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.

The Luxury of Theory

Today at each of our sites, we welcomed a speaker who discussed refugee determination procedures and the UNHCR (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). As we listened to her speak, both of us were struck by how utterly Western were the concepts guiding this process. The overarching theme we found is that often governments fail to live up to the theoretical guidelines mandated by the UNHCR. For starters, most of these refugees are living in Cairo “temporarily,” meaning that the Egyptian government cannot send them back to their home country. Yet in reality, few will ever be resettled in Egypt or elsewhere, and thus will never receive full citizens’ rights. A particularly telling quote from the lecture: “You [refugees] have rights, but they often aren’t carried out in practice.”

In the West we have the luxury of believing that all the agreements we make and treaties we sign will become reality, and that our humanitarian efforts will be fulfilled. Thus we have the luxury of theory – debating the finer points of wording while ignoring the failures and imperfections in implementation. But how do theoretical rights, agreed to on paper but not respected or adhered to in real life, help our students who suffer on a daily basis? Today we heard about our students’ first hand experiences in Cairo: being hit on the shoulder by an Egyptian and being unable to respond, being disgustingly overcharged while buying juice in a market, and having to pay the police in order to avoid arbitrary arrest.

We are not intending to diminish the efforts of the UNHCR, or our guest speaker, or AMERA (Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance), an NGO with which we work closely. Today’s lecture simply made us realize the gap between Western ideals and the true refugee experience. The language of UNHCR policies is laden with ‘maybe’s and ‘might’s and ‘probably’s and ‘possibly’s, but this legal jargon does not account for the real lives of our students. Successful theory, that which on paper solves problems and grants rights, does not necessitate happy and healthy lives. These policies certainly are the jumping off point for a solution to the suffering of refugees, yet they need to be tweaked to suit the infrastructure of the non-Western world. Trusting in theory – pretty pieces of paper that hypothetically eliminate injustice – is a luxury that we never knew we had.

Always Something New

Every day in Cairo is a little bit different. There are new adventures to be had, a new bawab guarding the entrance to our apartment building (a bawab is like a doorman or bellhop, and they chill on the ground floor and open doors for us), new bug bites to be futilely ignored, new types of street food to be attempted, and new places to explore.

When Fernando and I go to Ardilewa (or, Ard al-Liwa), our new adventure is the trip over. The metro ride is pretty standard, give or take the different looks and/or comments I receive, but the microbus ride is always something special. Our first real microbus ride was on the way over, just the two of us, with no one to explain as everyone in the bus began to pass money to a random passenger on the bus. At first, I didn't notice. I was too busy looking out the window, worrying that we were going to miss where we were supposed to get off, and ignoring the man who would not stop staring at the arm I was using to brace myself. Note that we were in the front of a quite crowded bus, facing the rest of the passengers, in an area where very few foreigners venture and certainly, if they do, they don't take the minibus. When I eventually realized that money was going around the bus and I had no idea why, I gave Fernando a panicked look. Did he actually work for the bus driver, but just sit in the back? Was it a low-key holdup that none of the Egyptians cared about but was going to rob us of all of our money? Was I missing some vital, culturally significant activity?

Turns out, it's just easier for everyone on the bus to pass their money forward to someone close enough to pass money to the driver, so my initial fears were unwarranted. But every day on the microbus presents some kind of new puzzle, whether it's how to get the driver to stop, whether or not we should just jump off, how to get around the fold-down seats full of people blocking our exit, or discovering which microbus we should actually get on.

The microbus isn't the end of our adventure, although the market area through which we weave in order to find the correct alleyway down which we meander in order to arrive at the building containing our site is actually usually less exciting, despite its overflow of people, vehicles, animals, goods, and food. But, all in all, pushing through all this is more than made up for by our students, because they are more than worth it!

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.