Kool senna wenta tayib

This sentence means something like “may you be well all the year.” You use it to say happy new year, happy birthday, and “here, take this tip/bribe.” I just got to use it for the first time and I am pretty excited about it.

My little old garbage man who comes by once a month for the $1.80 I pay him to take out my garbage for the month was counting out my change and in Arabic, I stopped him when he’d given me back all but three times as much as his usual monthly fee and said “thank you, happy new year.” He is always very polite and friendly when he sees me but I scored an even bigger than usual smile this time.

I am going to be using this sentence a lot in the next couple weeks before my trip home in September. Ramadan is supposed to be a time for charity, self-deprivation, and introspection. Since I’m not Muslim, I don’t actually have any charitable obligations but since I’m not fasting, I’m not really doing much self-depriving or introspecting these days so I’ve chosen to focus on charity in the spirit of the season. It is traditional to give gifts (think big tips) to the people who work for you so their families can eat meat a few times during the months.

Usually, the idea that I would have people who work for me would be ridiculous but I seem to have amassed quite the staff in the last few months. In addition to my doorman, who does absolutely nothing (a doorman’s job is to provide security so strangers can’t get into the building, run errands for residents, and keep the common stairwell and landings lit and clean…and my doorman does none of these things and on top of that is totally incomprehensible when he speaks to me and I have to rely on his 12 year old son as communications liaison), I have a dog walker who comes every weekday to take care of Whiskey, and a cleaner who comes once a week.

It is also traditional to buy customary Ramadan sweets for one’s employees. The favorites are basboosa, a sort of cake-like dessert made of semolina (so it is flatter, denser and a little grainier than cake) and then soaked in a floral syrup, and konaffa, which is the texture and appearance of shredded wheat but with a light, crispy pastry taste wound into the shape of a bird’s nest and topped with honey and either pistachios or peanuts. Love konaffa, hate basboosa but basboosa is significantly more popular with Egyptians. When I ask Egyptians what they think of when they think of Ramadan, they smile and their eyes roll back in pleasure and they purr “basboosa!” I think it is because after fasting all day any food tastes way more amazing.

I will be back in Oregon for the feast that marks the end of Ramadan in mid-September so I won’t be around to buy anybody sweets but I might leave some cash with my office mates to get some for the office attendants who are in charge of keeping the lunch room stocked with yogurt, coffee, etc., paying for lunch orders, making copies, getting office supplies, etc. as they are all really diligent about their work and are always very polite and patient with my clumsy Arabic.

The schedule and pace of life has shifted significantly since Ramadan started on Wednesday. I thought it was hard to get my handyman to come to fix something before Ramadan, now I can’t even get him to answer the phone. Apparently the first week of fasting is the most difficult for everyone and everyone works very little or stops altogether until they adjust to the lack of food, water, cigarettes and sex between the hours of dawn and dusk. It is August and extremely hot, and as if abstaining from these necessities (excluding smoking) weren’t hard enough everyone must still venture out into the heat three times during daylight hours for prayers, and endure (I mean enjoy?) an EXTRA hour of prayers specific to Ramadan in the evening after the normal evening prayer.

The time zone itself shifted back one hour to winter time. Daylight savings is canceled for the month of Ramadan so that everyone can sleep in an extra hour before work and thus shorten, in a way, the amount of time one has to be awake feeling hungry and thirsty from the fasting. The clocks will jump ahead again for the three weeks starting at Eid el Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, and October first, when it officially “falls back” to winter time again.

The pace of work and reliability of service, always questionable at best in Egypt, has slogged to a near-halt this first week of fasting (veteran expats say it gets better next week) meaning I cannot get my air conditioning fixed to save my life (it has been two weeks) or get the pair of pants the tailor is supposedly making for me any time soon (he said it would take a week but it has actually been SIX weeks! They’d better be pants made of gold when I pick them up). There are certain times of the day (during prayers, any time before noon when people are trying to sleep as long as possible so they don’t have to feel how much fasting sucks, and during Iftar and the special Ramadan prayers which, together, last until around 9:30pm) when everything is closed and no one answers the phone or shows up to work, even if work is sitting on the broken sofa on the street outside my apartment.

Iftar, or the daily breaking of the fast occurs around 6:40 every day and is traditionally dates and sugared tea (every beverage is heavily sugared in Egypt) followed by heavier foods with family and friends. Each day’s iftar is an event and Egyptians hop from invitation to invitation with various relatives, groups of friends, and colleagues such that Ramadan, despite the stress and difficulty of fasting during the day, made extra cruel by the fast that each year it moves earlier and earlier into the summer and thus gets longer and hotter, is a time many look forward to for the spirit of love, friendship, and community similar to what Americans feel leading up to Christmas.

The single beer distributor is closed during Ramadan and many places that serve very cheap food have closed or stopped delivery services during the day because the volume of orders drops so significantly that turning out buckets of koshery, for example, a mix of small tube shaped macaroni, chopped up spaghetti, lentils, rice, fried onions, tomato sauce, spicy sauce, and garlic isn’t a sustainable business this month. Technically no one can legally be served alcohol during Ramadan, even in restaurants and bars, but some of the older places either have grandfathered exceptions allowing them to serve to foreigners (you actually have to show your passport to order a drink if you look Egyptian to prove you have a foreign nationality) or else they are paying off the cops. Places that don’t get enough expat business to justify paying those bribes (kool senna wenta tayib, officer!) use the month to remodel. The rule against serving Egyptians is particularly unfair to the Copts, who are Egyptian and thus have no foreign passport but who obviously don’t observe Ramadan and have no religious prohibitions against drinking alcohol. They can’t get alcohol this month and thus, like many expats, stock up on beer, etc. the week before and just drink at home or in the homes of friends more than usual this time of year.

I walk the dog exactly at Iftar time now, as the streets are completely empty, no traffic, and no groups of young men sitting around the front doors of buildings drinking tea and smoking to distract the job from his central task of putting one foot in front of the other (it is soooo easy to distract a puppy!). I haven’t changed my clothing habits yet but I will dress a little more conservatively if I start getting harassed. Apparently Egyptian men who are abstaining from sex and supposedly masturbation during the day and who are supposed to be purifying themselves through this self-deprivation blame women who dress too provocatively (skirts or shorts above the knees, tops that are too low-cut, showing too much upper arm, etc. for “tempting” them to think the very thoughts they are supposed to banish. Like drinking ice water or eating a juicy burger in front of a melting, sweating fast-er, walking around in my Capri pants and short-sleeved shirt might be viewed as a betrayal of religious ideals this time of year and could get me into trouble. It is freaking hot, though, so I’m still walking around in my knee-length shorts and short-sleeved shirts until someone yells at me.

I’m sure I’ll come across more examples of Ramadan-induced chaos as the month wears on but those are the basics for now. It feels a bit like accidentally falling through a black hole into another reality where all the rules I’ve learned so far get tossed out the window and I have to learn a whole new set of cultural norms. Actually stepping into a new time zone doesn’t help counter the surreal feeling very much and, in another unexpected turn, the entire city ran out of fruit yogurt, my primary staple food, all at once yesterday, leading me to believe I am actually dreaming a terrible anxiety dream. Pinch me!

This one's not about immigration, I swear

For those of you with an excess of prayers, positive energy, compassion, and a few minutes on your hands, can I suggest aiming whatever you’ve got at Russia and Pakistan for a moment or two? Pakistan is suffering the deadliest flooding in eighty years and Russia is plagued by forest fires. As if forest fires spreading across the country weren’t frightening enough, consider what those fires are spreading toward. Apparently, Chernobyl could burn. If the fires reach Chernobyl, all the nuclear material that has been absorbed into the surrounding woods will be turned into smoke and blown around Russia and the world.

Why would I ask you to think and pray for those suffering in far off parts of the world rather than demanding your positive thoughts for myself? Well, I am awesome that way, but also, I am significantly less miserable this week. I got assigned to a new case! It is sure to cause some friction with my office mate this week as she has been increasingly depressed by having spent the last two years on this same construction case I’ve been on since I started, and it has been an unspoken rule in my department that we won’t be assigned to new cases until we finish the statement of claim for the case we’re working on.

So what changed? How’d I get lucky? This spring, I told UW’s Career Services office that my firm was hiring and around 20 people applied. When applicants asked to Skype with me about life at the firm and in Cairo, I gave up a couple hours of my weekends to do so and when asked by HR or senior associates about different quirks of American writing samples, cover letters, etc. I shared what I knew. It wasn’t really that much of a time sacrifice on my part and I was happy to give other UW grads a shot at gainful employment in a still-crappy job market and maybe help out the firm in the process if someone actually worked out.

I had my last HR-related meeting on Tuesday night and on Wednesday afternoon, I was told I would be going to a client meeting the next morning with a senior associate and the principal partner. I was absolutely terrified but my friend told me I’d be surprised after having worked on this very complicated construction case for eight months how much I’d understand. It turned out to be true and I really did get everything that was talked about at the meeting. I hope I get to stay on the case because it is so refreshingly straightforward compared to my usual day to day work and because it is a big honor to be put on something different before my current task wraps up.

So I am pretty excited. I’ve started looking forward to work now that it has shifted from doc review to actual drafting and the addition of a new case, if they do indeed keep me on it, can only boost my confidence and further convince me I’m capable of doing legal work.

In other news, Whisky is now all caught up on his shots. After 2.5 hours of waiting and 5 minutes in the doctor’s clutches, he has his rabies vaccine. He is also proving to be quite the guy magnet. In addition to attracting every child within barking distance while out on our walks, he also gets the attention of several groups of Egyptian men, hanging out outside buildings and in parking lots either for work or recreation. Today his unbearable cuteness pulled over a really good looking real-estate broker (in Egypt this usually just means a guy with a cell phone who knows other guys with cell phones who call each other when they know of an open apartment and exchange favors and commission fees and bilk foreigners out of a full month’s rent in exchange for finding something one could find by walking around the neighborhood). This guy was well-built, had nice green eyes, which is unusual here, was well-dressed, obviously not lazy as I ran into him out in the heat at 10am, spoke English, and was good with the dog.

I had already been out in the mucky August air and the muddy (air conditioning drip plus street dirt), garbage strewn street (the garbage men who clean the streets and scoop up the piles of trash people leave on the corners of sidewalks don’t work on Friday so Saturday morning is the grossest time to be outside) and was sweaty, hair pulled back but falling out of my ponytail in humidity-compelled frizzy chunks, drips of sweat literally sliding down from my temples to my jaw, and dirty-footed in my flip flops that my wet, grimy dog keeps stepping and sitting on when he wants to take a break. I was in shorts long enough to cover my knees but not quite long enough to be stylish capris, a dirty tank top because today was set to be laundry day, and a collared short-sleeve shirt somewhere between green and grey. And did I mention I was sweaty?

When good looking guys stop me on the street to ask me out I am suspicious. When good looking guys stop me on the street in my dog walking clothes before my shower after infrequent dipping in mud and trash I am very suspicious. I need to talk about this more with my Egyptian friends but either he asked me out because he wants to have sex and in the minds of Egyptian men, foreign women = sex, Egyptian women = marriage, or he asked me out to try to sell me real estate. Either way, if you yourself are good looking, educated and employed, you don’t ask someone out who looks as gross as I did this morning within 10 seconds of meeting them because you liked their personality when you saw them dragging their unwilling dog out of a puddle of air conditioning slime. You do it because you want something.

Maybe I am judging this guy (and all Egyptian guys I’ve met so far) and myself, too harshly, but it is definitely one of the pitfalls of living in a culture where gender relationships and sex are viewed so completely differently than in my own. Getting hit on by a polite, good looking guy should be flattering but instead I am left a bit bitter, thinking he is more likely a creep who watches too much imported porn and thinks all American women are (or aspire to be) Lisa Sparxxx.

Sorry for the two blog posts today. I am stuck at home waiting for the guy to come fix my air conditioning…which means I am stuck in my UN-air conditioned home waiting for the guy to come fix my air conditioning. Watching a lot of TV, playing fetch for 30 seconds at a time since the dog can’t make more than one or two trips to catch the toy until he is too hot and has to lie down, and trying to clean my apartment with my mind. Going about as well as you’d expect.

Dear Lindsey Graham, Lou Dobbs is making you look like a Dbag.

After watching Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert all weekend, I was delighted to learn Elena Kagan has been confirmed, Prop 8 overturned in California in a 138 page ruling making fun of the pro-Prop 8 so-called “experts” who got their "information" from the internet and discussions with like-minded friends, and Naomi Campbell actually testified against Charles Taylor in the Hague (c’mon, who really thought she’d show?!).

I was also honestly quite shocked to discover that the kind of idea that SHOULD by all rights be isolated to the far right wing of the far right wing of the Republican party is getting some play among Senators who I have previously considered to be somewhat reasonable. I am talking about the “anchor babies” craziness sweeping the conservative airways. And I am talking about Sen. Lindsey Graham, of S. Carolina who is usually not given to quite that level of craziness.

Remember Lindsey Graham? After giving NOW SUPREME COURT JUSTICE Elena Kagan a little bit of a hard time for having called the judicial confirmation process a “vapid and hollow charade,” in what was one of the funnier moments of her own confirmation hearings (he also gave her the opening for her joke about spending Christmas in a Chinese restaurant), he crossed the aisle to confirm Kagan, just as he had also voted for Sonia Sotomayor. Sounds like a reasonable guy, right?

Well former reasonable guy Lindsey Graham has gone off the rails on the subject of immigration reform (which I thought conservatives didn’t want to talk about going into midterms because they’d lose the Latino vote they need) and, of all things, the Fourteenth Amendment. Now if there is one thing I never thought I’d hear floated by formerly reasonable senators as a purportedly reasonable option, it is repealing the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Fourteenth is not just any old Amendment: not the one about not having to quarter troops in our homes (because when has that been an issue recently?) or the one prohibiting cruel and usual punishment (because we do that anyway, regardless of the Constitution), not the one creating lame duck sessions of congress (why is this in there again?) or making senators directly elected by the people (you’d think Senators should be more afraid of this one). No, the Fourteenth is the one that protects us from discrimination, defines citizenship (and means we don’t have to file complicated citizenship forms when we have our babies in the US), applies the bill of rights to the states, grants equal protection under the law to ALL PEOPLE in the US, and has always been the ONE THING conservatives point to when they tell women we don’t need our own Equal Rights Amendment because we already have the Fourteenth Amendment to watch our backs. This is the Amendment that demands African American no longer be counted as three-fifths of a person.

And yet it is this BIG FREAKING AMENDMENT that Lindsey Graham called “outdated” this week.

Because of a conservative talk show-fueled rumor that pregnant immigrants are sneaking into the US by the millions either illegally or on tourist visas to have their babies on US soil to use as “anchor babies” to get the rest of their illegal immigrant families the rights and benefits of US citizenship.

First off, immigration doesn’t work like that. Remember all those stories right at the end of Bush’s presidency about how increased immigration enforcement (and decreased common sense) was resulting in US citizen children basically becoming orphans at the hands of the government when ICE sent their parents “home” to Mexico? It isn’t like if a baby born on US soil is some sort of Green Card Midas child that confers citizenship automatically on everyone she touches.

Besides the legal issues involved, there is also a practical smackdown to the truth of these rumors of so-called “birth tourism,” where wealthy pregnant women fly in from Brazil (this is the repeated example but I don’t know why they’re picking on Brazil), have a child, then fly home with a US citizen child. Women are not allowed to fly past their 32 week of pregnancy. After the 29th week they need a certificate from their doctor stating they are still early enough along to fly and the airline reserves the right to have pregnant potential-passengers examined by a doctor if they don’t believe the certificate.

And yet, this totally irrational “anchor babies” rumor was enough to push Lindsey Graham, and a lot of people a lot crazier than Lindsey Graham, right off the Cliffs of Insanity.

Is he really prepared to withdraw all the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment and redefine citizenship such that every child born in the US has to APPLY FOR CITIZENSHIP now? Does he have any idea how much more bureaucracy that will create? To counter an imaginary onslaught of babies with imaginary powers to grant legal status? I mean, I expect this kind of crap from Jon Kyl, but really Senator Graham? REALLY?!

Speaking of people who are usually a lot crazier than Lindsey Graham, Lou Dobbs, yes LOU DOBBS, has earned a shout out from the far left, the left, the middle, and the thoughtful on this subject. He said, ON FOX NEWS (was it ballsy or was it because this is the only audience for Lou Dobbs anymore?):

“The idea that anchor babies somehow require changing the 14th Amendment, I part ways with the senators on that, because I believe the 14th Amendment, particularly in its due process and equal protection clauses, is so important. We have a law in which they become American citizens for being born here…If you’re going to insist upon the rule of law and order—and I do—I have to insist that we recognize these anchor babies as US citizens.”

LOU DOBBS SAID THAT!

So shame on you, Senator Graham, for siding with racist no-immigration-law-knowing, no-compassion-having thoughtless idiot moron buffoons on this one. And, in fact, leading the charge.

And shame on you Senators Jon Kyl, John McCain (really, man, what happened to you?), Jeff Sessions, and Mitch McConnell (even though you’re backing off your support now, the whole “I thought I read an article about it once” defense doesn’t fly).
Shame.

8 hour minimum

Two weeks ago, the manager in charge of developing systems and policies in the firm (the firm is only 5 years old and this is the first time enough lawyers have worked there that they need policies for things like taking time off to attend conferences and courses, matching contributions for gym memberships, how to bill for time spent recruiting, etc.) sent out an email declaring that everyone had to bill a minimum of 8 hours each day.

This was surprising because it is pretty well known among foreign lawyers here that part of the deal of working in Egypt, part of what you get out of accepting the significantly lower salary that comes from working in the Egyptian market is that you don’t have the same high yearly targets as big British and American firms. At my old non-profit office, “nine to five” meant you had to be in at least by eleven and everyone would start lining up at 4:55 to clock out. Those who came at nine got paid the same as those who came in at eleven. It is just the way things work in Egypt.

So the fact that things will no longer work that way in the firm has its positives and its drawbacks. On the one hand, for recruitment and business development purposes it is obviously important that potential hires and potential clients take us as seriously as they would take a big European or New York law firm. So when we say we have a billing target of 1700 per year and 8 hour minimum days (that is 8 hours that must be billed either to client work or firm work such as recruitment, professional development, research, etc.), which actually works out to a higher billing target than the 1700 hours we’ve been told to aim for, clients, lawyers, and other law firms will understand that conforms pretty well to a high industry standard.

On the other hand, although I was billing around seven hours (which takes about nine or ten hours of actually being in the office to acquire nine billable hours, depending on how efficient I am on any given day) a lot of people were only billing five or so. So this new rule essentially ups everyone’s billable hours and the amount of time everyone has to stay in the office to hit that new target without acknowledging that fundamental truth with a pay increase. The email was dictatorial and vague, offering no details as to how meeting or not meeting the 8 hour minimum requirement would be weighted against other factors at our annual performance reviews in January. Supposedly there will be a follow up email from the boss, who thought this email was a draft and was surprised when it was sent out to everyone as it was but he’s been busy and everyone is struggling to stay calm and professional while management gets the quirks of the new policy straightened out.

It has been stressful because under the new policy, I now have to leave the house around 9 and don’t get home until 7:30 or 8. I have less time to spend with my puppy, Whisky (who got his second round of vaccinations today and is asleep on my foot) and things like reading and exercising have fallen off the map entirely. I usually need a lot of sleep to keep up my pathetic immune system but I am going to need to start training myself to do with less so I can keep those things in my life that keep me sane.

On the subject of health, I want to give a shout out to the Ludwig family, longtime friends of my family, whose mom, Patti, was hit by a car earlier this week. She is still in the ICU in a drug-induced coma at Legacy Emanuel Hospital in Portland. Her family have set up a blog to update friends and family on her condition. For those of you who know Patti and want to post your support in comments on the blog or send her family something you want them to read to Patti, the link is: http://www.carepages.com/carepages/pattiludwig but you have to set up an account on the homepage first. She is receiving music therapy and they are planning to take her out of the drug-induced coma for a thorough neurological assessment Friday morning. Please everyone send Patti and her family their positive thoughts and prayers.

It has been a difficult year to be so far from home and family. My mom’s friend Sarene passed away suddenly of liver cancer only a month or two after I moved here and a childhood friend of my brother’s died while Thomas was staying with me. I wish I was just the typical few minutes or even few hours’ drive from these friends and their families so I could offer my support but there isn’t much I can do from here. It is very frustrating.

On an unrelated note, though also intensely frustrating, I have yet to successfully order groceries delivered. This is apparently what all of my friends do to save the precious time that we now have so little of but although it is not difficult to find someone in a store who speaks English and can understand and record my order, that fact is completely unrelated to any possibility that the ordered and properly recorded order will actually arrive. For example, the first time I tried this, I ordered “chicken breasts cut into cubes.” I said exactly that in English and in Arabic and the guy taking the order repeated it back to me. When it arrived, they had sent chicken bouillon cubes. I can sort of get the similarity but there is no way there is a “breast” meat option for bouillon cubes, nor is there any “cutting” involved so the guy should have thought twice when he checked the order.

Today, I ordered one kilo center-cut steak cut into small cubes separated into two Styrofoam packets of a half kilo each and one half-kilo of chicken breast cut into small cubes. Again, I went over the order with a guy who spoke very good English and just to be sure, I explained what I wanted in Arabic as well. I had a good feeling about ordering this time, as this is something people, even non-Arabic speaking people, do successfully all the time, but once again, Cairo served me right for getting my hopes up. The order was totally butchered. Pun intended!

According to the delivery boy there was apparently no chicken breast available today so they just didn’t bring any chicken at all. Instead of beef, they sent veal, which is a completely different word, and twice as expensive. The whole kilo was stuffed into one packet so I had to pull it out to freeze it in separate bags instead of just freezing it as is and the “small cubes” were slabs as big as my palm. If you order small cubes in person, they give you pieces about the size of a quarter. So with my dull crap veggie-cutting knife, I had to cut the veal into smaller and smaller pieces before I could freeze it. The knife was so dull it took like fifteen strokes of the blade to create one cube. Because it is veal instead of beef, I feel like I need to make it in a nice marinade or something because it would be totally wasted in a fajita or stir fry.

If anybody has any interesting meat recipes for grilling, baking, or tajine, hit me up!

Thomas Guest Post from Sudan/South Africa

Thomas wrote an update newsletter from South Africa describing his experiences in Sudan for circulation amongst his many fans. Since several of my readers count themselves as fans of Thomas, I am posting his letter.

However,(ATTENTION AUNT CHRIS!!!) no one is allowed to suggest (EVEN HINT!) that I forfeit my self-bestowed title of the best of the (West) Maffai bloggers. Because 99% of blogging is putting it on the net... and so, without further ado, I give you Thomas' update from South African/Sudan:

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Greetings from South Africa!

I arrived this week to this nation that is buzzing with excitement of World Cup fever and after a month in rural Southern Sudan with the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation. I am still re-adjusting to so many stimuli: paved roads, electricity, real showers, so many options of food. I find myself overwhelmed at making even the smallest of decisions and I long for the quiet simplicity that I have known for the past month.

I lived in a hut, without electricity, near the school campus. Most of the teachers I worked with lived with me. We ate the same meal twice a day, every day, showered with buckets, and played soccer with the students after school. We were a 30 minute walk to the village and my excitement for the week was walking to town on Sunday, market day, to the main road, an unpaved stretch of road bordered by small shops where mostly Darfurian Arabs trade goods from the north. It is the market where the entire village gathers each week to purchase goods, catch up with friends, people-watch, and flirt with potential wives. The elders sit under a tree and argue and laugh and hold somewhat informal court hearings to settle disputes. Men haggle over the price of cattle and goats. Women walk with massive bundles of firewood or large jerry cans of water carried on their heads.

While my time at the school was short, I feel as though I was able to make an impact. This wasn’t really made evident to me until my last day when the school held a goodbye assembly for me in which the teachers and students made speeches and a goat was slaughtered in my name. I worked mostly with the teachers many of whom had only a secondary education themselves. With no teacher training, computers, electricity, and very few textbooks, the teachers tended to provide their students with lessons modeled after their own educational experiences; based almost entirely on rote memorization and simple recall of information. With only one textbook for some courses, some of the teachers deemed it a necessary use of class-time to copy the textbook on to the blackboard and have the students copy this into their notebooks verbatim.

I facilitated daily workshops after school to reinforce basic teaching methodology, targeting the specific challenges of teaching and learning in such a rural area with very few resources. During the school day, I would plan and teach model classes for the teachers to demonstrate the skills we focused on. We set staff goals to use real world examples that the students can connect with, to present material in diverse ways (aside from copying notes on the board), to provide students with positive feedback, give the students many opportunities to practice the skills they were learning. Giving the teachers the tools and motivation to implement activities that encourage critical thinking, and use pertinent real world examples became my focus.

After one week, I was thrilled to see the teachers making an effort to incorporate engaging activities in their lessons. The biology teacher had her students plant bean sprouts to observe the impact of light on plant growth. The chemistry teacher took on a mad scientist persona as he began to walk around the school with his arms full of test tubes and chemicals for daily demonstrations. The English teacher had students stand up with pronouns on index cards, replacing the nouns on the blackboard. They were small steps forward, but as you walked through the outdoor hallways peering through the glassless window frames into the classrooms, the difference was noticeable.

Wanting to also work directly with the students, I began teaching an intensive world history mini-course. With no history textbooks the school was not offering any history curriculum. The students were incredibly motivated and curious and would constantly try to persuade me to come to their classroom during empty periods for more lessons. Every day after class they would rush to the front of the room to get a closer look at the one world map we had, they would ask endless questions. “If Africa is the cradle of civilization, why are we so far behind other continents in terms of development” “Why was Europe able to colonize almost the entire world?” “Why are there more dark-skinned people at central latitudes and lighter-skinned people near the poles?” “Why do African Americans speak English and not their mother tongue?” “Why does the east coast of the Americas resemble the west-coast of Africa?” Their curiosity and drive to learn was staggering.

I find it difficult to share my thoughts and feelings about these past few weeks. Having seen and experienced so much, it is difficult to communicate the importance of certain experiences to others. I thought it would be best to share with you some of the thoughts I wrote down while I was in Sudan.

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First impressions…
I am not one to journal, but being somewhat isolated in this rural village, I am left with few forms of entertainment.

I arrived yesterday… Finally , after over a year of planning, two months of waiting in Egypt, a flight to Nairobi, Kenya, a flight to Juba, the capital of Southern Sudan, a UN-chartered flight to Wau and then another to Aweil, followed by a 2 hour drive in a land cruiser on a dirt road, I finally arrive in Marial Bai. I have never been to a place so rural, so seemingly forgotten by the rest of the fast-paced internet- and caffeine- powered world. Yet the similarities are what really strike me. When I observe a class on abstract nouns or the process of photosynthesis, I could be here, in Marial Bai, or Miami Jackson, or even Redmond High School. The students face an obvious lack of resources but instead of being shocked at how little they have, I am shocked by how much they are able to learn. They have very few textbooks, sometimes only one per class. In 100 degree heat with not even a breeze, the students are crammed into the classrooms, over 40 students to a room with no desks, sitting in plastic chairs. The air is stifling and the students are dripping sweat as the try to concentrate. I am reminded of the days at Miami Jackson, when the air conditioning would break. I remember how sluggish the students and teachers would be and how difficult it was for teaching and learning to happen. But here, where the heat is constant and there is no alternative, the teachers and students push through and stay amazingly focused.

The teachers are up against a lot of challenges and are lacking many skills. But for the most part, they are hardworking and caring and willing to learn. Three of them are Kenyan women who have come to Sudan to teacher here. They live with me on the compound behind the school. The other 5 teachers are Sudanese men who are originally from the area, two of whom are live on the compound with us. They have been incredibly welcoming. The Sudanese help me out with their insider knowledge and insight into Sudan. Several of them are originally from Marial Bai and are only now returning after 11 years in Uganda. They have only a high school education themselves, but their eagerness to learn and hardworking nature is developing them quickly into teachers.

On women and cows…
Part of the school’s mission is to recruit young female girls. We are in the process of completing a girls’ dormitory which will hopefully attract many more, but right now there are very few girls. The women in Dinka culture work very hard. Every morning when I wake up at 7:00 and look over the straw fence, I see the women already at work in the fields. They sit on their knees to dig through the dirt and cultivate enough crops (mostly sorghum) to feed their families. They live in huts made of mud bricks and straw roofs with dirt floors. My hut has a cement floor and a blue tarp reinforcing the thatched roof. As I lie here writing, an early rainy season thunderstorm is raging outside. I wonder how the families whose huts aren’t as luxurious as mine are faring right now. Now that the rains are coming, several of our female students have already been taken out of school by their families to cultivate and tend to the crops. We will also lose several girls each year who are married of and no longer able to attend school. I recently learned that several of our male students are already married and have several wives. Polygamy is common here and a symbol of affluence. Aside from women, cows are the next most important sign of affluence. If you asked my students what they want to be when the grow up, many of them would tell you they want to be cattle-herders. Cattle is the legal tender for paying dowries and the going rate for a new bride is anywhere between 50-200 cattle. The cattle are actually delivered on the day of the wedding and therefore the day’s festivities include inspection of and negotiation for the cattle, sending back the sick or skinny ones. Sometimes, families can even just send their daughter to a man’s house offering her as a bride. If a man sleeps with a woman out of wedlock, he is expected to take her on as a wife. If he chooses not to, he can, instead, compensate the family of the girl with a fine of two cows for taking their daughter’s virginity and thus rendering her useless for fetching a dowry.

On the war…
The site where the school is now located was actually a mass grave a little more than a decade ago. The dead were civilian casualties of the brutal civil war that has plagued Sudan for decades between the mostly Muslim, Arabic speaking north and the mostly Christian south. It is difficult to tell how much of the violence was political; the work of governments and armies, and how much of it arises from a long history of complex inter-tribal conflict. Marial Bai is just south of the north-south border, about 30 miles from Darfur. These hazy borderlands have served for centuries as both a point of contention and one of connection between very different cultures. Arabs traders bring goods and products down from Khartoum in the North and many nomadic Arab herding tribes bring their cattle south during the dry season to graze on the wetter soils of the South. My students speak Dinka, their mother tongue, Arabic the language of the northern government, and English, the colonial language and the language of the future Southern Sudan. Today it is difficult to differentiate between politically motivated vestiges of the civil war and seemingly endless revenge killings resulting form intertribal conflict across complicated and sometimes hazy ethnic divisions. Gun shots were heard this morning and many some suspect that it might be an anticipated revenge of the killing of several Arabs a few months ago.

I am told that many of our students are actually ex-soldiers. As I watch them struggle through math problems, hunched over the papers on their laps as they sit in plastic chairs and straining their eyes to see the faint chalk on the scratched blackboard, I find it hard to imagine them as soldiers with guns.

The students…
The extent to which these students are going to get their education is incredible. The school is not equipped to be a boarding school yet. However there is a small building near the teacher huts that will eventually become a girls dormitory. In the meantime, many of the boys, who come from great distances, have asked to stay there in its unfinished state. It started with just a few but now there are over 30 boys sleeping in the rooms. We are still waiting for more beds to be brought from Uganda so many are choosing to sleep on mattresses on the floor. The rainy season is beginning and the water is driving the spiders and the large black scorpions indoors so it is risky to sleep on the floor but may of the students the only other option is stay at home, out of reach of the school. They eat nothing for breakfast, a bowl of sorghum and beans for lunch and another one for dinner. There are no latrines built yet so the students go to the bathroom in the bush. When it rains, the unfinished roof leaks, they have no electricity and the well from which they drink looks questionable. We informed them that we aren’t yet equipped to be a boarding school but many readily accept the squalid conditions in order to continue studying. Many are sick with stomach problems and diarrhea. In spite of this they are still so focused on school. They are smart and most are very well-spoken in English, their second (or third) language. They are incredibly respectful and appreciative. They often share one textbook per class, they play soccer after school each day, barefooted on the gravel. The boarding students petitioned us to open up a classroom in the evenings so they could have a place to study. Each night after spending all day stuffed into the classrooms, the voluntarily return to the unlit school in the dark to sit unsupervised and study in near silence for two more hours by flashlight.
-------------
Looking back…
I am currently driving across South Africa, hiking and catching a few World Cup games here and there. I am reading What is the What by Dave Eggers for the second time. This is the remarkable story of Valentino Achak Deng and his experience walking from Marial Bai, across Sudan to Ethiopia, spending over a decade in a refugee camp in Kenya, and then his resettlement into my own country. The proceeds from this book, combined with Valentino’s commitment to improve educational opportunities in his home is what has made this incredible school possible. It is strange to read the book again after being in Marial Bai. Valentino is no longer just a character in a book to me. He is my good friend. Sudan is no longer an unknown far-away place. It is a friendly, beautiful place with problems that belong to real people. It is so strange to reread the book after meeting all the “characters” and to realize that their stories are so real. I met hundreds of Sudanese with their own stories incredibly tragic, unfair, gut-wrenching and inspiring.

The atmosphere now in Sudan is hopeful, but cautious. With the referendum just a few months away, the south will vote for either separation from or unity with the north. As always in Sudan, the future is unpredictable, but it is obvious that Sudan is on the precipice of much transformation. I have not met one person who plans to vote for unity with the North. The students place so much value on their education. They see it as their only shot at improving their own personal future, but they also see it as their responsibility in the nation-building process of the New Sudan. I feel fortunate to have seen this country now, at such a formative moment for both the country and myself. I will return next month to the United States to begin grad school with new perspective on people and the world.

Thank you to everyone for your support. During my work, I depended on the kindness and receptiveness of the Sudanese, but it was my family and friends who provided me with the love, encouragement, free medical advice, on-the-ground connections, financial donations, thoughts, and prayers that got me to Sudan in the first place and I am grateful. It is truly inspiring to be the link between the community in my home country and the community in Sudan. On behalf of the students and teachers with whom I worked, thank you for your support. They, as I, are grateful.


Thank you,

Thomas

----------------
From the forward of What is the What, written by Valentino:

“My desire to have this book written was born out of my faith and beliefs in humanity; I wanted to reach out to others to help them understand Sudan’s place in our global community…I am blessed to have lived to inform you that even when my hours were darkest, I believed that someday I could share my experiences with others. This book is a form of struggle, and it keeps my spirit alive to struggle. To struggle is to strengthen my faith, my hope and my belief in humanity. Since you and I exist, together we can make a difference!”

Puppy sniffles

I stayed home sick yesterday with a cold I caught from my new puppy, which he apparently caught from the air conditioners. He was taken from his mama at around four weeks, which is way too young, so he hasn't learned a lot of the social norms (like, quit biting my hand) or gained the usual immunities puppies get from staying with their mom and littermates until at least eight weeks.

I had passed him at the pet store a few times but I was looking for a girl dog, which the owner said he had and kept promising to bring, but never did. After maybe ten days in the pet shop, this guy already had fleas and was covered in flies. The temperature outside was hitting 100 degrees regularly and there was no AC in the store, which was about the size of a walk-in closet. He wasn't barking, he was just sitting there, being chewed on by bugs, having to pee and poop in his cage, and looking really sad. So I took him.

He is going to be kind of a frou-frou looking dog, I think, as he is already really fluffy so I thought he needed a tough guy name. I thought to give him a sort of Mafioso street tough kind of name and considered Knuckles and Meatball but settled on Whisky. The name has the advantage of not only describing his coloring, but also being at the end of the military alphabet, from which trainers, etc. get the name for the lead dog in a pack, the Alpha dog. A lot of dog training is convincing the dog you're the Alpha, the one in charge, so hopefully having a name from the end of the alphabet will help Whisky respect my authority (insert South Park impersonation here). Though maybe I'm giving him too much credit, assuming he'll follow my alphabet reasoning and obey me.

Whisky and I both caught colds yesterday. Don't know if I got mine from him, he got his from me, or we both got sick from running the AC all the time (someone told me last week it got up to 114 degrees...is that even possible?!). He was sneezing a lot and couldn't smell where his food or newspapers were (he's actually been paper trained since I got him since had to go on the papers his cage at the shop). I tried to call the vet but he wasn't in the office. Later in the evening he started this hacking, wheezing cough that would end in a choking sound and some foamy (clear) phlegm would come up. The choking and spitting lasted all night and he sounded like he was in a lot of pain. I was really scared it was going to get worse and he'd stop breathing but it stayed at that level of stuffy-nosed discomfort and occasional choking panic (me panicking, not him so much).

I finally got through to the vet around 12 and the vet tech told me the doctor would be in a half hour. So I quickly showered, gathered up his "waiting in the vet's office" items (a towel at the bottom of my gym bag, extra towel to wipe his nose, little rawhide chew toy to gnaw on and hamster-cage-drip-on-demand-water-bottle, and headed to the vet's office for what turned into a 3 hour wait with 9 other dogs, 2 cats, and a creepy guy who had an I-don't-know-what in a basket (a severed head perhaps? A picnic lunch for two?).

I was glad I had brought him into the doctor because although I fully expected a "first time mom" lecture about how I don't need to bring him to see the doc for every little thing, the vet actually gave him two shots (antibiotic and anti-inflammatant to make his breathing easier) and said he definitely wanted to see him again tomorrow to check on him. He is so calm and relaxed at the vet, mildly interested in other dogs but generally sleepy in my gym bag, and happy to be on my lap for hours on end. The only moment where he broke his cool was when the vet needed to check his temperature...which vets do NOT do by putting a thermometer under the tongue, if you know what I mean. He made a sound and a facial expression that was pretty much exactly, "WHAT?!" Poor baby.

I am sorry this post is so short and comes after so many weeks. I was super depressed there for awhile after Thomas and Galleta left and I've been super busy in the week since I got Whisky and now I am sick and have a sick puppy to pamper. Off to take some more Dayquil!

Single Again

I saw a man today. A thin, tiny man with thin, tiny hair. His uniform was a navy blue jumpsuit with orange trim that absolutely dwarfed him. He would have looked like he had put on his dad’s clothes but he was easily 65 years old. Here was this man, who was no doubt so small from having eaten meat no more than once a week for likely his entire life, who would never ever use an ATM card or even have a bank account (you need $1000 to open a savings account), whose job it was, among many other things, no doubt, to dust the Cairo street dirt from the face of the ATM. He clearly took great pride in his work. He dusted the screen thoroughly first, then flipped his little wet cloth to gently press the clean side around each of the keys with a single skinny finger.

I hustled along to my air conditioned office with my sausage egg McMuffin and coffee.

Why was I eating breakfast at McDonald’s you ask? Well, no, you’re probably wondering more about the little old man but since I don’t know any more about him and his meticulous attention to his work makes me feel like a jerk for complaining about construction law all day, I will just tell you why I was at McDonald’s.

I was buying a measuring cup. Well, a measuring 4-cup, actually. From a girl who is moving back to the States in a few weeks (McD’s was just a convenient central location). I have been eyeballing my biscotti recipe because everything here is in metric measurements (duh) and I am never sure when I should be converting to grams and when I should be converting to milliliters so my recipes never come out the same way twice. So I bought myself an American measuring cup that measures in yes, CUPS, a unit of measure my British friend finds ridiculous since apparently, unlike other “Standard” units of measure, they never used cups in England. Yeah, like “Stones” are soooo self-evident.

Insert I HEART EGYPT note here: I just had seven bottles of beer delivered to my door. Why 7? Six for me (they don’t come in six packs here, but I am sentimental like that) and one for my landlord who is coming tomorrow from Alexandria to pick up my rent. Marisol and I discovered he is more likely to let us do whatever we want (like crossing Joana, the girl who used to have the apartment and never told the landlord she was moving out for good, off the lease without her being there to say otherwise) if we have a beer with him when he comes. He asks about my family in America and asks after my brother by name since he randomly met Thomas once during an unscheduled visit to my apartment – I usually had Thomas go somewhere else when the landlord came by since he was literally living on my floor for two months without anybody’s knowledge or permission. Instead of being mad there was this unknown guy in the apartment with two girls (usually a big no-no in Egypt), he called me from inside my apartment to ask me to ask my brother (though all of this was done in English) if he needed anything or any help from my landlord while he was in town. I am hoping he is the nice old man he seems.

Speaking of the apartment, today is my first day coming back from the office with no puppy to greet me. I have started picking up her toys and putting them in a pile in the corner of the apartment that was her “room” so that I don’t have to see little reminders of the sweet sweet heart that is no longer here to keep me company. Marisol came to pick her up yesterday afternoon around 4:30. I had called in sick to work, the only time in my life I have ever done that without actually being sick, because I kept crying every ten minutes or so and thought that would probably be disruptive to others in the office (and…um…embarrassing!).

We went for two long walks around the neighborhood on what has become our usual route and the boys downstairs who park cars for rich people, the son of my doorman, the guy who mans the parking lot down the street, the guard outside the Bahraini ambassador’s house, a driver who is always waiting by the apartments across from the supermarket, a man taking a tea break with friends a guy going to the grocery store, and two students all stopped to pet her without knowing it would be the last time. I am dreading the moment when I go out alone and someone asks me where Galleta is, not only because it is difficult to explain in my Arabic that she was never mine and now lives in Mexico, but also because it will be difficult to do so without a meltdown.

I am considering getting a new dog, one that will actually be mine, and technically my first to raise all on my own but I haven’t decided yet if I would be able to be fair to a dog, working over full time at the firm. Thanks to those of you who have pitched in with your advice and told me I would be a good dog mom. Even if it doesn’t come to pass, I like to know that people think of me that way. To dog lovers, there are few higher compliments.

Departures

The most important personality in my Cairo life right now (since Thomas is now safely "under the watch of the VIP/Presidential guard unit" in Marial Bai, Southern Sudan) is my roommate Marisol’s dog, Galleta. Some of you may remember her from the reeeaaaallly adorable picture I posted of her on the blog months ago when she was feeling sick and made herself look extra cute to get more sympathy. She has grown up now and we have really fallen into step this past month.

Marisol moved out officially a couple weeks ago but she was already spending most nights at her new boyfriend’s apartment for another couple weeks before that so I’ve been in charge of the dog for about five weeks now on my own. I was always the one to spend the most time with her but Marisol, for the most part, took care of the day to day responsibilities (food, water, fresh newspapers). I got the benefit of the constant cuteness and the only price I had to pay were nightly walks a few times around the block so she wouldn’t be too hyper in the evenings and would stop eating the furniture. Thomas was here to help me out with the walking and furniture protection duties until he left for Sudan on the 20th but it has been just me since then.

I was crushed when Marisol decided to go back to Mexico way earlier than expected and I had literally two months less dog time than I thought I would. Galleta has been my constant companion this week and, since Marisol moved out and Thomas left within a week of each other, she has been my only company at home in the evenings.

I have had to say goodbye to dogs before. As a one-lab family for my entire life, we’ve seen pets pass away. I haven’t always handled it well. When our yellow lab, Kelsey, died in 2004, I was living in New York and only found out afterwards that my parents had had to make the tough decision to have her put to sleep or else suffer through bone cancer. My mom, who didn’t have the hang of the whole answering-your-cell-doesn’t-mean-you’re-somewhere-appropriate-to-receive-bad-news thing told me while I was on a public bus coming back from the movies and I bawled the entire 20 minute walk home (which New Yorkers didn’t seem to think was that crazy), then drank a bottle of Yellow Tail shiraz and nearly fell down my Grandma’s stairs.

But this departure is different. Unlike my other dogs, I have raised her from a puppy and been her primary caregiver during that time so it is a totally different kind of awful than losing dogs who saw my dad, much more than me, as their parent. Plus, Galleta is going to a (hopefully) happy life in Mexico (Marisol’s sister is a vet, she has a young son and Galleta LOVES kids, and her parents have two little dogs who have the run of their yard) so I cannot really grieve for her. Meaning that there is a tinge of selfishness to my sadness because except to the extent that she loses me as a mom, my loss is mostly her gain (who wouldn’t want to live in a sunny yard in Guadelajara?). It makes it even harder to let go with a good bawling fit without feeling like a melodramatic moron (which hasn’t prevented me from crying every time I imagine Monday, when I come home from work and she’s not here, it just ensures I feel like a drama queen during the crying).

Either she is reacting to my emotions or she senses something is about to change (we do have a travel crate in the house now, which she has been eyeing suspiciously) or she is starting her heat cycle again (despite my objections to a dog that has her period in the house, Marisol refuses to have her fixed because she thinks some female dogs can experience “a trauma” if they don’t have puppies) but this weekend Galleta has gone from preferring to be in the same room with me to needing to be four or five feet from me at all times and preferring to be in contact with one or both of my feet. Even to the point of kicking in the bathroom door (yes, she is like 2 feet tall…it is a flimsy door) to come sit at my – somewhat surprised and embarrassed – feet.

By Wednesday, it will be all over. Marisol is leaving early Tuesday morning so I should hear by Wednesday that Galleta survived the SEVENTEEN HOUR flight and arrived safely at her new home. The vet here sold Marisol a travel crate so short the dog had to duck to even get into it and couldn’t sit or stand up straight or turn around once inside (leaving her no option but to lie down the whole time). I found this unacceptable-bordering-on-insane and took the drastic action of spending over $100 of my own money to buy her a size-appropriate crate so she’ll be comfortable. I’ve also been wearing the same gross old tanktop all weekend so I can put something that smells like me into her crate with her to comfort her since she will be traveling alone in the cargo hold with so many other unfamiliar smells. I feel like I will have done all I can and just have to hope the airline treats her well and she makes it through the ordeal okay.

The question I am grappling with now is, should I get another dog? I thought it was grossly irresponsible when Marisol first bought Galleta because we were sharing a two-bedroom flat and neither of us were home much but she turned out not only okay, but a really wonderful, good-hearted and well-behaved (except for the furniture-devouring) dog. This was largely due to my willingness to prioritize her by walking her each night and spending a lot of time with her on the weekends, which I would also be willing to do with another dog. Plus, now I have the whole 2 bedroom place to myself so there is more room for a dog to roam and one less person to work around. There is a Sudanese high school student I can hire to come by each day during the day to play with or walk the new puppy so I won’t feel as guilty about being at work for so long and the puppy can get some exercise and play or training time and socialize with someone else.

But on the other hand, I know I lucked out with Galleta, and her little heart of gold, and I don’t know that another dog would be as sweet. I don’t know if I am just reacting to the loss of THIS dog and just want to fill the hole I know I will feel in my life (i.e. get a Galleta-replacement) and how much I would be buying/raising/loving the new dog for its own sake. Is this just a philosophical question that doesn’t really matter as long as I am giving a new dog a happy home in a country that ostracizes and abuses dogs as religiously “unclean”? Is there something secularly unclean about the fact that if I could find a dog that looked exactly like Galleta, I would prefer that dog above all others? Am a walking freakshow for spending my Friday night drinking a beer, baking biscotti, listening to country music, and pondering these questions?

Speaking of, I am signing off to attend to the bi (twice) part of biscotti (twice-scorched) and take my own little Cookie (Galleta in English) for one of our last walks together.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

It is the dawn of a new age. My roommate moved out today (her stuff is still living here, her dog is still living here, but she has officially moved in with friends about fiteen minutes down the road and will no longer be leaving wads of gum in the sink and on the counter, not buying her share of the toilet paper, and smoking inside instead of on the balcony like we agreed). It will be more expensive living alone (not exactly alone since I still have the puppy until at least mid-July when she moves to Mexico) but well worth the calm and quiet of returning to only the manageable amount of mess I create, paying for my expenses and no one elses, getting to choose what stupid movies to watch on TV, etc.

Sadly, I got a little more alone-ness than I wished for, as my brother is moving out this week too. He finally got the green light to head to the village of Marial Bai in Southern Sudan, the hometown of Valentino Achak Deng, refugee and hero of Dave Eggers' amazing book What is the What. To get there, he must first fly to Nairobi, where the Southern Sudanese Consulate will (hopefully) grant him a travel permit (the visas you can get to visit North Sudan are worthless for entering the South). He will spend a few days to a week in Kenya until he meets up with Valentino himself, who will fly with Thomas to Juba, Sudan. From Juba, they will take a UN charter flight to Aweil, basically an empty field in Southern Sudan and then make the trek to Marial Bai by as-yet-unknown ground transportation.

The school where he will be volunteering to teach newly hired and untrained Sudanese teachers classroom management, lesson planning, curriculum strategy, etc. just started last week and they are still building the dorm they have planned to draw more young female students to the school. Parents who otherwise might give their daughters into early marriages could afford to consider education instead of the girls' accomodations would be provided for in the dorm, which had also hired a dorm mother to act as a role model and parent to the girls.

In addition to his teaching duties, Thomas may get to help build the dorm and he'll be sleeping in a hut that Greg, the guy in charge of coordinating his trip and communcations with Valentino, built with his own two hands on his last trip to Sudan. So, little by little the school's infrastructure will build up and Thomas' impact on the teachers and students who will fill the classrooms and bedrooms will hopefully be even more permanent and long-lasting than the buildings themselves.

Forgive me the advertising, but he does have to pay all his flights and his stay in Nairobi on either end of the trip out of his own pocket so if anyone wants to support him on his adventures, you can donate to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation and specifically earmark the funds for Thomas by using this link: http://www.valentinoachakdeng.org/pledgedrive_maffai.php

I will be sad to see him go and biting my nails down to nubbins while he is out of all communication taking malaria pills that cause hallucination and possibly epilepsy, and isn't getting his yellow fever vaccine because finding the vaccination center in Cairo sounds "complicated," but I am glad he will have this life experience and have the chance to positively impact the lives of so many others. Also, after eight weeks, he will no longer be living on my floor. So there's something to that to be sure.

At work, I feel I have finally turned a corner. I am still working on the same case, of course, but I am getting different tasks every few weeks, none of which I like or find interesting, because that is the way of construction law, but at least now I am doing a variety of boring things instead of just one really, really boring thing. I will get to start drafting hopefully as early as next week and I am doing this monstrous job now where I spend each day going through five enormous notebooks page by page, comparing each sheet to an Excel spreadsheet, which seems to have nothing to do with the pages it is supposedly coordinated with. Awesome.

So after this week, when Thomas leaves, Marisol is gone, and it is just the dog and I at home, and I finally start doing something at work that requires more than a high school education and basic secretarial skills, I will have a better idea of what life will be like for me here for the rest of my stay (however long that may be...hello? US economy? Are you listening?). I am excited. A little nervous. I know I'll be lonely without a full house but hopefully it will push me to make more friends and get out more often. And, I'll have more room for GUESTS!

If Egypt would only start selling microbrews, life would be perfect...except...I'd still be in Egypt.

UN-lazy Friday

It could have been the pefect lazy Friday. Spent last night in my friend's amazing apartment in the soon-to-be Hilton drinking whisky (a lot of whisky) on her balcony overlooking the Nile. Should have been able to sleep in until noon, read my book, watch TV, then go see Clash of the Titans in 3D with my brother and the same friend tonight. Unfortunately, I couldn't relax enough to enjoy a lazy day.

I was actually awakened around ten by this creeping, claustrophobic feeling that my apartment was the dirtiest hole on the planet. And on a planet that includes a city as dirty as Cairo, this is saying something. My roommate, who is moving out next week if all goes well, makes the strangest messes. Last week, she was chewing gum, poured herself a bowl of chocolate granola, then STUCK HER GUM ON THE KITCHEN COUNTER to eat her granola. The gum stayed there for a day, then she put it IN the bowl on top of the inch of leftover granola where it stayed over the four day weekend. Thomas and I did not clean it up just on principle and when she came back from her Nile Cruise, instead of scraping the chocolate paste with gum topping into the garbage, she PUT WATER IN IT and left it for another three days. This kind of thing happens all the time, such that the usual messy roommate behaviors like not taking out the garbage or leaving your clothes on the line for a week pale in comparison. I don't even notice anymore when I wash her dishes because I am distracted by having to clean up entire fourteen ounce bottles of hair mask she drops in fluffy pink swathes of GOO on the bathroom floor and leaves when she goes out for the night with friends.

So today I resorted to my new friend (and a longtime acquaintance of Melanie's), CLOROX and scrubbed down most surfaces in the apartment. The corner of the room where the puppy pees and poops on newspapers because my roommate can't be bothered to walk the fifteen minutes home from her office during the day to take her out to go, was infested with ants feasting on cashew speckled turds (the dog got into my roommate's plate of nuts she left too close to the edge of the table) so I had to spray Raid and THEN mop it up because if the smell makes me ill, I can't imagine what it does to little puppy lungs.

So for the last few hours, I have been basking in my squeaky, sparkly haven of my own creation and have actually enjoyed the lazy afternoon that should have stretched all day. She just got back from work though, so my bleachy, ABC gum-free party is over.

For those of you who enjoyed the mystery haikus, I enclose the following hot, steamy romance haikus in the hopes, again, of being discovered and offered a multimillion dollar advance to write for five minutes a day until I retire at 35.

Enjoy!

Perfect connection.
Long distance relationship.
We are breaking up.
(two cell phones)

Six pressed together.
Hard, slick skin, steams and shimmers.
Sweat beads, drips, pulses.
(cold six pack out in the hot sun)

I was made for you.
I fit inside perfectly.
I twist, you open.
(key, lock)

We fold together
Tight, firm, one. Spent and sweaty,
I shower with you.
(socks)

You are softer now
Than when we met. We wrinkle,
age, joined at the hip.
(two rotting bananas)

Jinx

I am cursed this week. I can feel it. Too many good things are happening. A big bad is coming.

My karma antenna first started jangling on Monday when I went out to run errands and actually got everything I needed at the first place I stopped for each item. I dropped pants off at the tailor and he didn't even need to measure the pair I needed hemmed, he just compared the inseam to the pair I needed hemmed so I didn't have to try anything on. Dropped my shirt at the dry cleaner, who is the sweetest Egyptian lady with very beautiful English who always holds my hand and tells me to say hello to my brother.

I got an extra set of keys made in case I manage to find a maid this week, since our last maid's sister got married and the whole family had to move out of the building to go do something about the animals demanded by the groom's family. The guy who made the keys was the guy who changed our lock for us when our old one was sticking and he remembered me. I got his phone number in case I ever have lock problems again and he looked over my shoulder as I typed in his name and insisted I put "Locksmith" in the last name box on my phone. Like some foreigner had taught him this word and he was so proud of it. His shop is a wooden shelf covered by two shutters on the side of a store that sells tupperware.

I went to a stationery store and bought the standard form contract foreigners use to rent furnished apartments in case my landlord came this week (which he did, but I'll get to that in a minute) because my roommate is moving out and I wanted to be the only one on the lease (right now the girl who used to live here is still on it). They actually had a bilingual Arabic-English copy of the contract!

On my way back to my apartment, in the space of two short blocks, I saw the brother of our maid, who used to live in our building and he waved and said he was happy to see me and wished me a nice evening. And I saw our plumber, who likes to rail against corrupt politicians who are stifling his dreams (he is an engineer, his friend who works as an office boy in a phone company is also an engineer, and his friend's garbage man got his degree in the Faculty of Investment and Trading), and who I might need to call again soon because the interior of our toilet tank is cheap Chinese-made plastic crap that he literally used a knife heated on the stove to melt back together the last time he came over.

So basically I started to feel like part of the community. And it really freaked me out. After being unemployed for so long, getting not-great grades, losing my health insurance, etc. I haven't been a big believer this year in good things happening to me. Okay, so I was never really an optimist of any stripe but now I'm downright suspicious when things start to go well. So I told my roommate I thought I was headed for disaster and she told the puppy I was being ridiculous.

The thing is, I am bad at guessing what will go wrong and if something big enough has gone wrong for the looming danger to have passed and karmic balance to be achieved again.

For example, I went through two laptops this week at work and then FOUR today. The first one, which I've had for five months with no problems started freezing early in the week. Then it started shutting off by itself with no warning. IT thought they'd fixed it, gave it back, and it crashed again losing several hours of work. So IT gave me another laptop while they worked on mine overnight and on into the morning. The new one shut off three times before noon. They told me it was just the normal process of installing updates and since I hadn't actually lost any work, because by then I was saving compulsively, I didn't insist on a new laptop...

Until it crashed another three times after lunch.

I called IT and they absurdly insisted it was just normal updates. I asked why there were so many updates and why the computer shut off without warning when a) most computers ask you if you want to install updates and b) when it was shutting off it wasn't actually installing the updates, it would turn back on and there they'd be!!! The guy told me the laptop hadn't been updated in several months because it was a spare. I asked, "you mean I gave you my laptop because it was shutting off without warning and I was losing work and you gave me this laptop in its place KNOWING IT WOULD SHUT OFF REPEATEDLY WITHOUT WARNING?!?!" And there was this long pause on the phone and he goes, "I bring you another."

So the third laptop, which IT hilariously calls a "floater," was fine for about four hours, when, yep, it turned off without warning. Since it had been good for most of the afternoon, I was lured into a false sense of security and had slacked off on my bi-minutely saving regimen and so lost another hour's work. I yelled at IT again and they brought me computer number 2, supposedly all updated, around 5:30.

But I'd learned my lesson. By then I'd given up on saving at all and didn't do any work on the computer for the rest of the day.

Was plowing through four computers, all my goodwill with IT, and losing four hours of work bad enough to have been the big bad I sensed coming? I didn't think so.

In my heart of hearts what I truly dreaded was the meeting with the landlord tonight. We had to tell him 1) that Marisol, who he has known for two years, is moving out of the apartment, 2) that I, who he only met a few months ago, wants to stay for at least another year at the same rates and conditions he gave Marisol, and 3) that Marisol's dog ate a Marisol's dog-sized hole in the couch last weekend. I just knew he was going to say no to everything and I was going to get stuck paying for a ton of dog damage or have to find a new place out of the blue or something.

Nope, totally normal. He agreed to everything, accepted Marisol's offer to have a furniture repair place GLUE a "piece of material" over the hole, then sat and had a beer with us, chatted, gave us some phone numbers to call if anything goes wrong in the apartment since he lives in Alexandria, and kissed our cheeks when he left. No big deal at all. So that wasn't the big bad either.

But there is one more REALLY bad possibility.

My firm has been working on this case for years. Now there are seven attorneys on it full time (five of us little guys and two senior associates). But technically the tribunal still hasn't awarded jurisdiction. It is totally normal to do this much work before the tribunal says a peep but then, yesterday, they peeped by sending a really cryptic letter that has about five different interpretations ranging from "swiss arbitrators are anal retentive about regulatory housekeeping details" to "you are the weakest link, good-bye!" Despite how much we all don't want to be working on just this one case anymore, the letter has everyone on edge and we might not find out for days or weeks what it all means.

So I have decided, as a vocational back-up, to become a mystery writer. Only I don't have the attention span to write novels. WAAAAY too long. And honestly, short stories are usually like 20 pages. That's not short at all! So I've opted for mystery haiku. But I could only scrape together a handful before I lost interest. Seventeen syllables wear a girl out.

Thus, I sign out with the following opus in the hopes that big time publishers are reading this blog while fanning themselves with extra cash they can't think of how to spend. And, knowing that my readers have a similar attention span to my own (especially so far down a long blog post), I've included the answers to the mysteries right below each poem.


The killer stabs through,
Distributes me piece by piece
With a shiny spade.
(pie)

I am crushed, smothered,
Drowned, evidence washed away.
Skid-marks the sole clue.
(poo)

My blood runs freely,
Stabbed with a sharp spear, tortured
In flames and hot oil
(kebab)

Systematically
We are counted, added, and
BURNED… to your delight.
(calories)

I am broken, breached,
Violated, compromised,
Rendered null and void.
(construction contract)


Whew, that was sooooo nerdy. Random House, you know where to find me!

Vacation poisoning

I am suffering from a terrible case of vacation poisoning.

Lest anyone think that this is an actual gastrointestinal disorder or that "vacation" is also the latin name of some sort of amoebic parasite, let me put your mind at ease: I am talking about the pit-of-the-stomach anxiety that comes from having to go back to work after two nearly back to back vacations at resort towns on the Red Sea.

My brother arrived in Cairo about four weeks ago and we immediately left on a six day trip to the Sinai Peninsula town of Dahab for some SCUBA diving and relaxing. Thomas was coming from a month in Brazil and had the kind of tan you'd expect from such an adventure. I on the other hand was the exact color of his butt.

My week in Dahab and the following weekend in the far snootier resort town of Sharm el Sheikh as given me a toasty glow but my brain now rejects the mundane tasks I'm assigned like work as if I am now allergic to office-induced boredom. I keep pretending my pen is a hand grenade and energetically pull off the cap again and again.

We are now reviewing the comments we wrote as we went through our correspondence review. We are reviewing our review. Which, although it is less boring, as promised, is only marginally less boring when I think we were all hoping for significantly less boring. Another highlight of my day was correcting punctuation. You know how tables and graphs often have a line or two beneath them listing the source of the data? I was correcting those mini-paragraphs for extra spaces, missing commas and the occasional hyphen. Good thing I got that expensive law degree.

Keeping my life interesting are the people in my office, and of course my brother.

Thomas has picked up three volunteer jobs with three different refugee aid organizations here in Cairo while he waits (ahem...on a mattress on my bedroom floor...indefinitely) for the Sudanese "elections" to peacefully resolve. Unfortunately, for the elections to conclude, they have to actually begin, which they seem to be having trouble doing. Voting for Bashir (since the primary opposition candidate withdrew two weeks ago) was extended for two days because by the day the elections were suppose to end, they had not even begun yet in some areas. It is possible that the US is supporting these "elections" and that the Southern candidate withdrew as part of a deal with Khartoum to get the promised referendum for Southern independence on the ballot next year and uphold the terms of the 2005 ceasefire. But it is also more than possible that the Sudanese people are not in on the deal and conditions could be too unstable for Thomas to safely go to Sudan.

In other news, my German coworker accidentally adopted an owl yesterday. The boys in her supermarket found it on the street, a helpless lost baby, and took it in to show off to customers and generally parade around as an oddity. They weren't taking care of it though and it seemed distressed and frightened so my coworker took it away from them but now she is stuck with an owl. A FREAKING BABY OWL!!! She tried to feed it small pieces of veal last night but it seemed more interested in pecking at her thumbs. Do baby owls eat living food? Do their mothers descend to their nexts with squiggling baby mice? Or thumbs?

White Taxi Blues

So this morning I waived down a cab at my usual spot, took the usual route, arrived at my usual destination in front of my office and got charged over 1/3 the usual price. Now, granted, I should have been paying closer attention on my ten minute ride to work. I shouldn't have relaxed and read my book. I should have compulsively checked the meter and told the driver immediately when I noticed the cost was rising at 130% its normal rate. But silly me, I assumed my driver was an honest guy and his meter hadn't been tampered with and didn't notice the cost "adjustment."

I pay 10 pounds on a 7 pound bill every day to and from work because I'm a nice girl and know drivers are poor so I tip well. Still without noticing the meter, I asked if the driver had change for a twenty and he said he didn't. This is absurd because most rides are at least 5 pounds so the idea that he didn't have ten pounds already by ten in the morning just from fares is impossible, not to mention he had to have his own money on him separate from his fares. So, still assuming the meter was the usual price, I gave him the seven pounds I had and walked off. He started honking and screaming at me like crazy and I, still not realizing the meter price was way high, walked back to see what his problem was, after all, I'd paid the cost of the ride, just not the tip I usually give because I was pissed he wouldn't give me change.

So then we got in a big fight out in front of the bank across the street from my office. Two guards came over to help and I said that I wanted to pay ten but he wouldn't give me change and they said I should go into the bank to get change. This is total bullshit, as the custom dictates that the driver is the one who has to get change, since it is his job, but still, I'm flexible, so I agree to go into the bank. In that instant two things happen. A very nice, adorable (he looks like Woddy from Toy Story as a teenager) Egyptian lawyer who works in my firm came over to ask what the problem was, and the driver pointed out that I owed him 10.95 pounds, not 10. I was horrified because not only was this way over what I normally pay, it is also not possible on a working meter since they go up in increments of .25.

Plus it was embarrassing that I was having this argument over about 80 cents in front of the lawyer from my firm but he and the guards didn't believe the meter was rigged. Every foreigner I know has experienced a rigged meter at least once. The white taxis are part of a government initiative to get the ancient and probably dangerous black and white taxis off the streets but the meters give the driver a lower rate than they could probably negotiate with tourists (i.e. white people) in their old black and white cabs. So they get the meter "fixed" so they can hit a button during the ride and increase the rate of the meter. Drivers don't do this to Egyptians so Egyptians don't believe it happens. The lawyer I know translated what I said to the guards at the bank and they all had a good chuckle and said "He'd be very smart if he could do that." Right. Like the same mechanics who keep black and white taxis working day after day for over 30 years with nothing but coathanger wire, tape, and a copy of the Koran holding them together couldn't also rig a white taxi meter.

So the lawyer gave HIS 20 pounds to the driver who went into the bank and gave him 10 in change and I paid him back. But THEN I got a little lecture about how if I think the driver is cheating me, I should tell him right away (again with the whole watch the meter and recalculate the fare every kilometer to make sure you're not being cheated on your whole ride to work scenario). This despite the fact that when you tell a driver his meter isn't working he says "it's fine, if you don't like the fare, talk to the government." The lawyer also told me that if I wanted the price to be negotiable, I could always take a black and white taxi, which I often do, but I pay them the same ten pounds I pay the white taxi. There's no "negotiating" about it because it is a very good price and much more than an Egyptian would pay for the same ride. Finally, despite the fact that the whole fight in the street had been in Arabic, including me telling the guards that the meter was too fast, that I take the same route every day and never have to pay more than ten pounds, etc. he also said "and you should speak a little Arabic." I know he just doesn't want to see me have problems in his country and he is saying these things because he wants the best for me, but right then I wanted to smoosh his adorable, carefully coiffed head!

Karmic justice - the driver, by being dishonest, cheated himself out of the feeling of getting a good tip. Because if he'd charged me the 7.5 pounds he was supposed to, and given my the correct change like he was supposed to, he would have driven off happily with ten pounds, freely and peacefully given. Instead, because he got my tab up to almost 11, he has the bad feeling of having almost got caught cheating, on top of the bad feeling of, in his mind, having been cheated out of that one pound he didn't earn in the first place.

Angry angry angry.

Garbage, snot, and shopping.

The garbage man just came to the door. We are supposed to either pay our doorman (actually a family of teenagers headed by what appears to be a single mom) or pay the zabaleen, the very poor, very old men who sweep the garbage from the streets and take it away. We aren’t supposed to have to pay both and we’ve been paying the door-family but I just can’t bring myself to tell the garbage man. The zabaleen are the closest thing Cairo has to a recycling/waste management system, as they pick through the garbage by hand and find every item with a potential use or value. The organic garbage used to be fed to pigs but last year the authorities killed all the pigs out of fear of swine flu. Pigs are unclean in Islam and in a country without healthcare for the poor, swine flu created quite a bit of paranoia that the government resolved by convincing people that the pigs were the source of the danger. Kill the pigs and the flu goes away. Unfortunately, now organic trash goes with the leftover inorganic trash (the stuff with no use or value to the zabaleen) to the outskirts of Cairo where the very, very poor live in plastic villages made out of tarps and garbage and stink. We pay the man who came to my door ten pounds ($2) per month. I will keep paying him because I can’t tell him I’m already paying someone else. What’s $2 a month to me?


I was hanging out my laundry the other night when I heard a short, loud whooshing noise in the dark above me and to my right. It happened again and again and I felt a little cloud of dampness on my cheek. My upstairs neighbor was blowing his nose farmer’s style off his balcony! “Hey!” I yelled. “SNOOSH” came again. I stepped back a little out of range and yelled again. “HEY!” “Oh!” came the startled reply (he didn’t know he had an audience). “Sorry. Sorry.” He said twice and then hurriedly stepped back to what was apparently an apartment bereft of Kleenex, toilet paper, paper towels and rags of all types. In the morning, I noticed that although his balcony was set off to the right of mine and that therefore my newly hung laundry missed the brunt of the snot shower but the apartment below me has a balcony that lines up perfectly with Mr. Snotty McSnotfest upstairs. And the woman who lives downstairs had her laundry out too!


The constant stress of living in Cairo is having a surprising effect on my health. I’ve lost around twenty-five pounds. Unfortunately, I’m still too big to wear most off the rack clothes at the mall but I am now a little too small to buy off the rack in the XXL shops either. Which means I go naked most of the time. No. Kidding. I still go to the mall, it just takes me forever to find clothes. I had a particularly Egyptian shopping experience last weekend when my roommate and I walked into a store on our way to H&M (the only H&M in Egypt is more expensive even than in Europe, but the clothes don’t have weird frills, sequins, mirrored buttons, build in “bodies” (these are skin-tight long-sleeved shirts women wear under what would otherwise be Vegas showgirl outfits to make them acceptable to wear out and about), or any other Egypt-fashionable accessories).

A young employee who obviously works on commission saw two foreigners stroll in and rushed over to help us, which meant demanding our size whenever we paused to look at an item and then looking through each one on the rack until he either found our size or didn’t. Basically what we would do if we were permitted to shop on our own. I was looking for basic dress shirts, a surprisingly elusive target, and extra frustrating since most of the men’s shirts here look like women’s shirts. They’re often pink or lavender, slightly tailored in at the waist and just generally seem to be rubbing it in that there are no women’s dress shirts that don’t seem to come complete with gills or lizard-like ribbed collars. Anyway, I digress. So I pause in front of a white, collared button-down shirt with black pinstripes, the only flaw of which was spherical shiny black buttons, that I could get my tailor to replace. The boy asked what my size was and I told him 48. His eyes went wide like he didn’t even know sizes went up that high. “No, no 48,” he said, without even checking through the rack. Then, he sort of roused himself from his shock and thumbed unenthusiastically through the few shirts. “No 48,” he said again, “44.” He actually made a counter-offer! Like we were going to negotiate about what size shirt I wear and inevitably compromise on 46. If only my pot belly would go along with the plan, we (my belly and I) could have made a killer deal!

A lazy Prophet's birthday at home

Sleepy puppy unconsciously burrowing closer to my left buttcheek? Check.
A good spy thriller? Check.
Comfy Brooklyn sweatshirt? Check (thanks Uncle Charlie!).
Cappuccino and a piece of chocolate cake DELIVERED TO MY DOOR? Check!

It is pretty much a perfect Friday afternoon. The maid (who lives downstairs) failed to show up for the third time last night (think we’re getting a new maid) so Marisol and I cleaned the apartment. Not really well, since we’ll eventually get a pro in here but well enough that I’m not cringing every time I put my foot down on something dusty or squishy or something that used to be a delivery menu I wanted to use but is now a pile of tiny pieces of paper covered in puppy saliva. Marisol swept (and I’m considering mopping tonight as well, I know, big plans!) while I de-slimed the stovetop and washed every dish and stick of silverware we own. So I can get into the kitchen now, though I haven’t gone grocery shopping this week there is really no need. Nothing to cook.

It might have to stay that way until tomorrow to. Today is the Prophet’s birthday so it is an official government and religious holiday weekend. Not many stores are open. I have errands to run besides the grocery shopping. My brother is coming to visit in a couple weeks and I need to pick up a mattress and a phone for him to use while he’s here. Also, I promised myself a bookshelf after payday as a reward for getting through the month.

There have been big shakeups at my office in the last few weeks so it has been a difficult month. I think I absorb more ambient stress than I realize because even though I don’t really know the people involved it was still really difficult to concentrate on my work. I went from reading an average of 220 letters a day to struggling to make 100. It is better now. One of our senior attorneys left the firm and left the LAW to follow a more spiritual path of studying reiki and teaching yoga. She did this after centering our entire correspondence review procedure around the way her mind needed it to work in order to process the information and draft our Statement of Claim, the central document we will submit explaining our client’s case. I’m glad she’s off to do something that will hopefully be really fulfilling and, after less than two months in a firm I can definitely understand how you could run yourself into the ground doing this for a lifetime, but since the whole system of information gathering was set up under the assumption that she was writing the SOC, she is kind of leaving us in the lurch.

We have rallied surprisingly well. She was only my supervisor for a week so I never experienced this but rumor has it she could be moody and, though a good teacher and friend when in a good mood, she could be unkind and somewhat maniacally ruthless in a bad mood. The tension in the office now that she is gone has palpably decreased. The other senior attorney working on the case has less management experience but he has definitely rallied. There was another scare last week when he had to leave for Canada for the whole week on emergency family leave but he is back and seems to be solidly picking up the slack where the other attorney left off. It is a little terrifying to feel so unprepared for what is coming when we finish the correspondence review in the next couple weeks, but also exciting because we will all get to do the kind of work we normally wouldn’t get to do until after we’d been at the firm for a year or so.

I am learning a lot more about how construction contracts work, which is a good thing, because it helps me do my job better and feel more invested in the work of the firm, but it is also a bad thing, since I honestly don’t really care how construction contracts work beyond the barest veneer of purely academic interest. In my soul, I am not a construction lawyer.

I am starting to wonder if in my soul I am a lawyer at all. I had an annoying conversation last night with a woman I work with that has picked open this old question in my brain that I thought had finally scarred over after I found happy employment and now it is festering again. She is incredibly smart and very intense about her work. Her brightest dream is to become an arbitrator of the highest degree and sit down with a cup of coffee to pour over two brilliantly written claims and determine who is right and what they are entitled to under the law. When she talks about the day she will get to do this, her eyes light up with actual joy at the thought of reading legal arguments. My eyes glaze over.

Anyway, she gave me a ride home last night during the biggest, longest thundering rainstorm I have seen since I’ve been in Cairo. Supposedly it actually HAILED out in Maadi, a neighborhood about 30 minutes away. People actually emailed the listserve about it in wonder. In my neighborhood it was just rain but since Cairo never gets rain there aren’t really any street gutters to speak of so the streets fill with deep puddles that run for ten, even fifteen yards and cover the entire width of the street. Cars that roll in too quickly or too slowly can lose traction and float a few feet before drifting to the other side and since no one knows how to drive in the rain this was happening everywhere last night. Also, it is not typical to drive with your headlights on in Cairo and windshield wipers are decorative only so most cars didn’t have the kind of visibility you want them to have so you can sprint across the street in your flip flops and reach the sidewalk alive. Weaving among the drifting cars and soaked Cairenes, my friend asked me when I knew I wanted to be a lawyer and I said I still don’t know that for sure, which is the wrong answer to give to someone who is so passionate about the law herself and someone, I forgot to mention, who is the WIFE OF MY BOSS, the lawyer who started the firm and hired me back in November.

Oh well, if she ever decides to rat me out for my wavering commitment, I can always spread the word to our coworkers that she called our boss something that sounded like “schnooky mouse” on the phone.