WestMeetsEast

It’s strange how the slightest bit of Americana — the kind I used to avoid back home — can be comforting in a place so far from home. Davin and I spent Friday afternoon (the equivalent of a Saturday in the states) at the Maadi House. It is basically a country club. Its membership base is strictly American military and any US government entity members and their families. We got in as guests of our real estate agent whose husband works for the US.

It was like reverse culture shock. We ate $3 burgers. We watched American cartoons in the TV room. We listened to very Southern-sounding moms scream at their kids to stop fighting with each other. We saw a young military couple lounging by the pool – he was reading Tom Clancy and she was reading People magazine. We watched kids jump up and down in one of those blow-up floaty funhouses that you see at big backyard parties in America.

The ex-pat community here has certainly built quite an empire for itself. They have their clubs and work hard to have nice homes and apartments but only inside – attempting to fix the streets outside their homes or coordinate trash pick-up in the neighborhood is unheard of. They are only passing through so why fix anything permanently?

This next part will most likely not shock any of you, but it is nonetheless appalling in my opinion. Over the past month I have had the opportunity to see firsthand yours and my tax dollars at work. Egypt is the second-largest recipient of USAID behind Israel. This money is peacekeeping money — in other words, the mission is to sink money into the Egyptian economy to build up business, environmental awareness, health, education and more. At the country club, we ran into a thirtysomething woman I had interviewed previously for a story on a USAID program that trains high-level managers. She was with another USAID worker and we hung out with them for the remainder of the day and into the night. These two single women — grads of Georgetown and Bennington — were full of talk of Egypt … Egypt’s men, Egypt’s bars, Egypt’s resorts. Yes, they both have actual jobs here but from what they say they only work about three or four days a week, they take numerous vacations and spend gobs of money. These gals make more than they made back home (probably somewhere in the $40,000-$50,000 range). They get 15% of that salary as a “hardship stipend” because they’re in the Middle East; they get up to $5,000 to ship their belongings from the states (even though all apartments in Cairo come furnished); they get a $1,500 monthly housing allowance and God knows what else.

First of all, before we moved here we found a website that translates your salary and bills, etc., from one international city to another. From our calculations, a salary in the range of $60,000-$70,000 a year translates to about $6,000-$8,000 here. Our apartment is about 1,300 square feet (huge) and costs about $380 a month, which is on the high end of the scale. And hardship?? Please.

These girls each have a three-bedroom apartment – much nicer than anything they can afford back in the states. Since the landlords know they work for the US government, their apartments cost $1,500 a month even though fair market price should be about $500 a month. They spend their weekends diving in the Red Sea and having romances with young Egyptians. (To use her own words, one said “How else as a 40-year-old divorcee am I going to date a gorgeous 25-year-old? This would never happen in the states…) Oh, and she made sure to tell us that she had deflowered him since of course he is Muslim and supposed to remain a virgin until marriage. The third USAID worker I met chooses to spend his gobs of dough on the illegal drugs he gets on romps to the coast.

And we wonder why people of the world think of Americans as spoiled and arrogant…when most Americans they meet are these government workers who basically treat these jobs as a spring break …partying and spending lavishly. And when they refer to their work they pretty talk only of how impossible it is to get anything accomplished with a government as backwards as Egypt’s so they are just putting in their hours and not accomplishing much. I must say however, that the one good thing that comes out of this system of sending singles into countries where they are treated like gods is that at least they are pouring money into the economy here and helping the country’s bottom line. And just think, the US has thousands of programs like these in numerous countries all conversely doing harm and doing good.