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.

To Tourist? Or Not To Tourist?

As we passed the halfway mark, meaning a whole month had elapsed already, very little changed in terms of our daily lives. I can speak Arabic a little better, and I know my way around now, and haggling comes a lot easier. But few other changes can be found between now and our first week, really. It's been like a major birthday, where you know you're supposed to feel older, but you really don't.
The frustrating part of this? I still get looked at as another American tourist. Trust me, I stick out in a crowd here, and it's a little disheartening to know that I could live here for years and still get the "Welcome to Egypt" greeting from strangers on the street who just want to interact with a foreigner. By this point, the impulse I have to restrain is the desire to turn to them and tell them off in Arabic, proving I'm not just some tourist and explaining to them that I live here.
But what makes me not a tourist? Just because I'm here for two whole months, or I live in an apartment, or because I take classes and teach and volunteer? So what? Two months is a seriously short amount of time, and, as our Pyramid tour yesterday proves, we still want to go around and do all of the sight-seeing and get all the obligatory Cairo pictures we think we need. Where's the distinction?
The unfortunate truth is that I don't think there's much of one. Yeah, we might be slightly more conscious of our dress (especially compared to some of the scandalous outfits I found on people yesterday in the Pyramids area...), but I know I still show my ankles most of the time - something you just don't see on most of the female residents here, even those women who don't veil. And my Arabic isn't that great, especially not my Amiya (colloquial, spoken Arabic).
The big difference, in my mind? What we'll eventually take from the whole experience. Yeah, we'll bring home the pictures, and the souvenirs, and we'll have been to many of those "you've got to go" places. But how many tourists have our microbus stories? Or will remember the contented looks on a bunch of street kids' faces as you let them rest on you to watch a subtitled 'Sword and the Stone?' While we're here, they seem like such little things, lost in the daily bustle as we rush from place to place, from experience to experience. But I have a feeling that, when we go home, it's gonna be Mustafa's smile as he rests his head on my arm, or the kid running up to the microbus' driver seat and stealing the keys, which stick in my mind a lot better than the crowded Pyramids area or whatever other obligatory "Cairo" feature.
Unfortunately, this knowledge does little to curb the comments I get walking down the street, but at least it helps me curb my temper.

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.

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.

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.

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.