Continued from Part 1 of Nada’s story.
After graduating from the University of Southern California, earning my master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York, and starting my career in Los Angeles, I made a winter trip back to Cairo for a cousin’s wedding. My future husband happened to be in Cairo at the same time, visiting his family.
We had been introduced through mutual family friends several years earlier in California, but life took us our separate ways. Now that we had each completed our studies and gotten started in our careers, the timing was right. (The commonalities between us as Egyptians who had lived, studied, and worked abroad, were a good starting point for a matchmaking opportunity.) The Egyptian grapevine worked its magic, and the next thing I knew, I was meeting him for lunch.
We hit it off and saw each other almost every day during my two-week stay. There was one catch, though: I lived in Los Angeles and he lived in London. In a year, he would be moving even farther away: the United Arab Emirates (UAE), based in Dubai as a management consultant.
