I was 13 years old, wedged into the middle of the back seat of my cousin's Volkswagen Golf, heading north out of Cairo after dark. Seven of us were in the car: my mother, my aunt, my brother and three of my cousins. We barely talked the whole way there.

We were always in Cairo for the summer, but that year was going to be different because of a poster somebody had made. It got copied and passed around churches across North America until one of them ended up in ours. The image on it was a painting of the Virgin Mary appearing at night above a church in a village in the Delta. We took one home.

The trip to Cairo was already happening and my mother was determined we’d try and catch it ourselves, like some shooting star. I told myself I wasn’t going to hold my breath but I counted the days anyway. 

We told no one we were going, so as not to jinx it. I remember finding that funny even then, mixing superstition with spirituality, but maybe it wasn’t superstition at all.

I turned 13 in Cairo that August as my birthday falls inside her fast, which as a kid (ngl) I found that to be somewhat of an inconvenience, because you cannot eat dairy, chicken, meat, or (optionally, depending on your level of devotion) fish. So my birthday cake was often seyami, and I am a chocolate fiend. (My first root canal was in 7th grade.)

Back to that night… the priest received us before midnight and walked us through a record of testimonies, prior sightings and other incidents I categorized as inexplicable. Two of them stopped me cold.

At the eastern end of the church, as in most Coptic churches, Christ is painted in the semi-dome behind the altar table, one finger raised for the one God, and above the finger there was a marking.

The priest said that during a live service the Virgin had appeared at full height in front of the congregation, a bright light standing there for several minutes, and then she had gone into the picture and left that marking above his finger. I looked at it for a long minute, something like a smudge of glow in the dark paint.

Then he took us back outside, to a tower attached to the church with a big steel cross on top of it. There was something in the side of the facade that none of us could resolve. Tilting your head back at ground level, there was nothing, but from an angle, a shadow came up out of the concrete – a face, and it was Saint Bishoy’s.

Bishoy was a monk in the 4th century, out in the desert west of the Delta, where Christian monasticism was invented. He wanted one thing his whole life, which was to see Christ with his own eyes, and eventually a promise came to him that Christ would appear on the mountain there. 

He told the other monks, and on the appointed day, all of them set out up the mountain. On the way, they passed an old man who could not make the climb on his own, and he asked to be carried, but every one of them went around him instead. Bishoy was the only one who stopped and decided to put him on his shoulders and carry him. 

The higher he climbed the lighter the old man became, until the weight lifted completely, and when he looked up, he saw Christ, making him the only man on that mountain who saw him that day. He died in the early 400s and his body is at his monastery in Wadi Natrun where Copts will tell you it has never decayed since.

And there he was on the wall of the tower, head and shoulders visible, but only from the side.

I dug for an answer and all I had was a single marking period from 7th grade on optical illusions. I could not work out whether I was seeing what I was seeing. I had gone into that night a total skeptic, and even though I had 13 years of being Copt underneath me, I could not have told you what most of it meant, because I did not understand 90% of what I was saying in church, not in Arabic and definitely not in Coptic. 

For me the spiritual side of it always felt out of reach, mostly because it all came across as dogma, with nothing to grip. So what was standing in that courtyard was a boy trying to decide whether his eyes were playing tricks on him or the church was, and surely, I thought, the church was not. We all saw it.

Then we moved on to the last stop, the roof of the building next to the church, where rows of plastic chairs were already set out. Around 20 of us sat down facing the church with the town underneath it. We started singing Coptic hymns and songs kept only for her.

Not long into that, the town below us started to fade, all of it at once, on a sort of dimmer, going down over 30 minutes or so until it was noticeably darker than when we arrived. The summer before I had been to the Sound & Light show at the pyramids, where they black out the Giza plateau and then tell you where to look. I want to say that it almost felt like that, but the church was in place of the Sphinx. That’s all I could compare it to at the time.

Then the same steel cross went, the one that had Bishoy's face on the facade, and in a matter of minutes I watched the darkness swallow it whole. When it was gone my brother and I gasped at the same time and slapped each other's knees, which was probably the first contact we'd had all year.

Then this ball of light came, round and translucent, moving left to right and up and down with no fixed pattern. It would vanish for a bit and then come back again, and it kept coming back. My mouth hung open most of the night. This was a part of the evening I have never doubted: an orb was there, plain and present, and if you had been on that roof you would have seen it too. 

About 90 minutes in, the crowd started to murmur. By then, I had taken stock of the people around me, everyone but my family was a stranger, and all of them wanting the same thing we wanted. When the singing broke into gasps, I could not see why.

I pulled on my mother’s blouse and asked her to help me see what she was seeing. Magic Eye posters were everywhere that decade, the ones you have to stop looking at before anything underneath the pattern shows up. It took real patience. “Do that,” she said. “Let your eyes do what you do with those 3D posters.”

I am not going to dress this up because truly, I struggled. Everyone around me was gasping and I had nothing. I turned and looked at my cousins instead of the sky, because I wanted to know whether this was real or whether we had all agreed on something in advance, but their eyes gave me my answer. They were really seeing it, because whatever was in their faces was not performed.

So I looked harder, which made it worse, because harder is exactly what you should not be doing here. It was exactly like those 3D paintings. Strain at it and it stays flat. Miss it once and it becomes twice as difficult to find again. The only way through is to ease off, and easing off is not a thing a 13 year old skeptic knows how to do on command.

I took a breath and tried again, crossing my eyes just enough, and there it was.

An outline where the cross had been, three times the size of it. The edges of a figure with its arms held out, no face, and nothing I could have described to anyone at the time. It was like those pin boxes they sell in gadget shops, where you press your hand down and the needles hold the exact shape of it, an infinity pool pushing through from some other dimension.

And then it went. And I had to find it again, and finding it again meant being easier on myself, and each time I got there it held for a while and then slipped. She was not the one hesitating. My eyes were where the slipping was happening.

I knew then that the mind has to be in a particular place to hold something like that and mine kept leaving it.

The warmth came with it, spreading in my chest each time the edges assembled. I want to be clear here that I do not think it hit me the way it was hitting the people around me. They looked settled, but I was working.

The orb kept moving around the sky and around the figure for hours, until sunrise. Then the edges of her body thinned out, and the orb stopped coming back, and the cross returned to the top of the church.

People stood and left, barely saying a word to each other, kind of like the way an audience is left stunned after a really good movie. The answer to a really good film is always the silence, except this wasn’t a movie. That’s when I noticed I had wet my pants. Luckily, no one had noticed. All things considered, me wetting my pants wasn’t going to be the thing anyone would notice, and I covered it until we got home, yet here I am, mentioning it to everyone reading. Such is the life of a writer, I suppose.

Nobody talked on the drive back to Cairo either.

The village we visited was Shentena El Hagar, in Menoufia governorate, just outside its capital Shibin El Kom.

As it came to be recorded, the council of Menoufia clergy met in early September 1997 and dated the start of the apparitions to early August, saying they had followed it closely for 26 days. Not everyone who visited was able to see anything, and there were thousands who did.

The church's priest described the first sightings as red lights and silvery white objects appearing around the roof. The clergy who ran that church also said she came in more than one form. Arms raised in prayer sometimes. Other times moving side to side, looking at the people. Other times turning into a silver dove.

The late Pope Shenouda addressed it in his weekly lecture at the cathedral in Abbasiya four days in, and called it “an unnatural light.”

Six weeks later the Patriarchate published a statement in El Keraza, the church's own magazine, under the heading ظهورات شنتنا الحجر, built on the reports of two of its bishops. It closed by noting that uncontrolled crowding brings its own harms, and that video and photographic equipment had not been able to give them anything.

That last part felt very true, and it is why the poster was a painting. Looking back, I cannot see how anything I saw that night could have been captured on camera; too subtle for the lens, and too little light. You had to see it with the spirit and not only the eyes, and a camera does not have one.

Anba Bishoy, then general secretary of the Holy Synod, which is the council of bishops that governs the Coptic Church, put it another way to a reporter. He said she was appearing more clearly than she had at Zeitoun.

That was a strange thing for me to accept, given what I knew Zeitoun to be, from what I had read and from the testimonies I had heard, including my father's.

On the evening of April 2, 1968, two bus mechanics working across from Saint Mary's Coptic Church in Zeitoun, a district in northeast Cairo, looked up and saw a woman on the roof. They thought she was about to jump. One of them, Farouk Mohammed Atwa, ran into the road shouting at her to stop and calling for the police, and it was the shouting that pulled everyone else out of their homes.

Both mechanics were Muslim, which is something to sit with when you consider how the largest recorded sighting of the Virgin Mary actually began. A Muslim man saw her first, and what he did about it was try to save her life.

She came back for three years after that first night with estimates of how many people saw her running from the hundreds of thousands into the millions, and press photographers had no shortage of chances to capture it. Zeitoun let itself be photographed. Ours did not.

Muslims in the street were also reported reciting the verse from Al Imran about God choosing Mary above all women, while Copts sang hymns in Coptic, a language that had been leaving Egyptian mouths for centuries by then and survived almost entirely inside the church.

My father was in the early crowds and got to watch her for 15 minutes. He has brought it up maybe twice in my entire life, both times in passing, which is also the culture we come from. People see things like this and then largely do not talk about them. You witness it, you hold it, you say nothing and a lot of enormous things stay unspoken that way.

Last Saturday was the Feast of the Assumption, and the 15 days before it were her fast. It was my first time trying to keep it, and quietly so, which I will get to later.

I have always loved the idea of her. Somebody who could put in a good word with the man upstairs, on the assumption that he was too busy for the small stuff. Like going to your mother when you actually want something.

Interestingly enough, the fast itself was never decreed. No pope ordered it and no council called for it. The earliest written mention of anyone keeping it comes from a Coptic priest writing around the year 1200, and back then it belonged mostly to nuns. Four hundred years later a Coptic pope was still saying it was for whoever vowed it and nobody was to be reproached for skipping it. Enough people kept it anyway that the church eventually made it standard for everyone.

So a fast I have been hearing about my entire life was made by villagers, and the hierarchy spent centuries catching up to them.

That is not unusual for us. The oldest surviving prayer to the Virgin Mary anywhere on earth is Egyptian, a scrap of Greek papyrus now sitting in a library in Manchester, and it calls her Theotokos about two centuries before a council in Ephesus made the word official. It begins, “under your compassion we take refuge.” Egyptians were praying to her before anyone had agreed on what to call her.

I ended up taking culturally from the Coptic faith and spiritually from the Catholic one. The rosary especially, for the tactile part of it, the beads in your hand so the counting keeps you from losing your place. The Coptic church had plenty of its own trinkets and gadgets and I collected them over the years, but the rosary gave me something my faith as a child felt like it was missing. Or maybe that is the diaspora in me, reaching for the version of God I could actually hold.

I carried that rooftop back with me to the States and could not find anyone to hand it to.

Everybody came back from summer with something. Somebody went to camp. Somebody got their braces off, and while I was starting 9th grade in a building full of people who had just started shaving, I stood at my locker that first morning working the combination, and when somebody asked what I did over the summer I said: “I saw the Virgin Mary in the sky in Egypt.”

The answers came back the way you'd expect. My closest friend laughed, not meanly, it was just hard to be taken as the truth. So I stopped bringing it up.

By autumn it sat with the other things about my Coptic faith that landed awkwardly on my American surroundings. Having a different Christmas, a different Easter. Different saints. Sure, America was a more religious country back then, but even so, none of it stuck, so it became one more item on a list I was already keeping short.

You see, growing up Coptic in America is like being handed an IKEA flat pack with no instructions, and when you do ask for the instructions, they turn up in broken English.

I still knew the fasting calendar cold, 200 odd days of it. I stood through three hour long liturgies next to men who had been engineers in Cairo and were driving cabs in Jersey City.

My friends at school, for example, got to rent Freddy Krueger and Friday the 13th from Blockbuster, which was banned in our house, but what I got instead was far more harrowing: video tapes the Coptic church in Egypt had produced about what the Romans did to us.

We took those home instead, and I am fairly certain I would have come out of Freddy Krueger way less terrified, at the very least because I could tell myself that he was made up. Saint Abanoub was not.

Saint Abanoub was a boy from the Delta, killed for refusing to give up his faith during the persecution under Diocletian, the Roman emperor, around the year 300. He was 12, which is why I suppose a lot of Coptic youth fixed on him.

I remember a scene from his tape in particular, hanging upside down from the mast of a ship, calling on God for mercy while they struck him in the mouth, and the blood ran dripping from his face. In the end they cut off his head. I was also around his age when I watched it.

I didn’t have anyone sit me down and explain what any of this suffering was really for. Sunday school teachers would try, but I’ll leave it at that. In America, I also never faced discrimination for being a Copt, and the country had no history of doing to us what had been done to our ancestors. The rules and the rituals crossed the Atlantic intact and whatever had been holding them up stayed behind, or stayed in Arabic, or stayed in the part of my parents that went dormant sometime after they landed.

So you keep her quiet, or, you write about her at length on the internet and undo the whole point.

She came up again at the peak of my professional career, which I hit early while covering Egypt’s revolution and which has felt like a plateau ever since.

In the hours after midnight on December 11, 2009, a light appeared over the Church of the Virgin Mary and the Archangel Michael in Warraq al Hadar, an island district of Giza.

The security guards at the church gate saw it, along with a group of Muslim men sitting at a café across the road, who watched it condense into the shape of a woman. Coptic passers-by recognized her. By the middle of the month tens of thousands of people had come to stand in that street.

Muslims saw her first. Again.

I was 25, working for Al Jazeera, based in Doha at the time. I did not get to cover it live. As much as I had been working up to it, I had not yet been deployed to Cairo, so I watched how we covered it from the desk. The script that was filed offered electromagnetic waves as a possible explanation. The reporter was not from the region, so I kept my expectations low, and that is no offense to her. It was just interesting to see how a news story was going to handle an apparition and in that sense, I was not thinking about accuracy. I was fine observing this one from the sidelines.

Later, skeptics were documented saying the illuminated minaret behind the domes sits almost exactly where she was reported, and calling the whole thing a trick of perspective. One cab driver was quoted saying it was a laser show. An anthropologist working there recorded a journalist telling people that even if the Virgin appeared in front of his eyes, he would deny it was her.

And I simply observed. For years I told myself that was rigor, that looking at other people's reporting with objectivity was a standard to seek after. It was the family habit wearing a press badge.

Ten years after Warraq I finished film school, I lost the rights to a book I had spent years trying to make, and I came apart. There is no version of that story that reads well. I had been working at a homeless shelter called Joseph's House on the east coast. Then I went west with nothing arranged, wanting to feel like a vagabond on purpose, and I spent a good bit of time in New Mexico living off the kindness of people who had no reason to extend it. I looked into the Ram Dass house out there but they were at full occupancy.

Then the world started closing due to Covid, and in March 2020 I flew to California and checked myself into a Coptic monastery in the desert for three months.

Everyone I knew was panicking and I did not want to do it that way, and if it was all going to end, I, at the very least, wanted to be near people who had settled the question a long time ago.

The abbot who took me in was also named Joseph.

I went hoping something would happen, that if I snuck out of my cabin in the middle of the night, I’d get another apparition, but there was no orb, no figure, no lights in the sky.

What I found instead was men waking in the dark, dividing chores without discussing anything, eating without talking, sitting and standing and kneeling if only to pray. I went wherever I was needed. The kitchen, the rabbit farm, the mail room. I got up at 5am to pray too, then went back for a nap before mass, which was quicker there, an hour or so at most, then ate. Chores until evening prayer, then ate again, then slept. There was little talking. Rinse and repeat.

Nobody there wanted anything from me and nobody was waiting for me to become useful, though the curiosity around me did intensify, and as inquisitive as they were I never once felt judged. So you might understand how that kind of life, for all the challenges of that much isolation full time, was desirable.

I learned more about Saint Anthony, who the monastery was named for, and how he started this whole way of living in the 3rd century, and how every monastery on earth since is a copy of a copy of what he built out there. I had flown to the Mojave for something my own ancestors invented 90 minutes from where I live now in Cairo. It blows my mind till this day that I found it in the U.S.A.

Believe it or not I actually did think about staying, but I knew it was not my calling before I could even ask the heavens for an answer.

Leaving was bittersweet. Three months is long for a visitor, even by Coptic standards. Anyone who stays a month is basically paving a path to monkhood, but the nature of Covid allowed me to stay longer. 

Eventually one of the bishops told me I should go if I was not serious, that the world outside was finally opening up, and that the brothers still waiting to be ordained had given up everything I would be walking back into. He did not want them missing me once I was gone. It made sense, so, I left, with a heavy heart.

Looking back, I think what changed the most is that I stopped confusing my parents with God.

So much of being first generation, the pressure of it all sitting on your chest, makes the two easy to run together, and I realized out there in the quiet of the desert that I had been doing exactly that since I was a boy.

The rules and the fear and the silence all came from one place and pointed back at one face, and when I prayed I was talking to a version of my father, and when I disappointed God I felt it in my mother's voice.

Out in that desert, all of that came apart. Nobody there was watching me for failure. The day had a certain shape to it that did not care how I felt about it. And what was left when my parents stepped out of the picture was smaller than I expected and, naturally, easier to be near.

It was also, I think, the closest I have ever come to being shown something real, something I could wrap my heart around and call it a day, without a longing for more. The rosary beads went from being the handrail to something I now only reach for on those harder nights.

To the devout, and I know a few of you might be already forming your thoughts about all this: you will tell me I do not know enough, and you are right. But the 15 days you just finished were not handed down to you by anyone so qualified either. They were made by villagers and nuns, and the church spent 400 years catching up to them. Our tradition was built by amateurs who saw something.

So take this as one more of those. Copt comes in more shapes and sizes than the approved one, and every one of us came out of the same force, which many label as God, and which does not stop being true for the person reading this who calls it nothing at all.

It has been almost six years since I walked out of that monastery, and as embarrassing as it is to admit, I am still looking for a sign.

I have had one that most people cannot say they have had, but I still scan the horizon.

Writing this is what finally showed me the flaw in that. On the roof that night, she was not appearing and disappearing. I was. The harder I worked at it, the more impossible it became, and every time I found her again it was because I had stopped straining.

We ask to be shown things. We look for angel numbers, we read into coincidences, and while I feel synchronicities are real, we forget that all of it has always been here, planted long before any of us arrived, patient and unmoved. 

The forces that be have never once left us. Perhaps we are the ones who keep stepping out of focus.

The steps are shallow, forcing a tall body like mine to arrive slowly. That felt right because I was also turning another year older that morning, and the slow climb matched the show I both needed and dreaded to see. Needed because my curiosity was killing me to see how we were being portrayed. Dreaded for the same reason.

"Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy,” the first in the Met's history devoted to the way Europe painted us for two hundred years.

To get there I should have used a map, only I didn't, because as soon as I walked in, I was taken aback by a three meters tall pharaoh made of granodiorite, Amenemhat II or so the label guessed, on loan, the label added, from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. That label, the first of many tell-tale signs of what was to come, said parts of us are permanently on loan.

He lured me in deeper, into a corridor of coffins, some standing upright, some lying flat, past jewelry and gods credited in small print, a whole civilization filed under the gift of European names. Again, no surprise there.

The realization that I did not know enough about Ancient Egypt hovered over me like a dark cloud, making me wish I could speak the way the tour guides did about the history of my own country. It made me walk faster to get away from my own self-contempt, and the corridor spat me out in the American Wing, where Tiffany glass asked less of me — all aesthetic and no history, making admiration easy on my now-bruised ego. Everything there suffered from coming after what I had just walked through in the Egyptian galleries.

By the time I skirted through America, I was famished, and so I surrendered to one of the Met cafes, where I ate an overpriced sandwich with a hummus crudité that tasted as bland as a paper napkin.

Then I tried again, this time with the map and a wee bit of faith. The map sent us upstairs through the Asian galleries, which were closed, so my friend Sakina and I were rerouted through Europe instead, hall after hall of dukes with their greyhounds and queens in silk, Sir Anthony van Dyck and his Henrietta Maria and all their friends on canvases as tall as cathedral doors. I walked that stretch fast, out of a discomfort I am not sure I care to name even now.

Then I arrived.

Orientalism, the word, had for some reason been hyphenated on the wall, Orient-alism, as if splitting it in two might ease the Western gaze that had so long presided over a land of so-called exotica and mystery. I felt a sudden urge to belt out Arabian Nights. I didn't. But it is that all too common tendency of turning us into a lyric in someone else's pop song, packaged neat enough to sing along to. The Arab Spring, I thought, again.

So I walked like an Egyptian as the exhibit unfolded across four small rooms, each leading into the next, juxtaposing Orientalist paintings, mostly by Jean-Léon Gérôme, the Frenchman who painted places he barely knew with a technique so exact it fooled people into calling it real, against those of Osman Hamdi Bey, the Ottoman painter who used that same training to paint his own world from the inside. On purpose, I assumed, and for once I was right. The curators had put them side by side to show a most awkward parallel between looking at a place and looking from inside it. But as I moved through each room, I grew more disturbed. Sure, the work was well displayed, but that attention to detail wasn't going to fool me. The NMEC and the Grand Egyptian Museum had already set that standard, long overdue but finally ours.

As I moved slowly from one painting to the next, a pattern grew evidently clearer. Look at Gérôme’s work and you would find a Cairo mosque he painted from pieces of other buildings, its pigeons copied from a dead bird propped up in his studio.

He painted a bathhouse in Bursa and filled it with naked women who were never there. These were confessions printed in small gray type, an excuse that taking liberties is what artists often do, but when do those liberties go too far? It felt like a family trying to avoid admitting an old scandal they wanted to forget.

I noticed another pattern, built from years of working in Western newsrooms and Arab ones both. The typical visitor comes with a confident eye, able to afford the opulence of a free ticket from living in the right zip code, taking Gérôme's polishing of the truth at face value. Osman Hamdi Bey saw his own streets clearly, even if his own eye wasn't innocent either, a self-portrait here, a favor returned to the archaeologist who needed his goodwill there. His compromises were the ordinary ones. Not clean, but the smaller of two compromises. Gérôme's were bigger. He got to invent an entire country and call it "observation."

It still took the Met until 2025 to buy one of Hamdi Bey's paintings, 146 years after he painted it. Gérôme's had already been hanging there since 2008, beloved and unquestioned. The bias I met in newsrooms was framed here first, in oil, long before it reached print.

Walking through the exhibit, I recognized the source of it, and it brought me to tears, however briefly. I had moved back to Egypt against every piece of advice I'd been given, against the entire logic of brain drain that tells people like me to leave and not look back, and here was proof, on a museum wall, 146 years wide, of exactly why people leave. All the more reason to say the things that need to be said, without compromise, starting with myself.

I left the museum believing the subject was history. I wanted to. But I couldn't, because a story had broken out of Egypt's North Coast just the week before, and remembering it hit me like an anvil dropped from the sky, another embarrassing reality I wished I could evade. That same careless gaze had landed on something even more helpless: flamingos, forced into a glass box between banana leaf plants, beside bathroom sinks, at kilo 183.

Let's say the obvious thing first. That is animal abuse, and the argument was over before it started. Greater flamingos are supposed to be pink, and the ones inside that glass box were as white as a hotel bathrobe. They stay pink by feeding on the salt lakes of Fayoum and Bardawil while crossing the Mediterranean. It should be common sense that a bird built for that migration cannot live under a trapped skylight, watching people dry their hands at the sinks beside it.

The interesting one is what the box was doing there at all. A way of looking that Europe retired into a museum turned out to be alive and working on our coast. The empires went home decades ago, but somehow the colonial gaze they left behind did not.

The coast isn't to blame, but the fact that a small portion of Egypt's population, which happens to be the most influential, is still stuck in the taint of colonial fantasy is the most damning reality yet, a tendency passed down through the careless abandon that comes with excuses, a luxury so profound it starts chipping at the cohesive force meant to bind a people together. It starts with one closed gated community built after another. It is passed down through club memberships, polished at schools and in homes where children feel embarrassed by the sound of their own language and coached into faking an international English accent. Today that gaze looks at Egypt through the tinted window of a car on the Alexandria desert road.

What's funny but tragic is how history repeats itself. In 1889, Paris built a fake Cairo street at its world's fair and shipped in Egyptians and donkey drivers and even threw in a bit of sand on the pavement, so visitors with the same privileged zip codes could stroll past a country arranged for viewing.

The fair was really a toxic relationship that never ended, one side looking, the other looked at.

Like the paintings, look at what the class that inherited this relationship has built. The look and feel of money in Egypt now is a careful removal of everything that reads as ethnically Egyptian, language, color, people, followed by the manufacture of something new to gaze at in its place. A flamingo behind glass is no different to what those paintings once gave European visitors, something exotic to look at without having to live beside it.

Whatever reads as local or loud gets edited out. It's not just what's in a frame anymore, or the caption under a photo. It's in the menus. It's in the removal of our own people, filtered out through one QR code at the compound gate and a second at the sand. So why wouldn't a wild bird become the next item. Even nature is being edited, for what. The fair in Paris needed real Egyptians to complete the scenery. I suppose the compound needed real flamingos.

We give generously, as a country. Egypt ranks second globally in the world for charitable giving, according to the 2025 CAF World Giving Report, ahead of nearly every wealthier nation, because giving here is old and it is not a rich person's habit, it runs through every income level and it is mostly quiet, unbranded, tied to faith rather than to a tax form. That tradition is real and it deserves to be said plainly. This class gives too, and often sincerely, hospitals get built, scholarships get funded. But you cannot build the well with one hand and poison it with the other.

All the while, the people with the most influence are the ones whose voices carry furthest, so much that the self-critique itself reeks of privilege, earned by no one but inherited by everyone. Together it means the people with the most power to fix Egypt have stopped needing Egypt to work at all. They complain about it at dinner, fluently in three languages, about the state of the roads, the hospitals, the crowds. When do we stop and notice we have become landlords reviewing a building we ourselves are refusing to maintain.

This whole system runs on labor priced at almost nothing. The cheapest unit in almost any one of these compounds runs 22 million Egyptian pounds, a sum that would take a worker earning minimum wage, 7,000 EGP a month, 262 years to save, assuming he has no children, no food to buy, no expenses of any kind. He is the gardener hosing the walkway at dawn. She is the nanny standing at the water line in uniform all afternoon, who cannot swim, because that might be deemed culturally unacceptable. What would the people say?

What would people say. Like the saying goes: some people are so poor, all they have is money. More importantly, where did our social conscience go, the thing that is supposed to make us a people and not just a segment of the population. It left the room the moment those flamingos went behind glass. This is not one person's fault. It is part and parcel of a bigger problem we are not willing to admit.

The summer is a feed and the country becomes a backdrop, gorgeous, empty, waiting. Beach behavior has become the only pastime that matters, three months that have come to feel like an entire year.

The birds stayed where the cameras would find them, and so, more quietly, does everything else: a cage becomes design, exclusion becomes vibes, removing Egyptians from a beach became keeping it clean. There is a whole new standard now, curated, private, premium, and for the human beings who fail it, one short word, bee'a. We have become tourists in our own country, with a tourist's love for the view and a tourist's irritation at the people standing in it.

When people online objected, the response told us more than the box ever did. The apologies sorted the critics into sympathizers, haters, and the oblivious ones who wanted to stay that way.

The fixing of the whole debacle arrived on camera too, a flamingo filmed running frightened down a boardwalk toward a DJ booth and an ocean that is not a salt lake, while conservationists said returning a wild bird takes quiet work nobody there seemed willing to do.

The apology was content. The correction was content. The bird went from one frame to another, and at no point did anyone simply put their phones down.

Underneath all of it sits a fear that Galal Amin named decades ago, in a book whose title was really a question, whatever happened to the Egyptians, a class that rose fast and lives in terror of being mistaken for the class below, calming itself with wealth most of the country will never touch in a lifetime. Read the coast that way and the summer makes sense. The gates, the codes, the English, the move further west whenever the neighbors start to feel familiar. It must be exhausting, spending a life running from people who look exactly like you.

The flamingos changed none of this. They just made it impossible to unsee because a bird cannot be blamed. It cannot be called bee'a. It cannot be told it should have worked harder. Everything it suffered, someone in this country was already suffering politely, out of frame. Held where it looks nice: ask the workers. Watched and never reached: ask anyone standing outside the gate of a beach their grandparents swam at for free. Moved when the guests complain: ask the farming families near Ras El Hekma, whose olive trees are older than every company involved, pushed toward the desert so the shore could be sold in blocks. We had trained ourselves to see past all of it. Then a bird stood in the middle of our own design, barely pink and barely breathing, and suddenly, everything stopped being invisible, and we called it backlash.

In New York this summer you can stand in front of the old way of seeing and study it, framed, captioned, confessed to by people who still don't seem to know what they're confessing. A museum is where a habit goes once a society is done with it. Ours is not in a museum. Ours is on the summer schedule and it stands next to a mirror. The least we can do is look into it.

We lost our sense of belonging so completely that we put a living thing in a glass box, and never noticed we were describing ourselves.