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OF CONTENTS
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The Children of Alexandria
By Caroline Park
Throughout
my travels, I have met children in all countries, many of them
endearing
themselves to my heart forcing me to love them. In
Egypt,
I experienced one set of children who survived on the streets through
stealing
and another set of children from an orphanage who gave out love because
they
were loved and knew how to reciprocate it. The
two contrasting experiences made me think about how
people become
the people they are by the environment and circumstances they are
placed
in.
Almost
immediately as soon as we stepped out of the train station in Alexandria,
exhausted from our overnight train from Luxor,
the five of us were greeted by a group of children around the ages of
eight to
ten. They greeted us with accented
hellos and as we looked around us in hopes to find our way back to the
ship,
they continued to stick close by us and uttered phrases and words in
Arabic
that we could not understand. However,
their gestures were familiar enough. Rubbing
their fingers together, by that time we all knew
that they
wanted bakeesh. Instead
of handing out money, we tried to be
friendly and conversed with them for a while. However,
I realized these boys were not going to go away
until they got
something from us. The more we tried to
ignore them, the more persistent they became, grabbing our arms and
poking our
heavy backpacks. They were no longer
innocent children who were fascinated by foreigners in their
neighborhood but
little hoodlums who were scoping out an opportunity.
Then the attack finally came. In
a matter of seconds, I heard a rustle and
felt a slight push. From the corner of
my eye, I saw my friend Mike stomp after one of the boys.
He came back explaining that one of the boys
had attempted to grab and run off with a package I had in the water
bottle
compartment of my North Face pack. Luckily
he had not been successful but the suspicions that
I had deemed
too judgmental were confirmed.
I had
another encounter with Egyptian children but one of an entirely
different
nature than the previous episode. On the
last day in the city I went on a service visit with SAS to an orphanage
in Alexandria. The SOS Children’s Village was a
revolutionary break from the stereotypical orphanages I had heard about. Rather than housing the children in one big
prison-like structure, a group of six to ten children were assigned to
a house
and a “mother” who was responsible for their well-being.
The SOS Children’s Village was established on
a commitment to “a family-centered
child-care concept based on the four pillars of a mother, a house,
brothers and
sisters, and a village” (Wikipedia). The
children I met there seemed so full of
laughter and love that it was almost impossible to imagine that these
children
had come from terrible losses and circumstances. These
very children who were so eager to
share their toys, pictures, and their happiness could have been the
“Oliver
Twists” we had met at the train station, wandering aimlessly, resorting
to
desperate measures for survival as a result of the lack of the care and
love of
a family.
Passing by
all
the different
countries and meeting its people, one of the biggest lessons I’ve
learned the
past three months is that people all over the world are surprisingly
similar in
many ways. The major difference among us
is that we are placed in different circumstances. Although
we are essentially the same as people,
we are given different cultural, social and economic tools, and a
vastly
different environment in which to live our lives. In
the first part of her book The Hidden
Face of Eve, Nawal El-Saadawi mentions the women who suffer sexual
or
mental
distortion as a result of their traumatic experience in circumcision
(9). Similarly, could it be that the
children who
grow up with up in an environment without the love and support of a
family
group suffer later in life as social deviants and menaces?
Leaving the
children’s village in Alexandria,
I couldn’t
help but wonder: Is it this difference that drives us to divide into
the “good”
people and the “bad” people? The people
who have the means to achieve what they attempt to achieve, the people
who are
given the love and support return what they receive back to others,
contributing to society as “good” people, whereas the people who are
deprived
of meaningful support and resources are given no choice but to resort
to less
desirable methods to survive.
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