At this time last year...

It was exactly a year ago at this time that I was preparing for my study abroad trip for the 2011 spring semester. For two years I had begged my protective Lebanese father to let me travel to a Middle Eastern country to study Arabic and Middle Eastern politics. Being one of the most stable and safe of the region’s countries at that time, I chose to study at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Days before I boarded my flight, my mother joked about my natural inclination to being innocently oblivious and scatter-brained and told me that I would be so occupied hopping from café to café that I would forget to go see the pyramids. She said I would be the only person to ever visit Egypt and come back to the States without seeing one of the world’s greatest wonders. Well, mothers do know best, because I never got to see a single pyramid. I arrived in Egypt on the night of January 21, 2011. Four days later, on January 25, Egypt’s revolution began. On February 1, I was on a U.S. State Department evacuation flight out of Cairo to Istanbul, Turkey. Finally, twenty-four hours after I arrived in Istanbul, I was on a direct flight to JKF airport in New York.

But the ten days I spent in Cairo changed me as a person, changed how I saw the world and the people in it. I had never been more aware or curious of my surroundings that during and after those ten days. It was a beautiful experience to watch the Egyptian people, regardless of religion, political background, or occupation, come together and fight alongside one another for their basic human rights and freedoms, to fight for a life free from fear, oppression, and poverty. If Egyptians could agree on nothing else, they collectively agreed on the desire for freedom, and at the end of every day, isn’t it freedom that every human being ultimately wants and deserves? At the end of the day, there will always be something bigger at work than ethnicity, race, religion, or political orientation that unites people as human beings over everything else. We just have to be aware, open, and tolerant, be willing to disregard any labels, classifications, or physical differences in order to understand this most basic, natural relationship with one another. The first time I realized this, I was in the Istanbul airport, fixing my hair in the bathroom mirror.

I walked into the restroom, set down my bags and took a spot at one of the two faucets in front of the wide mirror to assess my appearance. Another woman walked in and did the same, taking her spot at the other faucet on my right. What followed was an unintentional, synchronized series of movements and behaviors that I will never forget. Where I was wearing all black yoga pants and a fitted, black long-sleeve top, she was wearing all black traditional Muslim garb. Our skin was the same color, my cheekbones contoured with bronzer and blush and hers naturally, perfectly chiseled. We both washed our hands at the same time, dried them, and proceeded to stare at ourselves in the mirror, tilting our chins up and from side to side, taking in the features of our faces and how our hair looked from all angles. As I fixed my long, dark pony tail and smoothed away frizzy hairs that were out of place, she was doing the same to her long, dark hair that was tied in a low bun, poking and pulling at it until it was perfectly rounded and centered.

All the while I was completely aware of what this woman was doing and it took everything I had to not let her catch me watching her from the corner of my eye. Finally, after each of us mentally approved our individual looks, I took a thick black headband out and started pushing it on my head, properly positioning in it in an attractive fashion that didn’t make my ears stick out. At the very same moment, the Muslim woman, who appeared to be several years older than me, was wrapping a black scarf around her hair, assembling the flowing folds so that they were neither too tight nor too loose around her naturally beautiful face. Simultaneous chin-tilting and a final side-to-side head check followed before a final approving glance at ourselves in the mirror and we filed out of the restroom.

The two minutes the Muslim woman and I were doing our hair in the same mirror is something I will never forget, even to the smallest detail. Whether we come from different countries and are of different religions, and whether a woman is completely covered in her hijab or is wearing a headband and ponytail, in that moment in front of the mirror we were first and foremost women, each of us focused on beauty.

In a much larger context, the same goes for all people. Beyond the differences that everyone can point out in a mirror, there are always larger forces at work – desires of freedom, equality, justice, protection, education, food and a home for our families, basic human rights – that unite us all, that make every one of us the same, every one of us just simply human beings at the end of each day. All we have to do to realize it is open our eyes just a little bit wider.

-KJS