Simplicity
Lynda Service
I was in Egypt. I am a student working towards my degree specializing in Egyptian archaeology, and I had the opportunity to be part of a team working at a small site in the Egyptian Delta called Tell el-Mashala.
It took two days to get to Egypt and I was exhausted when we finally got there. When I got to the site it was nothing like I had expected: my idea of the village was a paradise compared to what I saw when we arrived, but the initial shock eventually wore off and I started to have a good time. The locals were extremely friendly and always curious as to what we had found each day. The simplicity was wonderful, but there were things that I had problems dealing with, namely the treatment of animals, and people with any type of disability. Being a village of maybe 150 people, the amount of people who had some type of mental or physical disability was absolutely staggering, and they were treated as if they were worthless, even by their families.
Everyday after we finished work we would sit on our small porch and talk to the local children. Being foreigners, we had been elevated to a status that was almost celebrity, and because of this we had to be extremely careful of the way that we acted and in the things that we said: we became aware of the fact that anything we said was taken as a truth.
Across the small dirt road separating our house from others, there was a girl that always sat on a brick wall beside her house. We always waved to her but she never waved back, smiled, or even seemed to notice us. The local teenage boys always laughed when they saw her, and we were always curious as to why they did this but we never asked anyone the reason.
About a week later, and we were on-site having a break: this was typically when the kids would start to hang around wanting to know, but too afraid to ask directly what we had found so they would tell us jokes and stories. On this particular day the only kids around were relatives of our local workers, and this is when we found out the reason why the local boys laughed at our neighbor.
A cousin of one of the locals working with us, a shy little girl named Saida who was around 8 years old, had come to bring us some food, and wanting her to feel comfortable we started to ask her questions about what she wanted to be when she grew up. With our broken Arabic, and her little bit of English, it took a while to understand what she was saying: she wanted to be a teacher because she liked school. We all thought that was a great idea and said so, but then she told us that she was never going to be a teacher because her sister, our neighbor, was "crazy" and her parents had told her that when she grew up she was going to be crazy too. Needless to say we had no idea what she was talking about, but after asking some of our workers we found out that Saida's sister was prone to having grand mal seizures, and having no real understanding of what caused the seizures she was thought to be crazy.
None of the locals knew that I had epilepsy, and when I tried to explain they didn't believe me because I wasn't "crazy." They knew that I took pills everyday but they didn't understand how taking a pill could stop me from being crazy. So, after being told on multiple occasions that I was wrong and was not the same as our neighbor, I finally stopped trying to explain. We hardly ever saw Saida because when we weren't on the field trying frantically to finish what we were doing, we were in the lab drawing artifacts and analyzing pottery. We did see her now and then, and sometimes she would give a shy wave but she never came over to talk.
Near the end of July we started to wrap up our field research: we were leaving Mashala at the end of the month. Two days before we were scheduled to leave, we had our last day on site, and all of our workers and some of their family came to our end-of-season party. Saida came with Abdul Hamid, our worker, and started to show my team the "right" way to dance but I wasn't included, and in fact, she was barely talking to me at all. I asked Abdul Hamid why, and he said that she was afraid that because her sister was crazy, and that because I had said I was like her sister, she would go crazy much earlier than when her parents told her it would happen. A little stunned and somewhat hurt that she didn't want to be around me, I told Abdul Hamid to ask her to come and talk to me. I could see she was apprehensive but she did what she was told. I didn't really know what to say, so I asked her if she could show me how to dance. She said she didn't want to because if I started to dance I would get hurt because that's what happened to her sister. I assured her I would be okay, and she eventually agreed. After I clumsily imitated what she had shown me, she asked me if I was really crazy. I told her no, but that I was different from other people because I had to take pills everyday because I had epilepsy. She said she understood this because she had heard of epilepsy before she admitted she didn't know what it was. I wasn't sure how to explain it to her, so I simply told her that different people get epilepsy in different ways, but that she would not get it by being around her sister. I also told her that it was not something that stopped people from doing things because there are medications to help. After saying this and speaking a little bit more, she asked me if that meant that she could be a teacher when she grew up. I told her yes. She still seemed skeptical but she also seemed happier. I told her that there was no reason that she couldn't be a teacher or anything else that she wanted to be, and that if I could do it, she could too.
The morning we left Mashala, Abdul Hamid brought Saida over to our house and told me she wanted to give me a present. I smiled at Saida and she handed me a page from her English notebook with the word "teacher" written on every line. All I could do was smile, give her a hug, and choke back tears. She smiled back and wished me "ma'salamah."
When I got home I put the page in one of my photo albums so that I wouldn't lose it. I have a lot of good memories from Mashala, but I can honestly say that the best memory I have from that trip is the goodbye I received from a little girl.
I know that there are probably many ways in which I could increase epilepsy education in my community and while this is very important, I believe that giving a little girl something to smile about is just as important. We have the doctors, the technology, the medications, and the resources to educate ourselves. And although there are many people still misinformed about epilepsy in western societies, I believe that I have helped in a much more significant way: I have given a little girl knowledge that she otherwise wouldn't have had regarding an issue that is incredibly misunderstood in her community.
I have never really thought of myself as a person with a disability because epilepsy does not hinder me in any way, and all I wanted to do was ease the mind of a little girl, but by doing this I not only educated her, I educated myself. I now realize just how lucky I am to have these resources available and because of this I now know that I have a responsibility to educate myself with regards to epilepsy so that I can pass on the knowledge that I have gained. To me that's the best way to increase epilepsy education.
Lynda Service was one of the winners of the 2nd Annual Epilepsy Scholarship Awards.
