Los Angeles:
This week, Khaled Abou El Fadl has greeted each fellow Egyptian he sees with one word: "mabrook," or congratulations.
But quickly, their joy over the toppling of the presidency of Hosni Mubarak gives way to a rapid string of questions. Can they raise money here in the United States to help clean up Tahrir Square? Can they help revive the economy by urging friends to invest in Egyptian companies? Can they successfully lobby for the right to vote even though they have lived abroad for years?
And, after weeks of watching events thousands of miles away unfold on television, another thought keeps nagging at them: Is it time to go home?
That is a profound conundrum for Egyptian immigrants, many of whom left the country to escape an autocratic government and have built a prosperous life for themselves in the United States. They are eager to help rebuild their home country and wonder if they might put their talents to use there, bringing their own experience with democracy to help reshape society. And yet, many are loath to give up the very freedoms they hope to see blossom in Egypt.
Mr. Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a critic of Mr. Mubarak, has spent hours on the phone in the last several days discussing ways to rewrite the Egyptian Constitution, including speaking with some of the jurists selected to serve on the panel created by the military there.
"My heart, my soul and my intellect is just completely tied up into that, the democratic constitution we need in the Arab world," he said. "One of the first calls I got was from a colleague there asking me to help. Would I quit my job? I don't know that yet. I don't know how to best contribute."
The conversation about whether to stay or go is repeating itself at countless dinner tables, in urgent telephone calls and in posts on Facebook, particularly among highly educated and younger Egyptians who may have the most to lose by leaving the United States, but also the most to gain.
"I don't think any of us are not seriously considering moving there," said Nadine Wahab, 34, a public relations executive in Washington and a leader of the Egyptian Association for Change, which helped organize protests throughout the United States during the last several weeks. "Everyone is asking what can I do? What would I be going back to? Where am I going to make the most impact?"
There are roughly 300,000 Egyptians living in the United States, according to the most recent census data, with the largest concentrations in Southern California and New York, and a smaller but close-knit cluster around the District of Columbia.
Hana Elhattab left Egypt five years ago to start college at the University of Maryland. Her parents had moved there three years earlier and Ms. Elhattab figured she was saying goodbye to Egypt for good. "I wasn't going to move back ever," she recalled telling people. "But the moment Mubarak was going to be gone, I knew I was going back."
Since graduating last year, Ms. Elhattab has worked as a policy analyst for a Middle East research organization in Washington. When the protests began last month in Cairo, Ms. Elhattab immediately began translating Twitter posts from Arabic to share with a wider English-speaking audience.
"Everything I have done since I got here has been about creating a career here," she said. "Now I have to start that over and figure out what is going to be relevant and helpful there. I need to do something that is a real job. I don't want to go and just be another liability there."
First, Ms. Elhattab plans to look for a job in the United States in international development and to go to graduate school, which means it could be two or three years before she returns to Egypt. "If I could go tomorrow, I would," she said.
The same kind of anxious impatience is tugging at Rania Behiri, 31, who left Egypt with her family when she a toddler. She traveled back often though, and last year married Rami Serry, an Egyptian racecar driver she met over the Internet.
Ms. Behiri was reluctant to move her two sons, 9 and 12, from a previous relationship, to Egypt from West Covina, Calif., and Mr. Serry refused to leave Cairo, so the two resigned themselves to a long-distance marriage.
But last week Ms. Behiri quickly changed her mind and is preparing to move with her sons next month. When she arrives in Egypt, she plans to work for a professional development company her father-in-law runs. A group of Egyptian-born businessmen are planning a fund-raiser in the next several weeks to help underwrite her efforts.
"People don't have trust, they don't have faith and they have been just so oppressed and messed up by the laws that they need to learn how to think for themselves," Ms. Behiri said. "It's going to be invaluable. This whole thing showed that people truly can make a difference -- so now I feel like, of course, I want to be a part of it."
Ms. Behiri is one of countless Egyptian immigrants speaking in such grand terms these days, driven by what they saw happen to their birthplace. Many in the Egyptian diaspora here say they hope to educate people back home before elections and will press for the right to vote as well.
After years of oppression, Ms. Berhiri said, many Egyptians might be easily deceived by unscrupulous or power-hungry politicians. Friends her age, for example, could be so focused on improving Egypt's economy that they are too willing to overlook religious demands by public officials.
It is not unheard of for exiles to return to their birth country to help rebuild after a revolution. Less than a decade ago, millions of Afghan refugees were repatriated, and many found a place in government, including President Hamid Karzai.
Hundreds of Egyptians come to the United States on student visas, planning to earn graduate degrees and look for a job in academia. For years, many of them scrambled to find jobs anywhere in the world outside Egypt. They worried that working as a professor there would not provide enough money to support a family. And more worrisome, they said, was the prospect of limited academic freedom.
Nora Muharram and her husband, Said Fares, assumed that they, too, would try to find a way to remain in the United States once he finished his doctorate in Islamic studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the spring.
"We never looked forward to going back," Ms. Muharram said "The environment would not allow him to publish the kinds of papers he wanted to do or give my children the kind of education I wanted for them. Now, all of that has changed and we are very, very optimistic."
Ms. Muharram said she was confident that with her background as an electrical engineer, she would be able to find a job.
"People are going to want a better life, to change things, to do something," she said, her voice rising in excitement. "The picture is still not clear, but at least now I am hearing the hope from everyone."