Follow Up: Hosting Guests

Okay, so I had a question and no on responded. LOL I took a wild guess based on my past experience and the information I had about the family.

1. 2 children under 7

2. conservative

3. only eats halal food

4. mom wears niqab

Here’s what we did. Because my bedroom has a bathroom en-suite, I decided that it would probably be most comfortable for the family to stay there. It has a full bathroom, bed, TV and space for a mattress for the children with room to walk around. I wasn’t completely thrilled to have someone in my room, in our room, but I wanted to be the best hostess I could for this family.  On Friday and Saturday, I went about and stashed as many of the not-under-7 toys that I could find, and I made the house guest ready. I cleared out almost all of our personal things out of the bathroom and bedroom and left fresh towels, hotel shampoo and soap in the shower.

I was away from the house for the better part of Saturday with Mr. Fox, but when I got home, Khaled had done the grocery shopping and was well on his way into cooking dinner for when the guests arrived.

Things in our home are more casual than you might find in a traditional ‘Egyptian’ or ‘Muslim’ home. We don’t keep the men and women segregated.  Wherever the guest children go, I expect their parents to follow and police them.  Everyone is welcome in the kitchen and if we have prepared Egyptian style food, Khaled was the lead cook in the show and he is in charge of dinner.  We tried to convey all of these things to our guests within the first few hours of their arrival, but cultural boundaries I didn’t know about were in play here.

On Sunday, we took everyone out to our favorite orchards and picked veggies and fruit. We pet the animals and had a great time. I was thrilled that in each place we went, no one batted an eye when they saw our niqabi guest.  I was anxious.  I was hoping that everything would go well, but you never know if you will run into some Islamaphobia somewhere….I’m relieved and pleased with the weekend.

Overall, I would say that our guests had a great time. They were comfortable and the sleeping arrangement worked for them.