I am tutoring a man named el-Amin in English; he is a blind Sudanese refugee, aged 43.

He was born in a city near Khartoum; worked as a sailor for four years from 1981 to 1985. He spent time in Germany, Kuwait, India, and where else I can only imagine.

He asks me if I'm married; I say no. Then, many lessons later, he asks if I have a girlfriend; I again tell him I don't. Then a week or two later, it occurs to me to ask him if he might have a girlfriend.

He had a girlfriend, in Sudan he said. Why didn't you get married, I ask him. After I went blind, he says: no job, no money, problems with the government. I do my best to express sympathy in Arabic, but I know neither of us feel embarrassed about the niceties of such things. el-Amin seems to have been born of smiles and indefatigable good humor.

He learns how to pronounce the "th" sound correctly in English. I tell him in rudimentary Arabic to put the tip of his tongue between his open teeth. Then we move on to using the sound in words; "thank you" instead of "sank you"; "think" and "the" come around fairly easily; "this" and "teeth" are works in progress.

He went blind in 1985. I still don't quite understand how. He points to the back of his head while explaining. It must have something to do with a disease or disorder or accident.

The problems with the Sudanese government began after he went blind. He joined the Union for the Blind. The government wanted all unions to be run by the government and his was independent. They accused him of being a communist; he fled the country.

We practice three autobiographical sentences; the narrative of his life in recent years, hyper-abridged. I am from Sudan. I came to Egypt in two thousand and three. I am a refugee with the UN.

He tells me, he once was in Bombay for three months, and had a girlfriend; she was from New Dehli. Very beautiful, he says. So beautiful.

The days you were a sailor, were they nice, I ask him?

Yes, so nice. The sweetest days of my life, he says with not a drop of sentimentality or regret.




I don't have anything insightful to say here. Rather I am in awe of the things a single life can bear witness to, and bear testimony to, far far more than extrapolation or explication could ever render.

latent in every child is a two-fold promise: one the world makes to the child, a promise of that brighter tomorrow which is his/her due in life; the second the child makes to the world, the promise of that brighter tomorrow which is made possible through his/her yet untried potential.


--random thought after smiling at a toddler on the streets of Cairo by Midan Saad Zaghloul

the tatters and scraps of who we are never become more precious than when under threat of annihilation

--random thought while watching Palestinian Dabka at International Day, AUC

... is wonderment, an ecstatic pain in the heart, a tugging at the soul, a memory you have yet to experience smiling up at you in the present, a laugh and a twinkle, faith and fate and a suspension of disbelief, incontrovertible, inexplicable, undefinable, a haunting dream, a (fill in the blank), a reason to get up every morning, a magnetic pull from deep in flesh, blood, and bone that tells me I am no longer my own.



Love...