My wife taught at Cairo American College (CAC) for four years while we lived there just after our marriage. The school is actually located some miles to the south of Cairo, in the once small and leafy suburb of Digla/Ma‘adi. The campus was open; I regularly used its (air-conditioned!) library to study. (I was a graduate student in Middle Eastern Studies at the American University in Cairo at the time.) For three of our four years, we lived directly across the street. When the school put in an Olympic-sized swimming pool right in front of our apartment, we were delighted and regular users of it.
During our visit to Egypt over the past Christmas holiday break, we spent some time again in Digla/Ma‘adi. (A former student of mine in Jerusalem, a favorite of our kids who is now an executive with a company there, is the Cairo branch president, and he and his family kindly had us over to dinner not just once but twice at their very nice place located not far from where we used to live.)
We went out for a stroll one evening, and wanted to visit the CAC campus for old time’s sake. But, alas, it’s now walled and heavily guarded, and even though we were accompanied by my former student, whose children are enrolled in the school, and even after appealing to the mercy of the guards on the grounds that my wife was formerly a member of the teaching staff there, we were unable to gain entrance through the substantial gate.
I understand this, of course. When we lived in Egypt, we felt safe roaming just about anywhere, at any time, but the Middle East has changed substantially since then — and, alas, not always for the better.
There are parts of Cairo where we loved to wander years ago that we would probably not visit today — including some of the most wonderful medieval streets and buildings — and I would certainly not take a tour group to visit them.
The same is true in Jerusalem. My most common way into the Old City of Jerusalem when I first lived there was via the Damascus Gate. I can’t begin to count the number of times that I passed through it. And, during visits in after years, we often entered the Old City that way. In November 2017, though, when I accompanied the governor of Utah and an official trade mission to Jerusalem, we were not allowed, because of security concerns, to take the governor through Damascus Gate. And I fully understand those concerns.
How I wish that these things weren’t so!
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