My Long History with Egypt

It was the summer of 2013, I was depressed over a boy I had fallen in love with. My days passed by watching House music videos and walking to the city center at night to pick up a shwarma and 2 beers. I returned home without delay and returned to the music videos.

My flatmate then had actually been the brother of David Draiman of DISTURBED. He didn’t understand me at all but I was a very quiet flatmate. I didn’t make any trouble until one night a drunk Jewish guy I had met came to the flat and pushed his way into my room just so he could curse me for dating an Arab man and took the Koran a shopkeeper had given me that was sitting on my shelf and ripped it apart page by page. But apart from that incident, I’m far from a troublemaker. He woke me up the next morning to clean the stairwell from the pages of the Koran that the guy who was trying to save my soul, continued to rip apart as I finally threatened to call the police on him.

But back to Egypt. It was during these days that I was slowly leaving religion. It simply hurt too much and I wasn’t being appreciated the way I needed to be by my fellow Jews as a lonely divorced woman who would have appreciated a dinner invitation. One of the aforementioned shopkeepers (not one who was trying to proselytize me) had offered to introduce me to a guy he knew who was desperate for a girlfriend. I met the boy and it was love at first sight. His family tore us apart, and I was left alone again.  

During this season of depression and shwarmas, I ended up on a dating site called OK CUPID which was a big deal in Israel at the time. Again, I didn’t know what I was looking for, I guess I just wanted any sort of distraction from my misery. I matched with a man from Egypt. We talked and talked. I had never known any Egyptian before and had only been to Sinai once or twice with my ex-husband to the Hilton Taba Hotel for some light gambling and then headed right back across the border into Israel.

It was years of casually chatting about life and what was going on in our individual lives and cultures. I was not ready to cross any borders and travel to meet a strange man so we kept our relationship strictly to Skype. Eventually, he got into a relationship and then when he was single I was with someone, etc. Until one day I had had enough and needed to escape Jaffa. I had had enough of Israeli men, I had had enough of Israeli culture and I needed a break. Manno (The Egyptian) invited me down to Sinai for a month’s stay with him, all at his expense. I was weary but I chose to take the opportunity to see and experience new things. So I ventured off into the unknown and let my gold-digger ex-boyfriend stay in my penthouse in Jaffa’s flea market to watch my cat and I left.

After twenty-four hours with this man, we realized it was a mistake. We had nothing in common, we didn’t want to do the same activities, we didn’t like the same movies, and we didn’t see a common vision for our futures. And we were not even attracted to each other physically. We tried to make a go of it for a week. He introduced me to his friends and showed me around the village of Dahab. I became with friends with his boss and other hotel owners and decided it was time to move to a hostel. I stayed there the rest of the month still enjoying my freedom. Dahab was unlike any other way of life I had ever seen. Unless you were a diver you did not leave your house until an hour before sunset for the sheer heat of the place was too much to bear. There was nothing but divers, mountains, bad food, and endless amounts of time to do nothing but think.

I sat by myself at the seaside every day and then wandered into shisha cafes in the evenings to people-watch and let my mind wander.

I loved Dahab so much that I ended up giving up my penthouse, closing my Israeli bank account, and moving down to Sinai with my cat. I rented an apartment and set up life.

Since my divorce and my father’s death, I hadn’t really allowed myself to feel any pain and truly process what I had lost. I remember crying on the rocks at every sunset and sometimes staying up all night so I could watch the sunrise and feel like I was part of something greater. I have a great appreciation for Sinai, it’s where you can really strip down and see yourself in your most natural state.

As I was there for longer periods of time I became friends with some other American girls. All happened to be liars and cheaters and dating the type of guy you’d find in an Egyptian jail cell but I didn’t know that then. I was glad to find some girls who I could speak freely with and became particularly close with a Mexican American girl named Zully. She was dating Ahmed and as the winter wind crept up we took to her house to watch American movies on MBC2 and smoke shisha together. They had their on-and-off issues but they acted like they were married. I took off to Cairo for a weekend to meet the famous Egyptian Zionist, Ahmed Meligy and offered my house to Zully just in case she wanted some peace and quiet.

When I returned to Dahab she said she hadn’t ended up using the house and returned the key to me. Nothing was amiss until the night before I was due to fly to Dubai and leave Dahab behind. I was packed and ready to go. It was April 6th, 2016. I was once again flying off to another Arab country with no plan except to use my overwhelming amount of positivity.

I had spent the day out and about saying goodbye to people and smoking my last shisha. I returned to my house (I had a standalone house with walls with shards of glass embedded into the cement and locked doors and gates.) I walked in and immediately saw one suitcase leaning on its side and zipped open. I opened it, quite certain that’s not how I had left it. My jewelry box with my family heirlooms was missing. Nothing had moved from around the jewelry box, just the box.

The front door had been locked when I entered, no sign of a struggle anywhere. I knew who had taken it. It must have been Zully’s drug-dealing boyfriend.

I called a friend who came over and surveyed the scene, we then went to the police station to file a report. They never came to my house, they didn’t take fingerprints. I named names and wanted them to be questioned but they instead told them that if I named names that they would go straight to jail and would not be able to travel internationally after that. In my naivete, I rescinded my accusations and let the circus of Egyptian men go home. I wanted the detective to DO something. Question them! Search their homes! Anything. But they refused and told me they would put a roadblock at the checkpoint leading out of the city.

I got into a taxi and took my case to the tourist police in Sharm El Sheikh. A bigger department, must be able to do something, right? No, they gave me their condolences and I returned to Dahab. On the way to and from Sharm El Sheikh, there was not one car or bus pulled over for inspection as the police told me they were going to. My great-grandmother’s pearls were in the hands of evil and disgusting men and I refused to let it slide.

I left on a plane to Dubai but did not feel myself. I bemoaned the loss of possessions so dear to me. Within 6 weeks I was on a plane back to Sinai. I headed straight to the village of Nuweiba where there were Bedouin lawyers who spoke Hebrew whom I could trust. As I’ve said before, I was not fluent in Hebrew but what little I did know did help when we were trying to communicate without the Egyptian judge’s understanding. I had obtained a job in real estate in Dubai but was going back and forth to Sinai about every 4-6 weeks. Until one day I couldn’t handle the pain of the loss anymore and was tired of screaming in the faces of Egyptian law enforcement officers who didn’t give a damn.

Years later when it was time for elections, I found out from a friend that the General of South Sinai had organized the thieving ring and I was not the only one affected. Zully’s boyfriend and his friends were the ones who had invaded my apartment and stolen my most priceless possessions. All my diamonds, all my pearls, everything I owned, and that made me who I was, was gone.  The diamond pendant I wear today was the only piece of jewelry I had on me at the time and I never remove it around my neck.

To this day, I trust only two Egyptian men I have ever met. One is an ex-boyfriend, and the other is like a brother to me. I only return to Egypt now if something in my life has gone terribly wrong and I have an overwhelming need to escape. There is nothing I like about Egypt but I keep getting pulled back and I still believe it is a trip of a lifetime if you are an avid traveler. There’s nowhere like it in the world. Go see the pyramids and walk in the footsteps of historic men but leave the pearls behind.