Why we are here?

Yesterday I re-read the initial executive summary we were given by St. Andrew's Refugee Ministry, the organization under whose auspices we work teaching English. The project descriptor lists five goals for our "English lessons". None of these goals have anything to do with English. The summary is blunt on this point: the goals are to provide life skills, information about organizations and resources available to refugees in Cairo, and conversational Arabic to non-Arabic speaking populations. In the words of the descriptor itself, though, "it is much easier to attract students to English class." The English component is the teaser, intended really only to attract students. Furthermore, the executive summary cautions us that we may not even be around to see the significant impacts of our program. "One of the main ways we have seen impacts from the summer school programmes have been a higher enrollment in St. Andrew's Adult Education programme by minors who have not previously been able/willing to access education."

To be honest, when I applied for Duke Engage, I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to be doing. I came into the program hoping to gain greater exposure to Egyptian culture, improve my Arabic, and some vaguely defined third goal. Stateside, when people asked me what the purpose of Duke Engage Cairo was, I'd often give obfuscating and unclear answers. "Working with refugees," was a non-answer I'd often use. Gradually I embraced the massive oversimplification of "teaching English to refugees." As I grew more and more accustomed to this half-truth, it became the reality in my brain, so when I got here, I envisioned English lessons as Duke Engage Cairo's raison d'etre.

While English lessons are an important part of our work with St. Andrew's, the reality is far more complex. The Duke Engage Cairo program reflects Professor Lo's philosophy on Duke Engage. Rather than orchestrating DukeEngage Cairo as a sort of "service vacation", where we can show up, do work, and go home satisfied, Professor Lo makes us do the hardest work.

Picture a soup kitchen. You can show up and work for a few hours - which is a very noble and charitable thing to do. But showing up and working, while a great means of civic engagement, cannot match the degree of engagement that the person who actually made the soup kitchen experienced. When we showed up here, I expected the soup kitchen to be ready. I expected there to be ingredients in the kitchen, ladles and bowls sitting in cabinets, and people lining up outside. Six weeks have impressed upon me that this is rarely the reality. The comforting "warm glow" of donating to a well-run, organized NGO is the result of countless hours of backbreaking and frustrating labor on the part of the NGO. While we see the finished organizational model and marvel at the results it is able to achieve, the hardest work has already been accomplished at this point - buying the silverware and convincing people to show up.

What does this mean for Duke Engage? It means that when we showed up, our partner organizations didn't do the "work" for us. I said it in my last post and I'll repeat it here: we aren't interns. Professor Lo mentioned at one point that in an ideal world, one in which we had more than two months to work here in Egypt, he would bring us here without any plans. Rather than working with existing NGOs, he would have us create our own projects based on our desires and the percieved needs of the community. Obviously, the short timespan of DukeEngage makes this an impossibility, but we are still given massive amounts of freedom. No one assigns us tasks or monitors their completion. We have opportunities - i.e. 9 hours a week teaching refugees - but what we do with these opportunities are up to us. And throughout this experience, its been the preparation thats been truly difficult. The hardest part of the trip has not been the three or four-hour periods we spend "in the field", but rather the countless hours of discussion, frustration, and arguments as we try to figure out the key questions of civic engagement: Why are we here? What are we doing? Are we achieving results? Does what we are doing matter?

With regard to that last question, let me quote Professor Lo: "... measuring the impact of DukeEngage is a difficult undertaking," he writes, "but its hallmarks include a lasting experience for the DukeEngager, a deeper bond with fellow students and faculty, and an entrepreneurial approach towards societal causes..." Duke Engage is a long term investment. Our success here is measured not by the improvement in our students' English. Although it may sound selfish, our success has far more to do with our personal gain that it does with the benefits to the communities in which we serve. As amazing as the members of this group are, none of us are teachers. None of us are fluent in Arabic. For the cost of sending 13 Duke students to Egypt (not to mention housing, food, insurance, and recreation, all of which DukeEngage generously compensates us for), Duke could probably hire about 40 competent local teachers. But DukeEngage isn't about short-term results.

Perhaps it's just me, but in my mind this is a receipe for guilt. Duke is spending a small fortune to send us here - our plane tickets, our insurance, our ridiculously posh accomodations, our unnecessarily large food stipends, my 3-student private language class, our beach vacation at Sharm al-Sheikh. Not that I don't enjoy these things immensely. I love being able to eat well without having to agonize over every Egyptian pound, and after seven weeks in the dust and pollution of Cairo, I'm tremendously excited for our trip to the Red Sea. But at the same time, I have a very hard time coming to terms with the fact that Duke is spending this money on my personal growth and "capacity building", and not in the way that would most benefit the people we are "supposed to help". (I should also point out that Duke itself gains immensely from funding DukeEngage - something like 12% of all applicants for the Class of 2014 cited DukeEngage on their application as their reason for applying to Duke, even more than Duke basketball.) I feel guilty. Every time I'm 5 minutes late to work, or skip a problem on my Arabic homework because I'm too tired or would rather go watch world cup matches at a cafe, I go through my head and think about the money and time the DukeEngage staff put in to our experience here, and try to calculate what fraction I just "wasted".

This guilt keeps me honest. Yet while I feel it in my heart, my brain tells me that the money isn't being wasted. My brain tells me that DukeEngage exists not to provide immediate gains in communities around the world, but rather to instill in Duke students a love of service and skill sets that they would never be able to attain inside the classroom. This experience is only wasted if I return home without having changed, without having learned, without having experienced anything. While this DukeEngage program lasts only eight weeks, the engagement DukeEngage exists to foster is meant to last a lifetime. DukeEngage is just the beginning. I'll let Professor Lo have the last word:

DukeEngage, as I understand it, is an investment in the human self, the human capacity and ability to do good, regardless of the constraints of lack of experience and the challenges of time-limits. It is a manner of helping students transit from the legally segregated classrooms to the chaos of the hierarchical, politically divided outside world, where they can witness the myriad problems that confront humanity across the globe.