As I’m one quarter of the way into my seventh year of living in Egypt, it’s no surprise to anyone that I love living my life here. Life in this country has opened my eyes to view both my life and life in general in a way I’d never done prior to living here. In my youth I imagined seven years to be a long time but now it seems no longer than the blink of an eye, and I often recall the saying that time flies when you are having fun. In our childhood we are supposed to have fun but children regularly complain that things take too much time. So as kids, is everything fun? I found childhood often difficult. The world of discovery into life is not easy. I find it as difficult as the exploration of an unchartered continent. The difference between historical exploration and childhood is that, even though similarly, spirits lead us in a certain direction, it is only the explorer who is 100% free to follow his or her intuition. In childhood our spirit speaks to us and so often we want go where our spirit leads us only to be told by some well-meaning authority figure that we can’t! Our spirit gets lost and when a person’s spirit is lost or trapped life becomes a challenge.

Slowly over time I came to accept that these souls who appeared to be suffering were placed here to teach the rest of us lessons of love, kindness and compassion.

In Egypt I have discovered my spirit. This does not mean that I don’t face challenges for I do, but this only occurs when I fight what my spirit knows to be the right course of action to take, or in other words, when I let my ego over-ride my spirit by thinking it logically knows best!

When I first arrived in Egypt, I found quite a few sights that frustrated me like the barefooted unkempt children, the underfed and mistreated animals, the beggars, the poor people scavenging food from the garbage, the dead animals floating in the canals and more. These are facts of life that are often glaringly open to public viewing here. I realise they happen in every country of the world in one form or another but here I really had to look at them and come to accept the horrors of life that have developed in an abundant world that supplies more than enough for everyone. Emotions of greed which have been brought about because of the belief of lack in life have helped create all of the above scenarios. One only has to look at the amount of waste in this world to know there is more than enough for everyone!

Slowly over time I came to accept that these souls who appeared to be suffering were placed here to teach the rest of us lessons of love, kindness and compassion. Acting in kindness and compassion does not mean we keep handing out dollars to these people for that will not solve the problem! My aim since living here has been to open doors of opportunity that alleviate ignorance in this world. When we give a small donation even if from the purest of hearts we only offer a band-aid solution to the problem we see before our eyes. What people need is a real solution. We can give a man a fish and it will temporarily relieve his hunger but if we teach a man how to fish he will never be hungry again! When I first began to look at life from a more detached spiritual aspect, an informed friend told me that I would appear cold to many people the deeper I stepped into the spiritual understandings of life. She was right, but in no way am I cold as I feel the pain of many of those I see around me and sometimes I still cry but tears and a few dollars will not help ease the pain.

Yesterday while travelling home I was so strongly reminded of this. It is autumn at present but the unseasonal summer heat continues by day. The young mother who boarded the bus before me was only around sixteen or seventeen years old. She obviously came from a very basic up-bringing with little or no education. Her baby I’m guessing by size to be around six months old but because of the level of nutrition for many such infants it may have been older.