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Last Friday I met K’s cousins, Omar (3) and Laila (5), the children of X’s sister. They’re growing up in Colorado, but come to Egypt in the summers to keep up their Arabic. K’s never met them, and unfortunately will miss them this year, too, because they’re going back to the U.S. at the end of the month and she’s not coming to Cairo until mid-August. They are adorable children. Energetic, amusing, and astonishingly well-behaved, even at times when they’d have every excuse not to be.

These pictures were taken in X’s mom’s apartment in Heliopolis.

This is Omar’s bubby. You can’t tell from the photo, but it barks. Incessantly. It’s supposed to walk, too, but that bit broke. This doesn’t stop Omar from putting it on a leash and shouting ta’ala! (come on!) at it. May Allah reward him for his efforts.

Can I take a moment and gush about my new camera? I’m still learning landscapes, but for close-up portraits I love it. This was taken one-handed while she was sitting on my lap and I was holding the cards in my other hand, auto-focus, auto-flash, no editing afterwards. It might be the best picture I’ve ever taken.

Playing with (and occasionally abusing) their auntie, X’s youngest sister:

Their parents debated about where to raise them. They were born in the U.S., but their mother (X’s sister) originally wanted them to grow up here in Egypt. They transferred back to Cairo, but Omar kept getting sick, so they transferred to the U.S. again. After a few years they started to talk, and she realized they were playing together in English. So, their baba stayed in the U.S. this summer, and she took the children back to Egypt for a few months so they will keep speaking Arabic.

It's hard, she said, in the U.S., because the only language schools are on weekends, and no one takes them seriously. "I always compare their education to mine," she said. She and X and their sisters went to French language schools in Egypt and Kuwait, became fluent in Arabic at home and on the street, and picked up English because everyone does. There are a few schools in the States that provide that kind of education, but they're mostly for diplomats' kids, they're rare, they're private, and they're expensive. Coming back to Egypt for extended trips is kind of a pain, but she doesn't want them to grow up monolingual.

She also, as she put it, “wanted them to get used to seeing the zebel boy” while they were still young. Cairo’s zebeleen are the city trash collectors. All Christians — in part because it’s nasty work and they are the oppressed minority here; in part because the work relies on pigs to sift through trash — they collect garbage from every apartment in the city and take it back to the Moqattam, a hill on the edge of Cairo, where they pick through it for valuables. Cairo has tried to replace them with a more modern sanitation system, but that would be expensive, would rob many many people of their livelihood, would take money out of Egypt and put it into foreign companies, and in the end wouldn’t be as efficient. (The zebeleen fought hard against a proposed recycling program a few years ago, because once people start separating their cans from their bottles they might realize that whoops! that’s where my wedding ring went!)

Obviously this is really dirty work, and the people who do it are, too. X told me that when he was a child he was told not to touch the railings in his apartment building because the zebel boy had touched them. When his sister says she wants her children to see this, she’s talking about a whole range of things: the poverty on the streets, the waiting in line for every little thing, the heat and traffic and noise and cars held together by scraps of wire and all the other evidence of grime and human suffering that is hidden from view in American suburbs. We were both worried that K., at fourteen, is already old enough that she’ll be annoyed at these things, hate Egypt, and won’t want to come back.

But there are trade-offs. I told her I enjoyed being here when K. was little because Egypt was so friendly to children, and she said oh really? because her experience was just the opposite. We compared stories and decided maybe the key factor was being a foreigner. In Egypt I was the American mother and everyone wanted me to have a good experience here, welcome to Egypt! your daughter is beautiful! but she’s just seen as another Egyptian mom. In the U.S., however, the reverse is true, for both of us.

Also, in the U.S., she’s able to control everything her children are exposed to. This is funny to me, because so many U.S. Muslims, including native-born American Muslims, complain that the U.S. is a den of sin and vice and it is hard to bring up good Muslim children in Gomorrah. For her, however, the U.S. is a country where you can put parental controls on the television (“not like Egypt, where they can look at anything”), the food in all the restaurants is clean, and you can enroll them in clubs and classes where everything is well-organized and you know the people they’ll be seeing there. And the only Arabic they hear is the Arabic their parents decide to use. Yesterday she told Laila not to do something and Laila came back with why she was going to do it anyway and then flipped her hand up, in a classic Egyptian hand gesture, and said “fi eh?” Literally it means “is what?” but its meaning is a sarcastic “what’s the issue?” or “do you have a problem with that?” I burst out laughing and Laila ran off and her mother said, “See, this is the kind of thing she hears here.” The other day, she said, her son called someone the son of a dog.

It’s interesting to hear this perspective because I come from the opposite place. One of the things I first loved about Egypt, and one of the reasons I initially wanted to raise my children here, was that it wasn’t sanitized like the U.S. is. Children are out at all hours, in every public space, exposed to everything that adults see. I thought that was healthy, and a nice alternative to what I saw as the hypocrisy of so many American parents, who live one kind of life in front of their children and another one once the kids are asleep or at the babysitter’s. But I can also see the appeal of having precision control over the way you parent, especially if you’ve grown up without that.