Tales from up the Nile

I spent the last few days traveling up the Nile to monasteries and towns near Assyut, El-Minya, and Samaloot.  Instead of writing the play-by-play, which would pretty well resemble my previous post (not much sleeping, lots of prayers, bad fool) I'll instead share a few sights I saw and people I met.

Brother Too Tall
After a tumultuous and freezing entrance (which I'll mention later) at the monastery of Our Lady of the Mountain at Dirunka outside Assyut, the monks were quite welcoming to me, as if, having passed the test of entrance (despite being neither Egyptian nor a Copt), I was now a part of the family.  After chatting with a monk that looked like Arab George Harrison for a long time, he suggested I talk with Br. Hedra AKA Brother Too Tall, because he used to live in America and could give me a different perspective.  I'm usually wary of when an English speaker is presented to me, because they almost always present a very different and rarely accurate portrait of the true state of affairs.  Nevertheless, I sat down for tea (YAY SUGAR) with him.

Now in his 30s, Brother Too Tall had chased the American dream with a passion for much of his life.  He immigrated to the U.S. when he was 16, settling in Reston, VA.  He got misty-eyed with nostalgia talking about the public library there and a quintissentially American Pleasantville existence.  After studying programming in college he got the job he wanted and was settling down.  "I thought I would never leave the U.S. again.  Everything I had ever wanted was there."  After a decade in the states, he felt the call to come home to Egypt and become a monk.  I asked him why he came back, what made him decide to change his life so radically.  "I just knew."

After a few more cups full of glorious sweet tea, I asked him how long he'd been in the monastery.  "Well," he started, "I became a monk in 2003.  And it's....What year is it now?"

The Girl with the Green Eyes
En route from Deir Mukharraq to Gebel at-Teir near Samaloot, I had to go from the town center, cross the Nile, and then hitch to the monastery on the mountain.  I walked through the busy market center of Samaloot, a run-down Nile valley town that time seemed to have forgotten.  More goods were transported by donkey cart than by truck.  As I walked through the busy vegetable market, where old women sat amidst piles of their produce, I saw a woman ahead.  She wore a yellow-starred black hijab, but curiously, a big cross hung down on her chest.  Apparently, Copts in Upper Egypt often wear the hijab.  With her flowing dress and green eyes, she seemed like she was plucked from medieval France.

Realizing that I was staring, I walked on, making my way to the pick-up truck that would take me to the river crossing.  As I waited in the back of the truck, sure enough, the green-eyed Coptic woman, along with her sister and her mother got in two.  Many of Samaloot's Copts live across the river, near the monastery.  They were going home with their vegetables.  The green-eyed one's mother had a permanent frown and the kind of wrinkled face that appears in National Geographic.  They each had small purple crosses tattooed on their wrists, and they joked loudly with the rotund Muslim woman who was riding with us.

As the small boat docked on the other side of the river, she came over to me.  Had she noticed me looking at her?  Finally, she said, "Excuse me, I need my vegetables."  Oh, I was in her way.  Right.

The Catholic
The Council of Chalcedon that began the schism between the Coptic Church and Western Christianity remains fresh in Copts' minds.  As I mentioned in my earlier post, they're not too fond of Catholics, and make many thinly-veiled references questioning whether Catholics are even Christians at all.  Since I can't very well claim to be Orthodox or Coptic, I have to go the honest-but-still-quite-dishonest route to say that yes, I am a Catholic.  Even still, this usually doesn't go very well.

At the monastery of Dirunka, where I arrived at 5:45am after an overnight train ride, I sat shivering at the gate for two hours of questioning.  It was really cold that morning.  After explaining that I'm Catholic, Brother George Harrison asked, 
"Are you Coptic?"
"No."
"Are you Egyptian?"
"No."

He was puzzled and quite skeptical.  "I'm sorry, we don't have room for you here."  This was a lie.  They had lots of rooms.

With my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, I then asked, "Perhaps, is there room in your manger?" (So I don't know the word in Arabic for manger, but I said stable, and I think it got my point across)

After advancing from the gate to the entrance to the main complex, I went to the visitors office, where I had to register as a guest.  After repeating my name a dozen times, I looked down to see that I had been put in their guest book as "Edward Yohanna al-Katholiki."  They had made up a middle name, and given me "The Catholic" as a surname.  Nice.

The Coptic Soft Pretzel and Nuns with Orange Soda
After mass, Copts gather outside the church, chatting with the various priests and brothers, munching on the communion bread.  Though I didn't take communion, I didn't feel any such prohibition for the after-church bread.  It was like a giant soft pretzel.  Score one for Eastern Christianity. Though you can make the theological argument that the eucharist should be unleavened since Jesus was celebrating passover at the last supper, you never win arguments with a soft pretzel is on the other side.  Delicious soft pretzel.

The picture I didn't take this weekend was also at Dirunka, and also involved food.  After the day-time visitors had left and their work was finished, the nuns were gathered in the little square by the commissary, chatting, laughing, and downing bottles of Mirinda.  It made me really happy.