Being looked after – in Cairo and everywhere, actually

The congress was great but I will write about it another time (there’s just too much to write right now). I also managed to find the “Tanzanian park” (very emotional moment for me), but did not find the priest – it’s been 26 years already, in the meantime Cairo got a metro and some new streets that replaced buildings… I was surprised by all this and did not have enough time or this unplanned thorough research. Which makes a perfect reason to go back to Cairo soon and give it another shot. Yupeeee!

But I did manage to walk around the town a lot, sitting down to drink a tea and smoke a shisha, enjoying the absence of tourists (I guess they sort of step, from their fancy hotels, straight into the a/c dark glassed luxury buses and head to Pyramids or whatever, avoiding to spoil their clean goretex heavy duty fancy walking shoes with the unclean surfaces of Cairo streets. Yes, I know, I am being cynical here. And I love it!). And I yet again experienced on several occasions how a community formed immediately, a little street community that instantaneously, if I was open and respectful of course, accepted me and tried to care of my needs. Not for money or anything else, but just for the joy of giving and providing, as it seemed.

Memories were flooding through my mind, tons of them, and the picture became clearer and clearer, until it hit me hard: I realized that I was being looked after so much in my life, so often and so lovingly, that I, upon this realization, felt utterly touched and humbled.

Yes, I have been looked after on so many occasions in my life, and by so open and eagerly giving and providing people, that I am not even going to try to write it all down since it would literally take hundreds of pages. But yes, while writing this, pictures just keep flashing somewhere inside my mind, from Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Sudan, I mean, from everywhere and from everytime.

Why did they do it? Why did they collect a glass of buffalo milk (not a small thing in that area)  in the nearby village to greet us somewhere in the dark night of Pakistan, us, who were the only people to have electricity (in our van) kilometres around? Why were guys waking me up each time I rolled, in my sleep, toward the edge on the roof of the train in Sudan? Why did my aunt spend hundreds of hours with me when I was a little boy – why did she play with me, take me on the long walks around the meadows and forests? Why did my dear friend from Belgrade, after reading about my accident, immediately call me and offered to sit in his car and drive over (a six-hour drive) to take care of me?

OK, folks, right now I am so overwhelmed with all these memories of being looked after in my life, by friends, family as well as by the total strangers, that I am sure this in not my story only. I believe this relates to all of us. I dare to say we are being taken care of and looked after all of the time, by people around us, through tiny little things. And sometimes through very big deeds. It must be Ubuntu alive somewhere within us. It must be that love is all around…

But I guess we just prefer to look the other way. It seems we prefer to look for and focus on the bad stuff. Rather than appreciate the good stuff and build on that. Perhaps we just like to be victims, perhaps we find this survivalistic discourse so darn entertaining. Or perhaps we were just never taught differently by our families, teachers, cultures…

Well, I will definitely, from now on, do my best to appreciate and cherish the good, the love, the attention and the appreciation. I will try to see it and enjoy it fully, with gratitude.

It would be such a waste to look the other way, wouldn’t it?