Last week, I gave in and bought 2 skirts that almost touch the ground. They were on sale and actually pretty cute and not too thick for the summer. On Sunday, I went out on the town with Azza (the lady that cleans my parents' apartment) and her sister Donya. I wore the skirt and buttoned up my shirt all the way to go with them and it worked out alright. Azza brought me over to her neighborhood and made me lunch in her apartment (in a building where all of her husband's family lives-I can't even imagine...). Her husband is apparently in Libya, working, and only comes back every few months. Azza lives in a tiny apartment about the size of my efficiency with her 2 little sons. Her husband's family doesn't approve of her nor do they know about the fact that she's a cleaning lady - they think she works as a nurse in a hospital. It's not uncommon to hear of married women taking care of their children all by themselves while their husbands are off somewhere they won't mention, or nowhere to be found - at least with lower middle class ladies that clean expat houses. Nobody's really sure if it's actually as common as these ladies say or if it's a way to guilt expat women into giving them a job. Typically, the truth in such things is somewhere in the middle. In Egypt, though, I suspect the truth lies closer to the side of the ladies that live here. Women don't get a lot of respect and wives don't have a lot of rights.
Inside her apartment, Azza, Donya and I talked, in a mix of broken English and Arabic, about men and marriage. They asked me why I wasn't married. It's a question I get a lot here and it's one that's difficult to explain because it's more of a concept. It's not easy to explain it in another language I don't really know how to speak. Basically, my answer ends up being something like, "I'm too young,"- which at almost 30 years old, doesn't really work much anymore - or, "I marry later." It seemed like I would never get anywhere with this whole why I'm not married thing especially since I've told them I have a boyfriend that's wonderful and who I actually love. It just seemed to be a concept that they didn't understand. Egyptian women don't have boyfriends, both of them told me while making the sign of slitting their throats. It's serious business. Women get married and that's it.
Then Donya, whose English is better than Azza's, explained that American women can get rid of their boyfriends if they are bad; Egyptian women can not get rid of their husbands. I guess that sums it up. At that moment, I realized that women are women and we can all relate to a no-good man. Things aren't so difficult for the men here. I've heard that, literally, all a man has to do is say, "I divorce you" three times and the marriage is null and void. For better or worse, at least in a place where divorce is all-too-common, I could get rid of a man that didn't treat me right. And I wonder how many men here have felt free to treat their woman as horribly as they wanted because they are raised and live in a place where they could get away with it. Anyway, I know I'm just an outsider looking in and that maybe I don't understand the complexity of it all. But I know about women not being treated right. I also know that even without legal or social power, women ultimately stick together; and in Egypt, it seems we need to.
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