It’s a perfect morning in Cairo.  Still cool enough to have my windows open, quiet and serene.  There’s a beautiful tree outside my window with the most vivid red/orange flowers.  I am sitting on my bed drinking coffee and not in a rush to do anything or go anywhere.  Bliss.

School continues to go well.  We are still playing the “get the schedules right shuffle” whereby my classes change weekly.  It is a bit frustrating as every time I think I’ve mastered my students’ names I get new ones.  The names are a bit tricky for me.  I am bad at learning peoples’ names to begin with and some of my kids have names I have never heard before and/or names that are difficult for me to pronounce.  So I have started giving my students nicknames.  My favorite is “snoozy” for my student who told me “ya miss…I snoozed” after an impressively loud sneeze. One of my classes has decided that everytime I give them  quiz they are going to quiz me in Arabic.  I think they are dong better than I am...  

We had school on 9/11, which was an interesting experience.  Many of my 12^th graders were aware of what happened on that day, but most of my 10^th graders were not.  They knew that it was a significant day and that it had something to do with planes flying into buildings in New York, but beyond that they were unclear as to what happened that day and what came after.  Don’t worry…I didn’t fill their heads with too much conspiracy theory.  Just the right amount to teach them to question everything they hear. 

I am teaching early man to 10^th grade and apparently they do not learn about evolution.  They literally remove the pages about evolution from the biology textbook.  So since no one told me I was not allowed to discuss it I talked about it for about 10 minutes.  Many of my students had heard of the term ‘evolution’ but had no idea what it was.  I drew a rough description on the board which I was sure to capture because it is hilarious.  This, ladies and gentleman, is the only evolution description some of these kids may ever get:

It hasn’t been all work and no play though recently!  Some friends of ours had a 70’s party last week that was a lot of fun. They also made amazing Mexican food two nights ago.  Last night some friends had a “paint our apartment party.”  They had everyone painting on the walls of their dining room.  It was really impressive and I look forward to seeing the end result. 

 

70's Party

The political situation here continues to be dramatic to say the least.  There are ongoing protests and strikes across Egypt.  Last week 4 university presidents were asked to step down and there were mass demonstrations at the American University in Cairo (AUC).  Egyptian sate security forces raided the offices of an Al Jazeera channel in Egypt.  The channel broadcast all Egyptian news and has run into problems with the government here before.  Although Egypt is much more liberal than many of its neighbors, the censorship of the media is still a problem. 

 

 A few weeks ago I went to a demonstration in Tahrir Square.  The demands revolved around hastening the pace of change after the revolution as many feel that things are not changing.  The list of demands is as follows:

1.  Permanent End of military trials of civilians


2.  A clear timeline with exact dates of when the military council will hand over power to an ELECTED CIVIL authority (the initially promised 6 months have now finished). 


3.  Cancelling the new law issued by military council that prohibits sit-ins and strikes.
 

4. Change the new elections law that helps the same old corrupt businessmen win the elections.


5.  Implement the minimum pay for public sector workers and maximum salaries for senior officials. 


6.  Implement Egyptian laws that will ensure the corrupt heads and symbols of Mubarak’s ruling national party, and who have been proved to have rigged Egyptian elections for years, can no longer stand elections again.

7.  Ensure the Egyptian police focus on ending crime and criminality rather than attacking law-abiding citizens. 

 

That same day there were violent protests outside of the Israeli Embassy, which resulted in a break in.  While I did see some coverage of this on Western news outlets what I did not see was any coverage of the reaction of political leaders here who all condemned the attacks.  Emergency Law is back in full effect at this point.  There is a lot of talk of this law being illegal but it continues.  This includes everything you might assume it would.  However this newest edition of Egyptian Emergency Law is even more strict than in the last days of the Mubarak era.  Any action disturbing the flow of traffic, disruption of work or even the spread of rumors (presumably aimed at facebook and twitter) is considered illegal under the law.  This is clearly aimed at protestors and strikers.  Anyone arrested under emergency law is tried in an “emergency court” which is a like a military court and denies defendants a fair trial or the right to appeal.  Since early September there has been increased military and police presence everywhere including road blockades and checkpoints.  

That's all for now! 

Love from Cairo,

Martha

I am a bad blogger

I haven't posted in a month?! OK that is waaaay too long. Sorry people! Things here continue to go really well. I started school 2 wks ago and so far I love it. I am teaching 2 sections of World History to 10th grade and 4 sections of 12th grade political science. The World History book is the exact same one that I used while teaching at Sullivan! Nefertari has never offered a political science course before so not only am I teaching, I am also writing the entire curriculum! Writing a political science course in post revolutionary Egypt during the formation of a new government, elections and the writing of a new constitution is pretty much the most amazing thing I have ever been lucky enough to do. The students are pretty par for the course so far. I think high schoolers anywhere are pretty similar. My biggest battle is going to be getting them to speak in English. They are supposed to be speaking all English, all the time, even with their friends but this is fairly difficult to enforce as I'm sure you can imagine. When I told one class that I was from Chicago a student in the back stood up and without saying anything and pretended to fire an automatic weapon then said "alcatraz"! Alcatraz? Wha? "Mobster!" he said. Ohhhhh...Al CAPONE! So good to see my city has made a positive impression on the world.

I get to and form school on a microsbus which is nice but chaotic. In the morning they pick me up a few blocks from my house and then after school they drop me in the same spot. We arrive and leave with the students. Luckily on my bus it is me and 3 other teachers and then 2 adorable little kids. We all sleep the whoooole way home. The bus issue has been a bit of a mess until recently. The first week they forgot me one afternoon after school. FORGOT ME. At this point there were only 2 of us on the damn bus so to forget me was pretty impressive. I have missed my bus once and had to take a looooong and costly cab there last week. It was the first day my bus was coming at 6:05 am and I apparently was nowhere near ready to wake up at 5am. But I made it! It also takes over an hour every afternoon to get everyone on the right busses and get them all on the road. It is pretty infuriating. And hot.

Ramadan ended 2 wks ago. Finally. I am feeling pretty proud of myself for making it all the way through! At the end of Ramadan is a holiday called Eid. Everyone gets the week off work so we headed to Sa7el...the north coast of Egypt on the Meditteranean. A few of our friends parents have houses there so it was an amazing cheap trip! The drive from Cairo is about an hour and a half. We had to stop on on the one road that goes there to get gas which was a mess. In Egypt an attendant pumps your gas for you and the line for gas was out of the station, down the driveway and on to the highway. There are not as many gas stations here as in the states and I'm pretty sure that station was one of only 2 stations you could go to once on the road. It was, as I mentioned, insane. The beach is AMAAAAZING. The water is so clear and blue and so so warm. We brought banangrams to the beach, made a sand sea turtle, played pro kadima, slept, everything. There are men who walk up and down the beach selling all sorts of amazing food and I had delicious fresh mussels and 'lil clams. So so so good! Just to make you jealous, here are some pics of what you missed!

So much more has happened in this past month that I wish I could remember to write about! I promise to be much better about doing this weekly. Yeesh.