Every morning at 5:30 am I am woken up by this. First, the mosque to the north, then joins the one to the east, then the one to the west and finally, the one in the south follows. In Mombasa, I live in a neighborhood called Mtopanga. Like every part of Mombasa, this area is filled with mosques.

I live in the middle of 4 mosques and 5 times a day I hear the most amazing blending of different muezzins making their calls to prayer, all in distinctive voices. My favorite moment so far in Mombasa was early on a Sunday morning when the bells of the church collided with the call to prayer and they all rang in a distorted, but beautiful harmony.

The thing that struck me the most when I first arrived in Mombasa was the physical evidence of the colliding of religions and traditions here. There is mosque after mosque with churches and temples nestled between. It is something out of an interfaith fairy tale. A land where people had finally learned to live together! My feelings were only further enforced when I sat at Fort Jesus, the old Portuguese slave-hold that looks over the ocean, and was invited into a conversation with a Jain, Hindu, and an Ismaili Muslim about our various traditions and texts surrounding slavery.

When I told them about the interfaith cafes that are hosted at my university, they gave me a puzzled look. My new friend Hussam looked at me and said “why would you need those to be organized?” Obviously, interfaith dialogue was commonplace here. I was convinced, and I was never leaving. I had found the interfaith holy land where every lives in harmony, conversation and understanding.

And then I started to experience this city more and one day, my love affair with this interfaith land that I thought I had found came to a screeching halt. In the span of 24 hours, I heard a comment from a friend that sincerely wanted to inform me that often times Western Christians are thought of as dirty when they eat because they use both hands to eat instead of only using the right, after my left hand slipped to grab a piece of ugali off my plate out of 21 years of habit. Then, I got into a tuktuk (the scooter cabs that fill the streets of Mombasa) and was warned to beware of Muslim men, because they “like to seduce and convert Christian women.” And my day finally ended with a friend telling the group of us, that in her opinion, Muslim women often use the niqab to be unfaithful to their husbands because of the anonymity that it provides. I went home heartbroken that night. It was the same feeling as falling in love and then realizing that you aren’t in love with the person in front of you, but rather the dream you created of that person in your head.

I couldn’t shake this heartbreak as much as a tried because I felt like I was seeing the same problems here that I was at home. Physically, Mombasa looks like it holds much more productive interfaith activity than Chicago, but it also holds something that I fear for my own city’s future: we will learn to live side by side, but only side by side, never truly interacting.

I started to think that this interfaith holy land that I had dreamed up didn’t exist. I realized that I was right, it doesn’t exist. There isn’t a place in the world where all the work has been done and foundations have been laid for everything to be perfect. If I had found this land that I had dreamed of, I would be missing the point completely. As someone who is committed to the interfaith movement, I remembered how much I enjoy doing the work that will one day build the world to become the interfaith holy land of my dreams. Everywhere we are facing problems that occur between religions: some more apparent than others.

And everywhere, there are people that are trying to make those problems better. I attempt through dialogue, others try different routes. What matters is that we are still planting the seed of the interfaith holy land, not relocating to a place where we think this land might be, as I vowed to do during my first week here in Mombasa.

I’m still in love with Mombasa, but our love for each other has matured. Mombasa has started to show me the layers of itself, and just like back home, under the surface isn’t always pretty. But we learn to love the faults, the ugly and the grounds where things can only get better.

Mombasa may not be the interfaith holy land of my dreams, but it certainly has captured a piece of my heart and I know that the people here are building the interfaith holy land of their dreams, so one day my children can come here and have the same love affair with this city that I did, hopefully with the heartbreak included, because interfaith work is never finished.