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.
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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

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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.