Life on the Cairo Doctors' Circuit

The last thing anyone wants to read a blog about is someone else's medical problems. I will try to keep these details to a minimum. The last 3 weeks I've spent trying to figure out what's wrong and get treated, though, has been an adventure into the medical underworld of Cairo (I mean this facetiously, I'm not buying paper bags of pirated drugs) and, more generally, into the confusion and frustration of trying to get the right kind of care in a foreign city.

I have already recounted my early October experience of receiving injections from the purple t-shirt man in the back closet of my local pharmacy. Unfortunately, those proved ineffective, as did the antibiotics that followed. When I started to feel worse instead of better, I visited one of the AUC doctors at the university clinic. She produced some giant pliers covered in cotton balls and antiseptic and shoved them down my craw with a flourish. Then I was sent on my merry way with prescriptions for a smorgasbord of sprays, pills, and gargles. None of these really seemed to work either, despite how wide she had cast the net. Commenting on the fact that I had lost much weight as a result of my inability to swallow easily, the doctor laughed - "I am old and I got fatty. I need to get tonsillitis so I am not so fatty." Then Dr. Susan sent me to an ENT specialist at a well regarded private hospital called Mostashfa El Salam (Peace Hospital). There is at least one good thing about the system as it's working for me, notably that AUC pays for all my prescription drugs and hospital visits, which by now would really be racking up.

It's worth pointing out that Egypt has both public and private hospitals. Public hospitals are generally considered to be pretty scary places, but of course they provide a very necessary function in the community because they are way, way cheaper. It costs perhaps 20 LE to see a doctor at a public hospital (~ $3) while it costs 120 LE ($20) for a consultation at El Salam. Especially if you're making repeat visits, which most people are, that's a really hefty sum for someone with a low-middle to low income. Then of course you add on blood tests, which cost me about 155 LE ($25) at the private hospital, and any medications. Fortunately, medications are incredibly cheap compared to what they cost us at home. Never mind insurance, a round of antibiotics often costs less than $10, and prescriptions generally aren't needed. (This makes me feel pretty sad about the astronomical cost of prescription drugs in America.) Anyway, at the end of September, the doctors' union announced a nationwide strike of all but emergency care physicians in public hospitals, protesting their pitiful government pay and demanding better working conditions. The strike is still ongoing and the doctors are asking that 15 percent of the national budget, instead of the current 5 percent, be directed to health. Several young doctors confirmed that the minimum wage for those in public hospitals, which is required for a few years after finishing medical school, is less than $20 a month. Of course, they all work several side jobs in private clinics to make ends meet, but this means that very little focus is given to the needy patients in the public hospitals.

Fortunately for my personal condition, the private hospital was running as usual. As soon as I walked in, I had a flashback to my one previous stay at a Cairo hospital. Rewind to 2006, when I got a nice pair of rear-end injections at one such hospital after a gruesome, McDonald's lettuce-driven bout of food poisoning. This time, when we finally found a check-in window (perplexingly labeled "Private" and "Contracts" rather than "Check-in"), I was told that the doctor with whom I thought I had an appointment was not working that day. Strange, I thought. (Or, actually, WHAT?!) Dr. Sherif Rafaat was here yesterday, but Dr. Sherif Magdy is here today! said the man at the desk. They have the same name and the same degree, you will be fine. Well, in that case, take me right on up! It turns out appointments don't really exist - you just wait in line, first-come first-serve. Fortunately that night there were only 3 or 4 others waiting. Dr. Sherif, his head decked out in some kind of giant headlamp, was not interested in small talk, taking my vital signs, or anything of the sort. He opened my throat, looked inside, and told me I had glandular fever. Within 5 minutes, he had written me up some papers for blood tests and drugs and shooed me out. In another building, my roommate and I were sent from unmarked window to unmarked window for paperwork, bloodwork, and more paperwork. A short while after I returned home that night, I received a text message from an unknown number who I suspect belonged to the man working at the check-in desk, though I can't be sure. "Hi my friend hope you better now and you will recovery soon rest a bit." 

The steroid I was prescribed worked well and fast. The antibiotic, as it turned out.... not so much. On day 2, I developed a grotesque allergic reaction and an AUC doctor came by for a home visit. His nurse administered another injection from a big black case. I napped all afternoon and it was great. My roommate discovered that our blender worked, although it was filled with dead cockroaches, and whipped up some fresh carrot juice. In the evening, I returned to Dr. Sherif #2. This time, I was Number 14 in the assembly line. While we waited, an hour and a half or so, I observed that stacks of medical records were piled up around our feet in the waiting area. Hmmm. When my number was called, Dr. Sherif was annoyed with me. Why had I not brought the test results? With all due respect, the bloodwork guys had told me that the entire point of this appointment was to get the results from him. How preposterous! he said, not actually using the word preposterous. He was about to leave for the night, so I'd have to come back on Sunday with my results and wait in line again to see him. We trekked over to the lab then and there, and picked up my results. Sure enough, they were positive. Go back and see Dr. Sherif now! said the blood man. He refused to see me. I insisted they call him and see what I should do. He was annoyed. You'll be fine in 2 days, bye. 

And that is where we stand now. On the one hand, I'm very lucky that I'm in Cairo, where there are many doctors, even if they are annoyed by my requests for information about my problems. I could, after all, be out in some village somewhere. Still, I find myself wishing there was a warmer doctor-patient relationship, with some small talk and a thorough investigation into one's medical history, allergies, and feelings. Things here are cut and dried. Open your throat. Get tests. Buy the drugs. In the long run, I think I will come to see it as an adventure, just as my first (dramatic, but much briefer) Egyptian hospital experience has provided fodder for six years of stories. It's also true that visitors rarely have to navigate these systems and institutions, so I guess I'm becoming more of a local. For better or for worse. 

The Uprising of Women in the Arab World

In a break from my usual long-winded rambles, I want to draw everyone's attention to an online campaign called "The Uprising of Women in the Arab World." (In Arabic: انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي) Although the Facebook page was started last October, it was on October 1 of this year that the women behind it -- Lebanese, I believe? maybe some others, too -- launched a new campaign that has made enough noise to capture the interest of both the Arabic and foreign press. The Facebook-based campaign asks contributors to submit a photo of themselves holding a sign that reads "I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because...", with a personal reason given afterward. Within 2 weeks, almost 600 photos had been posted and over 40,000 supporters had "liked" the group.

Here is the link to the group. Many of the signs have been translated into English (or written in English originally). It's worth checking out.

While perhaps some of the things written are truisms, some are extraordinarily sad, others infuriating, and others give me hope and reassurance that there are many really tough women here who are not willing to take the crap that is dumped on them by misogynistic laws, society, and even other women.

A couple of the best, in my opinion:

A Yemeni man who wrote, "I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because on my sister's grave it said only 'somebody's wife.'"
An Algerian woman who wrote, "I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because I refuse to let shameless men touch their crotch in public while I should be ashamed and hide my beautiful face and body, even in private."
AYemeni woman who wrote, "My name is Shaymaa Al-Ahdal (and I am) with the uprising of women in the Arab world because my brother is ashamed of saying my name and my mother's name."
Another Yemeni woman who wrote, "I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because society teaches us not to get harassed instead of teaching men not to harass us."
A Lebanese woman wrote, "I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world so that there is no more minute of silence every time a girl is born."

And many more.

As a Western woman joining a group (and, more importantly, a cause) like this, it can sometimes be easy to get hampered by the orientalist shame that filters in somewhere over the course of being a Westerner studying the Middle East -- as much as one tries to avoid that kind of thing. What I mean is that there is a by now well-known criticism of "white men (and women) saving brown women from brown men." That is, that Westerners coming in and condemning Middle Eastern men for their treatment of Middle Eastern women hurts the women's cause more than it helps it. I only agree with this to a certain point. It's true that some of the talk of abuse of women's rights here that goes on in the West is patronizing, and really does cast the women as helpless victims. However, I think there is a place for thoughtful engagement of Westerners (and everyone else) in this fight: it's not right just to turn a blind eye in the name of cultural relativism. What I really like about this online campaign is that it is regionally driven but does not discourage participation from the outside, and certainly no one can cast the women who appear in it as pathetic victims. It's hard to say how a campaign like this might move from the online sphere to the terrestrial world, but it's an inspiring indicator that a lot of women are really fed up. Hopefully men (and women! who are responsible for most of the female genital mutilation and a lot of the preferring sons to daughters business out there)  start getting the message.

Escapes

What have I been doing for the last 10 days? Well, as it turns out, I've been unknowingly battling an acute case of follicular tonsillitis. I won't go into the gory details for fear that you might just stop reading altogether, but the bottom line is that I am now more or less sticking to my bed for a couple of days while round 2 of my antibiotics begins (inshallah) to work its magic. What better way to pass the hours than a little blogging.

One of the things I pledged as I moved out of the September blues was that I would find more ways to make myself feel balanced and happy, rather than moping around and inventing hallucinations of changing autumn leaves. (Down with all those people who've been posting beautiful autumn photos on Facebook!) One such escape, a much needed one, was my weekend jaunt to Alexandria. Last weekend, several friends and I took the train up on Thursday night, and I went to stay with my old friend Mai -- one of my other LINC buddies I hadn't seen in six years. Alexandria may have a lot less action than Cairo, but it has a number of big things going for it: green spaces, fresh, crisp air, and the sea. It was also nice again to stay in the comfort of a family home, and to reconnect with a friend I hadn't seen in so long yet find that we had so much to talk about. Since I've done most of the tourist sites on my previous visits to Alex, I spent the first lazy day sitting on the Starbucks patio outside the Four Seasons overlooking the Mediterranean, chatting with Mai and her friend Laila. We talked a lot about politics: like most of my friends here, they really do not like the Muslim Brotherhood and are hoping that Morsi doesn't do anything too awful. At the same time, most such people I've talked to seem to feel that he hasn't done much of anything yet. Incidentally, after my return from Alex, the public prosecutor, who is a holdover from the Mubarak era and recently refused Morsi's offer of reassignment to the Embassy to the Vatican, pardoned all 24 old regime stalwarts accused of orchestrating horseback and camelback assaults on protesters in last year's revolution. Then, this Friday, the Muslim Brotherhood organized demonstrations in Tahrir protesting the verdict while, simultaneously, liberal, anti-MB groups led demonstrations in the same place protesting Morsi's first 100 days and demanding a more representative Constituent Assembly. Some people began throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the other side (accounts differ) and more than 100 people ended up in the hospital by the end of the afternoon with head injuries.

Back in Alex...For dinner, we relocated to a restaurant nestled in the Montaza, or palace, which is surrounded by acres of lush gardens. People were picnicking in the grass (not a common site anywhere in Cairo except perhaps Azhar Park), playing ball games, and strolling through the green landscape. I was entranced. The spell was broken only for a brief moment when the waitress came over to ask me to please pull my shirt down -- a bit of skin was showing above my pants. (How embarrassing! On the other hand, many of my friends have said that strangers often come over and tug their shirts down or up for modesty's sake on the street. Interesting to meditate a little on boundaries of personal space and whose responsibility it is to maintain women's modesty, which is obviously an important value here.) When I parted way with my friends after dark, I made for the Qaitbey Citadel, one of Alex's main landmarks alongside the famed library. Jutting out into the sea, the fort was entirely illuminated for the occasion of the Farah El Bahr Arts Festival. Sponsored by the Anna Lindh Foundation and emphasizing cross-Mediterranean cooperation, both communists and anti-Zionists had protested the really very innocuous-seeming event during the week prior. As a result, the main draw, that is the revolutionary Egyptian rock band Cairokee, had withdrawn its participation. Still, a big crowd came to see a number of lesser-known Egyptian and European groups, which presented everything from traditional folk music to, in the case of some Austrian ladies in glitter tights, an angsty rendition of something called "Satan is our friend." (Was this really the audience for that? Well, fortunately people didn't seem to really be listening to the lyrics.) We nestled ourselves in a sparsely populated corner of the old fort and reveled in what was unmistakably a cool sea breeze.

Inside Qaitbey Citadel, Farah El Bahr Festival 

The streets of Alexandria have not lost their colonial charm. There are the tall, scrubbed townhouses with wooden shutters and quite a few airy seaside cafes. There are places in downtown Cairo where you can catch a whiff of this grand architecture -- but the last century, and many layers of dirt, have taken a much harsher toll on the capital. However problematic the European presence here, they (along with the Mamluks, bless their souls) erected many of the most beautiful buildings. At the same time, Alexandria is considered much more conservative than Cairo these days: it is no longer the stomping ground of a global cast of recluse poets, artists, and seamen, but the city where Egypt's salafi movement is rooted and a stronghold for Islamist political parties like the FJP. On my second day in the city, after breakfast with Mai, I spent some time meandering through the stacks of the reborn Biblioteca Alexandrina. Worthy of its place on lists of the greatest libraries in the world, it is remarkable as much for the sense of history it evokes and as a symbol for a recommitment to book learning as for its particular collections. The main reading room, which is filled with open stacks, tilts down toward the sea and beams of light float in through chinks in the library's silvery shell. This monument to Alexandria's long-ago reputation as a repository for all the knowledge of the world opened in 2002, 2,050 years after the Ancient Library of Alexandria was apparently burned by Julius Caesar as he fought his way through Egypt. In Egypt today, as many of my young friends have explained, readings books is not much of a popular pastime -- in their view because the deeply troubled educational system turns students off them from a very young age. The library, though, is always quite crowded (perhaps more with tourists than locals, I'm not sure), and hosts all kinds of art exhibitions, poetry readings, and multimedia services.

Soaking up knowledge in the main reading room of the Biblioteca Alexandrina

We ended our visit to Alexandria at Teatro, a trendy new cafe in a back alley lit with colored lights that has what one might call an "oriental hip" vibe. (Oriental is the term in English that Egyptians use to talk about Middle Eastern food or decor.) No fish for us this time - we ran out of time. But I will be back - particularly because word has it that it rains in Alexandria! I will be checking the weather regularly.

When I returned that night, I decided to stop by my local pharmacy to see what the bespectacled 24-year-old man in the tight purple t-shirt could do for my problems. He took me into the back storage closet of the pint-sized pharmacy, where half-drunk cups of tea and packs of cigarettes were lodged into stacks of various drugs. I was instructed to sit in a desk chair stationed in the closet during the investigation. Sure enough, my tonsils were swollen and I needed antibiotics. I will get the injections, the man told me. My pleas for oral antibiotics were refused -- impossible. He began filling the plastic needles with some liquid I'd never heard of before. Ok, ready, pull down your pants, he told me. Hold up! Reality check: I was in the back closet of an Egyptian pharmacy alone with this needle-wielding man of my own age who was about to jab a giant needle into my backside. Nope, not happening. He said there were no women working that shift, which was obvious, so I called a friend to come. The pharmacist seemed to think this was very strange. I apparently survived, though when I left after the second and final dose the next day, he told me I should come by again. If I'm sick, I told him. No, no -- please come by just to talk, tell me about yourself, said my pharmacist. I think I may be switching pharmacies.

Nevertheless, feeling newly empowered by my antibiotics, I set out the day after my Alex trip for a long-planned day of field research in the governorate of Qalioubiyah. ADEW, the NGO I'm working for, was bringing along some prospective donors to check out the building they had used until recently as a shelter for victims of domestic violence. When the funding ran out, the facility became purely administrative, but the dozen or so apartments, outfitted with bunkbeds and shared bathrooms, are still there waiting for the center to reopen. Now it looks like the money is there and women will, indeed, be able to move back. Those who had lived in the shelter before it closed have by now all returned to their abusive husbands: One of the key problems in this community and many others is, of course, that there is really nowhere for women to go after they have spent time in the shelter (the only one of its kind). Their families mostly will not take them back and they don't want to return to abuse, but there is extreme stigma faced by women who choose to leave such marriages and little possibility for them to move out on their own. The village we were in, Masaken Shala'an, is only about 1.5 hours north of Cairo by car, but is largely agricultural. Unfortunately, as in many poor areas, there is no mechanism for sanitation, so the fields full of crops alternate with fields full of garbage. One of my coworkers from ADEW and I strolled up and down the main street seeking interviews with locals about the status of medical care. ADEW hopes to also open a medical center to supplement the badly underskilled and understaffed clinics in the surrounding area. Medical services?! most of our subjects scoffed, There's nothing like that here! People die before the ambulance comes. Some, perhaps to save face as my colleague suggested, said at first that they had everything they needed, but revealed the depth of the problem when asked more specific questions. The biggest problems are hypertension, diabetes, and kidney disease -- all of which people were extremely open about discussing. I was struck, in fact, by how friendly and unsuspicious our interviewees were toward two obvious outsiders approaching them on the side of the street and probing into their medical histories. The last woman begged us to come in for tea. What's more, we were not harassed a single time during the course of the day -- even though we both stuck out like sore thumbs. (Maybe village life is for me?!) While I learned a lot, I felt somewhat discouraged at the end of the day about what a basic medical center such as non-experts like us could really provide these people. Where will the doctors come from and how will the center sustain itself over the years? We still have to work out these big questions.

The local staff took us in the afternoon for a felucca ride on the calm Nile waters in nearby Kanatir. It's known for a big dam built by Mohammed Ali and the banks surrounding it are lined with what are apparently neat little resort cottages for army generals. Back at the Center, a farm fresh lunch had been prepared, including fat rounds of white cheese and something that was promisingly similar to arugula. As we left to board our van, gaggles of cute children appeared at the windows of the surrounding apartment buildings to wave goodbye.


Finally - or, actually, before either of these trips -- I went to see my first real Egyptian play. This was CASA attending en masse as a listening exercise, which I essentially failed because I didn't understand a solid portion of the dialogue. From the outside, the theater looked very institutional, and had the ministry of culture or some such official body slapped on. Inside, though, the theater held only about sixty audience members, which was strangely more evocative of some hip off-off-Broadway New York theater. I discovered, however, when the director came to meet with our class, that in fact this is because the theater is not very popular these days. Born as a genre in Egypt around the turn of the 20th century, it witnessed a rapid revival during the Nasser era and then promptly faded from public interest. The play, called Hanzala, was originally a Palestinian piece about a man who gets out of jail to find that his wife and job have moved on without him, but he's too kind to do anything about it at first. However, this was a new take on the old play (unbeknownst to all of us), and so we were all thrown for a loop when it began with a pair of cross-dressing clowns, a large woman in a neon muumuu and feather boa, a guy in a pharaoh costume, and an Italian tenor belting songs about macaroni. The director had transformed the play into an over-the-top comedy that further involved a prison guard with rubber duckies attached to his epaulets and a fly swatter for a sword, as well as frequent musical interludes and a sufi mystic with giant red horns. The new scripted mocked everybody, from the deposed Egyptian government to Asians to the Muslim Brotherhood to women to men, and was filled with Egyptian political and cultural references that I mostly didn't know. All these additions, the director Islam Imam told us, made the play interesting to an Egyptian audience that really does not enjoy works in formal Arabic, from other Arab countries, or with too much seriousness. When anything sells in the local theater world, it's rollicking comedy.

On the subject of entertainment, I also had my first Egyptian clubbing experience this month, when I got my boogie on at Cairo White Club to celebrate my friend Ryme's birthday. (Unless we're counting that 16-year-old venture into the TGI Friday's Nile boat 'nightclub' -- when we excited LINC ladies showed up on the dance floor of the famed chain restaurant in our baggy linen pants and dowdy t-shirts.) Like weddings, the few clubs that exist here outside 5-star hotels (and yes, it's really a few) are just about the only places beyond your own home where it's cool to show your shoulders and knees. It's both a self-selecting and a selected set: the minimum charge, which racks up pretty quickly, is 150 LE ($25). A small fortune. The bartenders whip up cocktails like it's Beirut and the DJ pumps out songs like "Gangnam Style" and "I'm Sexy and I Know It" that give me a pang of nostalgia for carefree college weekends on the Tower dance floor. But at the end of the day, the set that frequents these places is small -- and even on a Friday night, there were only a couple of other parties going on in the club. But, when you go and make your own fun, it's liberating to wear a short dress and do a little dance every now and again.

The Price of History

I want to write about a few things that have recently led me to reflect more on the importance of knowing and studying history. A couple weeks ago, I attended a lecture at AUC's downtown campus entitled "Archiving the Revolution." It happened to be in the middle of a large-scale student strike at the university, which managed to not affect us academically but involved students blocking the gates to the main campus, the administration canceling classes for a couple of weeks, and some staff members actually being assaulted by students. Over at tranquil Tahrir, however, a symposium was in full swing on Aesthetics and Revolution. Oriental Hall, which sparked a pang of nostalgia for the Princeton cocoon, is an architectural palace of wonders (colorful painted ceilings, carved wood, classical Islamic patterns, etc.) was built by the university in the 1930s and capable of satisfying every orientalist fantasy. Academics gathered from all over the world to nibble miniature sandwiches and discuss what happened happened to be, in this case, my thesis topic. The head of the history department at AUC, Khaled Fahmy, spoke about his efforts as head of the Committee to Document the Revolution to collect testimony from all kinds of people who had witnessed and participated in the events surrounding the January 25 revolution. As he and the Minister of Culture with whom he collaborated on the project pointed out, they faced some serious obstacles first in defining what really counts as "the revolution" -- did it start on January 25? with the overthrow of Ben Ali in Tunisia? with the death of Khaled Said? is it over yet? -- and then with convincing people to feel at ease telling their stories to the committee without fear of retribution. After all, although it was an initiative designed to preserve the memory of the revolution, people had learned to fear government collection of personal information. Who knew if Dar al-Watha'iq (the National Archives) was in cohoots with the Interior Ministry and those who admitted to activism would soon be put in jail? As a result, it seems, this official project essentially petered out.

At the same time, one of the other panelists was from the filmmakers' collective Mosireen, another group I'd written about. This man explained that Mosireen didn't spend time worrying about what counted as the revolution -- they would simply allow people to define the revolution themselves and submit whatever footage they wanted. One problem with this citizen journalism approach to documentation, however, is that a giant amount of material is amassed that doesn't tell a story. Whose job is it to sort through the mountains of digital footage and choose the "important" bits? One could argue that no one should do this, that an archive should simply be indexed and remain a dormant archive waiting for the people of the future to come dig through it. But the speaker pointed out that Mosireen is not intended to be neutral: its mission is to support the revolution and its ideals. (Of course, those are not necessarily the same for everyone these days.) Its filmmakers want to organize the material and distribute it in a useful way -- but that requires a lot of triage, as well as tailoring different products to different audiences. Is the goal to target those who are already hardcore liberal revolutionaries, since even they, in Mosireen's experience, are often shocked when they review footage from well-known events that happened a few months earlier? Or is it to reconnect with those who have lost faith in the revolution and just want security? Etc etc.

What struck me after listening to both Fahmy and Mosireen was how much of what gets remembered later depends on the choices that are being made now by groups like theirs. When I first started writing my thesis, I blurred citizen journalism with writing history more than I should have -- because indeed, in January when I conducted my field research, no time had passed in which to reflect on the revolution. (And even today, when the climate is certainly different than it was 10 months ago, you will find many differing opinions on the revolution's end date.) But it's important to observe from the beginning who the archivists are talking to -- and who will talk to them. Who is deciding how to index and narrate the material that's collected, and what is the reasoning behind these people's decisions? What gets relegated to the dustbins of the archives, and what gets highlighted in documentaries, reports, and websites? Writing the history of the last year per se - that is, reflective, composite storytelling - will take some time, I think. And of course it will be colored by the way events have progressed since the overthrow of Mubarak: As I mentioned, many former enthusiasts have grown disillusioned with the outcome of last year's events, and many liberals have become very resentful of the perceived hijacking of their revolution by the Muslim Brotherhood. The mural that long occupied the space of the first one (the artist facing the police) in my last blog post, for example, did not make any reference to the Ikhwan at all. That, a primary source for understanding people's revolutionary sentiments as of some months ago, was erased, and in its place came another mural condemning Badie along with Tantawi and Mubarak. For now, at least, important decisions are being made about how to collect and organize records of the events of the past year and a half, records collected from an unprecedented number of popular sources. Still, the disparate voices of citizen journalists, while they made history, do not write it alone.

* * *

Last Saturday, I walked into a trailer classroom with electric blue siding and walked to the white board to prepare for my students. It was a strange feeling, because I had been there before. Then, six years ago, I had come with my exchange group from the States, and we had watched a group of high school students perform a short play in this trailer. Then we went outside and played kickball or basketball with them in the courtyard, and exchanged e-mail addresses. I have stayed in occasional touch with two of the girls these last six years. The place is St. Andrew's Refugee Services, a nonprofit center in downtown Cairo that focuses on resettlement and education for refugees from Sudan, Eritrea, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia. Both girls I happened to keep in touch with since I was last here were resettled, in the US and Canada. The vast majority are not so lucky: they either stay permanently in Cairo or eventually return to their home countries. Egypt already has such enormous economic problems itself that dealing with refugees is not anywhere near close to the top of the agenda, and the African ones in particular may suffer from animosity and racism.

This is me at St. Andrew's in 2006, when I visited with the LINC program. Some of the children I was playing with, like these, are about old enough to be in my class this year. 

When I returned to Cairo this summer, I had nice memories of the day spent with the children at St. Andrew's, many of whom had then been my own age. So I responded to a call for volunteer high school history teachers. The center is about to graduate its first class of high school seniors, after offering only extracurricular courses for some time, using the English-language Sudanese curriculum with which most students are more or less familiar. Except then Sudan split, and English-medium South Sudan is still getting its business together while North Sudan is not interested in recognizing the degrees these kids have been working for years to get. So, St. Andrew's decide to throw the high school seniors the GED, which they will have to take in May. The GED, of course, includes a social studies component, including a large dose of American (and world) history. This is where I come in. For two hours every Saturday morning between now and May, I will try to teach twenty-nine Sudanese 17-year-olds everything there is to know about the history of the world. This may seem difficult. Yes, in fact only one of my students says she has ever taken a history class before -- and it was History of Sudan. There is no textbook, so I've been adapting PowerPoint presentations online and winging it with my own lectures. So far, I don't think much I've said has made an impression.

The first week, the topic was Prehistory and Early Humans. I tried to make things interesting with a couple computer-enhanced videos of apelike men rubbing stones together from the History Channel. I certainly felt, as I lectured animatedly about migration patterns and the Neolithic Revolution, that I was mostly talking to myself. Nobody had questions. Nobody wanted to answer my questions. Nobody would summarize the main points of the video. Okay, high school wasn't that long ago for me and I know what it's like to have that feeling that if maybe everybody keeps his mouth shut the period will end faster. But that's a sad dynamic when you're on the teacher end. I left feeling that they didn't particularly like me, and didn't seem to catch any spark of passion about the subject, but that I still had a long time to win them over. They don't see me as a fellow young person: I'm just a teacher imposing things on them they don't especially want to do just like all the others, which I sometimes forget.

On week two, we began with a review quiz from the previous week's vocabulary. A few students got them all right, most had only 1 or 2 out of 5. Worse were the real GED questions: almost all the students left almost all the questions blank. It became clear to me that although their conversational English is pretty solid, most do not have the vocabulary or linguistic complexity to understand GED questions about historical topics they've never studied  -- nor do they have experience reading the charts, timelines, and maps that this exam really relies upon. I don't really know how to establish these basic skills, or if it can be done in time. The principal of the school has told me that the students are solid in the other subject areas, and this is the one that they need to make huge progress in in order to pass the test in the spring. Of course this makes me feel anxious and responsible, since many will be caught in limbo if they fail and may drop out rather than repeat more classes. At the end of the second class, in which I attempted to cover the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China in one fell swoop, one girl approached me and said simply: I didn't understand anything, ma'am. I am sure she wasn't the only one. When I taught prison inmates during college, there were often enormous gaps in their knowledge. But I could often find a base, an anecdote or cultural reference that we shared, to grab their attention and a glimmer of understanding. Here, I have no idea what these Sudanese teenagers, whose mostly village lives were uprooted by war early in their childhood, do know. Many of them are quite smart, and some quite motivated. But I feel like I am deluging them with names and dates and stories that they cannot put into any context they know. How do I make that connection?

Revolutionary Art Continues on Mohamed Mahmoud Street

As I made clear in my last few posts, September was a rather bleak month. That is not to say, though, that it didn't have its bright spots. One of these was my visit to Mohamed Mahmoud St., just off Tahrir Square, where bloody clashes occurred between protesters and police in November 2011. Thinking of the recent history is sobering, but aside from this infamous confrontation, the area has been known since the beginning of the revolution for its colorful murals. The outer walls of AUC's Tahrir campus are some of the best known. About two weeks ago, municipal authorities painted over the anti-SCAF (military council) and pro-revolutionary murals as they had done occasionally since January '11 but not for some months. Overnight, the walls were repainted. A few days later I went and took the following photos, among others. Some are done by very skilled artists, others by amateurs.

 This is the most prominent mural of the new set. The three faces in the upper lefthand corner are Mohammed Badie (General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood), Field Marshal Tantawy, and Mubarak. "Elly kalaf mamatsh", the slogan written beneath, means "he who is appointed never dies." This same image, painted before the Ikhwan assumed so much power and thus omitting Badie, occupied this spot prior to the city's paint job last month. The artist facing down police brutality with his paintbrush is a new addition. The red and white text beneath the line of policemen reads: "Hey regime that fears the paintbrush and the pen; that oppressed and tread upon those who were oppressed; if you walked soundly you wouldn't fear what was drawn; the best you can do is fight walls and conquer lines and colors; but inside you are a coward; you will never build what has been destroyed." 

On the right, the red and yellow graffiti reads "Nifsy akon shaheed" -- "I want to be a martyr." This is martyr in the revolutionary sense of the term, as all those killed in the Jan. 25 revolution are referred to as martyrs. (The metro stop Mubarak, for instance, was officially renamed Shohadaa', or Martyrs. In English the word has somewhat different connotations I think and that can throw us off a bit.) Batman, meanwhile, threatens: Don't erase our graffiti again, you son of a bitch. 

Here, the upper slogan reads "Glory to the martyrs" while the lower says "Retribution". The yellow spray can says "Erase and I will draw again" and the blue one "Either we will get their rights or we will die like them," also a reference to the martyrs of the revolution. ULA7 is a variation of UA07, the tag for the Ahlawy Ultras. These are the soccer fanatics for the Ahly team who are now known especially from the match in Port Said in February of this year, when 73 were killed and 1000 injured in a riot and stampede. Many people blamed the security forces for intentionally failing to intervene and thus creating a distraction from their own abuses. 

In the time that my friend and I were inside the AUC campus accomplishing a little homework, this mural went up using stencils. The film strip shows the faces of various revolutionary martyrs, while the red slogan reads "Ya rabb takon mabsoot fe makanak" - "I hope you are happy in your place." This is a line, we were told by the artists, taken from a song about those killed last year, and refers to their place in heaven.

And here is another man at work on a new mural... 

Agnabeyya

I've already written quite a bit about feeling foreign here. The week before last's literary and political theme at CASA was الأنا والآخر - The I and the Other. As one of my exasperated classmates burst out after we read yet another article on the current state of the clash of civilizations, we are really tired of this from an academic standpoint. It's not just Samuel Huntington and his disciples, it seems, who are fixated on writing about the tension between East and West, and the crisis of Arabs caught between Western cultural infiltration and rejection of its loose values and arrogance, but a large proportion of academics and journalists here in the Arab world as well. Although I would now almost rather read about any other topic on earth than the clash of civilizations, I can't deny that my personal experience here has made me much more aware of where gaps do exist and conflicted about noting them.

Some days, my expat life and my Egyptian life blend seamlessly together. Two weekends ago, we hosted in our apartment a lovely dinner party with our collective Egyptian and American friends, bringing together the disparate groups of people Sarah and I are aggressively trying to befriend. My attempted contribution to this potluck extravaganza was roz belaban, a common Egyptian dessert made with rice, sugar, rosewater, and cinnamon. Despite my best culinary efforts, my Egyptian friends were not impressed: the consistency was all wrong. That's what I get, I suppose, for believing I can wing Egyptian recipes in the total absence of measuring cups. Aside from this failure, I felt afterward that I really have found a community of wonderful friends here, a good balance between fellow expats with whom I can share the experience of exploring and adapting to this city, and fun, smart, and likeminded Egyptian friends. Nevertheless, as I've noted before, the truth remains that I will leave after a year or so, passing out of most of my local friends' real lives (though probably not virtual ones). And so it's inevitable at times to feel like a temporary fixture, to wonder how close one can become in a year before going one's own way back home and their lives move on here.

Two Fridays ago, (I know, I've gotten pretty backed up here), the art space Dar 1718 hosted an event for World Peace Day full of vendors selling handmade artisan crafts (the trendy kind), and young Egyptians were sprawled out on the grass to listen to a long lineup of young soft rock bands and English-speaking dudes with guitars. Blocking out the immense heaps of cat-infested garbage piled up just beyond the exit, I could imagine for a couple hours that I was at any outdoor concert in an American park. This was really relaxing. I sometimes feel that there is a taboo among expats here and maybe in other developing countries about talking much about things you really miss about home - food, geography, comfort in the streets, etc. It can be embarrassing to admit that you haven't seamlessly gone native, or nearly so -- or, in conversations with Egyptians, it just feels annoying on our part to be making comparisons.

International Peace Day at Darb 1718

Sometimes I am able to laugh. "You are a white cat," I had one man hiss at me recently. What? Yeah, I think the pith of that one got lost in translation. Another day, though, I wore a button-down Oxford shirt, intending to look business casual for my internship. I guess I looked even more foreign than usual, because probably 10 people, many of them women rather than men, shouting the word agnabeyya (foreigner) at me in the street or pointing me out to their parents/friends/spouses. This visible foreignness is linked, of course, to an ambivalence toward any kind of public presence, particularly on social issues. Ninety-nine percent of the time, this isn't our business anyway. But the recent anti-harassment campaigns are another matter, and at the invitation of local organizers, several of us carefully participated in a small-ish "vigil" outside the Presidential Palace in Heliopolis. Sponsored in part by Haraket Basma, which I wrote about earlier, this event boasted 500 RSVPs on Facebook, though only about 40 appeared in person. The current goal of the anti-harassment movement is a law acknowledging it as a crime. The immediate motivator for the vigil, though, was the killing of an 18-year-old girl in Asyut just a few days earlier (Iman Mostafa Mohamed) after she responded to a local man who was harassing her. He shot her. (The man has apparently now been arrested.) The sign I was given read: "Faynak faynak ya Morsi, el taharrosh ba'a ayny aynak," which means approximately: Where are you, where are you, Morsi? Harassment is completely obvious [to everyone]. We stood spaced out along the high-traffic road by the palace and the Heliopolis Club, and received mostly stares. "Ahla sawra fel donya!" shouted one passerby to me, sympathetic but perhaps for the wrong reasons - "The most beautiful revolution in the world". One car stopped to boo and give us a thumbs down, an inexplicable reaction to the subject as far as I could tell. At least one stopped to give encouragement, though most people were willing to roll down their windows and take a look at our pamphlet. One husky older woman, in galabeyya and hegab, passed by chance with her teenage daughters. I was the first demonstrator she encountered, but when I responded in my accent, she cut me off with a sharp "agnabeyya!" One of the organizers, a charismatic young man, spoke with her, and she was skeptical. Was this really necessary? she wanted to know. Could the president make up a law by himself? If not, why were we at the palace? Suddenly she turned back to me. So where's she from? she asked the organizer with suspicion in her voice. Originally from America, but I live in Egypt, I responded. Amreeka, Amreeka. So then what about the film insulting the Prophet?! Of course this issue has not died. I don't agree with the sentiments expressed in the film, I told her, not going into more detail. Was I really going to agree that it was an ingenious idea to attack the embassy? Violence isn't good either, though, I said vaguely, still trying to disengage. She wasn't convinced.

At the end of the evening, despite the low turnout, I did feel that participating in this vigil was empowering. In a city where this kind of activism does have a new oomph in the aftermath of the revolution and the issues very real to all of us, there's a sense (real or imagine) that rather small efforts can and do reach the news and spread quickly. Here's a video from the vigil from Al Hayat TV. (It's in Arabic, but you can get the idea. All the foreigners are friends from CASA, and I make a brief cameo at 2:58.)

On a very sobering note, however, this very positive and somewhat cathartic experience was paired with the reading of a deeply troubling book called Aswat (Voices) for class. Written around 1970 by Soliman Fayad, the book recounts the mostly true story of an Egyptian man who returns to the village he left as child, this time with his chic French wife in tow. At first, the villagers are entranced by Simone, making every effort to beautify the streets and shops before her arrival and guiding her around.  When her husband leaves on a short trip to Cairo, though, the village women begin gossiping about her differences. She doesn't shave all her body hair. She walks around by herself. She drank wine with one of the men. She'll want to raise the children as Christians. And, most importantly, she is not circumcised. This, in the minds of the women, including her mother-in-law, naturally means that she is a woman with loose morals and uncontrollable desires who will be a liability to her husband. While Simone naively sits in her room writing letters and listening to music, the women come in and kidnap her. Then they forcibly circumcise her with scissors. She accidentally bleeds to death. I repeat this story in graphic detail because of the force with which it hit many of us. It was very well-written, and in my mind a good choice for our class, but not because it was easy for us to get through. Of course it is an extreme case. (Although, I should note, that about 97% of Egyptian women, Muslim and Christian alike, have undergone FGM, so that part of it is not extreme at all. Both the head Sheikh of Al-Azhar and the late Coptic Pope Shenouda decreed that the practice does not have religious foundations, but it is incredibly ingrained in the culture, as in much of Africa.) As one of my classmates pointed out, what was so unsettling about this depiction of "the I and the other" was that the seemingly small misunderstandings and judgments between the village women and Simone that lead to the final tragedy are the very kinds of things that we encounter here every day.

Against the background of Morsi and Obama's speeches at the UN General Assembly last week, notably addressing their difference in opinion on free speech, we went in search of ways in which we might try to close these gaps rather than reaffirm them. A few friends and I went last Thursday to the U.S. Embassy's weekly screening of the West Wing. Once one gets past all the tanks (and leering soldiers), the embassy is a neat and rather sterile place with lots of trite American flag art on the walls. The screening was in the Information Resource Center (IRC), which is a library for people to learn about America through books, movies, posters, you name it. It is unclear to me whether people actually do this. Do they really want to know about America so badly that they will navigate anti-riot barricades and numerous passport controls? Anyway, there were about 20 young Egyptian men in the screening room. At the front was the embassy's junior public diplomacy officer. We watched a few minutes of an episode about the fictional presidential race. A hand shot up. What's New Hampshire? The show did not have subtitles, which proved to be pretty difficult for a lot of the audience. A precocious teenager who later befriended us, however, had the answer to every question. He had been a participant in the embassy's Election Challenge (something like that), which offered a free trip to the U.S. to the team that best presented the American elections system to other Egyptians. For the rest of the show, then, the diplomat stopped periodically to explain things like "conventions" and "the debt ceiling." Then the giant poster paper came out for "abortion" and "separation of church and state", since at the end of the episode the moderate Republican candidate tells the media to stop asking him about religion. The FSO tried to explain that while the audience might think that Americans are not religious people at all, this tends to be true more in large cities than small towns... Family values! shouted someone from the audience. Generally, although the screening is clearly intended to teach American values, it seemed that many people were there to practice their English. Afterward, about six young guys crowded around us, eager for language partners. A few of them walked us back to the metro at Tahrir, and happened across another anti-harassment protest along the Nile. The woman in charge came over to us to present some pamphlets, and suddenly we were surrounded by a bunch of shining lights from TV cameras as I chattered like a fool to her in Arabic. She demanded to know, rhetorically, if a law against harassment existed in the U.S. I told her it did, but I couldn't really say what the penalties were because it wasn't something I ever worried about when going out in the street. She declared victory -- See, it's not like this in America! she said. But I felt ambivalent: Rotana TV had wanted to interview me, contrasting the state of harassment in the two countries. I said no, because I felt I was getting myself into dangerous waters. What good does it do to have an American in Egypt talking about how much better we are (when it comes to this issue)? It could be terribly misconstrued.