Sabrina CP#6

April 16th @ 5pm-7pm 

Optimist Park

I met Rehab at Optimist park where she comes every Sunday with her children. We sat down and I could just sense Rehab looked tired. I asked her if all was okay and she shared she was just overwhelmed with all the work at home/school/work. With the end of the semester, she just had a lot on her plate. I shared with Rehab that I was looking into the English-teaching job field in Saudi Arabia. I was surprised to learn that Rehab’s childhood was in Saudi Arabia! I knew her sister currently lived there, but did not know that she had once lived there too. 

She shared that her love for geology (she is a geologist) grew from the memories she had of the mountains in Saudi Arabia. Her father was an official government worker there and he worked there for several years. Rehab has great memories of her childhood in Saudi Arabia. Rehab lost her father when she was only in high school, so the topic of her childhood brought back many memories of her father. 

When her father’s contact finished, they had to return to Egypt and Rehab grew up in the village side. She mentioned how there were no college or university in the village and to get to her university she had to take two different kinds of transportation (neither of them being a car!). The villages are improving nowadays in their education system, but not enough like the bigger cities. We talked about how the family system works in Egypt. She shared that usually the norm used to be that the sons of the house finish college, get a job, and get married. But nowadays because of the tough economic condition in Egypt, graduates are not getting jobs. For this reason, sons are graduating and then their father’s are getting them married (paying for their wedding). This causes a joint family system where the son is living with the rest of the family with his wife because he cannot afford to live alone. 

We then talked more about expectations for new moms in Egypt. I mentioned how some elderly people do not like the fact that modern day moms use diapers. Rehab agreed that her mother-in-law and mother always had arguments with her about why she used diapers for her kids. We talked about other superstitions held in cultures about new moms/new babies. 

It has been a wonderful time having these long and fun discussions with Rehab. I really learned a lot and I believe Rehab learned some new things about our culture too.