This seems like such a simple phrase. Intuitive. Self-explanatory. Boring. Well…duh. And yet, it has been our working motto for almost 20 years.
It came about one day while we were in Cairo with our teeny tiny children. Okay, they had just turned 5 & 6, but when I think back, they may as well have been toddlers. There was this restaurant we wanted to try for lunch. All we needed to do was cross a street. Well, all we needed to do was cross a street with 8 lanes of traffic. Okay, all we needed to do was cross a street through 8 lanes of traffic with help from neither traffic lights nor pedestrian crossings. In the words of The Lonely Planet, crossing the street in Cairo is ”an utter-a-prayer, update-your-will situation, pure and simple; crosswalks and street lights in Cairo are both rare and ignored.”
Our children, being the ages they were, have had ‘the talk’ ad nauseum about crossing the road. It has been drilled into their heads; wait for the little green man, look both ways, hold my hand, DO NOT cross if you see a car, DO NOT cross if the red hand is flashing, BE SAFE!! <sigh> Now what? We looked around with a look of pure panic on our face. Right beside us is a young woman with a baby on her back, holding onto the hand of a 2-year-old. Without blinking, without hesitating, without freaking out (even a little bit) she walked straight into the throng of traffic.
Oh. Crap.
There was nothing left to do but follow suit. We took a deep breath, we grabbed our kids by the arms tightly, (I’m sure the evidential bruises are still there) and we stepped off the curb. Into traffic.
I’d like to say we got video or even pictures of this momentous occasion. Ha! We were so scared it didn’t even occur to us. And once we made it through, (because, yes, surprise, surprise, we did make it) the adrenaline coursing through our veins was so much, I doubt we would have been able to stop shaking long enough to get a picture that wasn’t blurry.
The look of confusion on our kids’ faces was genuine. It was time, once we were safe, once we were on the sidewalk, to have another talk. “Back home, you never, never NEVER! do that. NEVER.” Years of teaching out the window in one fell swoop. How do we make this lesson real? How do we let our kids know that it was okay to touch the cars in traffic while crossing the street in Cairo, but not back home? We had to make it okay but not okay, okay-but for here only. We had to make it simple enough that these young impressionable children would understand. Then it came to us, the phrase that works, in all situations, all around the world:
Different country, different rules.
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