that Houston was actually deeper south than Little Rock. When I asked later why we had to lay off in a city that was farther than our target city and I got the answer that it's just cheaper. Now we are in the part that we hadn't seen before in the D.C. Airport, the Food Court. We needed some breakfast, so we just sat at the nearest place, I remember it was Fudruckers. We finished eating and we had little time so we headed directly to the terminal where we are boarding our flight to Houston. We reached there earlier than we thought, so an idea came across our minds, to just call people. The moment that the three of us were in , we felt that it had to be shared with other people. Ermy and Mir'atul as I remember called their host families. Apparently they had had some contact with them online before they came. But I wanted to call Egypt. So we headed out and we bought 20 $ Calling cards, which were total rip-offs because those cards only let you talk on the phone 20 minutes maximum. At that moment money didn't matter much to us I remember, we still hadn't exactly felt the value of one dollar. I had 300 dollars that my father had given to me in Egypt and I had the 125$ envelope that they gave us in the orientation for our first month, and that is the amount of money I was sent from the Department Of State every month for the next year. Walking down the corridors of the airport, I still felt pretty lost, inside not outside. Only a couple days ago I was with my mother and father and brothers and my uncle, everyone spoke arabic, the faces and the streets looked familiar, everything was easy, Egypt was my comfort zone. Now I was walking down the hallways of the famous D.C. Airport, Everyone looked foreign to me, they can be from any nationality not necessarily American. I had to speak English all the time, but think in Arabic. I was always checking my passport and my boarding pass because I deeply felt like a leaf in autumn, fallen under a tree and then easily blown by the wind, if I lose any of my papers it will be a lot of trouble. I can still remember the scent of detergent all over the airport and especially the restrooms. I still remember the ads on the walls, the beautiful business women, the suited-up men, and the voice of conductors.

            Time came and we had to board the Houston flight. The plane was pretty small, I had thought all aeroplanes were like that KLM plane that flew us from Egypt to Amsterdam, and then to Washington. But the I was told that those little ones were for interior travels inside the U.S. Again, feeling terribly lost and dicombobulated I checked on everything, but still I fidgetted in my seat, couldn't sit still. The most beautiful blonde woman was sitting behind me reading a book. Her face was down and so at first I only saw her hair but then when I called on her she pierced me with those baby blue eyes of hers. For the last couple of days, although I was always surrounded by people from Egypt and everywhere else, I had felt very lonely. That moment was an absolute peak of my loneliness, and what I wanted was to just talk to anyone and get familiar with them. Now if you ask me, what if the person sitting behind you was a guy, would you have talked to him? My answer would be no. Yes in my loneliness I needed the softness of a beautiful lady. But our talk wasn't as long as I hoped, I just told her that I was an Egyptian Exchange student and that I was to spend a year in America with a host family and in an American school, at the time I knew I was going to a Catholic school. She applauded and said that it was very brave of me to do such a thing in such a young age and that she wouldn't have been able to do that at fifteen herself. But then I found nothing to say and apparently she wanted to get back to her book. So, I was back to my loneliness for the next 3 hours.

        After a 3-hour lay off in Houston Airport, we boarded the plane to Little Rock, Arkansas, and I couldn't have been more excited. It's very important for an exchange student to never expect anything about their host area, school or family. The plane lands in Little Rock, Arkansas, which was named so after an actual little rock under a bridge there, at least that's what I was told.

One freaked out foreign exchange student.

     I have attended many football games for the Rockets, the football team of Catholic High School For boys. Most of those times I was with my family and I just went back home with them but I had never gone out with my friends from catholic after a game, maybe because I didnt know they went out or maybe I did know but I had to go back home with my host family because they were my ride home basically, I can't exactly remember which was true. After I switched families , one time after a basketball game, I just didn't want to go home, there wasn't much to do there, and for sure I wasn't going to go to sleep, instead I was going to read my book under the light of my lamp on my bed till sleep gets to me. But that night I told my host dad I wanted to get somethoing to eat before we went home. I didn't know then that I was going to find about 30 people from Catholic High and Mount St. Mary's at Macdonald's at 10:30 pm. I sat with my host father while I ate my sandwich and he ate his salade, he was a strict vegan, when a couple of girls waved to me from a distance. " They're cute", he commented, which kind of encouraged me to go say hi. Then, I found all those boys and girls I recognized from school and football and basketball games. Some of the boys were with me in the Fitness team that I had joined at school, some others I had classes with. I said hi to Anthony and we chatted a little and he asked me who the man with me was and I told him it was my host father and explained to him what that meant. He offered to give me a ride if I wanted to stay and hang out with him and the rest of the people. I was ecstatic with his offer because that's what I had wanted all along, to go out with my friends from school and see where they hang out, and also mingle with girls that I had only seen at games and seldom talked to.

     I have to explain that my urge to talk to girls in America was due to a couple of reasons. When I came to this country I basically wanted to try and experience whatever an american teen did experience, as long as it doesn't conflict with my own set of values and beliefs. Of course my school was only for boys so I hadn't got to know many girls. I wanted to know how they really think and talk about everything. I had erased basically all my thoughts about american girls from movies and what not, which presented them as mainly promiscuous. I wanted to include some girls in my friends' group in addition to the many guys I had gotten to know. I wanted to see how they acted on different occasions and really see how they thought about different concepts. I remember that at that night I saw that one girl, we'll call her Erica, that wore a violet costume of a fairy probably, and she was always there in football snd basketball games. I had always thought she was very pretty and fancied to talked to her but of course had never got the chance. But then I saw her there and I just decided to talk to her, I don't even remember much how I started talking but I remember that I pulled a chair and sat facing her. I don't remember either what we talked about but what I remember very vividly was when I asked very shyly for her number. Make a note, that I had never asked a girl for her number, because I never knew what to do next, but I saw in american movies that once the guy got the girl's number that that was it, he did it, and now he has a date with the woman. So I tried that, and her expression till that day still confuses me. She was so excited that I did ask for her number, which startled me because we had never talked before and I didn't know that I can make a girl so happy just by asking for her number. Her excitement showed only a second on her face and when she asked"you want my number?". I said yes, but the worst thing is that I didn't have a cell phone, and wrote down numbers in a small agenda. Till this day I dont remember why exactly I dont have her phone number now, but one can guess, I leave that to you.

    I told my host father that Anthony, my senior friend, was giving me a ride and he left. We then left to Sonic, the famous food chain. There I found even more people from Catholic and Mount. Jake Chase, my buddy from homeroom class and the football player, Mike Ferrara, one of the writers in the Catholic High newspaper and also on the football team. Katherine Lorge, the twin sister of Stephen Lorge, my buddy from American Lit class. We hadn't talked before, but I recognized them, and apparently so did they me. My memory can only help me with a few things that stuck in there. I remember that girl that gave me a handkerchief with her number on it snd told me to give it to a guy sitting on the next table, I was stunned by her disrespectful attitude. I instantly frowned and gave the handkerchief to a friend and told him to take care of this. Katherine was pulling her zebra-looking socks, and for some reason I went like"easy zebra" which cracked them up so hard. It was my accent or how I said it, I never knew. Many people that I had seen at school and at games were there which was great.

We went to stand outside and I laughed so hard at that one black man who apparently worked there, when a TV van passed outside Sonic, he ran out frantically and screamed"I aaaammm KP babeee I wanna bee Oon Tv babe!" with the thickest black southern accent. It was a large group of high school kids, boys and girls, and it was exciting for me to finally crack in and get to know my friends outside school walls and out of their Catholic high shirts,  ties and kaky pants. I had talked to that one girl and apparently I had expressed the desire to want to see her again and so she wanted to give me her number but again I was faced with the same dilemma of not having a cell phone. So she just very simply took my forearm and wrote down her number on it, which stunned me at first, but then again it was kind of playful which was cool except that, what happened the next second disrupted all that. A cop came up to me, with my forearm still in the girl's hands, and I have to mention she was inside her car and I was outside on the passenger side, and the cop said"TAKE OFF".

      To fully understand what was going on, let me tell you what it was like. From what I understand, a large group of teenagers in a late hour as in 10:30,( we say it's late in Egypt starting from 1:30) ganged up around one place, in that case Sonic, is always indicative of a prospective fight, underage drinking, drug dealing, or an hour later DWI, driving while intoxicated. So a cop car was roaming the place, and the worst was that one of my friends was actually super drunk and he had in a bottle in his jacket and he was loud too. I had been overwhelmed by the whole scene, and I didn't see that when the people saw the cop car they felt they had to leave, but I didn't. So now comes the moment, my arm is in some girl's hands, and a cop comes up to me and says"take off". See, I have always thought my English eas great. My American friends always told me I had the lightest accent compared to any foreigner they had met. My English totally betrayed me that moment. I only remembered the worst meaning of "take off" that could have been understood at that moment, YES to sadly take off my clothes. I totally fogot that it meant to simply leave the place as fast as you can. My friend found out that my English was now temporarily deactivated, so he took me by the hand and we "took off". AFS, the organization that enabled my exchange year, had three strict NoNos. One, no drinking or drugs, two, no sex, three, no hitch-hiking. Now If Ihad been indicted by that cop of any drinking or drugs of any kind, I was going to be deported just as fast as I had come, which would have been a terrible failure to my experience and a great shame to my host family and my natural family.

The Arrival 1

The day I arrived at the D.C. airport is a day to remember for the rest of my life. We were all together, the Egyptian exchange students.There were about 37 of us, and we all wore the same dark blue shirt that says MASR in arabic letters. On the back it had about 25 keywords that were considered very essential for all exchange student to know and also remember, for example : Understanding, Compromise, and empathy, and many more.  Wearing that shirt attracted so much attention in Amsterdam Airport and also the D.C. Airport, especially the arab people since the letters were in arabic. Many arabs ,in Amsterdam, came up to us and asked if we were the Egyptian National team of anything, it was pretty funny, but we said no.
   
     We got off the KLM plane that took us from Amsterdam to Washington D.C. I remember we were all very excited because we couldnt believe we were actually in America then. I was excited and at the same time i was very confused. I want to use more words like confused or close to it,  perplexed, dicombobulated. The question that hit me the most was " what did I come to america for? What actually brought me here?" well, before I came I knew very well what I was supposed to do in America. But at that moment, or those couple of moments, I asked myself this question a lot. The airport of course was huge, and we only saw so little of it, only a terminal. I remember there were two lines one for the americans and one for the foreigners, like myself and my collegeaus. I distinctly remember seeing an old indian couple in  the line. The lady had the red dot on the top centerof her forehead that meant that she is married woman who has a son or more. I don't remember getting bored in the line, not because we didn't wait for a long time but because we were all still taken aback by the surprise that we actually left the country and that we are now in the famous Washington D.C. Most of us hadn't left the country before, myself one of them, and that doubled our shock. I remember shady was next to me and he kept saying that when we go back to Egypt we have to be very active as volunteers in AFS to pay back what the helped us to get to. I overheared another one of my friends talking to another friend of mine about how he wanted to get into the volleyball team in school because ( he said it in English actually) "girls" would be all around him if he is on the team. It was pretty amusing listening to my friends' expectations about the year in America. Some were positive,  like giving a good image of Egypt by making tons of presemtations at schools,  churches or even to random people, or by learning from school as much as they can and taking interesting classes that we dont have in Egypt like art or pottery or dance classes. Negative expectations, for me at least, were stuff like drinking or smoking pot or sleeping with girls. But I dont think that any of us had purely positve or purely negative expectations.
        
            The Airport officers finished checking our papers and we passed them to meet with the volunteers from AFS that had been waiting for us. Some of us went to get their bags first and then went to the American volunteers and others werent as apprehensive about their bags. We were met by two girls and a guy if I remember correctly. One of the girls was asian-looking and wore a shirt that said Stanford in Arabic letters, which I suspected because either she had attended Stanford and a university in Egypt, orthat she had been part of the Arabic language exchange program that was run by the AFS in Cairo and Alexandria. They called it Abgad-Hawaz. Some of my colleagues from Cairo and Alexandria seemed to know the american volunteers, since they recognized each other and said hi. Everything around me indicated that I wasn't in Egypt, but it just hadn't registered yet that I had left the country. I waited a couple of minutes with some friends for our bags, and as soon as we got them we went back to where the group was. I reminded myself that I need some AA batteries for my ancient non-digital camera. Many times I wanted to take pictures with it and I hesitate to get it out because I was ashamed of how old it was and that it wasn't digital. Now we were all together and ready to go, but I ran very quickly to the nearest shop hoping they had batteries ( of course I didn't know what shops that sold batteries in America looked like. It wasn't the first shop and so I asked with my afraid English , not bad but afraid English, about where to buy the batteries.

        We all started to move heading to the gates of the Airport. I can see that I had left Egypt, I mean no veiled -women, European and American -looking men, and the conductor spoke english. What frightened me the most at the moment was what would happen if I had lost a bag or the pack around my waist,anywhere? Would I have been deported, would the whole body of Egyptian exchange students wait for me a day or two at the airport till I get my stuff back, if I did. I worried excessively about that point. I had plenty of items to lose, my money, my passport and my papers and my bags, and so I had to check on all that every 10 seconds or something.
    
         At 6:10 pm I set foot for the first time on American soil. I smelled American air. I looked around and here I was outside the D.C airport, my hopes for a year full of new experiences to have and new friends to make. this year is going to be a life-altering year for me and I am going to live it and suck it in to the fullest, I thought. This is a once-in-a-life-time opportunity for an Egyptian teenager to leave his family and friends,  leave the streets of his country, his school, his bed, everything that encompasses his comfort zone, to have a whole new life in a new country, make new friends in a new school, meet a whole new family. I looked around, we were now outside the airport and there was the American flag on a very tall pole. It was cold outside, or maybe it was just me thinking that it has to be cold in america, even though we were in th summertime.

Intro

Now , I am very excited that I am gonna start my first blog. I really hope I can truly convey what it felt like to be an exchange student , especially one that is from Egypt . Being an exchange student was  probably the biggest  experience I have ever encountered and the most life-changing. thank you for following my blog and I hope by doing so you'll feel like you can see what an exchange student encounters day by day,thank you.