Sep 24 2011
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Anecdotes, Two minute read

Volunteering: The Ladies Love Us

Guess who the foreigners are.

Friend and I have gotten into the vicious habit of volunteering at a church here in a lower-income area of Cairo. Our current project is setting up an early childhood development center, something friend and I aid primarily through an abundance of good wishes due to our utter lack of qualifications.

Why do we donate our semi-valuable time? Though it’s mostly for the Arabic practice, there is also a small part of us that wants to “help people.” There’s something to be said for the furry, balmy feeling you get when you delude yourself into thinking you’ve made life on this earth a little more bearable for someone. While this morally indulgent feeling is great, it’s simply not enough. I need something spicier, so this is how I make the most of my volunteering experience:

Step One: Hunger Monger

Since I know our five hours of volunteering (probably) won’t include treats, I eat a tiny breakfast. Thus, without fail, I begin starving roughly 30 minutes after arriving at the volunteer site. The awful rumbles coming from my stomach provide a great backdrop to the children and cat screeches coming from in and around the church. Volunteering is even more interesting as I become a hunger zombie and spend my last kilojoules of energy planning out exactly what I’m going to eat when I get home.

Step Two: Sleepy Time

I never get an appropriate amount of sleep the night before involving myself in charitable work. This is a trick I learned during Ramadan, when I would regularly stay up until 4 am and then leave to volunteer at 8:20 am. Living life was so much more meaningful and full of nausea while running on less than 4 hours of sleep! While at the church, I would gaze into the distance with glazed eyes and wonder when I could leave and be reunited with my bedding and a bowl of ramen noodles. The feeling that nothing was real added an special depth to our projects.

Step Three: Ham it Up

The ladies love us, and by the ladies I mean all the females at the church, regardless of age or relation to puberty. They be smiling at us, giving us those eyes, coming to say hi to us…. Though it doesn’t take much additional work, I try to look as clueless and non-Egyptian as possible in order to create an even bigger spectacle and stir up more interest. Wacky faces and disturbingly broad grins seem to work well.

Step Four: Keepin’ it Real

In Egypt, there’s something called the “foreigners’ complex,” which means that anything involving foreigners is automatically considered better than something made from scratch in Egypt. Thus, when I wake up in the morning, I wrap up in my big ol’ American flag I keep beside my bed, throw on a cowboy hat, and grab a 64 oz. soft drink cup before heading out the door. There will be no question as to where my nationality lies.

And that, my friends, is how you volunteer.

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Sep 22 2011
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Fiction, Two minute read

The Hospital: Come Sick, Leave Sick and Scarred

I think the hospital is in this picture. I almost died getting there.

(partially based on true stories)

Friend: My ears are still shot so I went to the clinic again today but they told me I need to go to the hospital. They have no idea what’s wrong.

Me: Ooo…that’s not great news. I hear Egyptian hospitals are horrendous. Like really awful places. Like I would probably choose to suffer soul-rending pain just in order to avoid stepping inside one of those hellholes.

Friend: (hesitating) Well there’s nothing else I can do…the clinic at the university said they’ve done everything they can for me. The medicine they prescribed hasn’t worked and I can’t hear a thing. Maybe I’ll at least get some better ear drops from the hospital.

Me: (chuckling) The hospital! The only thing they’ll get from them is a rash and a ticket to the insane asylum!

Friend: (confused) I’m going today after class…

Me: (interrupting) So my boss told me about when he went to a public hospital because his employee’s  foot was pierced by an piece of rebar in a freak accident. Just poked right through like a pencil through paper. Pop! Blood gushing out everywhere, really gruesome stuff.

Friend: (concerned) Ewww…. So what was the hospital like?

Me: Well I’ll tell you what happened. They had no idea how bad their situation was until they saw the place that was supposed to treat them:  it was completely disorganized and crowded beyond all reason with desperate, sick people that had been camping out for days just to get into the ER. I can only imagine the haze from the bacteria growing in the air itself.

Friend: Did they get in?

Me: No! They had to go somewhere else, a “private” hospital where they still had to bribe their way in. And you won’t believe this: they had to pay just to use the elevator, even though the guy’s foot was literally a river of blood. Literally, a river of blood! And then they get to the hospital room and find all manner of wailing and chaos going on around them, blood on the walls, doctors frantically pouring liquid after liquid on the wound, which of course does nothing at all. It all seemed like a freak comedy act.

Friend: Which hospital was this?

Me: (ignoring the question) At last a real doctor comes along and sticks his finger right in the wound and wiggles it around while my boss’s employee is screaming in pain. Finally, my boss gets the doctor to quit it and they stitch they guy up with a dirty needle and some dental floss and then send him on his way. Last I heard, he’d lost all feeling in his foot along with 2 toes due to an infection he likely caught at the hospital itself. He’ll probably be subscribing to Prosthetic Fashions Weekly pretty soon! Hahaha!

Friend: …..

Me: But you’re not going to a public hospital, so I’m sure your case will be different. Catch ya later!

Friend: (sighs deeply, then heads to class)

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Sep 22 2011
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Anecdotes, Two minute read

I Want to Open a Bakery in Egypt

This is almost incomprehensible. And it’s just the beginning.

We met three minutes ago and you just learned that I study Arabic. You don’t take the news well—your mind is reeling….why would she study Arabic? What is it about this language with its scribbly letters and random dots that has confused her so much that she wants to actually learn it?

You may not know this, but on the other side of the conversation I can see the thoughts swirling in your head and I know what you’re about to ask me. I can feel the question being formed in your mind as your lips, tongue, and chin prepare to pronounce the dreaded words. The sentence pours from your oral cavity in slow motion as my usual panic sets in.

“Why do you study Arabic?”

You might as well ask me why hippos seem friendlier than crocodiles despite their notorious aggression or why lotion doesn’t taste like yogurt even though it looks the same. You, my dear, blundering acquaintance have forced me to peer into the black abyss of my future post-Arabic fellowship and let me tell you this: I can see a darkness that no amount of graduate school could penetrate.

If you really must know, I’ve been studying Arabic since my senior year of high school because–and pay attention to this part—I liked it. Indeed, friend, I enjoyed the twisty letters and sounds that required new muscle growth. I didn’t even know that people wearing black suits and sunglasses would pay handsomely for my skillz.

But I smashed those sunglasses on the ground and threw white chalk on their coats. I was much too naïve for the men in black, and instead dreamed of working at an NGO in development work or something romantic like that where I could “help people.” On less romantic days, I entertained the thought of working in a think tank, of swimming in big wells of ideas and spending all my waking hours in front of a screen.

To my great relief, however, I found after only 2.5 months out of college that I have absolutely no interest in any of those careers. I won’t waste time describing the depths of my dread when I think about typing on a computer all day in a cage with people who start conversations with statements like, “So, President Obama has kind of an aggressive foreign policy.” Suffice it to say that I’m glad to be free of those business casual and business formal illusions.

But, you insist, what are you going to do with Arabic? I’ll be honest: anything I say will be a lie to myself and to you so let’s just leave the future as the black abyss it is and I’ll tell you about how I’ve always wanted to work at a bakery. If you can connect that to Arabic, be my guest and stop by for cookies, or should I say كوكيز?

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Sep 20 2011
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Best blog posts, Humorous, One minute read, Stories

Purchasing and Eating a Sandwich

The time is 10:00 AM, EET. Class is over. I have 45 minutes before “education” begins again. I am hungry.

BOOM! This is me brushing past the security guards and striding down the street. My mind is one purpose. This is me and my stomach is growling, my sense of smell heightened at the expense of both sight and hearing. I am the closest I will ever be to being part of nature: I am the predator. I seek my prey.

The sun is merciless. Men in shirts with fake vests, middle school girls in fluffy white hijabs, middle school boys up to no good— I pass by them all, my mind interpreting their forms as big sandwiches. I come across all the usual obstacles— scalding patch of sand: crossed. Steaming pile of street trash: avoided. Slimy puddle: circumvented. Overheated puppies at the pet store: cooed at.

At last I arrive. I slide into the back of the small mob pressing against a shop no bigger than an Easy Bake Oven. I know this crowd: we sandwich mobbers all want the same thing and will do anything to get it. I edge in, my hackles and elbows raised. My ordering position seems quite poor. I languish in the back; I am in a forest of surrounding men; Arabic is not my first language; I prefer asking for things politely. All indicators point to failure.

However, these are only minor setbacks. I am still foreign, clueless, and girlish. My abject appearance incites pity amongst the lunching crowd. Other patrons ask me what I want or let me get in front of them, showing me where to stand in order to put my order in. Their pity is seasoning for my sandwich. It will salt my lunch.

Today, however, I catch Mr. Man’s eye from the back of the crowd, one lone Oklahoman in a haystack of Cairenes, and he knows exactly what I want. “One?” he says. And I nod. Seconds later his hand reaches across the sea of bobbing heads and I receive my prize: a hot Egyptian falafel sandwich. With my other hand, I submit payment. We nod politely at each other through the human undergrowth. He knows he’ll see me tomorrow.

BAM! I gobble the sandwich down, enter the university gates, and swerve to throw the trash away before heading back to class without ever easing my pace.

Eat fast. Play hard. Love bats. This is my life.

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Sep 19 2011
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Anecdotes, Travelling, Two minute read

Hydration Makes All the Difference

THIS ISN’T REAL!

This past weekend, I traveled to Ain Sukhna, a popular beach on the Red Sea, with the Arabic Language Institute on one of their egregiously swanky trips. Though I was initially excited to experience  an Egypt other than Cairo, I realized shortly after arriving at the resort that Ain Sukhna is neither a part of Egypt, nor a part of civilization in general. As a resort, it belongs to a class of places that is removed from time and space as well as sterilized of both culture and reality. Indeed, the whole point of a resort is cultivating a state of complete relaxation that closely resembles death. If it seems like I’m complaining about a free weekend at a five star resort on the cobalt waters of the Red Sea, my response is, “Yes. I am doing exactly that.” And I think you’ll see my complaints are legitimate.

1. Our stay at the resort did not include the elixir of life itself: water. The breakfast and dinner buffets were almost completely dry, and did not offer alcohol, juice, water, sugar water, etc. Since I was not willing to spend extra money, I subsisted off of the 4 cups of coffee at breakfast and dew I licked off the grass in the early morning. As a result of the crippling dehydration, I was plagued by bizarre thoughts about wanting to be a sea creature, leading to many  ill-advised attempts at settling permanently under water.

2. Resorts are creepy places. This particular one was about 40 kilometers from the nearest city, and it was an entirely enclosed compound, a world unto itself.  The longer I stayed, the more I felt my humanity leaking from me as I slowly forgot my former life, the one where I drank water. Furthermore, Ain Sukhna falls where the Eastern Desert meets the Red Sea. This isn’t one of those wacky deserts full of vegetation and animals. It is barren.  Despite this, at the resort one can find blossoming gardens, twittering birds, and broiling humans. None of this should be here. It is a desert. We should just call this whole thing quits and go back to fertile land.

3. The weather was too hot. I simply can’t understand how people find self-roasting (immolation) pleasant. Don’t they know they’re dying? I wanted to understand the others, and so I spent an entire day outside in the scalding heat, cowering from the sun under an umbrella.  However, probably due to the dehydration as well as the heat, I felt weaker than I ever have in my entire life and remained plastered to the lounge chair like a deflated beached animal, drifting in and out of consciousness and trying to remember what it was like to have thoughts. Next time, I will have no shame in embracing indoors and air conditioning.

One might say I should have expected all of this from the words “resort vacation on the beach,” but I had yearned for more. May my next trip outside of Cairo be a fount of creativity and not a sinkhole of lethargy.

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