St. Andrews Community Centers

Unlike the past two years that St. Andrews and DukeEngage have been working together, this year the organizations are trying something quite different. Instead of all of the refugee children going to the main St. Andrews site in Cairo, the DukeEngagers will be splitting up into groups of two or three students and going to centers in the local refugee communities to make the instruction more accessible. Someone from each site wrote up a little blurb about their community center and their first experience – these blurbs are combined here.

Ain Shams Group:
Brendan and I (Maheen) were paired together to go to the community center in an area called Ain Shams, conveniently located right off one of the metro stops but three stops away from the end of the line. The first thing that both of us thought as we left the station (after taking in the odd combination of smells, both sweet and, uh, not-so-sweet) was that this is what we thought Cairo would look like. Perhaps we had an ignorant or backwards notion of what a city in a developing country would look like, but Ain Shams is more of the Cairo we imagined than anything we’ve seen in the past week. There is one thing we noticed, though. As we walked by the street vendors selling fresh fruit and a donkey cart pulling hand-made vases, we found that no one was staring at us. We’ve kind of gotten used to getting a deluge of odd glances as we walk by any street in Cairo, both because I’m a woman and Brendan happens to be a 6’4 white kid. This we’ve just learned to accept as the culture. We felt oddly much less out of place in this conservative area- one that sees many fewer foreigners. We’re really looking forward to working with Adam, our community facilitator, in this area starting next week.

St. Andrews Group:
While most of the DukeEngagers were out on their volunteer site visits today, my (Hannah’s) day was a bit more relaxed, as we were already in my future classroom! I have the pleasure of working with Nusaibah and Hillary at the St. Andrew's center downtown, the same location where we had the beginning of our orientation today and yesterday. Although we got to see the St. Andrew's school in action, we have not yet met any of our students. Our program is geared towards unaccompanied minors who are not enrolled in school, specifically targeting those who work during the day. Our students will be primarily Eritrean and Ethiopian, with about four Iraqi refugees in the mix. I'm interested to see the differences between the circumstances of the various nationalities. The chances of resettlement are much higher for refugees from Iraq than for those from Africa, so there might be a difference in outlook between the different populations. The three of us will be working with a wonderful community facilitator named Jamal, who is Eritrean. He filled us in on the current situation in Eritrea: the country is highly militarized, and soldiers have made a habit of entering schools, measuring all the students, and, if a student reaches a certain height, immediately enlisting him into the military. Thus, there is a high percentage of students who flee to Egypt before they can be enlisted. He also said that many of the Eritrean students speak some English, but are anxious to improve. Although this could make our task a lot easier, I'm a little anxious that the skill levels of the group will be extremely diverse. However, with some creativity on our part, we should be able to accommodate all skill levels. We won't begin teaching until next Monday, but we're very excited to work more with Jamal and write lesson plans until then!

Hayd Ashr Group:
Despite a structured, planned schedule, life in Cairo is really never what you expect it to be. Perhaps the real adventure of our trip to Hayd Ashr, the site where Max, Ruba, Zuri and I (Moana) will be teaching, was our mode of transportation to get there – the microbus.
The microbus ride in itself was fairly comfortable. A microbus is essentially a mini-van seating a maximum 10 people. I got to sit next at the back next to the window and embrace the dusty yet breezy Cairo air as we sped along unfamiliar roads out of the city and I became oblivious to our infrequent stops and people getting on and off, looking outside in awe of the city’s traffic. It was not until we were deliberating how to get back did I realize that microbuses do not have an actual stops – people are allowed to get on and off at the whim of the driver. The bus waits for no one; if you are lucky, you can get on and off when the vehicle is not in motion.
Then we were there. I had only imagined a place like Hayd Ashr but never actually seen something like it before. As soon as we walked into the compound, I was reminded of India briefly – mostly in terms of the communal feel of the place: children playing in the open space, small shops, a pharmacy, a butcher and an outdoor community space for residents to socialize. It felt like its own little world within this incredible city. The residents are primarily Somali and Sudanese refugees and we saw the large indoor community center space and nursery where we will teach starting next week.
I have never taught before and furthermore, our teaching sites are far from anything like a classroom environment and so I am nervous yet excited about the prospect of meeting the 40-45 children next week and getting to know them, building their trust and, hopefully, impacting their lives in some way.

Ard al-Liwa Group:
Fernando and I (Lindsey) had no idea what to expect as we followed our community facilitator, Abdullahi, out of St. Andrews and down the street. After a failed attempt to hop on a microbus, we ended up taking a taxi to Ard al-Liwa, a neighborhood near Sudan Street in Giza where many Somali refugees reside. Abdullahi is great, and has been wonderful in answering our questions and making us feel welcome at the center in Ard al-Liwa, but as he walked through the market towards the community center we had to race to keep up with him, dodging not only people and goods but also cars, motorcycles and the occasional donkey, because Abdullahi stops for no one and rarely looks back to see if his two wayward American coworkers are keeping up.
But we made it to the center perfectly safe, and chatted over Fanta in the small room where we’ll be teaching 20 Somali refugees – 11 girls, 9 boys, ranging in age from 14 to 19. We discussed what we should teach, what should be less emphasized and the probable skill levels of our students (little Arabic or English, little literacy). It was awesome to be able to finally see this place we keep talking about, and it really started to make our project a lot more real for us as we began planning in our actual teaching space.
Then, we were off back towards home – Abdullahi led us to where we could hop on a bus, and waved us off as we began our journey to the metro station. We were a little worried at first, since we really had no idea where we were or where we were going, but I think both of us are glad that we’re finally out of the hand-holding stage of living in Cairo. We made it back without getting lost, and, if we can learn a little bit of determination from Abdullahi, we think we’ll be able to teach without getting lost as well.