Settling in the United States as Egyptians was hard due to the cultural difference. There are various backgrounds from music to socializing to various inherited family values that are hard to maintain with the influence and pressure that the American society gives. Egyptians naturally have a nationalistic mentality with the cultural pride that makes it hard for us to forget and we tend to push it into our lives regardless of where we live.

            First are the family values with traditions that we have. For my interview, I have interviewed my older brother who just started a family when we came into the country. In Egypt, as well as most of the Middle Eastern countries, dating was prohibited as most parents are tasked with finding a suitable marriage partner for their children. Since most Middle Eastern countries are the same, it was easy when we moved to Kuwait from Egypt because the society adopted the same view. In the United States, my older brother and I struggled to keep those values instilled especially that his children are slowly maturing to where they need justification for the decisions that we make. The girls (he has two girls and a boy) have a hard time understanding the concept since they were both born here in the United States. It is a comparison at all times of “how come my friends can have boyfriends and we can’t?” or “How come they can… and we can’t?” United States society allows them to adopt the notion that they are allowed to do anything that they want but in reality, how much of an informed or mature decision can a teenager make? How can they learn if the society encourages them to go on their own without our advice and guidance?

            The second issue is misplacement. In Egypt, there are different social activities that one conducts in than the United States. As a teenager, I watched my older brother go out with his friends all the time after college classes to go to a café or a lounge where they would socialize with other friends, eat, or smoke hookah while hanging out with their friends to tell stories, argue, and grow their friendship bond together to maintain lifelong friends. In the United States, college experience is a lot different because socializing almost always involved drinking which is prohibited and frowned upon in Egypt. The college students always go out drinking, partying, or even hunting for an estranged individual to have relations with for the night. The more you went out to drink, the more you socialized and the more you had American friends that tend to have you adopt their lifestyle and forget the Egyptian lifestyle that you know.

            In the United States, settling was hard due to the fact that we could not fit. We did not want to adopt the American culture because we wanted to instill the morals and values that we were taught onto our children. Going back to Egypt was tough because the society has changed. When we settled outside of Egypt, Egypt progressed as a society and a lot has changed so when years go by and we go back, we feel like foreigners because we are not used to the changes that occurred, we find ourselves being misplaced in society of both countries so we are left behind rather than being in the loop hole.

            Overall we find ourselves creating our own group to feel the sense of belonging. We moved to New Jersey since it has a huge Egyptian community of which we learned to interact with each other to help each other out. My older brother became friends with mostly Egyptians that live in the area through the local mosque. That way when the children are interacting with each other, they tend to share similar ideas and adopt the mental thought process that we have been trying to teach them. The friends that we make allow us to create social activities that we feel the sense of belonging to rather than adopting the American way that we feel invalid. For example, we kite surf with other Egyptians to give us the activity during the summer and plan trips to Costa Rica or Dominican Republic with a group of other Egyptians in order for us to kit surf there as a vocational trip. In the winter we can meet with each other at an Egyptian restaurant in Jersey City where we can share ideas with one another, socialize, and hang out while smoking hookah just like we did back in Egypt, just an adopted version of it. Establishing a Egyptian Community in Jersey was important to give us the sense of belonging by interacting with other Egyptians that just like us, settled in the United States.

 The interview seen below is of me, Abdul Alnashawati interviewing my older brother in regards to misplacement in a social class as an Egyptian who settled in the United States. For any additional information, please feel free to contact me at 703/944-0113 or at alnashawati@gmail.com