Conference... commentary on relationships begins

Secondly, new people: I met probably over ½ the people at the conference. Which is a lot, when you’re working with either brand new names (like Fady, or Methat etc), or common names (only among Christians), like 3 Peter’s and 3 Michael’s etc. Meeting new people, making friends here is different than back home. One of the guys in my group described it like this, putting explicit awareness and words to the experience: “When I first met you, and we shook hands, it was different than when you shake hands with an Egyptian. I felt as though you were looking for something else, something more. [I felt there was a bit of a negative connotation in his voice here, though it wasn’t harsh]. To you, we weren’t friends yet. In Egypt, all that is required to start a relationship is a handshake. In Canada [and elsewhere, obviously], it seems that takes more than just a handshake, something else has to happen; people have to do other things before there is a relationship.”

I felt this was an extremely interesting and important (and, to my experience, true) observation/description on his part. It really made me think about friendliness, openness, warmth, and relationships. So many people wanted to visit with me, in Arabic and English. Most people’s English is a bit better than my Arabic, but everyone is patient on both sides. I felt bad because I met so many people, and in a lot of cases, I felt like I was meant more to them than they did to me. In my case, I probably came out of the conference with maybe 12-15 people who I consider to have been important in a give/take type of relationship (which, in my opinion is a substantial number). However, I feel that more people than this were interested in a relationship with me. Even at the end as were getting ready, people wanted to exchange email addresses and phone numbers with me, and I couldn’t remember their names until they wrote them on the paper with their number. And similarly, I got a hug and kisses, words of affection (I love you so much) and praise (you are so nice, so very kind) from a guy whose name I didn’t (and to this point, don’t, remember.

So read my correctly on this. I’m not trying to puff myself up (everyone loved me) and I’m not trying to put others down (they weren’t worthy of my attention to remember their names). Obviously for all the mentioned reasons, I wasn’t going to know and remember everyone. And one new guy with a well known name is not hard to forget. But the openness, the “invitational-ness” the warmth, and the absence of any requirements or conditions on relationship was quite remarkable, and honorable.

For any of you who know Millwoods Pentecostal Assembly, and their Sunday evening young adults ministry, you’ll recognize that what I’ve just described is one of their essential goals, and one of the key points of former pastor C.S. Weirsma (I’m assuming it will continue to be a focus, but I haven’t seen much of their new look since C.S. left). To be honest, it’s a neat congruence, because it’s basically exactly the way he put it. If you’re interested in them, you can hit up www.the-project.ca for more info.

But I digress. So it was good on a relationship level. It should be noted that this friendliness is to a very large degree an Egyptian trait, and not limited to the evangelical Christians, though I expect it was slightly increased given the specific group and the setting. But at a place where there would be significant discordance between evangelical Christians and Egyptian culture in general would be at the point where you introduce the opposite gender into the equation.

Before I do that, though, I should just mention that lots of people want to improve their English, and of course I want to learn Arabic. Every now and again, someone would offer that we meet regularly for 2 hours and devote an hour to each language.