Beyond

Dear Faithful Readership,

I'm back. It's been far too long. I've been trying to give other DukeEngagers a chance to reflect on the blog...that, and I have been too exhausted to write anything coherent. With a light weekend fading behind me, and a two-hour nap tucked in there today, I now write to you.

The Zohan has asked us to either post pictures and describe them or write about something that surprised us in our week this week. I'll top that. I'll do both. But first, let me describe the title of this post. A few weeks ago- I think it was about the same time that Hannah and Hillary posted about the Luxury of Theory- I was going to write something titled "To Ambivalence and Beyond." A reference to Toy Story 3, which came out that weekend, it was about how I'd moved past my frustration that I described in my previous posts and how I had come to "embrace the chaos" of Cairo (thank The Great Andrew Simon for that nugget of goodness).

Essentially, I discovered that people like myself are products hearing "Can't Isn't In My Vocabulary" too many times. Our successes so far in life have been spawned by the positive self-image that President Obama so eloquently picked up on in his 2008 campaign: the "Yes We Can" philosophy. Our votes matter; our voices matter; our abilities can indeed bring about change. However, I had to shed myself of all these ideas that I could instigate change or success, instead hugging tight the pessimistic notion that I could not succeed whatsoever. This way, every little thing seems like a victory. It is a hyper-cynical concept- one very foreign to me, and I find myself to be quite a cynic in the first place- and I don't think it's a good life philosophy, but it works for NGO work in Cairo. Once you can put forth an attitude of ambivalence towards the obstacles you face here, everything immediately brightens up. I call it my “Small Victories” philosophy.

Thus, we get to the "beyond" part. Now weeks after changing my mindset, I feel better. I have not had difficulty in dealing with the world around me, save nearly being mauled by the clowder of feral cats a few nights ago as I emptied the trash. I have enjoyed teaching more, enjoyed my NGO work more, and have enjoyed this experience more once I took a step back and realized that I might not be able to have the same profound effect I expected to have.

Having caught you up to speed, what was it, then, that surprised me this week? How my beautiful patience has been worn so thin. I genuinely am marveled by how patient and outgoing I have been over the past three weeks. Sure, I complain about things just as much as the next guy (if not more) but I still keep my nose to the grindstone. But eventually the grindstone, well, grinds you down. This week, after one of the worst days ever (the kids at I the Egyptian were truly too much for me to bear; I decided that if Dante wrote the Inferno about DukeEngage Cairo, I'd be put in the circle with hundreds of uncontrollable 2-9 year olds), I snapped at my students in English class.

Let me lay it out for you: we were playing a game where they split into two teams, and they decided not to listen to me when I split the teams. This is a usual occurrence, so no big deal, right? Wrong. That day they decided to pick on the adorable, socially-awkward six-year-old. The boys on either team kept shouting at each other and at him about how he was on the other team; eventually, the boys started pushing the poor kid to either side like neither of the teams wanted him. I didn't tolerate it. I didn't tolerate it because 1) I identify with little kids that get made fun of and there just ain't no way I'm going to let it happen to someone else, 2) I was a socially-awkward kid (and I guess I still am), 3) because this boy is particularly sweet to me, 4) because I couldn't muster up enough patience to deal with it any other way. In beautifully correct Arabic, I told them to sit down and that he is on Team 2. When one of my students decided to mock Team 2, I spun around and told him to "Sit! Here!" and there was immediate action followed by immediate silence. Of course, I didn't yell or do anything wrong; I merely used a surprisingly stern voice and all of my 6'5" frame. Plus, I did the right thing. Rule #1: No picking on kids in my classroom.

But I was still surprised. Where had this come from? I love teaching these kids. In the Ain Shams Dynamic Duo, I am the carrot and Maheen is the whip. How had I transformed? Had I assimilated into the Egyptian culture, where arguing and shouting is a daily occurrence, or had a part of the American get-worn-down-and-finally-explode culture somehow eked through? Did the Small Victories Philosophy fail me, or was it a natural reaction that anyone would have had?

Alas, I will never know. What happened happened, and I did the right thing. I had ventured into the beyond weeks ago and this is simply part of exploring that grey, misty world. My students finished the game and enjoyed the rest of the day. No residual feelings. Teacher and students still get along. My patience repaired the hole in its wall. Discipline was properly disseminated.

I guess you'd call that a small victory.

Here is a picture of some of the kids in the nursery at Ana Al-Masri. Don't be mistaken by how calm they look. At least four sets of hands were grabbing my camera as I took this. Half of my pictures from that day have fingers in the frame.

This is Andi playing with some of the kids. She is awesome. Everyone ought to know that Andi is quite possibly amazing in every regard, particularly at playing Miss Mary Mack.

This Week's Tidbits - June 21

This Week’s Titles:

• Teaching Troubles
• Crying and Smiling Children
• Journey to the Center of Hai al-Asher
• Homework Vs. Lesson Planning Vs. Sleep
• Professor Lo and the Eternal Battle For Interwebs
• The Birthday Party
• Street Fighter: The Victorious
• The Twilight Saga: Cairo (cause the kids at I the Egyptian are routinely getting bitten)

Songs of the Week:

• “Hot ‘n Cold” by Katy Perry
• “Down” by Jay Sean
• “Jump On It” by Apache

Quotes of the Week:

• “What do you mean by Hello Kitty drugs?” –Zuri, befuddled by her teacher’s story
• “Where’d the blondes go?” “Where the pigs went.” –John, on how beautiful blondes like Andy aren’t seen around here because they continually stop traffic
• “Don’t lose your stuff, or else it will end up on some old man’s Christmas tree,” –Hannah, on the moral of story she read in her Arabic class
• “I freakin’ love unicorns…I probably shouldn’t have admitted that…It’s like 10 Galleons a hair.” –Brendan
• “Pregnant is just a dot away from being camel.” –John, on spelling Arabic words
• John’s Vader Voice, in Arabic: “Luke, I am your father.”

Favorite Moments of the Week:

• Street Fight in Khan el-Halili
• Zuri Eating in Class
• Moana Caking
• Zoe’s Birthday
• Working at the NGOs
• Coptic Cairo
• Lecture with Raymond
• Teaching Time to St. Andrew's Students
• Teaching "Ninja" to the Kids at I the Egyptian

Reflection - June 20

In case you are one of the loyal followers who stuck with us even though we haven't posted this week, I send you my thanks. It's been a tough week for all of us- each with his or her own difficulties- so hopefully I can post a few updates later tonight about what's been happening in The Victorious (the meaning of "Cairo"). We have been saving up some things for Today’s Tidbits, so be on the lookout for them.

Before I write anything, though, I will say that my opinion does not represent everyone in the group; it is my opinion, and others may agree or disagree at various points. As much as I might want to see the world in black and white, I realize that there are indeed shades of grey. But I digress...

If I could encapsulate this week in one word, that word would be "frustration". Earlier on in the trip I wanted to try to explain how Cairo is an organic force directly intertwined with our work and our lives. This is not Durham, where you make your own fate. This is Cairo, where things don't ever happen the way you expect and there's no way to change it. Someone is late? It's Cairo. Your class is full of students you didn't expect? That's Cairo too. Constantly changing your lesson plans? Definitely Cairo.

My personal problem dealing with this frustration is that I can't fix it. I am not a control freak, but I like having control over my little kingdom. Cairo wants to teach me spontaneity and I am not an eager pupil. How can you tell if your students are learning? How do you deal with them when they don’t want to learn what you feel they need to learn? How about when you think they don’t need what you originally thought they needed? How should we discipline kids when we don’t have the linguistic and cultural capability of how to do so? Should our goal be to break up every fight and attempt to affect every kid in at least a small way, or skim over the whole bunch and invest in a few shining stars? How do you judge being a good cultural ambassador and is it okay if being one is our only goal?

These are the answerless questions that have been rattling around my head this week during the treks to I the Egyptian and Ain Shams. I do realize that I skipped discussing the bright spots in the week- how Maheen and I are the Batman and Robin of teaching English, or how I met one boy who wants to learn English as much as I do Arabic- but warm fuzzies don’t sell newspapers (or attract blog readership). I battle against Cairo with an open mind and a newfound patience, and in that I am quite impressed with myself. That being said, I currently feel unable to deal with the fact that tangible goals are- in all likelihood- unattainable. There is no way to measure- to touch, to taste, to smell, to see- success here. There is no way to say, “Look, here is what I am accomplishing.”

And that, at least to me, is frustrating.

Today's Tidbits - June 13 and Beyond

Today's Titles

• The Group Gets Busy
• There's A Bat In The Air Conditioner -or- Night Bird In The Air Machine
  
• Brendan vs. Getting Knee Capped, Dance Moves And His Shirt
  
• Pecos Bill : Tornado :: Yasin : Taxi Cab
• George vs. The Nail
• It's About To Get Crazy

Quotes of the Day

• "Zoe, you know the direction?" - Prof. Lo, after all of us were already in the van
• Wild Zubat appeared! -- Air Conditioner used Fan Blades! -- It's super effective! -- Wild Zubat fainted!
• "Always smile at a man with a gun." - Mark Schleifer
• "Power is an aphrodisiac." - Henry Kissinger
  

Songs of the Day

• "Easy Love," by MSTRKRFT
• "Buy You A Drink," by T-Pain
  

Favorite Moments

• The group learning how to Apache
• Watching World Cup games at the Four Seasons and the koosheri place
• Zoe explaining how to learn languages
• The Arab Academy group discussing swine flu in Arabic
• Floating on the Nile, reflecting back on our week
• Mark Abdullah Schleifer illustrates the reasons behind and consequences of conflict coverage in journalism
• Visiting and observing classes at St. Andrew's
  

DukeEngager of the Day: John, for his heroic patience with children

Reflection: June 11

Yesterday, I started scratching the back of my head. I had this little feeling- a sharp, soft pinprick, more like it- somewhere on my head. A mosquito bite? No. A tick? Can’t be. Then, slowly throughout the day, the feeling spread: down the back of my neck, into my arms and fingers, through my chest and to my stomach, where it circled like a hawk overhead before spiraling into a heavy mass. This daunting weight sat in my stomach all day as I watched the child refugees at St. Andrew’s and as I planned my attack on how to better serve them.

We began our morning by observing various classes at St. Andrew’s and luckily I was put into an English class. The children were learning about parts of speech- nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives and all the wonderful things that I love to study in linguistics-, so needless to say I in exactly the right place. Along with Hannah and Lindsey, I had the opportunity to see these eager young kids figure their eager young ways through the English language. I’ve never seen so many smiling faces in a single classroom. Every time the teacher asked a question, at least half the class shot an index finger into the air- their equivalent of raising your hand- and shouted out, “Miss! Miss!” in hopes of answering it.

Chances are that these kids have no chance. They are refugees in a country that either doesn’t want them or doesn’t want to deal with them, or both. Maybe I’m not giving Egypt a fair shake, and the fact of the matter might actually be that Egypt is unequipped to deal with them, but these kids nonetheless have the deck stacked against them. Chances are these kids will have a brutal, challenging existence on this planet. Watching their eyes moon over prepositions was like seeing a beautiful flower that doesn’t recognize the winter two steps away from setting in. It was simultaneously soaring joy and crashing sadness. There was a kind of glorious innocence about it all that I wish I could capture in words or pictures or film. But I can’t. It was the most natural, most basic human reaction, the product of thousands of years of human experience programmed into my DNA. It transcended paternal instinct; it was a moment when you realize what makes you human.

It is our job to fight against all the forces soon to embitter these children’s lives- the government, xenophobia, fear, self-doubt- and to shield them from the coming storm. In all likelihood, our eight weeks probably won’t change things. We may teach 80 kids, but there thousands of others out there. But that’s not the point now, is it? The point is to try to affect them, no, to incite them to change their own lives. We are not teaching them English or Arabic, but rather we are teaching them the tools necessary to empower themselves. If even just one student goes on to lead a better life than they would have without us, then we’ve succeeded. Or, at least, that’s the goal.

Time to go do it.

June 8 - The Group Vs. FDOC

I thought jet lag was bad…until we started our first day of Arabic classes (FDOC = first day of classes) today. It is a four-hour mental marathon that is both something completely identical to and completely unlike physical exhaustion. Imagine your brain simultaneously understanding but not processing everything that is going on around you. John says it is like going to the gym for the first time in a while and finding out that your Arabic muscles aren’t as strong as you thought they were.

Our teachers at Al-Diwan were excellent, never switching to English to give us an easy way out. While I can’t speak for the rest of the group, I think I understood about 60-75% of what our teacher was saying at any given moment- and that’s a pretty good number. Max, Nusaibah, and I pushed our way through Chapter 15 in our book while also picking up a lot of new material (i.e. we discovered there are dual forms for pronouns aka pronouns for groups of two people). While I can’t say I was too excited about doing homework during my sacred summer months, I do indeed look forward to having class again tomorrow morning.

After a quick cab ride to St. Andrew’s- the primary NGO we will be working with- we had a second day of orientation activities. Today we learned about the services that AMERA (the African and Middle Eastern Refugee Assistance) can provide to refugees, such as legal and document services, psycho-social aid, protection, and sexual/gender based violence help. The presenter told us that her individual team works on about 8 cases every month, so we hope we can increase that number over the next few weeks by connecting refugees to the services that can help make their lives better. After a teaching and lesson-planning workshop, we split up and headed off to the sites we’ll be working at (look for another blog post from each group tonight about their individual sites).

Reflection: Week One

Before I get into my reflections and ponderings and whatnot, I feel like I need to give the background to how I reached them. It started last night when Professor Lo talked to me about the blog, specifically about how to make it less “touristy”. At first, I reacted a little defensively about how much fun everyone has had writing it but then I started to think a little more about what tourism meant. And, as usual, Professor Lo’s small statements opened up a world of introspective insights.

What is tourism? Is it spending 8 weeks in a foreign country? Is it exploring Cairo? What makes this blog “touristy”- is it our casual tone or our comparisons between home and here? If comparing the US and Cairo is touristy, then what is less touristy? Is there some deep insight that we (that I?) are overlooking? In a sense, we are actually tourists to Cairo. Eight weeks is not nearly enough time to make us natives of, or experts on, Cairo. So what is the difference between tourism and immersion – because, after all, this is an immersion program. Tourism is physically exploring a place but never becoming part of it. Immersion is exploring a place, in terms of its physicality, its culture, and its personality.

Circling back to the start of this entry, how has this physical, cultural, and personal immersion affected me so far? I don’t know. It’s hard to get perspective on something while you’re actually there, while you’re actually doing it, especially after just one week. What I can say for sure, though, is that DukeEngage has opened my eyes to a part of the world I would never have otherwise seen. Sure, I could have visited Cairo and the pyramids and the museums, but DukeEngage has opened me up to the people and individuals that enliven Cairo. Instead of hearing about poverty or imagining what street children look like, I can now say that the wool over my eyes has been pulled back.

As President Broadhead described in his address to the DukeEngage students, this service-learning project is a unique form of education. Personally, I’ve always found learning to be something you need to experience. I have trouble comprehending or understanding or believing something unless I witness it first-hand. Now I can say that I have done just that: I have seen Cairo. While there is a lot left to learn, and seven more weeks worth of experiences to have, I can see the problems that affect Cairo and I know my place in how to better serve the community. I guess I have just begun to see things in a different light.

Trip to the Tower - June 5

Andi, Brendan, Hannah, and Lindsey try to trek to the Cairo Tower but inadvertently end up wandering around Zamalek instead.