Ana Menéndez

Their Fulbright story

Ana Menéndez is a journalist and writer based in Miami. She arrived in Egypt in the summer of 2008 on a long-dreamed-of Fulbright grant, affiliated with the American University in Cairo. Within days of landing, the Parliament Building caught fire and burned for eighteen hours, sending black smoke into the sky and much of the structure to ash — an image she would later read as "a kind of prophecy" for a country poised, unknowingly, on the edge of revolution, and for her own year of change.

She had come to Cairo running toward a new adventure, a new culture, and a chance to reconnect with her linguistic roots. Her maternal grandmother was of Lebanese and Syrian descent, the daughter of immigrants to Cuba who never formally passed Arabic on to their children. Egypt, Menéndez hoped, would let her mend "the broken transmission of that beautiful language."

Like every meaningful journey, hers held both yearning and escape. The year became, in her telling, "a strange, moving reminder of the tireless force of change" — a city in flux, a language reclaimed in fragments, and a writer paying close attention to a place on the cusp of history.

Menéndez carried that year of close looking back into her work as a journalist and author, where the textures of Cairo, memory, and migration continue to surface in her writing.

My year in Egypt was a strange, moving reminder of the tireless force of change. I had come running toward a new culture and a chance to reconnect with my linguistic roots — and Cairo gave me far more than I knew to ask for.