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.