I’ve been here in Egypt for over three weeks now. I’ve been living a new life, full of surprises, frustration, and downright hilariousness. Within the first week, I’d experienced many moments of eye-opening shock, seen some of the most beautiful sights on Earth, witnessed some very disgusting acts of characters, been bed sick for a whole day, and have many times laughed so hard that tears readjust the position of my contact lenses. Before even making it to the half-way mark of my trip, I have come into contact with some of life’s saddest stories. I have met more and more people who live the personal narratives we often times only read about in books. Even the slightest reflections on what Cairo has presented leave me with hard questions to ask myself. Every day brings a new story, a new challenge, a new test of patience. Some mornings I wake up excited to jump into the busy lifestyle of Cairo; other mornings I feel as if the hustle of the Cairo streets, with its millions of people, will be fine without me. Either way, I’ve spent plenty of time living my new life here, and after weeks of procrastination, I am now ready to begin documenting it. Bismillah.
Things I learned during my first 48 hours in Egypt:
• According to Professor Lo, Egyptian drivers often keep their cars parked on neutral so that vehicles can be easily moved and repositioned without the driver being present. How they manage to find their cars within the long rows of double, sometimes triple, parallel parking on the streets... I don’t know.
• With a police escort, you can do almost anything in Cairo—including changing the flow of a busy one-way road to the opposite direction so that your bus will more conveniently make it to the apartment. (yea it’s a pretty obnoxious thing to do but the police seemed perfectly fine doing it for us).
• The Nile River is just as magical in person as it is in stories.
• People weren’t exaggerating when they described the amount of negative attention that women get walking on the streets here. Intensely annoying.
• When introducing my name, it is VERY important to enunciate. Although an Arabic name, “Nusaibah” is apparently not as easy to hear as “Museeba,” a word that sounds similar and is close in spelling, yet whose meaning is translated as “disaster/catastrophe.” Yes, this has brought me many awkward encounters with young children and old sandwich shop owners. Though turned into a constant joke and a new nickname by my fellow DukeEngagers, I choose to embrace the slight pronunciation error and add it to the long list of “epic fails” here in Cairo that I have no choice but to laugh at.
• And finally, after months of uncertainty, we received a much better understanding of what our jobs in Cairo will consist of. There are 13 DukeEngage students on this trip (9 girls and 4 guys), one on-site coordinator (Zoe) whose job it is to make sure everything is running smoothly, and one Duke Professor, Dr. Mbaye Lo, who has been the main planner of this project and provides us with constant guidance in order to make the most of this experience. Basically, our two months will be jam-packed with volunteering, interning and taking Arabic classes.
The main component of our DukeEngage project is working with the St. Andrews Organization to help improve the lives of refugees living in Egypt. Cairo is a central hub for adults and unaccompanied minors from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, and Iraq. These individuals were forced to leave their home countries for reasons related to war and danger and are looking to find a new life here in Egypt. Many times, children and teens had to escape their country by themselves and are now separated from their parents and family. We were told that we would be working with unaccompanied minors within the refugee populations, teaching them basic conversational English and life skills (such as hygiene, functioning in the markets, computer skills, etc.) in order to make their stay in Cairo a bit easier. The 13 DukeEngage students would be split into smaller groups and sent to various community centers across the city in order to maximize community participation and more efficiently divide classes along lines of ethnic and linguistic sub-populations of the multicultural refugees. Each class has one community facilitator who acts mainly as a translator for refugee students whose English may be too basic to understand us. We teach three days a week for three hours each day and are given much flexibility to devise our own lesson plans and shape the class in whatever way we feel will be most productive (we’ve received training on how to do this).
Each student also works with a second NGO in Cairo. After visiting the two sites, we each had to choose one to intern with. The first option was an organization called Ana El-Masry (I, the Egyptian). Sitting over 30 minutes outside of downtown, this is a huge complex that seeks to help the lives of children previously living on the streets. These street kids and teens come to the center and, after being evaluated, are asked to live there where they will be provided with meals, shelter, and a sense of family and community. They frequently meet with therapists, teachers, and others to improve the quality of their lives and discourage them from returning to a life of living on the streets. DukeEngagers are responsible for planning and conducting activities for the children. From sport lessons to art classes, we would have to think of creative ways to engage the children and provide them with a welcoming atmosphere.
The other choice for our second NGO is interning with an organization called Kayan. This is a center that works with disabled/special needs children by providing them with various therapists, psychologists, and teachers. Our work here is more administrative, as we will be in charge of projects such as networking, advertising Kayan to organizations with similar interests, improve means of seeking donations, and restructure the organization’s website. Another significant component of working with Kayan is teaching conversational English to the center’s staff in order to more efficiently prepare them for a leap into international networking. Staff members vary in levels of English, with some knowing only how to introduce their names while others are capable of holding down a full conversation.
Work with either Ana El-Masry or Kayan would also be three times a week for about 4 hours each time. I ended up choosing to work with Kayan based on my prior experiences and interests. To add to our already hectic schedule of teaching, interning, and lesson planning, we all take Classical Arabic (Fusha) classes four times a week for three hours each time. Because our group ranges in number of semesters spent studying Arabic at Duke, we are split between Diwan and The Arab Academy, both centers for learning Arabic as a Second Language. I am in a class of only 3 students where the Ustadh (teacher) instructs us only in Fusha Arabic, often frowning on our use of English or Amiya (Colloquial) Arabic. We also attend weekly lectures by professors from local universities. The lecture topics range in subject from political conflicts over the Nile to a look at the work of popular Egyptian writers. Weekly reflection dinners with our Professor and Community Facilitator allow us all to regroup and share highlights and challenges of our week. We receive Fridays off, which will usually be spent catching up on sleep, doing homework, or finding time to sightsee around the city.
We are very consumed within our work and are rapidly becoming more and more a part of normal Cairo life. Yet, we are very much still foreigners and are constantly learning something new about our lives here in Egypt. Learning to reconcile these two facts has been very interesting thus far and has made for many great stories I hope to share in future posts, inshAllah.
