How to Spend your Down Time

If there's one thing I think I'm going to get out of my five months in Egypt, it's how to take it slow.

Egyptians have mastered the art of hanging out: meandering on the sidewalks, lazily engaged in conversation, or slumped in a chair in the sun surrounded by friends between classes. While the traffic is horrendous, no one seems to be in much of a rush; you get there when you get there. Class begins more or less around the same time, after you run into your professor in line for coffee and wander back together.

But given the pace of American life, and my typical schedule at Georgetown, it's weird not to be busy all the time. I don't have a meeting to go to, and there's no GERMS practical on Saturday morning. Just a lot of hanging out.

AUC is a huge high school flashback for me: not only are the courses reminiscent of my adolescence (think reading out of the newspaper, creative writing prompts in class, using course readers with the "difficult words" defined), but the culture of the school is vaguely high school-ish. There are cool kids who gather in cliques based around what label they wear (Prada, Gucci, Fendi, etc.), with specific locations where they sit in between classes. People arrive in the morning and don't go home until late at night. The halls and stairwells are glorified benches. And I really should have a locker for all my books.

And since high school itself wasn't too challenging for me, I filled my time elsewhere. Mostly with Search and Rescue, but I did some other school clubs and volunteer work. So here in Cairo, I knew that if I didn't sign up for something, I'd spend all my time on Facebook and What Would Tyler Durden Do?, and while chronicling Britney Spears' cyclonic descent into madness is all well and good (what's next, Scientology?), I needed to do something worthwhile. Idle hands and whatnot.

So, for the past two weeks I've been tutoring Sudanese refugees at St. Andrew's Church and refugee ministry in Cairo. It serves as a primary school for refugee children during the day, and a learning center for adults in the evenings. I spend Monday nights chatting with adults in English or helping them correct their homework, and Tuesday mornings in a classroom of 8-12 year olds.

So far it's been a lot of fun, and pretty educational for me. The adults all seem to have left Sudan around 2004, and by the grace of the UN, were relocated in Egypt. They are refugees from either southern Sudan (where the Second Sudanese Civil War between the southern Christian/Animists and the northern Muslims killed 1.9 million civilians, the most since World War II) or the Darfur region of western Sudan (where a regional conflict has degenerated into tacitly-sanctioned genocide).

Their English skills vary. Last night, I worked with two young men: one, a 27 year old from Darfur who asked me to speak to him in French, but didn't know French, nor English, so after I tried both we resorted to Arabic; and the other, a very young looking 23 year old from southern Sudan to whom I taught the words "dude" and "bro," as he was well on his way to mastering conversational English. I've tried to talk to them about Sudan, but in all cases their vocabulary is pretty limited. Words like genocide, refugee status, and ethnic cleansing are all pretty foreign, even though they witnessed it first hand. When I ask them why they want to learn English, their answers vary: To get a job, to tell people about my country, to make money, to be educated.

Mussa, a thirtysomething sliver of a man from Darfur, wanted to learn English so that he can go back to his village and make things better for his family and the town. He tried to explain to me what he had seen there, but his accent was so thick and he spoke so quickly in Arabish (that's Arabic + English) that I had a hard time making out what he was saying. I asked him if anyone in his family had been killed. He shrugged and said, "Of course." Had he seen anyone killed? "What do you think? Of course. In the streets." They all have a pretty cavillier attitude towards it, but I think that's the attitude you have to adopt if you're faced head on with the evils of humanity on a daily basis. Suffice to say it breaks my heart, though, to see people--kids, really--my age discuss genocide with a wave of their hand, as if they were talking about the lunch they ate yesterday.

I usually try to stay away from unhappy topics like that. They want to hear all about the US: where I live, what my hobbies are, what music I like, what it's like to live in the United States. I tell them about my weekend, and ask them if they like living in Cairo. The answer is unequivocally no. It's dirty, it's too small, they don't like the food or the people, and when I ask them where they want to go next, the answer is always the same: America.

The children are fun, and they're teaching me more Arabic than I think I'm teaching them English. My friend Jordan and I help out in a classroom taught by a take-no-prisoners woman named Fatima, whose English is really very good. While English is supposed to be the only language spoken in the classroom (which is really just part of a gymnasium divided into sections by screens), most things are clarified by Fatima in Arabic. Amongst themselves, the children speak Arabic without fail. While they dutifully write down everything on the board in English (e.g. "Birds eat nuts and seeds."), their mastery of it is limited to "okay," "teacher!!!," and "excellent," the latter of which when written on a page of homework sends them into convulsions of glee.

I bring a highlighter with me, and draw big colorful stars on their papers. Today they were learning multiplication. I remember back in third grade learning times tables, and I can't imagine doing it in a language not my own. Two times eight can be tricky, but thamania wa thamania usually elicits the correct answer in Arabic: sitta-ashar. Arabic numbers were something I always had trouble with for some reason, and I think today marked the first time that I used them without having to think in English first.

After about an hour of school, it's time for "sport," oft-lamented by Fatima as the only thing they care about. The class gets rowdy around 11:30, with only 1/3 of the students in their seats. The rest are running around begging for recess. Jordan and I like it too, because we get to play soccer with the kids for an hour. Some of them are really quite good, but it reminds me of refereeing 3rd grade soccer where bunch ball was still the name of the game. We definitely have fun running around with the kids, and do our best not to kill any of them with a shot to the head.

I don't know much about the children...where they come from, where they live, what they've seen. They're all amazingly friendly, though, and very polite, and most of them seem to actually enjoy school. I hope they enjoy hanging out and playing with us awkward, big American kids. It sure seems like they do.

In any case, I'm loving my time at St. Andrew's so far. It's rewarding for me, as I've never done any real volunteer work with things that talk back (previously limited to cats, sea life and dead people), and even though we're all limited in what we can say, a round of high fives after I scored my first goal (!) really does go a long way.

And at least it keeps me out of trouble. :)

See the wikipedia entry about St. Andrew's United Church here.