Every occasion in college brought a care package from my parents, including some events only they deemed necessary to honor, such as Super Bowl Sunday and March Madness. Inside the heavily taped shoeboxes, I’d find a familiar mix of whimsy and sugar: a greeting-card reminder of an upcoming family holiday, a movie-size package of Red Vines I’d eat before I arrived back in the dorm.
During Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, the care package became more significant. From sunrise to sunset, I’d refrain from eating and drinking, starting the day with sahuur (the morning meal) before sunup and breaking the fast with iftar (the evening meal) at sundown. Under crumpled newspaper wads, my parents would tuck a fasting schedule listing the projected times of sunrise and sunset for the month. And the jackpot: a bubble-wrapped can of fool medamas, more commonly known as beans.
When I was a child, the aroma of fool medamas cooked in tomato was a silent alarm signaling the start of sahuur. There was no ignoring the wafting smell in the twilight before sunrise; it took on the persona of a restless visitor in my house, passing by the walls of the kitchen, moving slowly down the hallway, sneaking under the closed door to my bedroom. My parents used the beans as a staple for the month—hearty food, warming the chill of the kitchen. I lay in my bed in the early morning, listening to my parents’ hushed voices, wondering when they would call me to the table.
Fasting became more complicated during my junior year in high school. I had always done my best to conceal my religious identity from my friends. Being of Egyptian Muslim heritage and growing up in the postcard beach suburbs of Orange County, I often felt culturally isolated. I avoided discussing the life I lived outside of school because I couldn’t bear to see the differences the mirror would reflect back.
I expected nothing to change at school during Ramadan. Inevitably, however, some of my friends noticed that I was skipping lunch. That was when I started wandering at lunchtime.
My wandering plan worked beautifully until the high school counselor summoned me to her office. She introduced herself with a firm handshake, squelching my feeble attempt to make my own handshake a worthy adversary. “Have you been eating lunch at school?” she asked. “Some of your friends have worried about you not eating.”
I already had a strike against me: in middle school I had been the poster child for late puberty—the skinny kid with the nickname Bony, which stuck to me like Velcro.
And I knew, of course, how the classic scenario went. Friends notice that student avoids food. Friends meet with school counselor. School counselor meets with student, displaying a compassionate demeanor, while initiating a discussion of the silent plague haunting high school girls: eating disorders.
“I’m fasting for the month of Ramadan,” I said with the force of a pebble.
It was the first time I ever opened my mouth about my religious background, the first time I ever spoke a word in Arabic—my family’s primary language—at school. The counselor was trapped in an uncertain moment, trying to navigate an unknown landscape of Muslim rituals. Our conversation quickly became a primer on Ramadan. My explanation reflected more rust than confidence, like a student trying to remember the steps to solve a quadratic equation on the first day of calculus class.
Today, I rarely suffer from those moments of hesitation. The transformation started during my freshman year at Stanford with a simple question from a non-Muslim friend: “Can I fast with you one day?” She said she had friends at home who fasted during Ramadan. We had iftar together in the dining hall—a hurried affair, since a night full of reading awaited us. Other nights I’d dine with a fellow Muslim, who, like me, nursed a pile of contraband dining-hall food for sahuur.
My parents stopped sending me care packages after I graduated. I still miss them, even the cans of beans. As a kid, I used to complain about fool medamas. “Is there anything else you can make?” I’d beg my parents, claiming that the odor interfered with my sleep. Of course, my campaign failed. And a failure, as my parents say, is worth its weight in beans.
Nancy Farghalli, ’97, MA ’98, is a writer in San Francisco.
