a year in review: 2012

I am big on reflecting, and although I haven't been a good blogger, I know I'll appreciate this in the future. So here we go! A recap of the fantastic 2012:

January
I try to travel whenever I can (which, sadly, as a poor student with an overprotective mother, doesn't happen very often), so that usually means I jet off somewhere in January of every year. This is because college winter breaks are nice and long. My first college winter break I flew off to visit my cousins in Sydney, Australia, and in January of 2012 I visited my good family friends in Dallas. It was my first time in Texas and I loved it. Kind of crazy since my parents were thinking of moving to TX at about the same time. We just poked around the city and it was nice to see friends I hadn't seen in years. I also started a new job at an Indian restaurant by my house, which was definitely the nicest of all the part time jobs I'd had until that point. That being said, I'm definitely not a part-time-worker kinda gal. I also attended a lot of my sisters' basketball games (one was captain and one was a cheerleader) so it was nice to be able to go to my old school, bond with my sisters, etc.

February
I started interning with a nonprofit in DC and learned a lot about the inner movements of the city, how grassroots organizing looks like, resistance, speaking out, feminism, all of that. I attended my first congressional hearing on egypt on the hill, attended my second Harvard Model UN conference in Boston (the conference and the city is always a blast), and just kinda poked around doing new things: meeting new people, joined various clubs on campus, etc. Looking back, it seems like February was a slow month but I know it was super busy because I was taking 18 credits (including interning), working on campus, working at the restaurant back home, and part of a million clubs and organizations. 

March
March was midterm madness (I hate how much of my life/time is dictated by being a student when I  feel like I am also many other things...more on that later) so I didn't get to do much. I met up with the fabulous Julia and Yuriy Manchik, which was one of the highlights of the entire year! They are definitely as cool in person as they are online and I can't help but want them to be my wedding photographers although i'm young and single, haha.

April
April is my birthday month, so it always is special to me, although I really don't care much for springtime (also another discussion entirely). Since I'm Coptic Orthodox, and the Orthodox follows a different calendar, Palm Sunday/Holy Week/Easter usually take place right in the middle of a busy semester and usually doesn't coincide with spring break (not sure if it coincides with the Catholic church either, actually...). So this month coincided with random poetry readings, salsa dancing, my friends surprising me with dinner at a Mexican restaurant near campus that I always wanted to try, spiritual days for our middle schoolers at church, retreats with my fabulous youth groups, and a gradual change into warmer weather and the end of the year. Oh, and 20 has been fantastic so far.

May
May marks the end of another semester and the beginning of lots of festivities. There are always graduation parties, and this year my roommate's oldest sister had her wedding, which was absolutely beautiful. I love going to weddings and soaking in the culture (this one was Syrian), good music, good feelings, etc. I always learn something new at weddings. My little sister graduated 8th grade which is just crazy, I began volunteering at an nonprofit for immigration legal services which I loved and definitely taught me a lot about what I want to do with my career, and I wrote an 18-page research paper that I am very proud of and will hopefully be able to do more with in the future. 

June
June was the beginning of my working at the Latin American Studies Center at school (tweets brought to you courtesy of moi) plus a few birthday celebrations in the family. June is always Dance Recital Weekend, which lately has been more bittersweet than sweet for me, as I haven't been taking classes there since graduating high school and dancing less in general than I have been used to for the majority of my life. But it's still really wonderful to see the studio growing and getting even better at what it does, and reflecting on how much I've grown and knowing that so much of that had to do with dance. The best thing that happened in June was leading a mission trip to Rochester with my fellow servants for our middle schoolers. That was easily the hardest, funnest, most exciting and challenging week of the year. There were hours of traveling, most nights we got only 4 hours of sleep, we had to take one kid to the hospital, and I realized after that ER trip that I was the youngest servant there (20 while all the others were at least 22) and the only one who hadn't graduated college. That was humbling but encouraging, because I realized God had handpicked me for that trip, and I felt honored. Rochester was significant to me for many reasons, and I'm so glad it happened. It was my second time there, this time as a servant rather than a kid, and there is so much truth to this quote by Nelson Mandela:

"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered."

July

July was a craaaazy month. My sisters and I returned from Rochester to find our friends from Texas (the ones I visited in January) at our house, who were visiting for two weeks, with their adorable little doggies. While going around everywhere hanging out with them I started to really like my new job, the first one I have ever really enjoyed. A relative died, and I got my cartilage pierced the same day of her funeral (no connection; just saying). My dad's birthday came, and that night at 3 am I left with a group of random but lovely individuals from my church to go on my first international mission trip to Mexico. Mexico was one of the greatest things that has happened to me, and I am so thankful for it. We never realize what will matter to us until after some time when we think back and reflect on what happened. I made some really good friends, opened up my way of thinking, learned more about my abilities, and interacted with God in a very personal way. My favorite nights of the year of the group sitting on the rooftop of the church in the mountains of Mexico, right in the heart of the country but in the middle of nowhere, blasting tasbeha (coptic praises) or jimmy needham, sharing stories, playing games, sliding off the dome of the roof, and wrapping ourselves in massive blankets around each other to warm up against the breeze of the mountains in the summer nights. Mexico was amazing. I really hope to go back. 

August

In true crazy girl fashion, I flew in from Mexico and within 24 hours was on a cruise with my family for our annual summer vacation. It was our first cruise and we went with another family from church who I love dearly. It was filled with a lot of journaling, a lot of quietly listening to good music and reflecting, asking God questions like who I want to be, and will you help me out? and Him answering, yes, absolutely. It was a very cool experience to be out at sea for a whole week, and I seriously considered becoming a cruise ship dancer after speaking with a few of them. The end of August I volunteered at my church's booth at the county fair, which is does every year as a fundraising event. I made a few very cool, really random friendships and learned a lot about who God is and how I should interact with Him. None of it was easy, and there were some rough days, but His peace transcends all. Had a few major developments in the romance department, whose effects were felt throughout the fall semester, and all I can say is I'm very glad everything happened, that it happened the way it did, and that I wouldn't change a thing. God's foresight is astounding. The summer ended with a good concert with good people, some frank conversations, and our youth group's annual retreat in Ocean City, New Jersey, where we rent a huge beach house, chill, remember why we love each other, and that God is good. 

September

September was crazy in that I moved to my first apartment, although with my roommate from last year so the change was welcome and very bearable. It is something else to live in an apartment after living in a dorm, and even though my home is only about 30 minutes away (on a good day), it makes you think about big things like where you consider home and what makes a place home for you. I also began two classes I know would be very significant: a spanish literature class (that ROCKED MY WORLD, btw) and a foreign policy class with our very own foreign service officer. I learned so much about life from those classes, and they were more like Life Lessons 101 than literature or policy writing. I'm very glad I took those classes and can see their effects already, like in how I view the world (spanlit: leerlo criticamente!, foreign policy: a B+ doesn't matter so much if you've gotten the skills...) I also attended the sweet 16 for the girl of a family I love from church, and I began to feel the role of being a role model for someone else, of reaching out to younger girls, and the idea of womanhood and growing older (in a very positive sense) stood out to me. Good stuff.

October

October was unfortunately, also midterm season. I learned more about trusting God, had a high school senior spend the night so she could tour my fabulous school, and weathered bronchitis, my first real illness away from my mother, which also happened to coincide with my very own hurricane, Hurricane Sandy. Yes, i definitely took advantage of all the puns on twitter; a round of applause is in order for all of my followers who stuck around.

November

The first weekend in November was huge. In the same weekend, I got to meet/hang out with/sell merch for/record a video for the wife of/and make great Egyptian food as a gift for my favorite Christian artist, Jimmy Needham, who I linked to earlier in this post. It was the time of my life, and a huge blessing. I had always wanted to meet him and instead I got to spend a whole weekend with him chatting about anything and everything, plus telling him that I love his wife and family. That same weekend the Coptic Church elected a new pope, and the whole process, after months of prayer, fasting, investigations, etc went flawlessly. By this point in the semester, I started to rock my spanish lit class, and loved every minute of it. I voted in my first presidential election, and wrapped it all up with a great Egyptian-American Thanksgiving.

December

It's crazy to think that some of the stuff that happened in December was really just this month, but it's true. We had an awesome retreat with all of our middle school girls, which was a ton of fun and made me realize so many things about my own life, even things that happened to me when I was in middle school. That same weekend was my cousin's engagement party, which consisted of lots of family, Middle Eastern politics (of couse), good food (double of course), and a whole ton (3 hours to be exact) of bellydancing with Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, who are all part of the family. That was a great night and a great stress reliever before finals. I learned a lot about love that weekend. On a less positive note, my grandmother was taken to the hospital for heart problems the weekend before finals, and stress was at an all-time high. The holidays weren't quite the same this year. Somehow I finished finals, pulled off pretty great grades, went to a retreat at another church and met a bunch of cool people (man I retreat a lot). I also found out my other cousin was getting engaged (the sister of the guy from the first one) and we helped her celebrate that. A good friend of mine who I call my older brother proposed to his girlfriend in NYC on Christmas Eve, so that made 3 for 3. I guess you could call December the month of love ;)

Although my grandmother is right next to me and home with us all, I am not taking it for granted that we all made it to the new year because honestly, no one knows what might happen in 2013. I'm hoping for many good things, for a positive spirit and mentality above all, with good health and good conversation and lots of quality family time. 

I definitely learned a lot from 2012 and even though it may sound cliché, I feel very different than who I was in January of 2012. I am still fundamentally me, but I feel a bit wiser, a bit more sure of myself, and I feel like I can see a bit more clearly. And that is what life experience is all about.

I can't wait for my next adventure =)

Happy New Year to you and your family and friends,

 with peace and love and blessings for all, 

sincerely from me to you

Here

"All good. I'm here."

--What I didn't know I had been needing to hear, for so long.

Love

"The best thing about teaching is the kids, and I totally understand how a teacher would give her life for her students."

--My mother, 5th-grade school teacher

Om El Donia

"Reading about Egypt while listening to "Your Love Is Strong" by Jon Foreman. This is my life. Caught between total chaos and Your infinite grace.

Always two extremes, two identities, the two sides of being attached to one country and growing up in another. The spiritual and the political.

The duplicity of irreversibility.

Whatever I am, whatever You made me, You are pleased with it and not done yet. Thankful for Your foresight and sovereignty."


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--Some of my tweets from yesterday, December 4th, 2012, in light of the increasing rioting in Egypt against the authoritative Muslim Brotherhood.

Truth & Lies

Every time my dad acts like he doesn't care about Egypt anymore, I can see through him when he sits down and turns on the Arabic tv. Glued, completely focused, so concerned it makes me worry for him.

I don't understand why we have to pretend.

on my way

You know, I'm okay with it.

I'm okay with the fact that  that I took a chance. I like that I did. It didn't work out, you wouldn't let it work out, even though you didn't exactly say that in so many words.

I'm still proud of myself. I did a big-girl thing. I am strong. I am.

I don't know where this is going, or if we meet up, what we're gonna say....what I'm gonna say.

And I'm not going to act like I don't still care about you.....a lot.

But it happened. And although it hurts, I would have regretted a lot more not taking a chance.

Life will go on. In some direction. I just don't know which yet.

On Trust and Love

I have a friend. She is really hard to deal with, and has been for the majority of her life. I don't think she will change, and I think she has a lot of pain that she has to deal with. I state this not as a judgement or an opinion, but as a statement of fact. It is what it is.

I have another friend that was in a relationship with her years ago. After some conversation about friend #1, and what we could do to help her, the ideas about trust and love came up. I've been thinking about both of these ideas a lot lately, but I also think they are commonly in our thoughts as human beings.

Trust is important. It's super important, especially in relationships (and when I say relationships, I mean them in a very wide sense, including friendships). I think that if you don't have trust, you can't have a functional relationship. You just can't.

I believe love is the strongest force in the universe. I am a Christian, and as a follower of Jesus I am continually amazed by all that love has conquered and how we see that woven throughout the entire life of Christ and story of the bible.

But in terms of relationships, trust is at least as important as love. I don't say this as the final authority on the subject, as I'm not married and not in any serious relationship. But I do think that observations and what experience we do have can take us a long way. Over the summer, especially in terms of my relationship with Christ, I began to see love as a commitment, a choice that you choose time and time again, regardless of circumstance. I choose to love God by thanking Him for being Who He is, regardless of the good or bad happening in my life at that time. And I imagine that when the time is right, I will choose to wake up next to my husband every morning, I will choose to be patient with him, I will choose to serve him and our kids. Because love is a choice, a commitment that you must choose. And out of that commitment comes trust.

Trust is a natural response to love. I will trust you when I believe that you will stand by me, because of what your past actions have shown. Love is so, so strong; it crosses oceans and makes distance obsolete. It makes us brave. It gives us hope. But trust is what cements these great things that love starts. Love doesn't lack, at least not the perfect love that the bible describes. But I think it's safe to think of trust as an extension of love, as a manifestation of it. Because it's a response, it has its beginnings, its cause, rooted in love.

Where there is trust, there is love.

scars

"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are sealed with scars."   

--Khalil Gibran

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I know I've been quiet, and I didn't exactly intend on doing that. I wasn't intending to start a blog and then neglect it. I always have a lot to say, but I don't always know how to say it. I think I'm just in a season of soaking in and being quiet, and soon I'll have something to give back out. But for now, I have to trust that this is what I need and that this is good for me and okay for me to have.

I also just want to say, I really think Khalil Gibran got a few things right.

Things I am not used to at home after spending a week in Mexico

-[warm] showers. showering in general.
-using a dishwasher
-throwing toilet paper in the actual toilet
-people speaking english
-the smell and cleanliness of the air here
-my room

i feel like every mission trip i go on, it gets harder for me to bounce back. college has been a weird time for me- i've done the most traveling i've ever done, and i love it. i am constantly shifting from place to place. i like being a nomad, but your sense of touching down and calling someplace home gets warped.

yes, i confess: this is off of tumblr.

but it's too beautiful not to share anyways.

Why I love languages:

"In French, you don't really say "I miss you." You say, "tu me manques", which is closer to "you are missing from me".  I love that...you are missing from me. As in, you are a part of me, you are essential to my being. You are like a limb, or an organ, or blood. I cannot function without you."

See original post here: http://timorleste.tumblr.com/post/24224488075/you-know-whats-kind-of-beautiful

"Why would you want to limit the spectrum of beauty to an 'ideal' when you, as a popular women's magazine, have the opportunity to expand it? I don't think any woman should have to feel as if she needs to shove herself into an 'ideal' of beauty. Beauty should be something that is celebrated and something that is enjoyable, not something that people should feel uncomfortable about achieving. Most of the women, and certainly most of the adolescent girls, in the United States do not feel completely secure with themselves, especially with their appearance; is insecurity something you want to advocate? As American women, we don't need discouragement, but inspiration."
 

-Zooey Deschanel's letter to Vogue, 17 years old

The Red Candle

"I once sacrificed my life to keep my parent's promise. This means nothing to you, because to you, promises mean nothing. A daughter can promise to come to dinner, but if she has a headache, if she has a traffic jam, if she wants to watch a favorite movie on TV, she no longer has a promise.

I watched this same movie when you did not come. The American soldier promises to come back and marry the girl. She is crying with a genuine feeling and he says, "Promise! Promise! Honey-sweetheart, my promise is as good as gold." Then he pushes her onto the bed. But he doesn't come back. His gold is like yours, it is only fourteen carats.

To Chinese people, fourteen carats isn't real gold. Feel my bracelets. They must be twenty-four carats, pure inside and out.

It's too late to change you, but I'm telling you this because I worry about your baby. I worry that someday she will say, "Thank you, Grandmother, for the gold bracelet. I'll never forget you." But later, she will forget her promise. She will forget she had a grandmother."


--The Joy Luck Club

the beginning

being that today is the day that the egyptian president was announced, i felt like today was an appropriate time to start blogging. i have been thinking of starting this for many weeks now and i'm still not sure what i want this blog to become, but i do know that i have some things to say. whatever comes out, i just want to be sure i have a record of my thoughts and ideas.

i was born in egypt, in cairo to be exact. i grew up in america for most of my life; i came here when i was about three. i could spend all night (literally) talking about my life story and all the details that go along with that, but i'll keep it to the point of this post.

tonight mohammed morsi was announced as the president of egypt. whether or not he was actually the one that won the election by way of votes doesn't concern me much, because although i care about election fraud, it is what it is (funny how i used to hate that phrase), and egypt will announce whatever man they want to announce.

as a coptic christian, which is both a religious and ethnic minority, it scares me that the Muslim Brotherhood has won political power. that's about as simple and clear as i can state my feelings. we are ten percent of the population, yes, but egypt has at least 80 million people. that means that although there is a significant amount of us, there is also a lot of them.

side note: i am not a person that likes to create an in-group/out-group. i don't like making muslims a different group of people, or singling them out, or separating myself from them. i love everyone, i respect all beliefs, and i defend everyone's right to live as they please (more or less). but it's clear that politically, muslims want different things than us. especially those who support radical islam, which is what the MB is. many muslims also do not support their politics.

i say all this to talk about this: that while in the car on the way home from a friend's house tonight, where we watched the news coming out of egypt, my mother said "something doesn't feel right about egypt. i feel like it's not my country anymore."

now i don't know your relationship to your mother, or where she is from, or what she holds dear to her, but i do know that hearing that was one of the hardest things i've ever had to hear. my own mother, who is egypt to me, feels like she lost the country that she was born and raised in. my mother, who is egypt to me in the way she makes her tea, the way she laughs when there are guests at our home, the way she speaks to us in beautiful arabic and raises me and my sisters with her own hands. my mother is my country: "the house does not rest upon the ground, but upon a woman" [mexican proverb]. since i came here when i was young, she has been one of my strongest connections to egypt. i can't have the land, but i can have my mother.

it's hard enough to deal with all of this on a daily basis. even before the revolution, i had a hard time dealing with it all. i am not fully egyptian nor fully american; i do not fit in fully to either country but rather float between the two. i have two different sets of everything: beauty, standards, lifestyles. my mind speaks in two languages. i understand meanings in two forms. i have a choice of two paths at every decision i come to. i am a binary. i live in twos. my life is ruled by duplicity, and making things work is a matter of always finding a balance. live in moderation, my parents taught me.

i just wanted to get this out there. i wanted to release it. i wanted to find a place to put my mother's burden other than inside my own heart, weighing on my ribs, where it squeezes out all my air. i do know one thing, though. i will never let go of egypt. things like this are taken away from you the second you let them go. the second you release it, you relinquish control, and nobody is responsible for that but you.