The Language of Understanding

My name is Catherine Aslam, I am from Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. I was in the Cairo school. And transportation would be pretty fun to school everyday because it would be microbus or metro and it kind of changed each day.

And the traffic in Cairo was definitely interesting to get used to. We would have class for about two, two and a half hours and half a half hour for lunch break and then have another two to three hours.

The homework was - it definitely took about an hour each night, especially if you wanted to study ahead for the exams. The teachers were phenomenal on my part. I really loved their teaching style.

With my host family, we lived in a condo. They were the most welcoming family, extremely accommodating to the fact that this was the first time I had really stayed for a while in a country in the Middle East.

What was nice was that they were also very interested in a lot of things in American culture, so we had that back and forth.

I miss them dearly. They became a part of me. It's a wonderful feeling to have another family in another part of the world.

I'm really grateful to be an American ambassador, both in the country for Egypt and in Egypt itself. Just creating those ties and that understanding was definitely a really important experience.