"Palm Trees Under an Egyption Moon"
By Jessi Turner

The other night I was jogging after a long day of classes and correcting. As I stopped to stretch before I headed back to my apartment I looked up and saw the moon…it is beautiful here…the moonlight silhouetting the palm trees…it pretty much takes your breath away. I was wondering if anyone I knew was looking up and seeing the same moon. Obviously, in my romantic state of mind I forgot about time zone issues, but it doesn't matter…at least I was thinking of all of you!

It has been about a week since I got back from my upper Egyptian Ramadan break adventure…wow, what an eye opener for sure. Boys wear dresses called galabayas, camels are a regular mode of transportation, a goat came to visit me every morning, and girls can't really do anything. Good thing I am a foreign girl…this means I can do a lot of things, but still not everything I wanted to do. Medhat gave me a motorcycle ride through the village, but we had to go at night and I had to wear a cap so I sort of looked like a boy. One thing girls can do is eat and oh man did we eat! A lot of the students live in the village we visited. It is about 8 hours south of Cairo. Those from Zewik believe they are the most hospitable people in the world…they show their hospitality by buying you bottles of soda and are offended if you don't drink all of it. Ryan, one of the other SMs got very sneaky about not drinking his. I officially hate soda (pop as I call it). Every house we went to made us drink at least one bottle of soda (244ml) if not mango juice and tea as well. We have enough sugar in us to last till Christmas! It did make for very funny meal conversations though…we laughed a lot. I traveled with 5 body guards and two police! The five body guards were actually just my fellow student missionaries and friends from NUA (Medhat, Ryan, Mina, Daniel (Mr. French), and Dany), but being the only girl was interesting for sure. Oh yah, and the police kept a close eye on us as well. We had to check in in Zewik, then they escorted us in a vehicle all the way to our second stop in Dahassah, then some police from Dahassah lived in Medhat's house for about 3 days while we were there and even took walks with us and stuff. It was crazy!

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