Soccer Crew

by Clarissa Clemm (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find Egypt

I didn’t expect to find a soccer field in the middle of Aswan, Egypt. The field was in a lot nestled between two concrete buildings in what felt like the middle of the city, down a hidden alleyway right off of the main road where I had taken a carriage ride the night before. There were lights above illuminating the space and the balding heads below as well as netting surrounding the field so that we wouldn’t lose the ball or kick it into the concrete too hard. Crew members from the ship I was on had pitched in to reserve the field from 11 PM to 1 AM once a week when the ship made its weekly stop in Aswan, and the ship activities director Mohammed had invited my new friends, two sisters who were also tourists on the ship, and me to participate. The three of us girls huddled close together, trying to appear comfortable in a foreign place where there was loud shouting in a language we didn’t understand. We all had shiny blonde hair, didn’t speak a word of Arabic, and were the only women in a large group of men. We stood together awkwardly until Mohammed pointed me to a group of four men, my new team. It was time to show what I’d got, and I was terrible. I ran right past the ball during what should have been a golden scoring opportunity and eventually just sprinted back and forth, trying to signal to the guy who I recognized as a bartender that he shouldn’t pass me the ball. The men were loud and aggressive, cursing and taunting each other and ready to do what it took to score a goal. Two players limped off the field, only to sub back in after having a cigarette and a chat with the referee, who was dressed in a long tunic and a turban with a whistle between his lips that he never once used. While my friends and I were on the field, we were part of the team, the regulars feeding us passes and sending the ball flying into our stomachs. On the curb where we sat on the sidelines after the game though, we were yellow-haired enigmas. The crew members, now away from the constraints of the ship, asked for photos with us (as a group and individually) and posted them immediately to Facebook. They complimented us on our playing, their broken English supplemented by exaggerated hand gestures. Then, at the end of the night, we all piled into a white van, around fifteen people squished together except for us girls, who were given the wide berth of a row to ourselves. We got back on the ship and said good night. The next day, I joked more familiarly with the soccer players, making me feel a little bit like I was part of a family on the ship, a feeling that would get jolted when people would tip them or when they would take away the dirty plates. At the end of my trip, some of them asked for my friends’ and my numbers or offered to give us soccer jerseys and bracelets. The accountant I’d talked to after the game said that meeting me would be one of the best memories of his life. I had learned that we weren’t the first to join the soccer game; there had been another white woman just the week before and many more before her. There would certainly be more to come. The crew members said they worked 140 days straight, and the three of us girls were passengers on board the ship for only a week. We didn’t accept the gifts. We were just passing through after all: them through the city of Aswan, us through the country of Egypt. And it was only by chance that we were allocated to these different passages, that some of us were tourists and some weren’t. We would likely never see each other again, but what we did do while we were there was be included in a game of soccer. I have the memories and the bruise on my shin to prove it.