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