Hows this for a story?
I work with an Egyptian named Nashaadt at this casino. Very nice, chronically polite, sporting fairly good English and remarkably good taste in suits, I never had much of an opportunity to speak with him before this last week.
Turns out that Nashaadt is Christian, not Muslim. Coptic Christian, in fact, and he was a parishioner of the same church in Alexandria that has been on the news lately, because it is the one that got bombed by the Gaza-terror group "Army of Islam" that killed 21 people and wounded dozens more.
This guy hasn't said a harsh word about anyone or anything since I've met him last June... but he is very unhappy with the current Egyptian leadership, I can tell you that. Seems he feels that people of his religious persuasion have never been treated in a manner they feel is fair or just, and this attack is simply the culmination of many years of neglect and disdain Egyptian society throws at them in general. His church (the physical structure, I mean) is more than 1,000 years old, built on the ruins of an even older Christian structure that (he says) dates back to the days of St. Mark the Evangelist. Far older, he told me, than the Muslim faith that has supplanted so much of what was Christian in Alexandria.
Anyway... just a note to show how amazing the people you meet in this business are, and how small the world is getting. It's simply mind-blowing to me that I am no more than "two degrees" from the Battle of Belleau Wood (Frank Buckles) on one hand and "two degrees" from the most recent terrorist bombings in Egypt (Nashaadt), all because I worked in some casinos in PA.
Damn, I love this job.
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