Secondary counselor Josiah Laposky reminisces about his time in Egypt, explaining his core value of connecting with others in a foreign country. During his stay in Egypt, Laposky encountered different situations he needed to navigate.
What follows is Josiah’s story, in his own words:
I first moved to Ecuador and then Mexico. I thought, wow, this is so different from the U.S. After, when we moved to Egypt, it was right after the Arab Spring. There was a revolution. So the country was in a pretty hard place. There was a curfew, and there was fighting in the streets that was quite intense to deal with. But we really loved the culture and our time there.
There was the initial revolution in 2011, and I moved there in 2012. In 2013, there was another change of government or coup d’etat. There were so many people killed in the streets, and there was fighting. The U.S. Embassy evacuated, some of the other embassies evacuated, and the school that I worked at at the time [Cairo American College] got quite small. When I first started working at the school, there were about 1,400 students, and by the time I left, it was a little over 700. The school size was cut almost in half. You can imagine that had a big impact on the school and on the environment and on how safe we felt there. But that being said, even though all those things were happening, I didn’t really feel that unsafe. The people were very kind, and I didn’t feel like it was going to be very dangerous for us.
In many of the places I’ve lived, like the U.S., Mexico, Ecuador, and Romania, there’s this Western type of culture, maybe more influenced by European types of ideals. In Egypt, there’s a different religion and different ways of interacting with people that we [my wife and I] learned to navigate. There was a culture of [being] welcoming. I found this in many cultures. So often, if we’d go into a place to shop, they would offer you some tea and you’d sit down with them and they’d ask about your family and all these things. They were really connected in that way. We learned to love it.
One of my main regrets about our time in Egypt—and my wife has the same regret—we always thought we were going to have to leave the country quite quickly because the situation was so disruptive. We always had our bags packed with our passports and things that we might need in case of having to quickly leave the country. Because we experienced quite serious things. We would sometimes hear bomb explosions from our apartment. We always had to be ready to leave at any moment. We didn’t really learn Arabic, or we wish we would have learned more, because it’s such a beautiful language. If we would have learned it, we would have been able to interact more with the locals and have more of those types of intimate cultural experiences that we might have missed out on because we didn’t learn the language.