Egypt’s Street Children, Aya Hijazi, and Me

The case of Aya Hijazi has caught the attention of Americans who are well outside the typical audience for Egypt news. As most readers of this blog probably know, Aya is an Egyptian-American who has been imprisoned in Egypt for over 900 days on charges stemming from an organization she and her husband, Mohammed Hassanein, founded to serve Egypt’s street children. The trial was delayed for another month today, with Aya and Mohammed facing charges of child abuse, trafficking, kidnapping, and others. Aya’s case has struck a chord because — aside from the absurdity of the charges and court proceedings — she is so eminently relatable to a wide swathe of the American public. She was raised in the United States, graduated from George Mason University, and moved abroad to serve underprivileged children.

If I’m being honest, Aya’s connection to Mason is what first caught my eye. I’m a proud Mason alum, and though I didn’t know Aya, we graduated just a year apart and have several mutual friends. Also, like Aya, I moved to Egypt after graduating.

Though I went to study Arabic (and eventually got a job as a translator), the fact of children sleeping outdoors, unaccompanied, tugged at my heart. Outside the public sports center where my wife and I played tennis and where friends from church and I would play basketball, I would frequently see groups of children huddling for warmth under a single blanket — sometimes asking for money, sometimes just sleeping.

(I should pause to note that Egypt is far from alone in having problems with urban poverty. Child poverty is perhaps masked better in the West, but on a typical day in Washington I see more homeless people than I did each day in Cairo. With that said, the issue of children living unaccompanied on the street has been a long-running issue in Egypt, with activists accusing the government of understating the problem and failing to address it properly.)

As the months went by, my wife and I decided to take a more proactive approach to engaging with the children we saw on a regular basis. We were familiar with the tensions of aiding poor people with ad hoc handouts, but felt that while we were not well-placed to start an organization to address the structural issues facing these children, we were positioned to address some of their most pressing needs. We ate with them several times at the restaurant near the sports center, and through awkward conversations over fuul and falafel, with my stilted fusha, my wife’s broken ‘aamiyya, and a fair amount of gestures, the boys told us that food was always welcome but clothes and blankets were really needed.

My wife and I asked our friends with children if they had old clothes they were willing to part with, and gathered a few blankets. We headed to the neighborhood by the sports club one night with the supplies, found our friends, and started distributing the clothes and blankets, laughing and talking.

And then someone asked us what we were doing.

Just a random passerby. He was older than we were at the time, maybe 30 or 35 to our 25. He drove a nice car, which he had pulled to the side of the road before hopping out to figure out what was going on, and spoke good English. We told him exactly what we were doing: These children needed food, clothing, and blankets, and we were giving it to them. “But who are you with? Who is giving you the money? How did you meet these children?” Each question was snapped off more harshly than the last, until he pulled out his phone. When we asked who he was calling, he said he was calling “security, the police.” But why? we asked. “Because I am jealous for my country,” he said repeatedly.

A crowd started to gather, mostly vendors from nearby stands and shops, some of whom recognized us and were actively defending us. The kids we had given clothes to slipped away. My Arabic wasn’t good enough to catch all the conversations happening simultaneously, but I knew that when our interrogator mentioned amn al-dawla it was time to go. My wife and I extricated ourselves from the crowd, hailed a taxi, and went home.

* * * * *

All of it turned into nothing, really. My wife and I got home safely, we saw all the kids in their usual spots the next time we played tennis, and we even still ate together occasionally. But my wife and I were cowed. Our efforts to meet even the smallest of needs had been quashed. We had our niches in Cairo — studying, teaching, translating — and we had been pushed back into them. There were lessons in our story about xenophobia and about poverty reduction and alleviation, but to be honest I mostly just forgot that it happened and went back to my everyday life.

Aya does not have that luxury. By dreaming bigger, she and Mohammed raised more awareness and more hackles. I hope and pray that this dream which is now a nightmare ends soon.