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.