Traveling to Minia is nothing new for me. I take the train to Minia every Wednesday, and return to Cairo every Friday or Saturday. It has become a tiring part of my weekly routine. The people I work with are good, and several have become friends of mine. I also attend an Egyptian Presbyterian church in Minia on most Thursdays. Minya is an urban center for the largely rural area that surrounds it. In this way the city is quite different than the surrounding areas.

Suburbs are a relatively new idea in most of Egypt. Minya has one area I would consider a suburb. That is New Minya, which was an empty area of desert on the hills above Minya. Now it has many apartment buildings, schools, and businesses. Since land is plentiful, the cost of living there is cheap. People have a choice of taking a 10 minute bus ride, or driving, to get to Minya itself. The rest of the areas around Minya are all rural villages. There are some as close as 5 minutes from the city. Despite their proximity to Minya, the lifestyle is very different in the villages.

Most of the people I work with weekly in Minya are in either the upper-middle class or upper class. This means that some of my friends have a car for their families, and satellite television. Unfortunately, it also means that they have enough money to constantly show me how "American" they are. This is done in various ways, including on insisting on eating at KFC (Minya’s only American fast food place), or constantly playing English language Time Life Christian songs when I visit, or even turning on satellite TV evangelists, like Benny Hinn, when I visit their homes. Egypt, like many countries, is a place where being American is fashionable, if a person can afford it. For me this has been disappointing, since I am interested in learning about the Egyptian culture, since I can eat at KFC and see all I want of the US when I return in August.

The lifestyle of my friends in Minya is very different than the lifestyle of most of my other Egyptian friends. I have friends who are students, security guards, and pastors. Most of these people are middle class Egyptians. None of them have a car. Most have a TV, but some of them are only black-and-white. Many of them either live in the villages, or are from the villages and have moved to the city for work or school. Many of these friends are people I have met through my work at Evangelical (Presbyterian) Seminary in Cairo. Many are from Minya, since Minya has a large Christian population, and invited me to join them for Easter.

I had Thursday and Friday before Easter off as holidays, so I was able to spend Thursday through Monday in Minia. I spent my time with three different friends, from three different villages around Minya. I met my friends Hany and Sherif, along with Brice (a Presbyterian volunteer and pastor from the US) for the trip to Minya. We went to the bus station and made the trip to Minya. The 150 mile trip cost about $2.35. When we arrived, I met with my friend Adel, and we traveled by bus, and by pickup (a popular form of public transportation in the rural areas) until we reached his village of Beny Mohammad Sharohry.

Adel’s father is a farmer. Their home was nice, but simple. The advantage of being with a farming family is that I was able to drink fresh milk, and eat fresh eggs and cheese. The family also treated me by killing one of their chickens for us to eat for dinner, which is a special treat. This is a big sacrifice for a family with only a few chickens, but they insisted to share their hospitality in this way. I stayed in the pastor’s apartment at the Presbyterian church in the village. Like many rural churches in Egypt, this church has been without a pastor for a couple years, so the apartment was available.

I got to tour the church on Thursday, and watch the youth prepare for the worship on Friday. The Presbyterian church in Egypt will celebrate Maundy Thursday often with the installation of new members, and remembrance of the last supper, but with no pastor this church did not have a service on Thursday. The big service is Friday. Good Friday, as it is known in the US, is much different in the Presbyterian church in Egypt, than it is at many of the churches I know in the US. The service is very celebratory, rather than dark. It is also a 5 to 6 hour service that goes from about 11am or noon until 5pm. In Beny Mohammad Sharohry, the Christian community is divided between Presbyterians and Coptic Orthodox. Fortunately, the Christian community is in a good relationship between both the Protestants and Orthodox. The larger Orthodox community fasts until 5pm on Good Friday to remember the suffering of Jesus, so the Presbyterian community in this village also fasts with them. As a guest, I was not required or expected to fast, but decided to join with them in community as well. This did make for a long 6 hours of church.

The worship included 5 sermons, a lot of singing, and showing of clips from "The Passion of Christ". One of the sermons was a short sermon from me, translated into Arabic by my friend Hany. It is considered ans honor for a small village church to have a foreign guest. Most foreigners do not travel to the small villages. They consider it a great honor to have a foreigner preach. Since I did not have any other way to show my appreciation to them, I preached for a few minutes. This has been a common request from many of my Protestant Christian friends in Egypt. Since I neither have skill or practice, I have only this one time accepted the invitation. After worship, we broke the fast with a meal of sprouted beans. This is a special meal served only around Easter. The sprouting of the beans symbolizes new life, which is why it is served for Easter. The next morning I then traveled to the city of Minya, to meet my Friend Hany, and go to his village.

Hany’s village is Zouliet Sultan. It was my second time there, since I met with Hany and his family for lunch on Eastern Christmas (January 7). Sherif and Brice were there with us. We joined Hany’s church for the Easter celebration on Saturday night. In Egypt, the big Easter celebration is Saturday night, rather than Sunday morning. This comes from the Orthdox belief that Jesus rose from the dead on Saturday night, but it was not discovered until Sunday morning. Therefore, the resurrection should be celebrated Saturday night. This village was different than Beny Mohammad Sharohry, since it is on the east side of the Nile. In Minya, the west side has most of the agricultural land, and the east side has very little land between the Nile and the cliff that separates the river valley from the desert. Therefore most people in Zouliet Sultan are quarry workers, rather than farmers. After the service, I left Hanny and went with Sherif and Brice to the Mousaus neighborhood in Minya, where Sherif lives.

After sleeping over for the night, Brice, Sherif, and I went to a church service at 2^nd Evangelical Church in Minya. This is the largest Presbyterian church in Minya, and also the richest. It is the one I go to every week I am in Minya, since many of my friends in Minya go there. We stayed for the service, and then I met with a few friends. After that, we went Sherif’s family’s home village of Beny Mafdy. This is an agricultural village on the west side of the Nile. Brice and I met many of Sherif’s relatives, and spent the day in the village. We then returned to Minya.

The day after Easter this year was the holiday of Shaman Naseem (my spelling and pronunciation may be wrong). This is a government holiday that started in Pharonic times to celebrate the start of Spring. It is a holiday with a tradition of eating salted fish. The salted fish is supposed to be preserved, but if it is not well preserved, one can become very sick after eating. Both Egyptians and foreigners have become very ill from this. Sherif, Brice, and I did not eat any fish. Instead, we spent the Monday morning along Nile in a large public park. There were hundred, if not thousands, of people there. There were more Christians than Muslims, since some Muslims consider this holiday an extension of Easter, even though it is a pharonic holiday. Parks all though Egypt were packed with people, and there were many boats on the Nile. Many families enjoyed this day outside picnicking. The day concluded with Brice and I taking the train back to Cairo, where I packed for a conference I traveled to in Jerusalem the next morning. I’ll discuss the conference and the trip in my next letter.

These five days were the highlight of my stay in Egypt so far. The people in the villages are very friendly and generous. Unlike the way I sometimes feel in the cities, the people in the villages treated me as a person rather than just a status symbol. Unfortunately, being American is a status, and it is also status for an Egyptian to be with an American. Sometimes it seems among my richer friends that I am only around to enhance their status. The people in the villages were also interested in me somewhat as a celebrity, but the people are close enough that they did not seem to feel a need to prove status to each other.

There is also unfortunately a lot of discrimination based upon social class. One example is that we did a lot of traveling by pick-up truck. The pick-up trucks are covered with a covering that resembles that of a covered wagon. Up to 15 or more people can be squeezed into the back. Along with 2-3 more in front, and up to four hanging off of the tailgate, it becomes a very affordable method of mass transit for the villagers. For this reason it is also considered a low class form of transportation. My friend Sherif came from the village, but his family moved into the city. His family was very comfortable with the idea of riding in the pick-up truck. One night when Sherif, Brice, and I were returning from Zouliet Sultan, Sherif told us we should get out before his home because it would look bad for us riding in a pick-up truck. This was his way of saying that it would look bad for him if his neighbors saw him in a pick-up.

2^nd Evangelical Church in Minya is a good church. It has reminded me much of my church at home. You will see people with camcorders filming special services where their children are singing. The church does a lot with computer video and PowerPoint during presentations, and has a projector for a laptop. These are all good things, but this has caused me to realize that for Egypt this church is a rich church, even if my home church is more middle class. Most churches in Egypt do not have the money for this equipment. In the coming months I have realized that people I know from the villages felt uncomfortable at the church. They would not say anything to me, since they knew that I know people there. Fortunately, I was able to hear from a 3^rd party that some of these people felt uncomfortable in the church. They felt excluded because of their social class. I talked to a friend of mine who is a pastor in the city of Zagazeeg, and he told me there are similar problems at his church, which is a wealthier congregation. This is not just an issue in Egypt, but at churches in the US. It is also a problem that often goes beyond church and into society itself. It is often easier for a higher social status person to be accepted by a lower status community, than it is for a low social status person to be accepted by a higher class community.

I told a friend in Minya about riding the pick-ups, busses, and non-air-conditioned trains. He told me that it is not good, since the people who ride these forms of transportation are poor. Since they are poor, they may not eat well, and this affects their thinking. I then asked him if the people in the air-conditioned trains think better because they have more money, and he told me that they do. I then confronted him by asking, "Are you saying rich people are smarted than poor people?". He was stunned into silence. This man is a good man and a friend. He also is one of the few richer people I know who active tried to reach out to people of a lower class. Unfortunately, as one of the best examples, he still has a long ways to go. I think this is also true of Egypt in general. Egypt is making progress on eliminating class distinction, but still has much work ahead.

May is here. Temperatures got up to 99 yesterday in Cairo. They are already above 100 in Minya. The fan on my laptop has been running very high these past few days, and I am now sleeping with the fan on to keep cool at night. I realize that I will always be sweaty, even after I shower. The Egyptian power grid is already straining under the load of people turning on their A/C, as the lights have been flickering at times. Overall it is nice though. The winter was too cold, so for now this is a nice change of pace.

Peace,

Rob