The Mother of the World

"Cairo is a seething, breathing monster of a city that swallows new arrivals and consumes those who return. All are destined to be captured and captivated in some small way by its incredible past and vibrant present. There are few, if any, cities in the world where the clash between old and new, modern and traditional, and East and West is more evident. Tall, gleaming hotels and office buildings overlook streets where cars and buses rumble and weave past donkey carts and their stubborn drivers."
-Egypt and the Sudan, Lonely Planet Travel Guide

The students arrived three weeks ago, and life has been hectic, but always in a good way. I'm loving watching them experience Cairo and experience Egypt and after they go out on excursions on their own, their stories are always entertaining. We've ridden camels (well, some of us have - it was my first time), we've raced horses across the desert, we've braved the Cairo traffic (crossing the street is probably one of the more dangerous things we do here), we've swam in the (garbage-filled) Mediterranean, we've gotten lost, we've been to a mosque, we visited Garbage City, we've met wonderful people, and we've laughed a lot, which is always helpful to counter culture shock.

In the middle of that, and between all of it, I've been getting to know more of the people who live here. I've been visiting a family who lives on the roof of the building across from mine, I've visited a family who lives in Garbage City (an area on the outskirts of Cairo where many of Cairo's garbage collectors live among the trash they collect - sorting it, recycling it, and making a living off of it http://www.ape.org.eg/), and I'm getting to know the Sudanese family who live on the bottom floor of my building. Every day is a new experience - yesterday I had tea on the sidewalk with some older women who sit there everyday and sell onions and mint leaves (and occasionally a few other things). One thing this culture is definitely teaching me is the true meaning of hospitality and what it means to receive graciously.

Every once and awhile the city and the traffic and the noise and the pollution and the constant feeling of being watched (there's no such thing as being invisible if you're a foreign female here) gets wearing, especially if I'm tired, but the people always bring me back to the reality of why I choose to be here. This week the students are living with families all over Cairo for six days (each student is with a different family) so it's a "different" week, although classes and cultural activities continue. For fun, and for the benefit of my own curiousity, I'm taking a couple of cultural activities with the students - the first is tabla (sort of like a Middle Eastern version of the jembay, but played with a faster beat, more complicated patterns, and a "tinnier" sound); the second is belly dancing (no laughing). The belly dancing teacher likes to yell at me if I stop paying attention: "Dena - get up!" "Dena - look here!" but that's mostly because I just laugh when she does (and because I think because my name is the easiest to remember). Sometimes I have a hard time convincing people that my name is actually what it is because it's an Arabic name (and Hebrew apparently) and so there are a lot of Egyptian women who share it. Sometimes after hearing my name, people ask me if I'm Egyptian (and then I laugh and look at them like they're crazy) or sometimes I tell them that I'm Egyptian (and then they laugh and look at me like I'm crazy). I used to try and act surprised everytime someone said, "that's an Arabic name!" but now I've stopped trying to look like it's new information. It's nice though, to have a name that everyone here can pronounce, because at the very least it means that they usually remember it.

Yesterday I heard that there's snow in the forecast back home in Edmonton - kind of makes me miss snow, or actually, at this point, it's mostly the crispness of the air in the fall that I miss. If anything kills me here, it's going to be the pollution. Unless of course I happen to fall into the Nile - that would probably kill me too through some form of amoeba or other digestive horror (that may be an exaggeration). Sorry to ruin any smog free pictures of Cairo any of you may have had - it's a wonderfully insane city, but there's over half the population of Canada crammed into the few fertile kilometers that surround this part of the Nile, so it's not exactly clean, just crazily pituresque.