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.
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