culture shock and culture wars

So I've been here approximately 2.5 months.  This is the amount of time I was here before.  Its like the point of no return, this is the farthest I've ever been from home now, according to distance and amount of time.  I'm looking back and forward in disbelief that I got here so quickly.  This Egypt thing is now really happening.  I am really here and this is really my life.  I am not on vacation.  I am savoring and living the moments more and starting to think in terms of all that I will miss here when I leave instead of all that I miss from home.

Last time I left the Middle East I experienced mild culture shock, but the effect was dulled by lots of MESP program processing, an airplane ride for two days, etc.  It wasn't so bad, and I probably wouldn't have even called it culture shock, just mild readjustment issues (like having problems looking men in the eyes and freaking out in silent, uncrowded places).  I never really even understood the term culture shock until this Friday morning.  I rode the Metro with my roommate to Maadi to check out this new church (since I will not being going back to my other church and Julianna was looking for a friend of a friend).  We walked down the streets, the vegetation and streets get really nice in this area, mostly inhabited by ex-pats.  We draw near to the "address" we have, start to hear a milling crowd, I see behind the church courtyard wall, spotlights and a sign that says "Extreme Church Makeover."  My defenses are immediately up.  We walk up to the name tag table.  English voices and American-clothed, English name-tag bearing multitudes are congregated.  The life group table sits in the back corner, the folding chairs facing a stage or on the other side.  We are in an American Evangelical church in the heart of Cairo.  My heart just about stops, my mind is doing flips to take this in.  I had just begun to find a sense of continuity and understanding of Egyptian life, and then this!?  The projector screen cycles those ridiculous backrounds that you see in every church trying to make themselves look cool and "dynamic" for the youth and seekers.  The band starts up, the CCMesque praise almost puts a hole in my gut from the sheer weirdness of it all.  

It literally feels like an electric shock, adrenaline rush to the heart and inability to function while still being rooted to your spot for a full hour long service of music, offering, communion (grape juice in little baby plastic cups in the metal tray, where do you even FIND this in Cairo!?  Did someone bring it in their suitcase from America?), announcements about a church information session and ministry to people displaced from the rock-slide here, sermon about living in community (which means joining a life group with all the other ex-pats), altar call to receive prayer form the prayer servants, introductions, and on and on.  We walked around for awhile, asking people for help in English, looking for Julianna's friend of a friend while we evidently were both frantically thinking of when we could go back to the Cairene world outside this church that we could make sense of. 

I realize I have a double standard.  Arabic or Hispanic ex-pat churches in America are the coolest thing ever, but American ex-pat churches in Egypt... I can't stop judging the clothing and the culture and the wierdness of it all, harshly.

So I guess I have officially become an awkward ex-pat that can't navigate within her own culture.  This kind of church is where I became a Christian and where I spent a lot of time in the last several years.  This church was the exact replica of what my culture and religious culture had been.  No longer is this the case evidently. I don't like this kind of church, somehow it rings a little false for me now.  This worries me a little.  I guess I should rejoice in the fact that right now I've made it to the point that I feel the most relaxed, happy, and comfortable in Egyptian homes, Egyptian Ahwas (coffee shops), or walking along the Nile (this is a far cry from where I was two years ago) but at the same time, what will it be like when I actually go back to America?  Will I be able to function at all?  Especially in any kind of religious cultural context?  How long will it take for me to readjust, if ever?

And at the same time this weekend I have been forced to recognize the endless relationship between culture and religion.  Both seem to have the power to transcend the other in terms of people connecting with and understanding each other.  Both are ways to understand life.

We went to a festival in the monastery at Masaara last night with our family where we saw the Anglican community's reaction to Ramadan.  Tattoos on the spot of any religious picture (Jesus, Mary, cross, the local Bishop), juice and peanuts and garbanzo beans for sail, boys and men on bad behavior, statues of Jesus for sale.  I bought some 1 pound puzzles with pictures of Jesus on the cross, Jesus rising from the tomb, and a glowing Mary.  While in America this would be the equivalent of a county fair, religion permeates everything here: decoration (Allah Akbar is in almost every home, taxi, business, and sign), identity, community, social life, family.  Religion is a culture in itself.

I kind of think of myself as floating here, apart from culture somehow, not really American, obviously not Egyptian.  The ex-pat conundrum is you never quite fit anywhere.  I am a living, breathing culture war.  Religion and culture are ways of understanding life, and here I am forced to confront and choose between peices of these ways of understanding all day every day. 

This is part of why I love being here: possible lifestyles and ideas, like the people, are constantly vieing for your attention, brushing up against you, running straight into you, sometimes to the point of intense annoyance and almost despair, but necessarily and sometimes pleasantly reminding you of the vast ocean of humanity and of possibilities that you live in.  But at the same time, when you have so many possibilities to choose from, and a person like me who can't reject anything until thoroughly convinced it is bad and who compulsively almost always choose at least two things (majors, jobs, countries to live in) or nothing when one thing is called for, I am pulled in every direction, with no one possibility to call my own.

Example #1: I am partly in Cairo to discover myself, to learn that I can do life in a different context.  This sounds like a valuable thing to almost all Americans.  To Egyptians I sound crazy and selfish.  Why would you leave your family and friends and life to be on your own? I am also here partly to learn about dependence on others, community, and love, but in order to get here I had to leave all of that that I had built up and start off by myself, aww the paradox of it all!

Example #2:  With my Egyptian family, I cannot mention the fact that I spend time with boys or Muslims.  When anyone in this family happens to see a picture of me wearing a higab, with someone wearing a higab or a male, the reaction is either fierce distate or if you're my discrete 16 year old sister, turning red and hiding the picture from the rest of the family.  Am I supposed to stop spending time with males and Muslims?  Nope, not gonna happen.  Am I supposed to think or tell my family that they are ridiculous, don't understand, and have no right to judge me?  Absolutely not.

Micah has infused me with a spontaneous need to read Kierkegaard...  I think I'll go do that.