After months of anticipation, excitement, fear, and all kinds of emotions, I finally found myself heading to Minnesota. Since March I had known I was part of the fellowship, but even with all the preparation, I never felt fully ready. Packing light, as everyone advised, felt like leaving one of my children behind.
The journey itself was surreal. On my way to the airport, I got into a car accident and barely caught my flight. Then came the seemingly endless 14-hour layover in Paris. I spent the hours half asleep on an airport chair, half-awake with the thought that maybe this Layover would never actually end. Watching people rush to their flights while mine was delayed again and again felt like a test of patience. The flight from Paris to the United States was another nine hours in the air, hours that seemed to stretch endlessly across the ocean. I had left Cairo at 3 a.m., and by the time I finally landed it was already 9 p.m. local time. It felt as if the morning had never ended. Between airports, delays, and time zones, I realized I had lived through a 26-hour day.
My first encounter at the border office was far from pleasant., Yet, the moment I saw the big “WPI” sign at the airport, all the exhaustion and stress turned into relief. Still, I was the last fellow to arrive, which meant one more night of wondering what my colleagues would be like.
The first night abroad is always the hardest caught between the pride of “I’ve made it” and the question, “What am I doing here?” By the next day, though, the warmth of the host families began to ease that confusion, even if the Minnesota weather did not. Their kindness reminded me of home in a way I did not expect, a reminder that even thousands of miles away, there are people ready to make you feel welcome.
Slowly, the first day unfolded. I sat in the car listening to David McDonald , Executive Chair of the WPI Board of Directors, interesting speeches and looking at maps, learning about a new city. I smiled at the first American ad I saw “Don’t you know what offside is?” “a reminder that, football or “soccer” as it is called here is the new thing. These small cultural surprises reminded me that I was no longer just a visitor but part of a bigger experience.
But Minnesota also showed me a different kind of reality. Back home, we read about shootings as headlines. Here, I found myself walking through communities still grieving from the church school attack in Minneapolis. I listened to conversations filled with pain and fear. For the first time, the tragedy was not distant, it surrounded me. It was not just a headline anymore. It was voices shaking, parents mourning, a community scarred.
Later, visiting the George Floyd memorial in downtown Minneapolis made that feeling even heavier. At the memorial, the flowers and messages on the walls carried stories louder than any report I had ever written. These moments reminded me that as journalists, we do not just report statistics and events – we carry the weight of the people living them.
Yet amid the heaviness, there were lighter discoveries. I spent hours at Target, wandering through endless aisles that felt more like a small city than a store. Everything seemed oversized compared to what I was used to back home – the carts, the shelves, even the snacks. I laughed when I picked up a bag of Cheetos almost double the size of the ones in Egypt. At the same time, I found myself carefully checking labels, searching for something halal after a week of surviving mostly on cheese. It was a strange mix of amusement and relief laughing at the scale of everything, but also grateful for the small comfort of finding food that connected me back to home.
To complete my first week, I went to a mobile phone shop and got a U.S. number. I could not help but cheer “Yay!” a small, silly moment, but it captured exactly how I felt after days of travel, new experiences, and emotions running high. The fellowship had already begun to show me its layers: the challenges, the stories, the culture, and the connections waiting to be made. As the shopkeeper smiled and said, “Enjoy America,” I felt it in my bones I truly would.
