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Editor's Note: This is part two of a two-part series. Part one was published in October 2007.
Iliana Venz is a 17-year-old from Resistancia, Argentina who was a year advanced in school. Carla Arguello graduated high school in Bogota, Colombia last year, but decided she was not ready for college yet. Both young women had a dream to study overseas, and through the American Friends in Service program, they each are spending a year attending school and living with a family in Egypt. Iliana is living in Alexandria, and Carla is living in Cairo. They had both heard a lot of rumors and seen a lot on television about how women are treated in the Arab world prior to going to Egypt. But as it turned out, what they experienced was quite different from their expectations.
With their year abroad almost over, Latinitas wanted to get their impressions of life in a Muslim country. In part one of this two part series, we started our conversation talking about marriage and social practices. This week our conversation begins with a discussion about the two teens' expectations of what life would be like for women in Egypt and gender relations.
Andrew Stelzer: What about being a woman. Didn't people warn you ‘Oh they're gonna make you do this, this and that”?
BOTH: Yes, uh-huh.
Iliana Venz: You have some limitations here if you are a woman, but it's not that bad actually. It depends on the family.
Carla Arguello: We have a more restrictive curfew than boys. It makes quite a difference. For boys, most of them, its 12. Most girls, its 9 or 10pm. And clothes, you can't show your shoulders--and it's better. For me even if I say, ‘I don't want to!' and my family said to me, ‘Ok, you can.(wear what you want)' I wouldn't do it. Because of the men outside, it's better to cover yourself and not be getting attention.
IV: What I find funny is this. I have a lot of Egyptian friends now, and when they met me it was like, ‘Oh, this is a foreigner girl.' They were talking a lot about my country and this and that. And after one month, they started treating me like an Egyptian girl, because I'm living with an Egyptian family. And they started talking to me in the polite way you are supposed to talk to Egyptian girls. Because there are some topics you can't bring up with Egyptian girls. You can't curse in front of them most of the time. You have to give them a chair and be really polite with them, and it's a way of treating them. Now I get that from them. So even telling them about my normal life in Argentina is hard, because they're not expecting me to tell them those types of things anymore. It's like, ‘You're Egyptian now. You can't talk Arabic, but you are somehow Egyptian.”
AS: And what about the machismo? Lots of people would say its worse for women, or at least say that in Latin America the men are bossy, and treat women bad, and then people say that same thing about men here.
IV: I don't think it's the same.
CA: I think in Latin America, if the man treats us badly, we can rebel ourselves, and make something about it—it's not ok. Here, it's a shame for a man to wash dishes in the home. It's different in a restaurant, but he wouldn't ever do that in the home.
IV: I don't know…I met some men that are really helpful in the house. Really. They are cooking with their moms, they are helping, cleaning, they take them everywhere, they do the shopping with their mom. But it's not much, its just a few men. It really depends. It changes a lot depending on the group of people that you are seeing.
AS: Did you expect to have problems as a woman when you came here?
IV: Yes, of course. I had some problems as a woman, but mostly in school.
CA: In school for me, something difficult happened. You know how the way to interact with boys sometimes is by bothering. They push you, and laugh. And sometimes that can make you think that, ‘Oh you can touch this girl.' Because you know, the touching thing here is quite a big deal. So all the teachers here told me, ‘Don't touch boys. Don't touch boys even if they are bothering you. Don't touch boys.” Not even saying “hi” to them; don't do like this.'(Slaps Iliana five). That's the only thing that they warned me about in school. For the boys, even sitting beside them can mean, ‘You are the easy girl ”
IV: They didn't warn me, I had to find out by myself. When I arrived everybody told me that there were other foreign girls in the school, but they are half-Egyptian, and they are from Muslim families, so they know how to act with them. But with me, even in the bus it was quite crazy. It was like, ‘Oh it's a foreign girl, she doesn't even talk Arabic, let's talk with her.' They paid a lot of attention to me so I felt good, because I felt welcome somehow. But after that, I saw the way that the other girls were acting with the boys. Just saying hi, and being polite to them. Just saying, ‘I'm fine,' and that's it; not paying much more attention to them. So I started doing the same to them in the bus and in the classroom, and the boys said to me ‘What happened to you Ileana, are you sad? Do you miss your family or something?' And I told them, ‘No, I'm fine.'
CA: I had to change the same way with boys in my class. Most of the people were boys and I had to keep my distance with them. So no joking, no nothing. And that's the only way that I can speak with Egyptians, because I didn't know the language. I couldn't make a conversation so it was just joking.
IV: But when I started acting like that, I made a lot of friends that were women.
CA: Ahhh yes, this happened to me too.
AS: Carla, you live in Cairo, where compared to Alexandria, you can dress more openly.
CA: Yeah, you can wear jeans, you can wear anything. I dress the same here as I do in Bogota.
AS: So do you think that their way is right, or wrong, or just different? Especially for dealing with teenage boys, it's difficult. Is the way here better or worse that what you are used to?
IV: I don't know. I think if I came here to Egypt to stay here to live and to have a job and get married and a family, I would be happy, and it would be totally okay. But there are still things I prefer in Argentina.
CA: There's no relationship with boys here. I'm talking more than a friendship.
IV: I know people who are totally happy like that, because it's their culture. They are totally happy like that because its what they are used to, and even the woman thinks that their situation is right for them. It's better than most of the other Muslim countries, so they are happy with it. What can you say to them? They're happy. Even if they are not happy, it's not something that you can change.
JN: But when you grow up, do the restrictions get looser? Like can adult women who are married and have their life, can they have male friends?
IV: No, I don't think so. You can have friends, but the concept of friendship is different. You can't just invite the friend to the house if you are alone. But when the woman gets married and has her own kids, she gains a lot of power.
CA: The social life with friends, for my host mom, is only at work, and the family and the husbands of her family. That's her group—that's her circle.
AS: Are you going to recommend to girlfriends to come to Egypt?
CA: Yeah, I will recommend to girlfriends to come.
AS: Were they (your parents) scared for you to go to a Muslim country?
IV: Yeah. It was funny to hear my mom talking with her friends. They would ask ‘How are you letting your daughter go there, or go abroad even?' And she was like ‘I prefer for her to stay in the house. But if this is something that she wants to do, I will let her do it. Because it's her choice.'
This interview was conducted by Andrew Stelzer, and co-facilitated by Jessica Noel.
July 2008
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