Troy Headrick
The American University in Cairo
Maadi, Cairo, Egypt
contact@savvy-women-magazine.com
I am an American teacher who lives far away from the place I was born and raised. Once a year, whenever the days grow long and hot, my nightly dreams change. I begin dreaming about airplanes. I often dream that I climb aboard one and then go up and up into the clouds. When that behemoth with wings lands and I’m back on terra firma, I’m in a place I recognize and surrounded by faces that belong to people I know and love.
But travel is not only about being reunited with friends and family. Often, while moving through space and time, I have the opportunity to meet new people. The purpose of this blog is to share two photos of a very interesting person I met not long ago on one of my journeys. The pictures were taken by Greg McElwain, a friend and fellow traveler. Even though I spoke nary a word with the woman shown in them (except through a translator) and spent a very short period of time in her presence, she left a lasting impression.
I met this woman while traveling, though not by plane. I met her during a brief stop on a bus trip I took a few weeks ago with a number of AUC colleagues. Our destination was a resort on the Red Sea in an Egyptian town called Ras Sidr (sometimes spelled “Ras Sudr”) on the Sinai Peninsula. To get there, we had to drive through a tunnel that passes under the Suez Canal. Once we’d popped up on the other side of that man-made waterway, we stopped at Oyoun Moussa, an apparently uninhabited and inhospitable site in the vast desert.
All of a sudden, while we were milling about outside the bus at Oyoun Moussa, this wonderful Bedouin woman appeared of out nowhere. She was selling handmade bracelets and wondered if we’d like to become buyers. She was standing right next to me, and I looked down into a face that was wizened but beautiful. I asked Sherine Zaki, an Egyptian friend standing nearby, to translate. She spoke to the woman whose answers to my questions came in a soft, susurrant Arabic.
A number of us bought her pretty jewelry, and then I asked if she’d mind posing for a photo or two. She seemed very pleased that I found her so interesting.
Several minutes later, while we were rolling down the highway again, I couldn’t help thinking that I’d just met a woman who was physically tiny but also larger than life, someone straight out of a fairytale, perhaps the Mother Goddess of the Sahara.
A number of questions came to mind as we made our way along. How had she survived all those years in the desert? What had her life been like?
I imagined that she must have had some incredible stories to tell! It’s unfortunate that I’ll never get a chance to hear them.
