The Luxury of a Hot Bath

After three days of sweating through visits to the towns and villages of Upper Egypt with a Coptic charity and spending two nights in some of the dirtiest hotels I have ever seen, one of the first things I wanted to do when I got home was have a hot bubble bath. Once I did, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about this woman, who has probably never had the luxury of soaking in a bath in her life and probably never will. Along with her daughters, she shared her crumbling home with a small buffalo, a cow and countless roosters, hens and ducks. The stench of urine was overwhelming. She answered our questions about her finances, her daughters’ educations and much else stoically but tersely. She clearly would have preferred we hadn’t been there intruding into the details of her life, but as the charity was going to build her a new home, she suffered resolutely though our inquiries. She is getting a new house, but there is so, so much more that she and everyone in her village and countless others just like it still need.

I’ll write a lengthier account of the trip in the week to come.