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/