"My overseas connection" by Nazar

My 8-year old son, Nazar, also spoke in the regional Multicultural Public Speaking competition. He talked about his connection to Egypt, including his friends and some of the things he loves about it.

Today I would like to talk about my overseas connection.

Many people in Australia are from other countries. For example, me! Well, half of me. One half of me is from Australia and the other half is from Egypt. Egypt is a country in Africa.

The main language in Egypt is Arabic. My brother and I always speak Arabic with our dad, no matter where we are. One Egyptian word is “Iziak”. That means “hello”.

There are so many awesome things I love about Egypt.  For example, the people are really generous.  They are also very funny and are experts at making jokes.  

My best friends in Cairo are Zeinab and Mohamed.  They don’t have a lot of money. They live in the garage of the building next door. 

They are so kind and happy, even though they don’t have a proper house to live in. We hang out together a lot. They are fantastic at inventing new games.  One fun game we invented is a type of hide-and-seek, where we hide in the trees. It’s called Hide and Tree.

Kids in Egypt also love to play soccer in the street. We all meet in the park outside our house after school.  On the weekends, we sometimes play until 11 o’clock at night!

Sometimes we get two pounds from our grandparents and go to the kooshk to buy chips and chocolate. A kooshk is a very small corner shop that stays open until about 1 o’clock in the morning!

There are also some really nasty kids in our street.  They love to pick fights with all the other kids and cause problems – just for fun. They have heaps of money. They prove that having money doesn’t make you better than anyone. And money doesn’t make you a better person. Because they have heaps of money and they’re bullies. 

Kids like Zeinab and Mohamed prove that being a good person isn’t about how much money you have. Because they don’t have that much money and they’re fantastic.

If scientists are ever able to make a time machine, I would travel back to Ancient Egypt because I want to find out how the pharaohs built the pyramids. We can learn a lot about ourselves from our past.

A lot of people in this school think that Egypt is just desert, mud huts by the River Nile and people riding camels in the street. But they are just stereotypes. Egypt has much more than those things.

Egypt has cars, trucks, buses, trains, roads, apartments, parks, theme parks, I phones, I pads, schools, malls, shops, airports, markets and cities. It just goes on and on and on.

Do you still think the same about Egypt now?