Rain in the Desert and Harassment on the Bridge

I have to say, I neglect this site terribly. When I was in Thailand it was my main outlet for communication. Now I have facebook, and in this part of the world facebook is extremely popular, so all of my Egyptian friends as well as my American friends and others are on it, and I love being able to keep up with all of them. Today however, I was surfing my family's blogs and I thought I post a blurb on my own.

I am on holiday this week! I love holiday. Although the past two days I went in to school and put in pretty full work days. Today I have chosen to brew myself a good cup of coffee, lounge around in my pajamas and do some of my class reading and report writing from the comfort of my own sofa. I turn on my mom's blog and listen to her playlist in the background. This position is ideal. I love days when I can just lounge like this. Although if I have too many of them I go stir crazy. It is nice to have them scattered among busy work weeks.

Yesterday it rained while I was walking home from school. My walk home from school takes about 15 minutes at a good pce and it only truly rained for about five of those, but it was enough to make my hair wet. I was so excited! Usually it rains about 3 or 4 times during the winter here, but this year we hadn't had any. This was the first I'd seen, and spring is already coming.

Well my delight from the rain didn't last long. I cross a bicycle bridge over the Metro tracks to get to and from school. That is the part of the walk that I dread the most because women get tons of harrassment there and there's not really any place to get away from them. Of course as I crossed two stupid teenaged boys blocked my path shouting in Arabic, "Foreigner, you, foreigner, welcome to Egypt. I want to kiss you." I hear this ALL the time, so I just attempted to walk around them. There were two of them and only one of me which I guess made them bold. They blocked my path and wouldn't let me pass. One put his arms out as if he was offering to shake my hand. That's not appropriate in this culture, so I put my hands up to signal that I didn't want him to come closer, and tried to dodge him. Yeah right. He grabbed me around the waist and tried to pull me to him. If course at this point I shouted at him in Arabic how rude he was ans shoved away and got past him. They thought that was hilarious and made a big scene of laughing at me until I wass out of site.

I was ticked. This happens all the time. You would think that I would get over it. But every time something like this happens I get super ticked. I am making a little bit of progress though in that I wasn't afraid to shout at him this time, and when I got home I didn't disolve into tears. I stayed angry until John got home and then he prayed with me. Of course my part of the prayer was asking God to punch that boy in the nose. I don't think that's the mature Christian prayer that I am supposed to pray, but it was honest. Besides, John filled in the gap and asked God to bless those who persecute us.

I got over the whole, "I'm overseas, so I'm supposed to be an ultra mature Christian," a long time ago. If I weren't real before God then I would never make it here. And my being real often includes my being immature before Him. Sometimes it includes my being angry before God. It always includes my being completely helpless before Him. He knows the real me anyway, so why fake it, right? And the amazing thing is that He accepts me as I am and fills in all the gaps to make me who He has called me to be.