“We have to be careful here,” she says. “If we give the Elhadads more money than they are used to having, they will get accustomed to having it. What happens when we leave and they have to go back to what they were earning before?”
“That’s a harsh way to look at it, Beck.”
“I’m being realistic.”
“And I’m being altruistic.”
Mom can’t stop herself from smiling. “This is exactly why I fell in love with you, but we’re going to burn through our savings if we aren’t careful.”
“We make more money than we spend,” Dad says. “If we can’t use it to make other people’s lives better, what’s the point of having it?”
She shakes her head, still smiling. “I hate it when you’re right.”
“You know what else I’m right about?” He rubs his hands together. “Pizza.”
CHAPTER 4
Living aboard a tugboat has made my dad impervious to thunderstorms. He can sleep through early morning lawn mowings and college football games on TV, so he is unaffected by the predawn call to prayer. Instead of trying to fight it, Mom and I sit on the new couch with the balcony doors open and just listen. In the dark, the call is haunting and I worry that I’ve absorbed some of Grandma Irene’s fears.
When Dad told her we were moving to Egypt, she tried to get him to change his mind. She clipped out newspaper articles about suicide bombers. Brought over library books written by ministers and political talking heads about the dangers of Islam. Suggested I stay behind with her so I wouldn’t be kidnapped. At the time it seemed like the exaggerations of a little old racist lady, but I would feel better if I understood the song coming from the minaret. Hopefully the difference between Grandma Irene and me is that I want to understand.
“It’s not much different from church bells,” Mom says, and I think about how all the churches in downtown Sandusky ring noon bells, slightly staggered and playing different melodies, but not unlike the calls to prayer. “In Arabic, the word for the call is adhan and the man who performs it is the muezzin. Each muezzin has his own style, which is why some calls are longer than others, but all of them are proclaiming that there is only one God, who is great, that Muhammad is the messenger of God, and—in this case—that prayer is better than sleep.”
“That’s it?”
“Basically. For Muslims the actual prayer comes next, but the adhan is simply a reminder that it’s time to pray.”
“They pray so much.”
“I say prayers in the morning when I wake up and at night before bed, and we always say grace before dinner,” she says. “If you count the moments when I am thankful for something good that happens or offer a prayer to ease someone’s misfortune, it all adds up.”
“Except your prayers are private.”
“True, but this is what Islam requires,” Mom says. “I’m sure there are plenty of Muslims who have trouble waking up for this prayer the same way you hate getting up early on Sunday morning for Mass.”
It’s not that I don’t believe her, but the noon bells in Sandusky are more pleasant than the adhan. “I hope this means we’ll eventually be able to sleep through it.”
She ruffles my hair. “Me too. I’m tired.”
When the call to prayer ends, we go back to bed, and when the real morning comes, Mr. Elhadad arrives to take us to Mom’s new clinic. During the drive, she asks him about the neighborhood where the clinic is located.
“Manshiyat Nasr is called Garbage City,” he says. “The people who live there—the Zabbaleen—collect the garbage from around Cairo and take it back to Manshiyat Nasr to sort out the recyclables. There is no running water there, no sewage system, and the electricity is almost nonexistent.”
His description makes the place sound terrible, but he could not have prepared us enough for what we actually encounter. The neighborhood is a tightly packed warren of crumbling brick apartment buildings, and the mostly dirt streets are lined with bags of garbage. The air—which already stinks of Cairo smog—carries the sharp, sour stench of rotting food, and it takes all my willpower not to pull my shirt up over my nose. The children playing in the street, however, don’t seem bothered.
We pass trucks stacked precariously high with bales of flattened water bottles, long-dead cars with smashed-out windows, and alleys filled with mountains of cardboard. Amid the garbage are wandering goats and vendor stalls selling fruits and vegetables. I don’t think this was what Dad had in mind when he suggested we go in search of a market.
“It is easy to put this place out of our heads,” Mr. Elhadad says, turning the car into a narrow street lined with shops. Overhead the buildings rise up ten stories and taller. Some of the balconies are strung with clotheslines pinned with drying laundry, while others have colorful fabrics creating privacy screens. “But it is a good reminder to be grateful for the blessings in our lives.”
Dad shoots an I told you so glance over his shoulder at Mom, who sticks out her tongue at him, then smiles.
The clinic is at the end of a block, in a one-story building as dilapidated as the others, but someone has applied a fresh coat of blue paint over the stucco. My mother unlocks the front door. Inside the clinic is bright and clean with a small reception room, an even smaller office, and a couple of examination rooms. The space is ready. It’s just waiting for equipment and staff. For Mom.
“How is this tiny place going to meet the needs of so many people?” Dad wonders aloud.
“It’s not,” she says. “But some is better than none.”
The door opens behind us and a girl barely older than me comes in with a curly-haired baby on her hip. She says something in Arabic, gesturing at the baby. Mr. Elhadad responds, shaking his head. I don’t understand their words, but I gather that he’s telling her the clinic is not yet open.
“Wait,” Mom says. “What’s wrong? What does she need?”
“She says her daughter has sickness in her eye,” Mr. Elhadad translates. “I believe she means infection.”
My mom fishes a packet of peel-open latex exam gloves from her tote bag. As she pulls on the gloves, she speaks to the young woman in Arabic. I know Mom well enough to know she is asking permission to examine the baby, which is verified when the baby’s mother nods her assent.
“She has conjunctivitis,” Mom says in English. “She needs clean water, fresh toweling for compresses . . . I don’t know how she is going to manage that in these conditions and I don’t have the resources to help her today, but . . . okay, I’m going to need everyone to step outside so she and I can speak privately.”
“What if you don’t know the right words?” Dad asks.