An interesting discussion that I would like to delve deeper into was about curiosity and how it is not always a good idea to satiate it. In The Cairo House, Gigi sneaks out of her bed, and she starts to roam around her home, stumbling upon a horrific site – a lamb being slaughtered for Eid al-Adha. This traumatizes her and launches her into a state of paralysis (or something of the sort). She wakes up to her caretaker being scolded by her mother, but the damage has already been done. Her curiosity has already been filled.
Thinking back to my childhood, it was an often occurrence that I would injure myself or get in trouble just so I could find the answer to some question that entered my headspace at that moment. I believe that that is how it is for most children. It is how they learn about the world around them, even if they are deemed too young to learn about a specific topic. With that being said, it allows me to relate to Gigi. This small anecdote humanizes her and allows me to empathize with her in the subsequent chapters, even when she was forced to flee her homeland it made me really think about real world applications. Conflicts, environmental damages, and government intervention were some of the factors that came to my mind when thinking about emigration. An example of this could be what the Chinese government is currently doing to the Uighurs. They are displacing them from their homeland and relocating them into labor camps. The start of this book was a good way for me to really think about everything we have learned in the previous unit.