Breaking Fast and Breaking Barriers
A photo of my friends and I .
PGS: Cairo as Palimpsest
Hans, one of the Penn Global Seminar Correspondents, shares his experience abroad during the Spring 2025 PGS. Follow along with the group of correspondents on our blog and look out for their images on the @pennabroad Instagram feed.
When I look back on my experience in Cairo I think the thing I was most taken aback by would be the feeling of togetherness that I was able to experience during Ramadan. I was so taken aback by just how charitable people were. I watched women in mosques setting up food and water for iftar (the time of day when fast is broken). I watched a man setting up a table with drinks an hour before iftar outside a shoe shop. Finally I have an image from our bus ride on the first day imprinted on my mind, when I saw people on the side of the road scrambling to get juice to people driving by. I watched in the middle of a busy highway, these people who had set up a station quickly pour this purple juice into cups and run out to cars stopping and repeating the process. Seeing such urgency solely in the name of charity was truly an incredible thing to witness. It was honestly hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that no money was involved when I first saw it. Looking back at the trip I think I did a lot right. I took so many photos, and because I was engaged with our tour guide Amani, I was able to learn so much about the history of Cairo. However, with this said, I believe what I learned did take place in a bubble and I think I could have worked on talking to locals more, or at least having some of my friends who speak better arabic than I do ask questions about things I was curious about. For my seminar I’m writing about refugees in Cairo and the general attitude towards them as well as the impact of migration on other parts of Cairo. Although I discussed this with our tour guide, I think I should have tried to talk with locals to get an even better point of view, and to improve my white paper even more. My advice towards future Penn Global Seminar students would be to go out of your comfort zone. Yes, it’s hard and something I struggle with as well, but one thing I am really proud of was even when I was unsure about going out at night to explore markets in Cairo, I am so happy I did. My only regret is not pushing myself out of my comfort zone even further when it came to talking with people other than our tour guide.
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