Seeing Bahira

Bahira got her high school diploma this summer. Over her long, black Bedouin robe, she wore a shorter robe, in the forest green color of Memorial High School here in Madison, Wisconsin. Along the elasticized band of her matching mortarboard was glued a tricolor ribbon in the colors of Egypt. Her happiness, with the gap-toothed smile that seemed fairly common among the local Bedouin, was every bit as wide and shining as the other three girls who graduated alongside her from a little school along the sandy shores of the beautiful Red Sea.

The four friends, who had been schooled together for years by a succession of teachers from Egypt and abroad, were the first to earn their diplomas, to complete their high school equivalencies. When I landed in Cairo for my visit this summer, they were all in the city taking some of the tests that would verify their learning and serve as the basis for at least three of them to continue on to college.

But probably not the demurely radiant Bahira. At the time I had to reluctantly leave Egypt, it was not looking likely that this sparkling intelligence would be cultivated further. While the other three girls went off to universities in Cairo and Germany, Bahira was, most probably, going home to her family, to her tribe, to get married, to tend the goats, to make a little money for the family perhaps, by making and selling rugs or jewelry in the desert towns and seaside resorts.

Most Bedouin girls still leave formal schooling at the age of twelve. This is when they start covering themselves, too, and are no longer allowed to associate freely with boys outside their immediate family. Younger brothers are allowed to order them about. When I met Bahira on the bus back to South Sinai from Cairo, her younger brother was along to make sure she was protected. From Cairo’s urban violence, you wonder, from the sexual predators looking for the innocence of a girl fresh from the country? Well, that’s one way of looking at it, if you think that the casual sighting of a young woman whose eyes and the bridge of her nose are the only parts of her person showing is somehow might somehow be construed as male predation, sexual violation, danger. My son, an economist, also visited Egypt this monumental year. He went to visit his sister, who was one of Bahira’s teachers. My daughter wanted him to present a talk to the older girls on the subject of economics, to help prepare them for their comprehensive exams. He was not allowed. He would have seen Bahira.

Bahira, I gathered, was allowed to complete her high school diploma for one reason: Her father wanted it, and before he died commanded the rest of the family to respect his wish that she finish school. It did not seem like the remaining men of her family shared this vision for her, and at the point I had to leave the desert, the conversations between her (male) teachers and her (male) relatives regarding her ability to go to college were not getting any closer to Cairo than the Taba/Nuweiba roadway stretching along the Red Sea shore.

Change does not always come overnight, and if it does come overnight, if the tyrant is deposed and flees to a distant enclave, change has not necessarily been wrought in anything other than a superficial if satisfying moment. Change comes like evolution more than revolution, by tiny increments that eventually change the whole world. My heart aches thinking of Bahira married off to someone she may not even meet before the marriage is completed. My heart grows heavy realizing that Bahira may never leave the desert, never fall in love, never walk in the shade of a dense forest, throw stones into a cold mountain lake, read Yeats, play a piano or hear YoYo Ma.

And then I read what she writes on her Facebook page, “If I cannot go to college then I will be happy to teach the children here,” and I know I have underestimated Bahira, that I have applied my own Western standards of freedom and happiness to a non-Western environment, and that change is coming, as it can, and both Bahira and I have our own small and essential roles in it.