Week 4: Max's Reflection

Walking through Tahrir Square, one is struck by the massive presence of the Mogamma, the headquarters of the Egyptian bureaucracy. Tahrir Square is a giant crossroads located near the Nile, filled with western fast food chains and ringed by hotels and tour agencies. The Mogamma sits incongruously on one side, with a small courtyard accenting its utilitarian facade. It sits there as a rather ugly landmark. Sometimes I see people doing their laundry on the roof.

According to its Wikipedia page (in English), there are fourteen stories and 18,000 Egyptian employees work there. I've never been inside it, but if I needed to renew a visa or get an Egyptian drivers' license I'd need to go there and likely waste a few hours waiting in line. It would be an inconvenience.

Walking back the other day, I reflected on how casually I dismiss the Mogamma as simply another unattractive presence in a city not known for its aesthetic appeal. For the refugees we work with - and for the average Egyptian - the Mogamma is the manifestation of the inefficiencies of the Egyptian state and the difficulties of life here.

I first heard of the Mogamma in my Arabic class, where we watched the video Al-Irhab wa al-Kebab (Terrorism and Kebab). (Arabic classes, especially those at Duke, place a huge emphasis on teaching cultural proficiency as well as language. The first vocabulary word in our Arabic textbook is "the United Nations".) In the film, an Egyptian everyman becomes so frustrated by the bureaucracy that he ends up taking over the building. He is labeled a terrorist by security forces outside, but becomes a hero to the disillusioned "hostages" inside. Whenever I see the Mogamma, I am reminded of the film's satirical analysis of Egyptian society.

I don't know a whole lot about the refugee status determination process, and what I do know is from hopelessly academic sources. I imagine having to wait in line for hours to plead my case to an overworked, underpaid Egyptian employee. I imagine being intimidated by the crowds and inhumanity of the process. If I were from Eritrea, Ethiopia, or Somalia, as many refugees here are, I might not even speak Arabic well enough to understand what was going on.

I can't even begin to imagine how scary the Egyptian state can seem to someone without a foreign passport and an embassy to advocate for your rights. While we were in Alexandria we saw dozens of armored cars and surrounded by riot policemen - apparently in response to protests related to the death of a teenager at the hands of policemen. That's all I've heard and that's all I know about the situation, although I believe it was covered in at least some Western media. (EDIT: for a great analysis and description of the events related to the death of Khalid Said, I refer you to the amazing Andrew Simon. Andrew just graduated from Duke and has a fellowship to spend a year studying Arabic in Cairo.)

Foreigners must content some governmental unpleasantries as well: foreign women will often find themselves stared at by bored policemen with guns; security forces will go out of their way to escort western tourists with the tacit understanding that they will be given compensation for their troubles; there are security checkpoints on the highways where passports are inspected; foreign tourists must pay many times the Egyptian price to visit museums and historical sights. These minor annoyances aside, Egypt pretty much bends over backwards for tourists. This isn't just the cold economics of tourism - Egyptians seem to genuinely love hospitality and their charm in receiving guests is remarkable.

Anyways, I started out hoping to write about the teaching process but once again I've found it far easier to write about buildings than to write about people. I know a lot of our readers (both of them probably!) are curious about what we're doing. I'd like to explain this, but it's difficult. I'm not exactly sure where or how to begin. Before arriving in Egypt, I had sort of implicitly assumed that our role would be more along the lines of an internship, where would be given a role and expected to fulfill the duties of the job. While we have partners here we work with, it's not the same thing as having a "job". Any job requirements we have are our own creations. We have immense flexibility, but this incredible freedom is, at least for me, extremely challenging. Far from the instant gratification of receiving a letter grade at the end of the term or a paycheck every second Friday, we have to come up with our methods, our own goals, and our own ways of measuring success.

I'm probably rambling somewhat, but I think the point I want to make is this: the question "what does Duke Engage Cairo do?" is a question that has 13 different answers. Everyone one of us has, after nearly a month, begun to realize the needs of the communities we are working with and our ability and capacity to engage. We are all developing our own curricula for teaching and making our own choices about how we can best spend the brief time that Duke Engage provides us. Hopefully some of us can begin to define our personal answers on this blog over the next month, and I'm going to make it one of my goals to provide one answer to this question - I think I owe it to Duke Engage and to our readers. I hope to write another post again soon.