In the wake of regional strife, Cairo has served the Sudanese people as a generational vacuum, displacing educated youth with an unsettled life of perversion and isolation. One young man bounced back and forth between Turkey, and Sudan, while not in Cairo. The youth began to submit falsified testimonies to the bureaucratic infrastructures imposed by NGOs, and UN agencies providing refugee services in Cairo. Abdel Rahman met the youth briefly in Cairo, as he had a month previously in Khartoum. The money the young man received was genuinely for survival. However, youth, and truly anyone willing to risk cheating the system, often use the funds for illegal migration to Turkey, where they risk entry into Europe. The journey can be fatal, and often is for desperate fathers who have left behind their families in Cairo.

While the young man was said to have used the corrupt money he attained to travel to Turkey, an older Sudanese salesman of Turkish descent stood outside of the Sudanese Restaurant in Cairo every single day, as he had for over fifteen years. While living out a more honest example of the refugee experience in Cairo, a life in limbo, service provisioning had required that he stay in Cairo, based on his medical condition.

The foreign is deeply embedded within Sudanese society, as in the ancestral memory of the people. The same is true in Egypt. Roman, Greek, Turkish and English elements comingle in modern Egypt and Sudan mutually, and presently, as the earliest autochthonous cultures of the Nile. One of their most commonly shared experiences is a dependency and frequency of interaction with foreigners. In the Sudanese Restaurant, an apt microcosm for the Sudanese diaspora, an Egyptian face was rare enough. Still more rare were the tourists, journalists, and students of the West.