By Carol Bolden
What do you do when you see the planet you live on cracking down the middle from the disintegration of its people and the loss of peace?
If you’re Derek (34) and Alicia (26) White, you move to Egypt.
With a toddler in tow, the little family picked up and moved last July to Cairo, a massive city of 20 million inhabitants, in order to live the vision they believe God has for them, a vision that encompasses their relationship with their fellow man, their relationship with God, and their relationship with creation.
Leaving behind friends and family, including their church family at LifeSource Adventist Fellowship, they took with them their desire to create peaceful family relationships with people from all walks of life.
“In the past,” explains Alicia, “we tried to make peace in our city of Aurora, Colorado, a city unique because of its diversity with immigrants from around the world including South and Central America, Africa, and Asia.” The family lived in “an area of town with many refugees” so that they could “learn from their neighbors, share life, and seek peace together.”
With Alicia working as a nurse and Derek as a lawyer, they were able to build bridges between people by sharing many meals at their home along with community celebrations, a community garden, and community activism.
Moving to Egypt was the next step on their path toward peace. As rookies in a huge foreign city, they work to build bridges by asking for help. Since they’re just learning the language (Arabic), becoming acquainted with a new overwhelming city, and navigating a different culture, they have plenty of needs. Most often, people are happy to help and, in the process, they often make new friends.
As they develop new relationships on the road to deep community, they’ve taken lessons from their toddler son who is teaching them how to love strangers. “The openness with which he approaches anyone and everyone, fully expecting them to give him the love he deserves and with absolutely no fear of rejection, is beauty to behold,” says Derek.
“Isaiah melts away walls that might take us years to chip away. He is Egypt’s Number One Peacemaker. He will stare with a welcoming smile and intense eyes at the most city-hardened male until he becomes putty in Isaiah’s tiny hands. What we can’t do, he can.”
As a lawyer, Derek serves refugees in Egypt. After much prayer and thought, he has committed the majority of his time (and the family’s time) to migrants in Egypt. The stories of persecution that refugees and asylum-seekers share from their home countries are “raw and fresh” and the hopes that led them to Cairo inspire him.
Alicia volunteers twice a week for half a day using her nursing background to advocate for improved access to medical services for migrants and refugees. She also tutors young teenagers who came to Cairo without their families, and teaches and encourages teenage moms with young children resulting from rape.
It hasn’t all been easy. The “crowds, noise, trash, and pollution” of the city take their toll as did getting their three- month visas renewed at Tahrir Square, Cairo’s large city center that greets 100,000 visitors each day. Then there was the time they rode the metro, not recognizing that the female symbols on the metro platforms designate the females-only metro cars. They had a “very awkward ride” as they slowly realized that Derek was out of place in that particular car.
Not to mention their separation from family in the U.S.!
But there are also many joys—connecting with people at church, sharing meals and playing new games with friends, cultural and language exchanges with neighbors, and the adventure of exploring a new place.
Alicia’s brother, Alex, has joined the family in Cairo, bringing with him his programming expertise and love of Ultimate Frisbee. His contribution to peace includes “spreading awareness of Frisbee throughout Egypt” and “putting enough Frisbees into the hands of youth that the sport becomes as popular as soccer.”
Along with sharing Frisbee with the youth of Egypt, Alex volunteers his time helping an organization put in a new database management system, He arrived at the perfect time to help with its implementation and, of course, they are very happy to have him.
The friends Derek, Alicia, and Alex have made come from widely differing socioeconomic places. When they sit with friends in their comfortable, air-conditioned apartment enjoying ice-cream, they feel grateful for the generosity, yet “it sparks in us a desire to connect our different relationships that seem worlds apart,” explains Derek.
Yet through all the challenges of everyday living, Alicia and Derek remember that God called them to Cairo to learn, not just to do.
With all the media hype and the current world climate, “there is so much misunderstanding between people living in the Middle East and America as well as much misunderstanding about refugees,” explains Alicia. The result is separation, hatred, fear, and conflict.
“By living among people considered to be dangerous, we hope that we can humanize these people and encourage our American family to see them as family. And we hope we can to show our growing family here in Egypt that Americans may not be what they hear in the news.”
“We earnestly hope and pray for the day when there will be no more need to say, ‘No, I can’t help you,’ when refugees won’t be forced to bear the indignity of standing in long, hot, sweaty lines at place after place, desperate for someone to help them with their impossibly huge problems, when parents won’t send their kids on the terrifying journey with smugglers to save them from the worse fate of being abducted by local terrorist groups, when young girls won’t be raped because there is no one there to protect them,” says Derek with passion.
Maybe this cannot happen, Derek continues, until the poor and the outcast, the refugees and other groups are brought together, when they are finally seen as what they are—family.
Carol Bolden provides administrative support for the RMC communication department.