Summer comes early in Egypt, and sometimes I have trouble remembering whether spring ever happened at all. As temperatures climb toward the 90s, I am reminded more frequently that CASA is actually winding to a close. A few more weeks of classes, a spring break, final exams, and then a brutal thrust into the real world of unemployment. For the time being, I feel in some sense that I am treading water, unsure whether I should be laying down deeper roots here or picking up the loose ends and getting ready to move on. I've never had this degree of uncertainty in my life before -- that is, not knowing what I will be doing 8 weeks from now, much less in a year. As I work on figuring out what comes next, I alternate between two sentiments. Sometimes, I think of the long, long summer ahead, a thirsty Ramadan under the July sun, an indefinite period of traffic jams on the Corniche and feral dogs and shouting matches with taxi drivers and sandwiching myself onto the metro as the sweat drips down my pant legs and the matrons ogle my arm hair. At those times, I am not ashamed to say I miss America and am maybe ready to go home. Yet I think just as often with fondness of the relationships I've formed here and the communities I have become a part of. At those times, I don't feel ready to leave.
One such time was the recent end-of-year awards ceremony for my social studies students at St. Andrew's. All grades gathered together with their parents to recognize the top students in each subject area, watch a slideshow of the year's highlights, and feast on cookies and soda. I was afraid before I went that I would feel out of place: I was only a part-time teacher and felt I didn't know many people around the school. I also felt like a failure because not a single one of my students had passed the final exam -- a real GED test intended to simulate the one we had hoped they would take in June. The highest grade was a 42. I worried that my students would feel incredibly discouraged. In fact, the same results were seen across the board, and the high school students who did come to the ceremony didn't seem fazed in the slightest. Grades in hand, they came up to shake my hand and pose for photos. They seemed pleased that I had come. The mood was jubilant as the student DJs blasted Jai Ho and, peculiarly, Barbie Girl, giving the elementary kids a chance to break it down.
I thought back then to the impending doom I had felt as we approached the final exam. I knew that only four or five students would be selected to take the actual GED, but they didn't. A few questions in particular stuck out. My lesson on supply and demand, involving an extended comparison of Chloe's Car Company and Velia's Car Company, had gone surprisingly well. A day or so later, a sample test I gave them asked an easy question about the effect of price increases on the demand for toasters. I felt good: I knew they had supply and demand down pat. But one hand went up, then another and another. What's a toaster? each student asked. Therein lay the crux of (one of) the big problems we were up against. State lottery revenues, teen driving laws, toasters. These were the questions that were supposed to be easy for any half-grown American with his eyes open, but they were the hardest for my students. So there I found myself, drawing pictures of toaster ovens on the whiteboard. Teaching American history made me feel alternately patriotic and foolish -- the former when my students oohed and aahed over Albert Bierstadt's paintings of the American West or when a few produced moving commentaries on the iconic photos of the Civil Rights Movement. The latter came about when I had to apologize for awkwardly propagandistic instances of cultural bias. One sample question featured a photo with soldier returning from battle and the stars and stripes waving behind her. What American value does this photo represent? it asked. A teaching moment for all of us occurred when I assigned a few sample questions related to an excerpt on Manifest Destiny. One question asked:
Which of the following beliefs from the 1840s has been discredited?
a. Democracy is a form of government that appeals to many people.
b. Native Americans are incapable of self-government.
c. The United States should promote freedom throughout the world.
d. Individuals should have the opportunity to improve their lives.
e. Economic development helps the United States prosper.
Obviously, the correct answer as per the test is (b). Almost every one of my students chose (c). I tried to use this to segue into a discussion about the world balance of power after World War II, but in the end I found myself just telling my students that they should try to pretend they are the US government when they take the test. Standing in front of 27 16-year-old refugees from Sudan, that sounded pretty ridiculous.
A few days later, though, I had planned a lesson on analyzing political cartoons. The GED loves them, but I was panicked because cartoons are incredibly culturally specific. All but 7 students skipped class that day, yet those who attended came alive. They were very well versed in current events, and laughed raucously as I passed a few images around. As we discussed a cartoon of an ostrich with its head in the sand roasting in the sun like a chicken (global warming), I joked that I'd never eaten ostrich. But one of my students had. Yeah, it's easy, just grill it, he said, making a matter-of-fact grilling motion. Another cartoon showed Ahmadinejad as Pinocchio, lying about nuclear weapons. That same student launched into a discussion of Iran's right to nuclear weapons if everyone else was going to have them. Except, he explained, it's very bad with Sudan. Ahmadinejad was selling nuclear technology to Bashir [President of Sudan, not so popular among these kids for obvious reasons]. Yes, this was very bad.
When the semester ended, we agreed that in May I would start bootcamp for the 4 students selected to take the real GED. The rest will do another year of high school and hopefully pass the Sudanese national diploma next year. Getting them from 40 to passing - not just in social studies but in every subject area - will not be easy. But for a lucky one or two, the GED offers a way out -- hope for a scholarship to study abroad. Of course, many other hurdles also stand in the way: the TOEFL, the SAT, the admissions process. But there are a few precedents, and my students hold on to this possibility.
The day after I celebrated the end of the school year with my St. Andrew's students, I left Cairo for a CASA-sponsored weekend on the Red Sea. We arrived in El Gouna via a red-eye to the nearby Hurghada airport. When I stepped out onto the balcony of our adobe villa at dawn, I discovered that I was on a manmade island paradise. Around me were canals with little footbridges and all sorts of desert flora.
As I quickly learned while walking outside the resort down to the Abu Tig marina, El Gouna is a kind of elite desert Disneyland. It was developed only in the 1990s by a family of telecom magnates as an alternative to its somewhat tackier neighbor, Hurghada. The spotless streets are lined with tasteful villas evocative of Hassan Fathy's New Gourna, with SUVs and fluffy puppies parked in the front yard. We walked through the streets in short skirts without a single whiff of harassment. Of course, it is a completely artificial place, the kind I might have pooh-poohed back home. But as a brief refuge from Cairo's din and chaos, this artificiality was a welcome relief.
Our first night in town, a group of us wandered around the marina (very quiet, perhaps the season or perhaps the tourism crisis, hard to say), where a number of shiny yachts were moored. We wound up at the same place as, it seemed, everyone else: Mood's, an outdoor dance club with tiki huts and a DJ spinning house beats. Most of the others there were Europeans dressed lavishly for the occasion. It was a toned-down version of the kind of evening I expect people have in Ibiza and places like that: music pulsing across the coast, colored strobe lights searching the horizon. In Egypt, I didn't expect it.
The next day was water aerobics class, with a very muscly Egyptian instructor and a pair of fleshy middle-aged Brits. From there we moved on to snorkeling, though this time the water was really rough (there had been a sandstorm the previous night). Later that night, after squirreling plate after plate of smoked salmon appetizers from the open buffet, we gathered on a moored pirate ship that serves as a beach bar by day. We clung to our last moments of peacefulness by spending our last day sprawled on the "Relaxation Beach". That night, dining at an Indian restaurant, the contestants in the Top Model of the World competition walked in. These were ten or so girls, all over 6 feet tall, wearing evening gowns and sashes bearing the names of their countries. The champion was to be decided right there in Gouna later in the week. Then arrived the men with whom they were to be taking photos in the restaurant (where they did not, apparently, actually consume any food) while making scintillating conversation. Within 20 minutes, they had all left.
Back in Cairo, I answered a call online to translate a screenplay for an up-and-coming local actor/director/screenwriter. I had never done any formal translation, but the simultaneous interpretation class I'm in has shown me that I really enjoy the creative puzzle of recreating a speech or story in another language. Most of what we translate in the soundproof booths in class is in the category of official political discourse (UN, Arab League, Mubarak's surrender, etc.). But even in the most basic ways - capturing a turn of phrase in Arabic in an equally elegant English expressing, for example - there is room for creative imagination. There's also the cultural interpretation element. A formal speech in Arabic typically begins and ends with "As-salaamu aleikum w rahmat allahi w barakatu" - Peace be upon you with God's mercy and blessings. Saying this in English would be absurd, so we were instructed to ad lib something like "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us." When it came to the screenplay I was translating, there was even more space for me to interpret: it needed to sound natural in English more than it needed to be perfectly accurate. Much of the dialogue was youth slang that demanded a careful repertoire of expressions like "hey, dude!", "you'd be nothing without me, man", and "can you chill out, please?". The hope is that the screenwriter/director will win a grant to produce the film, which portrays issues like an at-home abortion that are pretty wildly taboo here. One of the things that is great about the independent arts scene here is that it's kind of a small and tight-knit community. It is easy to come in and meet pretty important up-and-comers.
Meanwhile, in political news, warrants were issued for the arrest of wildly popular TV satirist Bassem Youssef (often called the "Jon Stewart of Egypt", since he modeled his post-revolution political satire show El Barnameg on The Daily Show). Accusations were brought to the general prosecutor by independent lawyers that Youssef had insulted Islam and and the Presidency. Youssef posted bail a couple of weeks ago, and as of today, Morsi has asked the claims to be dropped. But even the threat of such action against a comedian is an ominous sign. The best English-language summary of what happened can be found, as it happens, on The Daily Show.
Not knowing how much longer I'll be here, I'm also trying to make an effort to get to corners of the city I still haven't seen. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Lindsey organized a hiking expedition to Wadi Degla, on the eastern outskirts of the city. Who knew there was hiking to be done in Cairo? Unfortunately, the ticket gave us false hope that there would be flora and fauna. Instead we found ourselves trekking across scorched canyons, feeling something like post-apocalyptic Indiana Joneses. We offered a collective prize to the first person to spot a non-human living creature. Nobody claimed the prize. (Not that it wasn't cool: desert scenery is awesome until you run out of water.)
Not long afterward, my good friend Caroline from Princeton arrived to spend a week taking in the sights. This gave me the chance to flex my tour guide muscles again. Among the highlights for me were returning for the first time to two places I visited on my first trip to Egypt so long ago. One of these was Al Azhar mosque, the global power center of Sunni Islam. The seminary-university attached to Al Azhar attracts students from all over the world, and this internationalism can be felt inside the mosque as well. Not only were the visitors very diverse, but we dropped in on lessons (Islamic finance for instance) in a few of the side rooms and found Africans, Asians, and Arabs listening intently.
Al Azhar, then and now:
After winding through the khayameyya (tentmakers' market), one of my favorite somewhat lesser visited parts of historic Islamic Cairo, we suddenly found ourselves at the back side of Azhar Park.
The second place I revisited with Caroline in tow was the Garbage City (Medinat El Zabaleen). It is the place that made, I think, the greatest impression on me in high school, and when I think about how my relationship with Cairo has been tempered by realism I often reflect back on my first experience of Garbage City. Then, in 2006, we drove in on a coach bus... Some years ago, I wrote in an internship application:
"There was a lurch, then a wave of gasps, and I suddenly found myself sitting peculiarly sideways. Outside our ill-fated bus, which had tried to navigate the narrow, unpaved alleys of Cairo's Garbage City, a mob of curious children had already gathered. Five minutes later, my friends and I were on foot, jostling with donkey carts piled high with teetering stacks of watermelons..."
Indeed, the experience of walking through a neighborhood centered around garbage -- its collection, sorting, and recycling - symbolized to me at the time my coming out of my comfort zone and exploring the unknown. The neighborhood is an amazing example of human resilience and ingenuity, of people filling the gaps left by nonexistent municipal services. That is more what struck me this time around, though: the first time, I was more drawn to the cacophony -- the teetering watermelons, the near collision with a donkey cart, the colorful political slogans scrawled on the walls, the skinned and headless cows hung by their tails from the butcher shops. Then, I found the neighborhood's colorful poverty both fascinating and shocking. I had never seen anything like it up close. These days, I'm sometimes troubled by the knowledge that a key element of Cairo's original allure was the exoticism of its poverty. Looking now at the Garbage City, it struck me that it might be the most organized place in the entire city. Without any idea how the residents actual organize themselves, it is a marvel that they are able to get the plastic bottles or the cardboard boxes of 17 million people into a single place.
Buried inside Garbage City, an overwhelmingly Christian neighborhood, is the Church of St. Simon the Tanner. Garbage City is built onto a plateau called Mokattam, and St. Simon is a Coptic Orthodox saint said to have moved the mountain in the 10th century. Although there has been a holy site associated with this incident for hundreds of years, about 25 years ago the Coptic Church decided to chisel a giant open-air church into the mountainside. These days, it seats 5,000 people. When we arrived, there were a lot of Christian school groups visiting and even a stand where you can get your cross tattoo (which all Copts here have on the inside of the wrist).
The final stop on this week's spiritual journey through Cairo was a viewing of the new documentary Jews of Egypt. For some months, authorities were censoring the film, but finally the ban was lifted and it is now in the ritzy Nile City Renaissance cinema. The audience was of mixed ages, but was overwhelmingly chic, with a heavy percentage of foreigners. I had heard that there weren't more than a couple dozen Jews left in Cairo, and knew that there had once been quite a sizable population. (Indeed, maps we looked at in my Ottoman Egypt course showed entire Jewish quarters in Cairo, just as they exist in most cosmopolitan cities in the Middle East.) But I didn't know how it had happened. Of the people interviewed in the film, only one was both still living in Egypt and still Jewish, and he only nominally. He was a radical communist organizer who happened to be in jail for his political activities at the time Jews were stripped of their Egyptian citizenship and expelled from the country in 1956. He had actually converted to Islam as a formality in order to marry his Muslim wife, but a law put in place in the Nasser Era legally negated the conversions of any Jews that occurred after a certain year. The poignant stories of most of the other interviewees were told in French, from France: they had been teenagers at the time of the expulsion and their mostly fond childhood memories of being Egyptian had blurred with time. Even in the 1940s, few recalled much animosity. The film took pains to demonstrate that Egyptian Jews felt, for the most part, far more Egyptian than Jewish, and did not sympathize with Zionism at all. (Anecdotal evidence suggested that most went to Europe in 1956 rather than Israel, but the question was not addressed head-on.) Still, as historians noted, in the 1910s the Zionist movement had an office downtown that was open to the public, and in fact some of its members were aligned quite amicably with the Egyptian nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul. After 1948, and especially in the 1950s, however, relations deteriorated rapidly. It was the Suez Crisis that gave Nasser the pretext to expel Egypt's Jews once and for all. You can still visit a few of Egypt's historic synagogues today, in Cairo and in Alexandria, but they are empty.
One such time was the recent end-of-year awards ceremony for my social studies students at St. Andrew's. All grades gathered together with their parents to recognize the top students in each subject area, watch a slideshow of the year's highlights, and feast on cookies and soda. I was afraid before I went that I would feel out of place: I was only a part-time teacher and felt I didn't know many people around the school. I also felt like a failure because not a single one of my students had passed the final exam -- a real GED test intended to simulate the one we had hoped they would take in June. The highest grade was a 42. I worried that my students would feel incredibly discouraged. In fact, the same results were seen across the board, and the high school students who did come to the ceremony didn't seem fazed in the slightest. Grades in hand, they came up to shake my hand and pose for photos. They seemed pleased that I had come. The mood was jubilant as the student DJs blasted Jai Ho and, peculiarly, Barbie Girl, giving the elementary kids a chance to break it down.
I thought back then to the impending doom I had felt as we approached the final exam. I knew that only four or five students would be selected to take the actual GED, but they didn't. A few questions in particular stuck out. My lesson on supply and demand, involving an extended comparison of Chloe's Car Company and Velia's Car Company, had gone surprisingly well. A day or so later, a sample test I gave them asked an easy question about the effect of price increases on the demand for toasters. I felt good: I knew they had supply and demand down pat. But one hand went up, then another and another. What's a toaster? each student asked. Therein lay the crux of (one of) the big problems we were up against. State lottery revenues, teen driving laws, toasters. These were the questions that were supposed to be easy for any half-grown American with his eyes open, but they were the hardest for my students. So there I found myself, drawing pictures of toaster ovens on the whiteboard. Teaching American history made me feel alternately patriotic and foolish -- the former when my students oohed and aahed over Albert Bierstadt's paintings of the American West or when a few produced moving commentaries on the iconic photos of the Civil Rights Movement. The latter came about when I had to apologize for awkwardly propagandistic instances of cultural bias. One sample question featured a photo with soldier returning from battle and the stars and stripes waving behind her. What American value does this photo represent? it asked. A teaching moment for all of us occurred when I assigned a few sample questions related to an excerpt on Manifest Destiny. One question asked:
Which of the following beliefs from the 1840s has been discredited?
a. Democracy is a form of government that appeals to many people.
b. Native Americans are incapable of self-government.
c. The United States should promote freedom throughout the world.
d. Individuals should have the opportunity to improve their lives.
e. Economic development helps the United States prosper.
Obviously, the correct answer as per the test is (b). Almost every one of my students chose (c). I tried to use this to segue into a discussion about the world balance of power after World War II, but in the end I found myself just telling my students that they should try to pretend they are the US government when they take the test. Standing in front of 27 16-year-old refugees from Sudan, that sounded pretty ridiculous.
A few days later, though, I had planned a lesson on analyzing political cartoons. The GED loves them, but I was panicked because cartoons are incredibly culturally specific. All but 7 students skipped class that day, yet those who attended came alive. They were very well versed in current events, and laughed raucously as I passed a few images around. As we discussed a cartoon of an ostrich with its head in the sand roasting in the sun like a chicken (global warming), I joked that I'd never eaten ostrich. But one of my students had. Yeah, it's easy, just grill it, he said, making a matter-of-fact grilling motion. Another cartoon showed Ahmadinejad as Pinocchio, lying about nuclear weapons. That same student launched into a discussion of Iran's right to nuclear weapons if everyone else was going to have them. Except, he explained, it's very bad with Sudan. Ahmadinejad was selling nuclear technology to Bashir [President of Sudan, not so popular among these kids for obvious reasons]. Yes, this was very bad.
When the semester ended, we agreed that in May I would start bootcamp for the 4 students selected to take the real GED. The rest will do another year of high school and hopefully pass the Sudanese national diploma next year. Getting them from 40 to passing - not just in social studies but in every subject area - will not be easy. But for a lucky one or two, the GED offers a way out -- hope for a scholarship to study abroad. Of course, many other hurdles also stand in the way: the TOEFL, the SAT, the admissions process. But there are a few precedents, and my students hold on to this possibility.
The day after I celebrated the end of the school year with my St. Andrew's students, I left Cairo for a CASA-sponsored weekend on the Red Sea. We arrived in El Gouna via a red-eye to the nearby Hurghada airport. When I stepped out onto the balcony of our adobe villa at dawn, I discovered that I was on a manmade island paradise. Around me were canals with little footbridges and all sorts of desert flora.
The view from my balcony in El Gouna: an island playground
As I quickly learned while walking outside the resort down to the Abu Tig marina, El Gouna is a kind of elite desert Disneyland. It was developed only in the 1990s by a family of telecom magnates as an alternative to its somewhat tackier neighbor, Hurghada. The spotless streets are lined with tasteful villas evocative of Hassan Fathy's New Gourna, with SUVs and fluffy puppies parked in the front yard. We walked through the streets in short skirts without a single whiff of harassment. Of course, it is a completely artificial place, the kind I might have pooh-poohed back home. But as a brief refuge from Cairo's din and chaos, this artificiality was a welcome relief.
Our first night in town, a group of us wandered around the marina (very quiet, perhaps the season or perhaps the tourism crisis, hard to say), where a number of shiny yachts were moored. We wound up at the same place as, it seemed, everyone else: Mood's, an outdoor dance club with tiki huts and a DJ spinning house beats. Most of the others there were Europeans dressed lavishly for the occasion. It was a toned-down version of the kind of evening I expect people have in Ibiza and places like that: music pulsing across the coast, colored strobe lights searching the horizon. In Egypt, I didn't expect it.
The thrill of showing some leg - much taken for granted
The CASA contingent after a few days in the sun
Back in Cairo, I answered a call online to translate a screenplay for an up-and-coming local actor/director/screenwriter. I had never done any formal translation, but the simultaneous interpretation class I'm in has shown me that I really enjoy the creative puzzle of recreating a speech or story in another language. Most of what we translate in the soundproof booths in class is in the category of official political discourse (UN, Arab League, Mubarak's surrender, etc.). But even in the most basic ways - capturing a turn of phrase in Arabic in an equally elegant English expressing, for example - there is room for creative imagination. There's also the cultural interpretation element. A formal speech in Arabic typically begins and ends with "As-salaamu aleikum w rahmat allahi w barakatu" - Peace be upon you with God's mercy and blessings. Saying this in English would be absurd, so we were instructed to ad lib something like "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us." When it came to the screenplay I was translating, there was even more space for me to interpret: it needed to sound natural in English more than it needed to be perfectly accurate. Much of the dialogue was youth slang that demanded a careful repertoire of expressions like "hey, dude!", "you'd be nothing without me, man", and "can you chill out, please?". The hope is that the screenwriter/director will win a grant to produce the film, which portrays issues like an at-home abortion that are pretty wildly taboo here. One of the things that is great about the independent arts scene here is that it's kind of a small and tight-knit community. It is easy to come in and meet pretty important up-and-comers.
Meanwhile, in political news, warrants were issued for the arrest of wildly popular TV satirist Bassem Youssef (often called the "Jon Stewart of Egypt", since he modeled his post-revolution political satire show El Barnameg on The Daily Show). Accusations were brought to the general prosecutor by independent lawyers that Youssef had insulted Islam and and the Presidency. Youssef posted bail a couple of weeks ago, and as of today, Morsi has asked the claims to be dropped. But even the threat of such action against a comedian is an ominous sign. The best English-language summary of what happened can be found, as it happens, on The Daily Show.
Not knowing how much longer I'll be here, I'm also trying to make an effort to get to corners of the city I still haven't seen. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Lindsey organized a hiking expedition to Wadi Degla, on the eastern outskirts of the city. Who knew there was hiking to be done in Cairo? Unfortunately, the ticket gave us false hope that there would be flora and fauna. Instead we found ourselves trekking across scorched canyons, feeling something like post-apocalyptic Indiana Joneses. We offered a collective prize to the first person to spot a non-human living creature. Nobody claimed the prize. (Not that it wasn't cool: desert scenery is awesome until you run out of water.)
Hiking in Wadi Degla
Not long afterward, my good friend Caroline from Princeton arrived to spend a week taking in the sights. This gave me the chance to flex my tour guide muscles again. Among the highlights for me were returning for the first time to two places I visited on my first trip to Egypt so long ago. One of these was Al Azhar mosque, the global power center of Sunni Islam. The seminary-university attached to Al Azhar attracts students from all over the world, and this internationalism can be felt inside the mosque as well. Not only were the visitors very diverse, but we dropped in on lessons (Islamic finance for instance) in a few of the side rooms and found Africans, Asians, and Arabs listening intently.
Al Azhar, then and now:
Here I am in 2006, Crocs in hand and my infamous fuchsia & lime green headscarf (with LINC friends Mary and Ashley)
And now in 2013 with Caroline
After winding through the khayameyya (tentmakers' market), one of my favorite somewhat lesser visited parts of historic Islamic Cairo, we suddenly found ourselves at the back side of Azhar Park.
Picnic games against the Cairo skyline, Al Azhar Park
The second place I revisited with Caroline in tow was the Garbage City (Medinat El Zabaleen). It is the place that made, I think, the greatest impression on me in high school, and when I think about how my relationship with Cairo has been tempered by realism I often reflect back on my first experience of Garbage City. Then, in 2006, we drove in on a coach bus... Some years ago, I wrote in an internship application:
"There was a lurch, then a wave of gasps, and I suddenly found myself sitting peculiarly sideways. Outside our ill-fated bus, which had tried to navigate the narrow, unpaved alleys of Cairo's Garbage City, a mob of curious children had already gathered. Five minutes later, my friends and I were on foot, jostling with donkey carts piled high with teetering stacks of watermelons..."
Indeed, the experience of walking through a neighborhood centered around garbage -- its collection, sorting, and recycling - symbolized to me at the time my coming out of my comfort zone and exploring the unknown. The neighborhood is an amazing example of human resilience and ingenuity, of people filling the gaps left by nonexistent municipal services. That is more what struck me this time around, though: the first time, I was more drawn to the cacophony -- the teetering watermelons, the near collision with a donkey cart, the colorful political slogans scrawled on the walls, the skinned and headless cows hung by their tails from the butcher shops. Then, I found the neighborhood's colorful poverty both fascinating and shocking. I had never seen anything like it up close. These days, I'm sometimes troubled by the knowledge that a key element of Cairo's original allure was the exoticism of its poverty. Looking now at the Garbage City, it struck me that it might be the most organized place in the entire city. Without any idea how the residents actual organize themselves, it is a marvel that they are able to get the plastic bottles or the cardboard boxes of 17 million people into a single place.
Buried inside Garbage City, an overwhelmingly Christian neighborhood, is the Church of St. Simon the Tanner. Garbage City is built onto a plateau called Mokattam, and St. Simon is a Coptic Orthodox saint said to have moved the mountain in the 10th century. Although there has been a holy site associated with this incident for hundreds of years, about 25 years ago the Coptic Church decided to chisel a giant open-air church into the mountainside. These days, it seats 5,000 people. When we arrived, there were a lot of Christian school groups visiting and even a stand where you can get your cross tattoo (which all Copts here have on the inside of the wrist).
Inside St. Simon the Tanner's cave megachurch
With Caroline at St. Simon's
Spring flowers in Masr El Qadima
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