by Sara-Jessica Dilks

Recently, I was catching up with an old friend through Facebook messenger, a common activity for many users of social networking sites. Like any usual catch-up conversation, we exchanged the typical and expected “i miss you!” greetings and “it’s so good to hear from you!” exclamations. We proceeded to discuss our dream colleges and the bipolar weather and some plans for summer, until the conversation died down and I simply asked my friend how things were going where he lives. I was not prepared for his response:

“Everything’s been good to a certain extent…I’ve been fine,” he wrote. “Life here is pretty hard now, [it’s] very insecure! There’s rubbish everywhere, hundreds of people getting killed daily, even one of my friends passed away a couple days ago…The highways now are super dangerous, people are getting robbed…”

My old friend is Amir, a fourteen-year-old kid who lives in Egypt who my brother and I met a couple years ago on vacation. We still keep in touch pretty frequently through Facebook; he’s essentially my foreign pen pal. Amir’s home country is one that many outsiders know primarily for the infamous massive pyramids, ancient mummifications and turban-wearing nomads who ride camels through the bare desert. But his homeland holds much more depth than these misinformed stereotypes.

The New York Times article “Egypt Needs to Act” identifies Egypt as a “failing state,” one that urgently needs to create political and economic consensuses to work toward basic “democracy, human rights, freedom of expression and tolerance.” Egypt’s former president-turned-dictator, Hosni Mubarak (referred to as some as a “modern pharaoh”) led the country for more than three decades but was recently overthrown. In 2011, thousands of Egyptian citizens attempted to rebel against his rule through protests, but Mubarak ordered that these protestors be killed…as a result, an estimated 800 civilians were murdered on the streets by his military. Following his conviction in June 2012, Mubarak is now serving a life sentence for the killing of these peaceful protestors during the revolution.

I remember that a few years ago I had received a random Facebook message from Amir. He seemed frantic, and asked me if I had heard about what happened in his country. I honestly had no clue, so he continued to tell me how a “guy with an explosive belt went near a church and exploded.” I was completely horrified…not only because I was disturbed by the violent situation itself, but also because I was ashamed that I hadn’t even heard of the foreign ordeal until he explained it to me.

To put the situation in context, on New Year’s Day 2011, Amir was at a New Year’s party with his family, when they were informed that a nearby Egyptian church was bombed. Shocked, they turned on the news and came to the realization of what had just occurred: a terrorist attack at a Coptic Christian church in Amir’s city of Alexandria, Egypt. The death toll was approximately 23 people, with an additional 100 or so injured.

It turns out that a few months before the bombings, terrorist group Al-Qaeda had announced that all Christians in the Middle East were “legitimate targets” for destruction, according to a 2010 article from the Israel National News.

I acknowledge that I can’t directly relate to the unrest, corruption and devastation that my friend across the world is currently being exposed to during his early adolescent years; yet somehow, I still feel distantly affected. Amir has described that his surroundings in Egypt are “falling into pieces” — a term that urges me to pay attention to what’s occurring in his homeland. Through maintaining a virtual connection with him, I came to realize two things: how stable my life is in comparison, and also how misinformed my generation is about international matters.

Probably the reason I was so astounded by Amir’s message in our catch-up conversation is that he reminds me of myself. Well, not specifically me… but rather, my friends as well, my peers, my community and my entire generation. Amir listens to Lady Gaga and Ke$ha, uses Instagram, plays soccer with his friends and goes out to parties. In fact, his school even made a Harlem Shake video. At the same time, the national chaos that surrounds his country leaves Amir feeling “unsafe and confused” after devastating local events such as the church bombings.

I know very well that I take advantage of my life, just as many other American students might who attend a safe private school that costs more than $10,000 per year. My street is free of rubbish, Missouri is not a warzone, our highways are not occupied by robbers, Barack Obama is not a dictator and none of my friends have ever died (nor have they been killed by the government or armed rebels).

While it is important to help our own local community and country, I find that it is equally necessary to at least be informed of the horrific civil unrest that so many other countries face. Thus, I’ve promised myself to stay connected about what’s happening outside of my sheltered life in Kansas City. To the readers of this article, I challenge you to do the same through any way that you can…whether it be through simply reading the news, actually paying attention in history class, or maybe even acquiring a Egyptian pen pal.

P.S: A huge thanks to my friend Amir, who has opened my eyes and helped me to become a more internationally aware individual.