The $10 ticket home

As an expatriot I was very happy last night. You see I attended my first American Embassy (Halloween) party. This is perhaps embarassing, but I had assumed that all Embassy parties would resemble the Cold-War-Germany Embassy Christmas party scene from Spy Game. As in Generals, politicians and spies holding cocktails mingling with foreign service staff and their guests. In reality it is much more like a frat party. Though I would have preferred the former, there is nothing quite like dancing with a bunch of Marines to Britney Spears to remind you of home.

Not-so-rhetorical questions

My mom forwarded me a NYT Op-Ed from Monday's paper. Naturally, I just now got around to reading it. This particular article was simultaneously heartwarming and cause for thought. Nicholas Kristof wrote again about Dr. Greg Mortenson's effort to build schools for girls in Afghanistan. More than that though Kristof implied that education will be an important component to ensuring peace and stability in a country that has known neither for a while now.

So if education is powerful enough to break through barriers that even the United States military cannot break, what happens when education becomes neglected? If education can change the face of a country and perhaps even increase its security and prosperity, will those same things suffer if education is not given the sense of urgency it requires?

I ask because once again I am grappling with the fact that what will be the future ruling class of Egypt, approaches education the same way a 5 year old approaches cough syrup - with protest and disdain. Perhaps I am being naive and overly idealistic in the face of what is surely a universal teenage reflex. But if not, is this a subtle yet ominous sign of things to come?

Proximity

This is going to be one of those things that may be received with a resounding, "well, yeah, obviously," but here it goes. Proximity matters. I studied issues faced in the Middle East in the comfort of my posh DC university and later in the comfort of DC offices. But the gravity of the issues never rang so true as when I am here, actually in the area. For instance, President Ahmedinejad recently visited Beirut. He was met with crowds of support and well-wishers. I am going there for vacation next month. So that's creepy.
I am finding that this is a hard idea to convey. Sarah and I discussed this on the cab ride back from Arabic class one night. It is not that people are more or less educated about a place or situation the closer or farther they are from it. I would argue the people in DC are just as if not more educated about what is going on in this region than some of its citizens. But from a safe distance it feels like we are studying characters from a fiction novel. We wonder perhaps what that certain eccentric Ahmedinejad will do next. Or, we suggest a given policy towards Syria, believed to be at least somewhat geopolitically strategic.
In the comfort of our own home, the world feels like a chess board. And we are free to suggest where to move the next pawn. But here you can feel the implications of what's going on. You can see the pawns, and the knights, and the bishops coming towards you and from where I'm standing, they look awfully big.

My backyard

This is a scene from Al-Azhar park, one of my favorite places in Cairo. Good place for sweeping, panoramic views. Also a good place to remember what the color green looks like.

Remember that one time?

So I had an interesting experience yesterday. I was actually sort of expecting it, and knew that it would occur at any time, just didn't know when. Generally speaking it was neither a positive nor negative experience, instead a catalyst for thought.
My 11th graders have been studying speeches these past couple of weeks. We had been looking specifically at American Revolutionary speeches, ie Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Yesterday however, I decided to bring in an example of a modern day speech. I chose the speech Elie Wiesel gave last year at the site of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp on the anniversary of D-Day. President Obama was in the audience (having just come from Cairo where he gave his famous Cairo speech) as well as Chancellor Merkel. The speech is beautiful and I do recommend giving the transcript a look. Wiesel talked about the feeling of optimism people had for the world after the end of WWII. Maybe after such horror and devastation, the world would have learned its lesson that "all wars are absurd" and that peace would reign. But the world hadn't learned he argued. Instead, destruction and war became the stories of decades upon decades. He hoped however, that today with new leaders promising 20/20 moral vision, the world would finally seize the opportunity to leave war, hatred, and dominance aside and finally learn the lesson that history has so vehemently tried to teach; that peace and understanding of others is both possible and imperative here on Earth.
The students liked the message, only its impact was somewhat lost for one particular reason. They didn't know what a Concentration Camp was. How can you understand the plight of peace and the paradoxical optimism Wiesel felt after his liberation if you had never been introduced to the original suffering? Now, having to explain to a group of Egyptian students what a Concentration Camp is without discussing religion or politics (school rules) is a verbal feat of acrobatics. My sentence went something like, "It's where they took the Jews and other people during WWII."
This incident sparked a discussion in the staff room, not so much about the Holocaust, but about history in general. Is there such thing as a common world history? Or even a commonly acknowledged history? Should the African continent study the same history as the North American one? More importantly, if history becomes regionally or perhaps even politically motivated, will we ever really understand each other?

Is our Children Learning?

There is a trend developing in Egypt. I recently had my students write a one page essay comparing Chinese, American, and Egyptian proverbs. By doing this I told them that they would better understand the three countries' values. My students gave me one page summaries copied and pasted from Wikipedia. Ironically this assignment about values taught me a lot about theirs.
The students I teach attend a private school and pay a significant amount per year. The school is a for-profit institution, which I believe to be counterproductive. Mohammed Yunus, pioneer of social business, has some interesting ideas about how to revolutionize business models so that they do actually contribute to the social good. But that is a long way off from the system the school has now.
Unfortunately the feeling I'm getting is that an education here (at least with the class of kids I'm working with) is just a check in the box. Something to be either completed or not completed. Which is odd for me, because here I am convincing a group of 90 students (total) that actually you can become very well educated, and that the key to that is critical thinking. Maybe for the first time ever they are being asked to draw conclusions, make inferences, and apply lessons learned in literature to their own lives. The process is painstakingly grueling.

The $4 ticket home

It happened. It was bound to. I went to Starbuck's. I am familiar with the concept of walking into Starbucks and feeling like you're home, but it still surprises me every time. There is however one reminder that you are somewhere else... the tumblers cost $50.

Reckoner

There is a Radiohead song called Reckoner. The movie Countdown to Zero, which warns us of the threat posed by nuclear arms, uses this song in its ending montage. I liked the choice, I felt it was appropriate given the apocalyptic implications of nuclear war. I found myself thinking about this song the other day.
Chatting with my expat friends, it seems somehow the same theme arises again and again when talking about all things Cairo. Strange as it sounds, that theme is the apocalypse. Now I realize how melodramatic this may sound, but it's really not supposed to. Almost as an afterthought in considering our city, we mention this phenomenon as if suddenly remembering the correct word to describe something. My friend Chris once said out of nowhere, "If I ever had to choose a place to film a low-budget, post-apocalyptic film, I'd choose Cairo." Everyone contemplated this for a second and then agreed. The city does not reek of tragedy or disaster, but there is a quality to it that makes my friend Tim, for instance, claim that "Cairo is what I imagine the world would look like after it ended."
I can think of two reasons for this. The first, is aesthetic. Beautiful buildings, mosques, and palaces still stand, but they are covered with layers of dust built up over decades. There is therefore a constant reminder of splendor lost, yet enduring. The second reason is a bit more political. Every day we encounter worse traffic than the day before. It's so bad that we now refer to it as wrath-ic. And so we find ourselves coming to the same conclusion at the end of each day, which is that the way of life here is unsustainable. It would be my guess that life as we know it here will eventually cease to exist. It has to.
The message here is perhaps unclear. Admittedly outsiders must give the city credit for continuing on with its daily life despite our convincingly Western label, "unsustainable." Still at the same time, as with anything, a city that does not adapt will not survive. Perhaps certain American cities can get away with ignoring environmental and social realities a bit longer because they are smaller. But with 22 million people living in one city, there is no where for the evidence to hide. I've always thought that it was our urban environments that should do the most to embrace a sustainable future. Cairo, one of the world's largest urban phenomenons is no exception.