Some Poorly Constructed Thoughts…

This is probably going to be my nerdiest post and the one most loosely connected to DukeEngage, but I haven’t been feeling so hot and I’m at that weird in-between where you can’t sleep but you’re too tired to do anything else.

So here’s the deal: I kind of miss Science. And by kind of I mean a lot. A few months ago I was beginning to feel really burnt out with school. That’s when I decided that I would strongly consider taking a year off after college before going to graduate school, which is still something that is quite probable. But along those lines, I thought DukeEngage and my following semester at UCL would be a great test run. It isn’t a complete respite from academia, but I thought it would be a good chance to fully immerse myself in subjects I hadn’t really focused on yet. You know, exercise some different parts of my brain. I’ve been here a month and I’m already a little concerned.

I always thought that what I liked about Science, or rather what I thought set it apart from most of the humanities, was that it’s concrete. It’s very methodical- there are experiments and controls and you must have a definitive measure of your results; even the credibility of your answers is determined by its statistical significance. Of course this is an over-simplification but you can see where I’m coming from. I always thought Literature did a much better job of appreciating subtleties and the social sciences were way bigger on nuances, both of which I think are beautiful and important ways of understanding the world. I can’t say much about Literature yet, but I have been rather disappointed with the intellectual experiences I’ve had with other people so far, Mr. Schleifer’s talk being the only notable exception. Of course I’ve learned new facts, but I’ve found the actual use and discussion of that information very uninspiring. There will be an argument for one side of an issue and an argument for the opposing side and people just talk all day about the bases of the two arguments without, it seems, acknowledging the fact that if both sides are legitimate and made by intelligent people, then there are strong foundations for both and grey cannot be resolved into black and white so easily. It appears to me that some people have trouble letting things sit and working in a realm of that grey. I know this isn’t always the best thing to do, and I definitely acknowledge that I am often guilty of what I am accusing others, but I suppose I just expected something else from people who claim to prefer working in subjectivity. I realize this makes me sound extremely pompous and while, to an extent, that may be well founded, a lot of it is just my inability to articulate exactly what I’m talking about.

On the other side of the same token, I’ve found that there are quite a few subtleties and nuances in my field that I’ve taken for granted because of the people I am surrounded by in class. Everyone I talked to about my subject functioned under some basic premises: a confidence in scientific experimentation, a knowledge base, and a general feel for how the discipline works. I didn’t expect people outside the subject to carry the second of these premises, but it’s the third that really irks me. I find that I’m surrounded by intelligent people with whom I cannot have a conversation about the field that I love. I mean, I deal with that quite often when I’m not at school, because science, especially neuroscience, is a very specialized area. But this amount of deprivation, particularly when I have so much academic respect for my peers, is really getting to me, and I’m beginning to feel like other people just keep talking in circles about stuff I already know. I’m 100% aware that that’s not true, but I’m feeling a serious lack of intellectual conversation. Not only do I find that disappointing, but I’m worried that after a few more months of this I’m going to get pretty rusty with my ability to think in a scientific manner. The worst part is that I just know I won’t have the willpower or time management skills for a self-motivated study of neuroscience when I’m studying English and Art History at UCL.

I feel like I’ve offended almost every non-science major I know in this post and I apologize for that; it’s completely unintentional. I’ve tried really hard all my life not to be academically elitist, and I suppose I’m just frustrated with how difficult that is in a subject I’m so passionate about.

Also, for anyone who cares (A.K.A. parental units), I’m really not that ill. I’m beginning to feel better already J

Ma’Salaama!

Our Trip To Alexandria

So we made a group trip to Alexandria this weekend. Remember that the weekend here is Friday, so we left on Thursday evening after working with our NGOs and returned Friday evening. It was about a 4-hour bus ride and was completely uneventful, as was pretty much the entirety of our stay in the city. I know we were only there for a day, but I feel like “uneventful” is reasonably characteristic of Alexandria. Many of my colleagues loved it. Before we’d gotten off the bus some of them were asking why we couldn’t stay there longer. It’s cleaner than Cairo and less busy. The ever-present Mediterranean coast is also a pretty big perk. My roommate, Andi, will be studying abroad in Alex (as Egyptians call it), and we discussed how she would be much more comfortable there. But that’s exactly what it is- comfortable. And I find comfortable obscenely boring. I couldn’t tell you about living for a long period of time, because as I mentioned earlier I haven’t encountered any particularly frustrating circumstances in Cairo yet, but I can definitely say I’d rather spend 2 months there than in Alexandria.

The only real redeeming quality I found in the city is its tangible history (though in my biased opinion, Cairo is “The Victorious” in this matter as well). The site seeing was pretty cool, though my camera died early in the day (sorry, parents). We saw the palace of the last monarch of Egypt, which was this absolutely gorgeous piece of land on the beach and is now infested by both tourist and Egyptian beach-goers, with their shoulder-to-shoulder identical commercial umbrellas sprouting on the beach like a dense mushroom garden. Before we left we also got an outside view of the city’s famous citadel, but we unfortunately could not take a look inside because it was Friday. I have a strong feeling that the inside looks like a standard modern-day museum, fully equipped with a gift shop and pretty-looking seashells in glass cases (which I saw when I peaked in). That’s the thing about the place- everything is just too renovated. I suppose I can, or at least need to, get over the fact that a place like that is going to be commercial. And I can’t really think of an alternative solution, but I feel that in Alexandria, much of the antiquity has been lost in the preservation. It’s just too new to be that old.

Before the citadel we saw the Library of Alexandria, and I’m pretty sure that this was the part that many of us Duke nerds were most excited for. I knew that the original library had burned down but I was hoping that I would still find some sense of history and transcendence of time in this revered symbol of academia and scholarship of another era. I think most of my friends were even more disappointed than I was. I heard them talking about how they expected symbolism and meaning and just found themselves in a cool-looking building. I think I still enjoyed it more than I would have a normal library, but only because I could remind myself of the significance of where I was. It’s a very academic place with fantastic archives and some pretty impressive technology, but I wasn’t really there to see what the advancements of today have to offer. I was interested, rather, about how and in what environment the great minds of the time managed to lay the foundations of thought for our age.

Faluka Ride With AUC Students

Hey all! I recently wrote a post for our main blog on a faluka ride the group took with some students from the American University of Cairo. I'd love some input :)

Again, the main blog is: dukeengagecairo2010.blogspot.com/

Bittersweet Victory

This week is what I imagined my trip to Cairo to be like. As our handy dandy DukeEngage Academy had warned us, last week morale in the group was pretty low. The combination of exhaustion and frustration was making everyone a little cranky and as the novelty began to wear off, some people were getting pretty disillusioned with Cairo. To be honest, I’ve been pretty unaffected and continue loving this city more and more. I guess that means the excitement of being in a new city hasn’t quite gone away for me yet and the frustrations will probably hit me all at once, but I’m pretty curious to know what it is that puts me over the edge, so bring it on. Either way, while Cairo wasn’t really getting to me, the negativity was, and I was irrationally frustrated that the others couldn’t handle it with the tranquility that I hadn’t even expected from myself.

But I digress. This post is about this week, not last. As most of our group began having a regular class and getting over whatever it is about Egypt that got to them, morale rose. Also, Brendan (who is my partner, in case I haven’t mentioned that) and I realized that we’re pretty awesome. I’ve always been aware of my weaknesses when it comes to children and to creativity and Brendan seems to make up for everything I’m not. I have a year of Arabic on him, so I’m a little better at communicating with the students, but he’s the one that makes the class enjoyable. I think we discovered this about our partnership last week, but we got to see the results of it this week and they were both bitter and sweet. On the first day of class this week half the students were there 5 minute before it was supposed to start (the implications of which you can appreciate if you’ve ever worked with Sudanese refugees). Some came up to us before class and told us they brought their friends; everyone just seemed so happy to be there. I felt so proud that we’d already managed to make them consider our class something worthy of their time. However, as a few more students began to trickle in, Brendan and became a little concerned. I’ve included a picture of our classroom on this post; it’s not exactly a giant room. Luckily, there is a second room in the center, and though it doesn’t have a fan and we were short a few chairs, we decided we had to split up. I know it’s great that we have so many people that we need 2 classes, but I feel like the students will miss out on something in both classrooms. Also, I’m not exactly a huge fan of the fact that I won’t have someone else’s support in class anymore.

Well, as usual, I’ve managed to ramble on for longer than I expected, so perhaps I’ll write another post about the rest of the week. But until then, Ma’Salaama!

Hey kid, want some candy?

So last Monday was our first day of actually working at our respective St. Andrews sites. It was supposed to be a registration day but we were told that we could go ahead and start teaching if the students stayed. The name of my site is Ain Shams (Eye Sun), and since our locations are not, for the most part, in downtown Cairo but at the actual refugee communities on the outskirts, the majority of them are ethnically homogeneous. Ours is a Sudanese community. Now I try to take stereotypes with the giant grain of salt with which they should be taken, but when working with organizations that deal with large, single-nationality groups, like ones doing refugee assistance, little “rules” come up about different groups. The Sudanese have their own sense of policies and time; the Somalians on the other hand are always on time; and the Eritreans don’t like learning Arabic.

I’m not sure if I made it clear earlier, but the focus of our program with St. Andrews is to teach unaccompanied minors in the refugee community. The loose guidelines for the age range are between 15 and 21. Perhaps this wasn’t completely clear to the local man St. Andrews put in charge of getting the word out. It was really exciting to register a full class’s worth of students, but our age range was more like 20 to 46. Brendan and I just took what we had and went ahead and taught class, but when Zoe came to visit our site the next day and saw our group, she and Adam, our community facilitator, left class to literally round up kids and send them to the center. While it is likely that what she did was knock on doors of families that Adam knew and talk to the students, we just got this image in our mind of Zoe and Adam sketchily coming up to kids on the street and telling them to go to our site. Either way, by the end of that class we had a room full of students close to our target age range. Compared to some of the other groups that had only one person register the first day or only 4 show up the whole week, I think we fared the combined precariousness of Cairo and refugee work quite well.

All of our students so far can read and write English, which is a relief that we did not expect. Still, I’m already finding it difficult to teach different skill and age levels. We condescend to half the students when we teach basic introductions and go over the heads of the other half when we break out with parts of speech. The 24 year old doesn’t exactly want to play the games we catered for the 12 year old’s maturity level. Another problem I feel like we’re facing is figuring out what to teach them. The Sudanese are some of the most laid back people I’ve ever met, which is fantastic when you want to be friends with them and awful when you’re trying to help them. We can’t give a full, in depth language course in two months, so we have to pick and chose the things that would be important to them or that they want to learn. The thing is, they won’t tell us what they want to learn. Whenever we ask them about it, or any other matter really, they say they’re fine with anything. But I suppose I understand- you can’t really know what you don’t know yet. Hopefully Brendan and I will start getting a better idea when we spend more time with the community. 

A Little Less Action

Ah, the much overdue post about work. The days have begun to blur together into this mass of stress and action. Everyone has at least 3 main jobs- teaching English at St. Andrews, working with the other NGO (Al-Kayan or Ana Al-Misri), and taking Arabic classes. 

The three tasks alone are pretty difficult to manage, but this doesn’t take into account lesson planning for both St. Andrews and Al-Kayan, the weekly lectures and “reflection sessions” we have, and the quite frankly excessive amounts of homework we are expected to do. This post is probably going to sound whiny, but I think it’s pretty well founded. We are enrolled in an Arabic language institution that caters to students who come here solely to learn the language. I understand the importance of making the most out of an experience, but at some point it begins to be counter-productive. When I’m in an endless daze from constantly trying not to cross the line between getting everything done and sleep deprivation, I’m not working at maximum efficiency. Like I said before, an experience isn’t complete without reflection, but our schedules here are so packed that there often just isn’t time to think about what you’re doing. Here’s an overview of our schedule:

 

Sunday: morning- class            evening- lecture and group activity (ex. AUC visit)

Monday: morning- Al-Kayan            evening- St. Andrews

Tuesday: morning- class            evening- St. Andrews

Wednesday: morning- class            evening- St. Andrews

Thursday: all day- Al-Kayan

Friday: Day of Rest (supposedly- though this has yet to happen)

Saturday: morning- class            after class: Al-Kayan

 

It may not look like a lot on paper, but we spend at least 4 hours at each place and each entails preparation. Honestly, I think the biggest problem is class. I know that it’s important to continue learning Arabic while we are here, and I really appreciate that DukeEngage is giving us the opportunity to do so, but if one thing has to go, it’s that. It’s not what I’m here for and to me it just gets in the way. I should point out that I probably have more reason to be frustrated because I am no longer going to be studying Arabic and thus these classes, while I find them informative, will not be as useful for me as for the people who are majoring. Still, the general sentiment is that it’s a problem.

I was discussing how absurdly little time we have with Zoe, our on-site coordinator (and really our savior) for the trip, and she made a pretty good point. She asked me simply, “Well who really has enough time to do service?” Which is true. We might be here because we happen to have a completely free summer to go help people in Egypt, but in the future, which is presumably what this is preparing us for, we will be working and have families and who knows what else. Everyone who wants to make a difference is spread thin, and it might be good practice to just learn to get used to it.

I’ll try to make this my only whiny post. I’m actually loving Cairo and really enjoying the teaching that I came here to do. But if I want to give a faithful account, I think this piece is important to include. Coming soon (hopefully)- a post about what’s actually going on in the NGO’s.

The Coptic Museum

Who would have thought that I’d remember how much I like Islamic art in, of all places, a Coptic museum? Now I should probably clarify that I don’t mean art necessarily by Muslims, for Muslims, or about Islam. I just mean the art that’s associated with Islamic culture and history and that often uses themes or tools very characteristic of Muslim art, like precise geometrical shapes or the lack of faces and icons.

Some friends and I went to Coptic Cairo today. If you don’t know, the Copts are a Christian religious minority in Egypt. We checked out the museum and I was pretty unimpressed. Honestly, I think I have yet to be impressed by any art exhibit or museum. So unless I’ve just visited all the wrong ones, I’m beginning to think that I’m not particularly interested in whatever it is that museum-seekers enjoy, which I must admit is a bit of an intellectual let-down for me, especially because I’ll be taking half my course load in Art History next semester in London. I can definitely appreciate the need to preserve old art and artifacts, and the stories behind the pieces and their creators and influences are often fascinating, but I would enjoy just as much, in all likelihood more, to read or hear about the incredible material or new method or tools so-and-so artist used centuries before anyone would expect. Because, quite frankly, I don’t want to see mediocre quality paintings and random preserved pieces of intricate yet completely unoriginally carved columns, even if they are from 5 thousand years ago or something.

Still, the experience wasn’t completely empty. While I wasn’t too fond of the actual exhibited work, I thought the museum itself was fantastic. It was full of these beautiful wooden panels on the wall with intricately carved holes that functioned as windows letting just the right amount of daylight in to create a good ambiance. It reminded me of one of those aspects of Muslim architecture I studied growing up that always made me feel so solemn. I’ve seen plenty of them before, but I can’t seem to get over the effect. The other part I loved was this massive central room with high ceilings that was all white and displayed a handful of stone pieces. It probably seemed more Roman than anything else, but the lighting and I suppose just being in Cairo or something, I’m not really sure, made me feel like all it was missing was a big fountain in the center with 4 streams going to the 4 corners of the world like the one in the Alhambra. Though I think I’m just romanticizing now. It’s pretty irrelevant, because either way it gave me some good personal insight about what kind of art and architecture I enjoy. Nothing I didn’t already know in the back of my head, but now that it’s in the forefront it might give me some guidance for when I go about my studies in London.

Youm Sayeed!

18 June, 2010

Always Smile At A Man With A Gun

Today I have been utterly exhausted. Sleeps become a bit of a luxury and my stomach hasn’t been feeling quite right, a casualty of visiting Cairo of which I have fortunately been the last and most mild sufferer. But even our discussion in Arabic class about perceptions of women in hijabs and Coptic-Muslim tensions in Cairo (yes, fully in Arabic. We’ve been having these surprisingly intellectual discussions in class for three days now and they are quite encouraging) didn’t perk me up like it should have. 

However, there was a 2-hour span of time today that I forgot about my exhaustion. We went to the American University of Cairo in the evening, which is a beautiful campus, and met with a professor of TV journalism there named Abdallah Schleifer He was one of the most accomplished, or perhaps I mean well-connected, men that I have met. A slim, gray-haired figure of over 6 feet, his presence itself is unmistakable. We’d gotten no briefing on whom we were going to hear speak and I had literally never heard of the man, but within 5 minutes of his beginning to talk I knew that he was something else. His experiences spoke for themselves. Among other things, he’d worked as a foreign correspondent and an NBC Cairo Bureau chief, and as he began to speak about something or another that he’d written, he accidentally mentioned that he was good friends with Ayman al-Zawahiri. Yes, seriously.  He was so flippant about the fact that more than half the group didn’t even notice. You can just tell that he’s really been in the field. He’d worked for everything from a low-budget dissenting paper in Lebanon (for which he was essentially thrown out of the country) to gigs that involved interviewing Henry Kissinger and Middle Eastern heads of state. He was a riveting speaker that not only understood, but did an excellent job of actually communicating the intricacies and the subtleties involved in journalism. Dr. Schleifer gave me two original pieces of advice: I should always smile at a man with a gun, and I would be surprised at what I could learn from getting in trouble with government intelligence agencies. What a guy.

Well the point of that little spiel was not to promote his new book or anything. Most people who read this blog know that I’m absurdly clueless about world affairs or current events. This has been bothering me more and more lately but I can’t get myself to care enough to actually do something about it. Well, hearing the way Mr. Schleifer talked and made references to world affairs that he just assumed we knew and the way he could look back on these events and applied insight to connect them and show cause and effect, all in that interesting way of his that comes from being out in the field, it got me pretty motivated. I’ve never actually wanted to read the New York Times until right now. So I’m making it a goal to try to become more actively aware of news when I get back. I’m not sure how well I’ll hold to it, which is why it might help to have this blog entry up as constantly holding me accountable.

On a different note entirely, I will begin to put my own date on entries because the work (which I will hopefully post about soon) has gotten to the point that I literally don’t have time to write a full entry in one day. Thanks to everyone who actually asked about the blog when I hadn’t posted in a few days J

Ma’Salaama!

13 June 2010

A Bit of Miscellany

Salaam Alaykum!

I don’t have any specific experience or event to write about in this post, but a trip is about more than just things that happen and your reflections on them. Sometimes you also make a series of observations that begin to form part of a sort of coherent picture, and when that begins to happen, or doesn’t happen, I’ll probably file it under miscellany. That and anything else random I feel like sharing at the moment.

As a girl going to Egypt, one of my first concerns was dress. I knew I’d have to cover up more than at home and I was both annoyed and worried that I’d have to do this in 100-degree heat. First off, the heat is surprisingly tolerable. I know it’s going to get worse but I’m pretty grateful for that. Even with that aside, I really think that there’s something to be said for modesty. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for freedom of expression, and I think the institutionalization of something like modesty destroys much of the beauty in it. But we must remember that even without political or religious mandates, there are still social pressures on how people, particularly women, should dress. And these are just as prevalent in America.  Many women in the states feel compelled to show their bodies in the same way that they feel compelled to hide them here. At first I thought it was just the little traditional Pakistani in me talking, but a group of us girls were discussing it yesterday and we agreed that, really, no one wants to see women in booty shorts. There’s something delightful in the reserve it takes to want to cover yourself, though I think the feeling goes only as far as the ability to make the decision of your own volition, and that concept seems a little too idealistic to sit well with me.

On a perhaps less insightful note, while I may be covered, I still manage to remain constantly dirty. I know my mother is cringing in her seat right now, but honestly mom, I can’t help it. You get out of the shower and the moment you walk outside you get grimy again with the dust in the air and on the ground, air conditioning water dripping on your head from the buildings above, and your own sweat. It sounds horrifying, but you can’t fight it. You just have to give in to it, and once you do, it’s actually kind of nice. Perhaps that’s disgusting or something, but the situation is unavoidable, so you might as well let it make you a little more care free, if only for the time being.

Lastly, I suppose I should touch on the matter of safety. I’d feel safer in Cairo than New York- any day of the week. Probably even more than Chicago or Atlanta, and definitely more than Durham. We were all surprised. A woman chased after me in the metro because I accidently left my change of 25 piastres at the counter. That’s less than 5 cents. One of the guys in our group received an email yesterday in broken English from a taxi driver saying that he had his i-pod and should call him to get it back. You may have heard about the large amount of catcalling that goes on in Egypt, but not once have any of us been touched, shoved, or scared about our safety in any way (except, perhaps, because of the traffic). We’re always very cautious anyway, but it was indeed a pleasant surprise.

Oh, and one last thing. I ate Egyptian style McDonalds yesterday. It was quite possibly one of the best things I’ve ever eaten.

Ma’Salaama J

St. Andrews Orientation

This whole week we’ll be getting oriented with St. Andrews and today was the first day. This year, the organization is doing something it has never done before. Unlike the past two years, when the refugees traveled to the main center in Cairo, this time we’ll actually be splitting up and going out into the communities. This will probably be more difficult and involve more planning on both our part and the organization’s, but it’s incredibly exciting. It will be a much more comfortable environment for the kids, it will be more easily accessible, and we’ve moved the classes to the evening so children who have jobs can still attend.

During the very casual orientation, Fiona, the person from St. Andrews that is leading this project, and some of the facilitators that will be helping us, got to talking about how we should focus on the reality of the situation. Many of these kids have this dream in their minds that we, coming from America, have the power to take them home with us or get them to America somehow. I know it’s not nearly the same thing, but I thought of when I was younger and reading the Harry Potter books and wished to no end that I would get a letter from Hogwarts on my tenth birthday. Again, it doesn’t compare to situation of these kids, but there’s still the strained yearning that kind of fills your entire body, that hope that your whole life will change somehow, and that slow, heavy feeling in your stomach when your tenth birthday passes by, and then your 11^th, and then you’re 16 and it’s just a silly memory of some stupid dream. America might as well be Hogwarts to them, not just in how foreign it is, but for most of them, quite frankly, in the likelihood that they’ll ever go there. Being here, now, in the moment, it just makes me so upset. Not exactly in an emotional sense, but more like unsettled and antsy. I want to do something, physically, with my hands, as if I could feed them education and a better quality of life with a spoon.

Fiona told us how we’re going to have to think of some creative ways to teach and get to these students. Especially because the focus of our work with them is not teaching English or Arabic, which will apparently only be a small part of what we’re doing. We will be concentrating on important skills, like teaching them how to apply for housing, the process for appealing a decision on refugee status, and even basic things- many of the children are separated and don’t have parents to tell them the simplest things, like what kinds of food are cheap and nutritious, that they are allowed to go to the hospital when one of them breaks a finger, that they should brush their teeth. It could be anything. What I was getting at, though, was that this stuff has to be taught to children in a way that they can understand, and I really don’t have a creative bone in my body.

Now that I think about it, it’s really difficult to feel qualified to do something like this. These kids need everything in the world, and I don’t think there’s a politician, economic planner, or social worker out there that can solve all their problems. Who am I to try? And I know I’m not here to solve all their problems, but they just have so many that even trying fix a few begins to look like quite a daunting task.

First Day on the Job

I had SO much fun yesterday! This is actually what I intended to write about in my prior blog, but I was just too exhausted to keep going. If you haven’t looked at our main DukeEngage Cairo blog, even though I told you to, I’ll just give you a very brief run through about what we’re doing.

The entire group will be working with an organization called St. Andrews and teaching refugee children English and some basic skills, like computer training. The group will also split up to work one of two NGO’s. Ana Al-Misri (meaning I The Egyptian) works with street children. Children on the street is a considerable problem in Cairo, and they include orphans as well as children who did/do not have a suitable living environment at home, though they might even still be in touch with their parents. We were told that this is quite different from children on the street in other parts of the world. Our job here would be to play with the kids and teach them lessons in things like sewing, drawing, and computers. The second NGO is Al-Kayan. This organization works with children with mental and physical disabilities. While working with Al-Kayan would entail weekly trips with the children, it also involves more behind-the-scene development work for the organization, including updating information on their website and teaching their staff English. Oh yeah, and we’ll be taking Arabic classes 4 hours a day 4 times a week. Moving on.

I ended up choosing Al-Kayan. I thought I could be really helpful with some of the website stuff, as one of the main things they want to do with it is keep the English part of the site updated on the latest important information in relevant fields like child psychology, motor disorders, autism, etc. I’m the only science major in the program, and that’s totally applicable to neuroscience. Of course I got excited. Also, I really don’t like kids. That was an important factor. Anyway, yesterday was our first day on the job. We took an Arabic placement test in the morning, attended an orientation on Cairo, and then five of us got sent off to Al-Kayan (with this crazy taxi driver who tried to cheat us in an endless number of ways. Good thing I’m awfully mean and shameless) while the other eight people got to explore the city because Ana Al-Misri wasn’t ready for them yet. I was pretty jealous of them but I’m not anymore- I had such a blast. We’d found out which of the two NGO’s we’d be working with literally the night before, so we were completely unprepared and caught off guard when we walked into a room with five Egyptian female employees accompanied by the two men we’d met during orientation. Ready, set, teach English! No really, they expected us to just go for it. So we did.

We introduced ourselves and then met with one woman each (the numbers worked out eerily well) individually to assess their current English level, then broke them up into two groups based on the level. We made lesson plans on the fly and during random, albeit sometimes awkward, breaks between activities. It actually worked. I mean, we didn’t teach them English in a day or anything, but we came up with some great ideas, got a good understanding of where the students stand and for what purpose each wants to learn English, and actually taught some pretty helpful material. Two of the three women in my group (the more novice level) were teachers for disabled students and they wanted to learn English to be able to understand medical terms and read more about the conditions they were working with. I’m going to see if I can find a good English-Arabic dictionary of disorders and maybe a scientific article that won’t be TOO complicated to go through. Now I’m so excited to make lesson plans. It seems like a lot of work though, and I worry that we won’t be able to teach them enough English that they will actually be able to use it for the purposes they want. I really hope I’m up to it. 

Here's the link to the English part of Kayan's website: http://kayanegypt.com/en/

My First Reflections on Cairo (The Victorious)

Hello all! This is my first blog post even though we’ve been here for almost four days now, and while I know this means I’ve probably already forgotten quite a few noteworthy things and will not include everything in one post that I would have in four, I just needed some time to get my bearings. Egypt hits you all at once, and the idea is something akin to taking a picture of a beautiful object moving fast by you. I’d rather experience the moment without a lens first.

 Still, there is no depth to an experience without reflection. The moment I stepped out of the airport, I immediately thought of Pakistan. There’s something about that odd combination of the smell of rotten eggs, petroleum, and dust that makes me nostalgic for the country I spent very few years in. Ah, but I won’t spend much time on our first introduction to the city. The other blogs do a great job of it and I’d highly recommend reading them. Military holding guns as casually as their soviet-era walky-talkies (fingers carelessly resting on the triggers), officers following us home from the airport for our “security” because they really have nothing better to do, areas with blocks and blocks of unfinished yet fully occupied apartment complexes because if they are not finished they technically do not exist and thus do not obligate taxes, and pyramids. No seriously, the pyramids, they’re right there. We haven’t visited them yet, but next time you’re casually driving down one of the bigger highways of Cairo (or getting driven, you won’t be able to drive here), you will glance up and there will be the pyramids. Not far off halfway into the Sahara or anything. Google map it. In fact, Google map Cairo. Remember in those cartoons when some lovable character would almost be dying of thirst in the middle of the desert and just in the nick of time would chance upon a surprisingly lush oasis? That’s Cairo. Palm trees and all. There is no gradual transition. One of the organizations some of our group will be working with is in the desert (also where the suburbs are. I suppose I should know that the suburbs of a desert-locked city would naturally be desert, but did you think about that? OK then). As we drove out of the city, there was literally a line of palm trees marking the boundary between city and sand dunes. Never have I seen such a stark scenic contrast.

 Last night, we were invited by some friends we have in the area (yeah, we have friends in Cairo. No big deal.) to a concert by a pretty famous and popular Arabic band called Al Wast Al Balad, which translates to The Center of the City. The music was great in itself, but it was really interesting to see college-aged women in hijabs dancing wildly, relatively speaking of course, to a pop band. And I know with that comment I risk sounding like an ignorant American that thinks women who cover their hair are not entitled to enjoy themselves, but that’s really not what I’m getting at. Cairo seems to have this fascinating combination of modernity and tradition, liberality and conservatism, advancement and antiquity. I feel like I can’t say much after four days, but I’m really interested in taking a closer look at these dichotomies.

 Oh goodness, I did exactly what I didn’t want to do, and that’s write a giant blog post that mentioned everything but today, which is the day I’m actually really excited to talk about. Well, I know no one reads super long posts, and it really feels like a different subject entirely, so I’ll just go ahead and start it on a new post.

 Thanks for reading, and if you’re interested, please definitely check back periodically to see what my colleagues and I have been up to. Ma’Salaama!

Intro

Hello readers, welcome to my blog :) I have created this, for now, to catalogue my experiences in my trip to Egypt. This is actually a branch off from the official blog for my trip, which has the following website: dukeengagecairo2010.blogspot.com/ I am going to write on it as well, but it is much more of a group effort and I wanted to have a place to reflect on my own thoughts without having to consider what other people have already discussed and other such things. In any case, I will write as if you already know why I am here. Feel free to ask me if you don't, and please do reference the real DukeEngage website.