Why Can’t We be Friends - Atif Mahmood

Last Wednesday, I took three of my students – Asli, Mona and Abdullah – to watch the sixth Harry Potter movie. Having fun was part of my agenda, of course. But I actually really wanted to observe firsthand how Abdullah, who’s Sudanese, would interact with Mona and Asli, both Somali, outside of the domains of the classroom.

The movie itself was terrific. All of us kept laughing hard during the first half of the movie, and were on the edge of our seats during the other half. I asked Asli whether she and Mona understood what the characters were saying (British accents are bound to sound different from the American ones we’re bombarding them with in class). She nodded and replied that they were reading the Arabic subtitles. That surprised me a bit, since I realized that the two Somali girls sitting beside me were laughing and gasping at all the right moments. I thought that they knew too little Arabic to be able to read the subtitles quickly enough. I guess I was proven wrong. Abdullah, on the other hand, I knew was as comfortable with Arabic as Harry with his phoenix-feather wand. He thoroughly enjoyed the movie, as expected.

Later on, on the taxi ride back home, I asked Asli about the relationship between Somali refugees and Sudanese refugees living in Cairo. She told me, in broken English, that there have been fights between Sudanese and Somalis. She began a story, much of which I think was lost in translation, of how a Somali she knew had her arm broken on the hands of some Sudanese refugees. She also mentioned that the Sudanese are larger in number in Cairo and have better access to resources such as the NGOs at work here. I then asked her whether or not she was friends with Abdullah. Both Mona and Asli laughed, and said that Abdullah’s all right. He’s their classmate. But “what will happen once class ends?” The girls did not know of any Somali befriending a Sudanese. Were it not for my position as a teacher, Abdullah would never have mingled with Mona and Asli outside of St. Andrews.

In overpopulated Cairo, refugees are competing for meager resources not only against Egyptians, but among themselves as well. In the words of Grandmaster Flash “It's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder.”