Perfect Strangers - Part Five

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"Arab culture played an essential part in the Phoenician era. So Arab identity is acutally a mixture of Arabic, Islamic, Christian and Phoenician roots. This highlights the importance of the integration of elements within a given Arab identity". (Ruba A).

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The girl was unbound. To the point of comedy. Like this. At a certain point in her childhood, every morning, her Catholic school would line up hundreds of its elementary students, boys and girls in sharp white and navy blue uniform, with a tie around their neck, to march up to the huge Catholic church across the street for mass.

At first, she didn’t mind the instant silence that dropped in the entire school block when she stayed behind. As if aliens abducted earth and she was the last one standing. Utter shhhh silence. Nobody. Was there. But her sister. She could even call her all the way to the end of the school block and she’d hear her, even see her like a small speck in uniform in the far silent distance.

Then one day, she decided to go too. Tucked neatly in the rows of children, she walked in that huge building that had benches lined up kinda like the seats in her classroom facing the front, and with cool colorful big windows. And a man dressed in a white robe with a big hat on his head and a shiny golden necklace with a cross on it. He looked friendly.

She wasn’t scared. Her turn came. Her tummy was eyeing that yummy round white thing that he was putting in her friends’ mouth. She wanted one too. Under her tongue it went, and the nice man made some hand gestures, something about Jesus, she wasn’t sure, too busy decoding the flavor of that yummy white stuff in her mouth. Icing sugar?

Back to the row she goes. And since then, the little one, who adapts easily to wherever you put her, would take holy communion and consume the flesh of Jesus every morning at 7:30am, and march diligently like a good soldier to and from the big nice building with colorful windows.

Until she discovered that the store next door sells communion candy for 5c each, 10c for the colored ones, which she bought in bulk and gave to her friends at lunch, pretending she’s the friendly man in a big hat and a white robe who made hand gestures and wore a shiny necklace and gave out candy.


...to be continued ...


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