The Christian Family

The Christian Family

I grew up in a small village on the banks of the Nile in northern Egypt, where life was as peaceful as death itself; where lifestyles haven't changed that much since the time of Pharaoh, and the local demographers stopped issuing their annual census report after they discovered the copying machine.
Before CNN and Elgazira network, villagers lived the simple life of a farming community where their interest in the outside world went only as far as the edge of their cornfields. The men left for work at dawn and came back at dusk, when their wives caught them up on the business of giving birth to new trainees who would work in the farm as soon as they mastered their first step.
People consulted the same fashion designer and dressed in the same traditional robes, went to the same mosque to pray, ate the same food, celebrated the same holidays, and for generations villagers kept the gene pool very much in the families.
There was one little thing though that made our village different than the rest of the villages; a Christian family lived among us, and villagers simply knew them as "the Christians." They dressed different, walked different, talked different and smelled different; most of the villagers were not sure that was because of the Christian pork diet or because they didn't wash their butts after visiting bathrooms like Muslims excessively do.
The Christian family lived in the outskirts of the village near the remote cemetery, a place where most villagers would rather visit just once in their lifetime - to be buried.
The Christian family's peculiar lifestyle was intriguing to me; it was a breath of fresh air to invigorate the monotonous village life. They were overly friendly and easily flashed a smile to anyone who cared to share eye contact. Most of all, unlike other villagers who worked on the farm for generations, they didn't use the same job placement agency as everyone else; they were in the hunting and gathering business, and they made their living from hunting down wandering wolves on the outskirts of the village. Then they'd drag their kills around the village for show and tell, describing the grave danger they had just faced and the heroic adventure that they just encountered, which earned them reluctant admiration from villagers and free handout of rice, corn or whatever the season offered at the time.
One more thing about this Christian family that was the envy of the villagers' kids: the Christian kids weren't required to attend the daily religious class (usually about Islam) at the public school like the rest of us who had to endure daily abuse from the undereducated, well-fed, overbearing religion teachers.
The religious teacher called on them to leave the classroom, and they happily complied, freely roaming around the schoolyard during the one-hour religious class. Students called them the "wonder christens"; it has become a customary after a while for some Muslim kids to claim Christendom for an hour and tag along with them to skip the boring religion classes and enjoy their right to freedom of religion.
I didn't know why I hung around those Christian kids, especially after being warned many times not to intermingle with them. The villagers called them "blue boons" people. Just like almost everyone else, I had no clue how they earned this colorful name; all we knew was that it referred to sneaky people who are not to be trusted or even visited, according to the villagers' whispers.
Although I had the privilege of the majority religion, my alliance with the Christian family was more of secular than a sectarian one, which won me the ridicule of the other village kids. To most of the villagers I was also different. My family, unlike everyone else in the village, chose a different career than farming. My family became the educators who for years ran the only village elementary school. We didn't wear the traditional dress like everyone else either, and villager's kids entertain themselves by poking fun at us. We were just different. And different is good… I thought!

Ahmed Tharwat
952-933-6825
2/1/02