Note: This post was written two weeks ago before we left Kigali, and I am just getting around to posting it now.

“I wanna take a break.” 

This is a favourite phrase of our toddler Ralph. Sometimes he says it when he is upset and wants to be held, and other times when he is shrieking with laughter while being tickled (and then a few seconds later he says “again!”) 

Following Ralph’s lead, after nine years of living abroad, Jessica and I have decided to take a break. The catalyst for this decision is that Jessica is pregnant, and we are expecting the baby in mid-March. 

Ralph was born in Cairo in July 2021, and we never considered going home for the birth. We wanted to prove to ourselves (and others) that we could have a child in a place like Cairo and continue our life abroad. Canada’s ongoing pandemic restrictions made it an even easier decision. If you ask Ralph where he was born he will tell you “in the pyramids.” And where was our cat Lucy born? “In the pyramid too!” 

With this pregnancy we were unsure from the beginning about whether we would stay in Kigali or return to Ottawa. After Ralph was born Jessica took the six months of paid maternity leave offered by UNHCR, but this time she wanted to also take an additional six months of special leave without pay to make it a full-year off work. 

The more we discussed what we wanted this year to look like, the clearer it became that we didn’t want to spend it in Kigali when we could be anywhere in the world. As we came closer to making an official decision about having the baby in Ottawa, we started thinking about whether it even made sense to return to Kigali at all.

Jessica started her four-year posting in Rwanda with UNHCR in May of 2023. From the beginning we weren’t sure if we would necessarily stay for the entire time, but we were committed to staying at least for a few years.

But the truth is, we don’t love it here. I outlined some of the reasons in my previous post about the suburbanness of our Kigali life. 

But more than simply being dissatisfied with Kigali itself, I think we have just reached a point where we need a break from living abroad. Even if we enjoyed Kigali more than we do, it would be daunting to leave for a whole year and then come back, especially since some of our closest friends there have already left or will be leaving soon. 

So we have decided to take this next year to have the baby in Ottawa, to spend time with our family and friends, to do some travelling, and then Jessica will apply for a different position with UNHCR in another country. 

My feelings about this transition are complicated and LONG, but please read on if you are interested.

Conflicted feelings about Canada

We have spent the majority of our adult lives outside of Canada, and our perspective about life in Canada has definitely shifted over time. 

Every time we visit we are struck by the mundane chatter about gas prices, the humidex, windchill, coupons, and Costco.  

Each year it seems like our politics are dumber and more insular. When we left Canada, Pierre Poilievere was a joke, and now he is the person most likely to be the next Prime Minister. 

In September, I had lunch with some British friends who moved to Calgary during the pandemic. I enjoyed hearing them describe the funny aspects of life in Calgary and the idiosyncrasies of their neighbours, and I found myself identifying with their perspective rather than with my fellow Canadians. 

Our visit to Canada in December 2021, when we had the unfortunate timing of visiting at the height of the omicron panic, was the time that I had the most difficulty relating to people in Canada. 

While quarantining at Jessica’s mom’s house, we spent the first few evenings watching the news on TV. This was a surreal experience, and it felt like I was watching some sort of dystopian movie rather than a nightly newscast. After a couple of evenings we had to stop watching, and it seemed bonkers and completely unhealthy that people were consuming this information on a daily basis. 

But watching the news was good preparation for what we were going to experience over the next few weeks. We were excited to see family and friends for the first time in over two years, but it ended up being incredibly difficult to make plans with anyone, and when we did meet up it was so strange to hear everyone perfectly quote the latest case numbers just as they normally quote the weather. 

On the one hand, I truly admired the degree to which many Canadians were willing to give up their freedoms to help reduce the spread of Covid. But it also felt so arbitrary. Why were people collectively willing to make sacrifices this time, when at other times the plight of poor and vulnerable people in Canada is completely disregarded?

A centrepiece of Canada’s response was CERB, a $2,000 monthly payment to people who were unable to work because of the pandemic restrictions, and this seemed to have broad support. This is all well and good, but this $2,000 a month is substantially more than people receive when they are on welfare or disability support.  

Canada also never finds enough money in its budget to meet its foreign aid targets. Under both Conservative and Liberal governments Canada has routinely given less than half of the amount necessary to achieve the target of 0.7% of GNI. Yet somehow, when middle class Canadians were affected by pandemic restrictions, there was limitless money to be found.

My life in Egypt during the pandemic

While our friends and family in Canada had spent the better part of two years obsessing over Covid, Egypt had only a few months of moderate restrictions before our lives returned to pretty much normal in July 2020. We continued to wear masks, we got vaccinated as soon as possible, but we also saw friends regularly, traveled around Egypt, and lived fulfilling lives. 

For me, those years in Egypt are more associated with my growing understanding of political repression in Egypt. 

I read Jack Shenker’s magnificent book The Egyptians, where he describes the 2011 revolution as a time when“marginalised citizens muscling their way on to the political stage and practising collective sovereignty over domains that were previously closed to them.”

I used a VPN to read Human Rights Watch reports about the estimated 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt. 

I followed “Verità per Giulio Regeni”, the campaign for justice for the Italian graduate student who was studying Egyptian labour unions in 2016 and who was murdered by intelligence officers.

I discovered Mada Masr, the only independent news outlet in Egypt, which helped me understand the precarity of the city’s art scene and the constant anxiety of people who fear that their phones could be checked at any time by the police.

I read about the Rabaa massacre, where over 1,000 protesters were killed in 2013 at the order of then-Defense Minister and now Preisdent Sisi.

I spent an evening on our terrace in September 2019, having been urged not to leave the neighborhood because of the anti-Sisi protests that were planned in nearby Tahrir Square. 

I read the writings of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a prominent democracy activist who was once again arrested after the 2019 protests (and he remains imprisoned till today). 

I listened to my Egyptian classmates talk about living through the promise of the revolution, only for the military regime to come back with a vengeance. 

I wrote a silly blog post that lightly poked fun at the Golden Pharaoh Parade, a made for TV spectacle that transported the royal mummies between museums, but Jessica told me it was better not to post it. 

–

One morning, in June 2020, I opened Twitter and read that Sarah Hegazi had committed suicide in Toronto. Sarah was a queer activist who had raised a rainbow flag in 2017 in Cairo, and for this she had been imprisoned for three months and tortured. She was granted asylum in Canada in 2018, but continued to suffer from PTSD and depression. The fact that Sarah had been made to suffer in the country where I was living, and that she couldn’t find peace in the country where I was from, was heartbreaking and is something that continues to haunt me.

Becoming expats

At the same time as I was immersing myself in the horrors of recent Egyptian history, I was also being subsumed more fully by the expat bubble. 

Our time abroad started in Geneva, where Jessica worked a series of short-term consultancies and where I started was an intern, meaning our jobs were never secure and we had a very low income by Swiss standards. We also mostly hung out with other interns and consultants in their early or mid-twenties, and the vibe of our social circle felt closer to a semester abroad rather than entry to the global elite.  

Rome was our next long-term destination. This was Jessica’s first official UNHCR posting, meaning we started receiving the benefits of proper expat life, including a moving allowance and a rental subsidy. We rented a fancy apartment with a large terrace with a view of the Vatican, and we also started eating out several times a week and spending more on travel.  

Our social circle was mostly other expats, but we knew far more international teachers than diplomats, and we almost never attended any embassy sponsored events. We also lived in an upscale neighborhood, so our lifestyle didn’t feel so exorbitant (although in reality Jessica’s salary was very high by Italian standards). 

Things started to feel different as soon as we moved to Cairo. We once again received a large moving allowance, and we rented an expensive apartment in a building with only other expats (plus the landlord’s son). Most of our friends were diplomats and we frequently attended embassy parties. The only Egyptians we regularly spent time with were members of Gezira Club, the exclusive sporting club that had been established by the British in 1882.

The inequality is also much more stark in Cairo than in Geneva and Rome, and it would have been silly to claim that we weren’t living at the highest echelons of society. Yet because of our social circle including some of the wealthiest Egyptians, the ones who owned multiple residences both in Egypt and abroad, some of our fellow expat friends clung to the illusion that we weren’t properly part of the elite. As is the case everywhere, people tend to underestimate just how privileged they are. 

Most people in Egypt are poor and struggle to afford basic necessities, and the situation deteriorated drastically while we were there. Between early 2022 and early 2023, the Egyptian pound lost half of its value, and inflation was over 30% for all of 2023. This has been a catastrophe for so many people in Egypt, but because Jessica was getting paid in USD, things actually got cheaper for us. 

Seeing the deterioration of both the political and economic situation in Egypt, while my upper-middle class social circle in Canada fixated on single-digit inflation was hard to reconcile (although of course I understand that this inflation was challenging for poor people in Canada as well). 

I wanted to tell my Canadian friends to stop complaining, to understand how amazing life is in Canada for them. But it also seemed inappropriate for me to do this, since we were the ones whose financial status remained unchanged and who were having no trouble affording our extravagant lifestyle. 

Deciding to call it quits on Kigali

When Jessica was 12 weeks pregnant, we traveled to Germany for my great aunt’s 100th birthday, and then to the Netherlands to visit Jessica’s sisters before spending two weeks in Ottawa.

This trip was an opportunity to tell all our friends and family in-person that Jessica was pregnant (something we couldn’t do in 2020), and it also served as an opportunity to help us decide whether or not we would want to go back for the birth.

A highlight of the trip was our first night in The Hague where Jessica’s sister Jodie lives with her husband Lennart. We were tired after a long train journey from Lippstadt (our five-hour journey turned into a seven-hour journey due to delayed German trains as Lennart smugly predicted). We hopped on the tram from the central station to Jodie and Lennart’s apartment, and then carried our suitcases up the extremely narrow stairs that are typical of Dutch houses. 

Jodie had kindly gone to the market to buy a bunch of cheese and charcuterie, so we quickly went back down the stairs and had a picnic in the nearby square.

It was a warm evening and there were plenty of other people out, including many dining at a restaurant whose tables spilled into the square. There were other kids who, like Ralph, were most interested in the fountain. I started mixing some Aperol Spritzes, the ideal cocktail for European public drinking, which also gave us a good moment to announce Jessica’s pregnancy. It was such an idyllic evening, and similar to many we had spent in Rome and other places, but the type we have been missing in Kigali.

The following weeks in Ottawa were also nice. We spent more time driving than I would have liked thanks to our friends and family being spread around the city, but there were also parks everywhere, we ate delicious food, and people were happy to see us.

After the trip, we spent a couple of weeks discussing whether we should leave Kigali for good, but I think in reality our decision had already been made the moment we popped the bottle of prosecco in The Hague. 

Or maybe the decisive moment came earlier, when we learned in short order that two of our best couple friends were planning to leave Kigali, and it was hard to imagine life here without them.

Or maybe it was already back in May, when we had only been here for a few weeks but I had already been to each of the kid-friendly cafes several times. I remember going to one of them on the weekend with Jessica, and she was happy since it was new to her, but I already felt the dread of a routine that involved these same cafes over and over.  

Then I think back to our very first morning, when we woke up to loud construction directly behind our Airbnb, which was a crushing revelation after how much we had hyped the quietness of Kigali compared to Cairo. That same day I walked along the main street which was quite busy with cars but had very few shops or anything of interest to pedestrians. I arrived at MTN Shopping Centre, the neighborhood’s main landmark, and I was bewildered by how dark, depressing and empty everything felt inside. I bought a few things at the grocery store, and the price of many imported products was shockingly expensive, and I immediately thought to myself “What have we done?”

I realize this comes off a bit harsh, and in reality there are lots of great places in Kigali if you know where to look. After Cairo we thought we needed a change, and Kigali seemed like a great option, but the cumulative effect of all the years abroad meant we were ready for a break. 

A trip to Bangkok made us feel good about our decision to leave Kigali

After making the decision to leave Kigali, we wanted to take one international trip in the region before returning to Canada. Instead we ended up going to Thailand for two weeks in December. Jessica was invited to attend a week-long workshop, and so we also added on a week of vacation.

The trip was a lovely break from all the stress of organizing the move back to Canada. I was a little nervous of having to entertain Ralph while Jessica was working. We were staying in a small hotel room and it had been a long time since we had done such an intense city trip, and I wasn’t sure how Ralph would react to being carried everywhere now that he is more independent and used to driving almost every day. 

But my fears were unwarranted since there was just so much to do. We spent our days traipsing around the city, walking for hours at a time with Ralph in the carrier, stopping at public playgrounds, taking naps on the skytrain, riding the ferries ap and down the river, visiting the children’s museum, taking a break from the heat at a beautiful indoor play area. Ralph was almost always in a good mood, and he fed off the energy of the city. It felt completely different from some of our recent hikes in Rwanda when he kept asking to go back to the “big car car road.” 

When we used to fly back to Cairo after a trip, we would brace ourselves for the extremely inhospitable airport and the terrible traffic to get back to our apartment. We were inevitably in a horrible mood by the time we got home. 

Kigali doesn’t have such bad traffic, and the airport isn’t far from our house, but our return from Bangkok was somehow just as frustrating as returning to Cairo. We had a long line at customs, and then an even longer line for the single scanner that they use to check everyone’s hand luggage. After that we still had to wait for our checked luggage. By the time our suitcases arrived there wasn’t a single trolley available, and so I awkwardly tried to carry them out but was accosted by someone who wanted to inspect our duffel bag. I assured him it was only dirty laundry and started unpacking it on the spot. He tried to insist that I bring all my bags for an inspection, but Jessica convinced him to let us through. 

Then for some unknown reason there was traffic and it took us 30 minutes to get home (twice as long as normal), and by the time we entered the house we were Cairo-level riled up. The next day I took Ralph to a tiny park with a swing and small merry-go-round, which is the only public play area I know about in Kigali. I parked on the small street next to the park, where I have parked many times before, and we sat on a bench to eat an ice cream. The park was empty, and there were no other cars around.  

A couple of minutes later a soldier with a machine gun came and told me to move my car. I asked him why and he said “security”. I told him I would move it once we were finished, and we then very slowly ate our ice cream while he stood guard next to our car.

This may have been one small interaction, but after having men with guns in Cairo repeatedly tell me not to do the most innocuous things for no reason I now become infuriated almost immediately. Kigali feels less oppressive than Cairo, but the security presence is always visible, heavy-handed, and often dismissive of citizens enjoying public space. 

A few months ago we were having drinks with a few friends, including a couple that I hadn’t met before. We inevitably got to talking about what we like or don’t like in Kigali, and they said that they weren’t thriving here. 

I hadn’t really thought about it like that before, but it resonated a lot. There are lots of reasons to like Kigali, and many people we know do like it here, but for a variety of reasons we just haven’t been thriving.

There is no shame in calling it quits if something isn’t working for you. Whenever I hear of people spending years and years in a city they don’t like, it makes me sad. So rather than stick it out here just because that was the initial plan, we are looking for somewhere else where we can thrive.

If I could see all my friends tonight

That’s how it starts, we go back to your house

– LCD Soundsystem, All My Friends

Back in November we started messaging people about our plans to leave Kigali and return to Ottawa. Some of these friends were still in Cairo, Rome, and Geneva, others had moved on to Paris, Tbilisi and D.C. Some were still in Toronto but planning to escape the city.

I found it incredibly moving to be able to message friends around the world, to reminisce about past trips together, and to plan how we could meet in Ottawa or somewhere else in the world. 

At the same time this exercise was incredibly sad, because it is impossible to get all our friends together in one place when they are scattered around the globe. 

I am always drawn to dinner party scenes in books and movies. What can be better than people gathering in someone’s home to eat, drink, and tell stories. 

During one of my pretentious moments in university, after reading Plato’s Symposium, I tried to organize my own symposium by gathering a bunch of friends on a Friday night and instructing them to bring a piece of art to share. I made the mistake of trying to read a short story, and it took about two minutes for my already quite inebriated friends to lose all interest in my story, and with that my symposium failed and became a running joke for a long-time afterward. Cocktail-making parties continued more successfully, however. 

I have learnt my lesson, and I won’t be trying to host any symposiums anytime soon. In Cairo we had some success with ‘Babies and Booze’ parties so we will have to see if people in Ottawa are receptive to this. 

A simple yet adventurous life in Ottawa

“When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child – a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all.”

Sally Rooney – Beautiful World, Where Are you

Living in Cairo and Kigali have required constant creative thinking. 

Cairo is a city that rewards creative thinking and an openness to explore off the beaten path. I feel like we made the most of our time in Cairo, and I enjoyed exploring all varied parts of the city, especially on foot.

I would frequently invite friends for excursions, and often they laughed at my plans, but sometimes they also joined, and I think they usually were happy when they did. I find that when people aren’t doing new and exciting things, it isn’t usually because they aren’t willing to try them, but simply because they don’t know where to start and they need someone to invite them. 

But after four years in Cairo, I was starting to run out of ideas and we increasingly didn’t feel inspired to do new things during the weekend. This attitude has also carried over to Kigali. I am sure that if I dug deeper I would have found many interesting things to do here, but I simply haven’t had the energy to be always searching for new things. 

When people ask what makes us most excited about moving back to Ottawa, I think the biggest thing is that I won’t have to spend so much energy on creative thinking, since there are so many obvious great places to visit and activities to attend.

We are looking forward to having more access to public parks, libraries, community centres, and endless areas to walk both in and just outside the city. I am looking forward to being able to look things up online, to communicate with people easily, to criticize the government freely, and to not see soldiers walking the streets with machine guns on a daily basis. 

I am also looking forward to having a network of people who can invite me to things! Please invite me to your bookclub. Tell me about your favourite restaurant. Ask me to play any sport. Bring me on a hike or a road trip. Invite me to a protest or to sign a petition. Ask us to watch your kids so you can do something fun without them. 

If you don’t live in Ottawa, please come visit. Our apartment has an extra bedroom and would love to have visitors. 

We have been away a long time, much longer than initially expected. We are incredibly grateful for all the experiences of the past few years and for all the people we have met.

We know that this year back home will present different challenges than living abroad, and the adjustment might not always be easy.  But it will be a joy to be with friends and family again without feeling so rushed, and we are going to make the most of it.