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.
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