Egypt is kind of like the Middlebury Health Center

So I went to the pharmacy looking for some sore throat tea and the pharmacist (yes, the same pharmacist who took a pair of scissors to my ingrown toenail and is always trying to get me to go to church with him) sold me some weird ginseng tablets.  When I got home and read the box, I found that it said it could be used for the treatment of constipation, old age and obesity.  My symptoms exactly!  I guess it's not much worse than the Middlebury Health Center, where they would've just given me and condom and told me to have a nice day!

The best way to make hot chocolate...

...is most definitely with fresh milk, a chocolate bar and a sprinkling of chili pepper, stovetop, by candlelight, stirred with a wooden spoon.

You Can't just be the Moon

For all the men in the streets who claim as you pass by that you are like the moon...

You can’t just be the moon

Pearly light on a warm summer’s eve

You must also be the dark of the night sky when a storm is brewing.

You can’t just be moon

Stagnant and weak, a sitting jewel on a mahogany dresser

You must also be the raging tides whose power moves the Earth.

 

You can’t just be the moon

Ephemeral reflection atop the calm ocean water

You must be the darkest depths and the strange creatures that dwell in trenches on the ocean floor.

 

 

You can’t just be the moon

Borrowing light from the sun

You are a warrior with a light of your own.

 

Everyone knows the smiling face of the Man in the Moon

You are the one they don’t see, the mystery and the secret within

The ruler of the seas and the spinning dancer in the sky

You are the Woman in the Moon.

The Magic in Teaching

I started this post back towards the end of September, and now, a month later, it feels like time to finish it…

Yesterday I got a glimpse into what must be something like the collective teachers’ psyche.  For all the times I’d heard teachers say it; and even though I had always believed them, I had never actually seen it myself: it is the magic of why teachers teach!  My classes have been going well; and overall teaching has been getting easier, but there’s only so much fun one can have and so much inspiration one can draw from teaching English grammar. Granted, I have been subjecting my classes on a regular basis to Billy Joel, Great Big Sea and Simon & Garfunkel, which always makes me smile.  But then there is always one student (usually a woman; I find many of the women to be more closed-minded than the men, perhaps because they are more accustomed to simply following orders.  This, of course, contributes heavily to the feminine angst that had been raging in me for the past month or so.  Many of you have watched me pass through a number of crazy stages on my journey towards the discovery of the female identity, but never has it been something so fierce!  I find here that maintaining my idea of what it is to be a woman is something that I can’t just parade around with in the streets.  It is something that I have to disguise and often even hide.  It is something subversive and something that often gets relegated to the privacy of my own home, in the company of my roommate who has been here a couple of weeks now.  It is morning yoga to Andean music (because it is the earthiest music we have found) just so that we can actually do the Lion’s Roar from our gut.  It is blasting Only the Good Die Young and head-banging to Green Day’s Minority (“I wanna be the minority, I don’t need your authority, so down with the moral majority ‘cause I wanna be the minority1”); GBS’s Consequence Free (“Wouldn't it be great, if no one ever got offended, Wouldn't it be great to say what's really on your mind, I have always said all the rules are made for bending, And if I let my hair down, would that be such a crime?”) and other various songs that recall the glorious angst of Friday afternoons in high school when “nonconformity” was more of a buzzword than anything else.  Now it is a way of life.  For anyone with our color skin, it is inevitable.  It is an anthem.   Why else would we play the angry Palestinian rock song on repeat just to shout the line “ANKLES ARE SEXY FOR YOUR BIG BEARD!” over and over again?  Why else would we dance scandalously to Madonna in the kitchen with the lights off and Tupperware containers for hats?  Why else would things that were once nothing more than a game for prepubescent boys --- shouting the word “vagina,” for example, --- suddenly become so liberating and occasionally even vital to our survival here?)

 

And now for the new part of the post… 

This term, I was lucky enough to get a ridiculous Level 11 class that consists of seven “twentysomething” guys and one female.  Luckily, the female student is not veiled and quite liberal, or else I’m pretty certain that she would have dropped out of the class.  Hell, that much testosterone in one room was certainly enough to make me want to bolt at times.  Luckily, there have been many a day when I have actually felt that my personal level of pent-up Egypt-style estrogen has just about balanced the testosterone of seven young men.  Peace!  Anyways, to further expand upon the “magical moment” to which I alluded when I began this post a month ago, my Level 11 class is pretty bright, and due to an administrative decision to swap textbooks, my whole class already knew all of the grammar that I was supposed to teach for 2.5 hours 3 days a week for 5 weeks.  At first, I was petrified.  What was I going to do with this class???  It didn’t take me long to figure out that as long as I managed to keep them interested, I could teach anything I wanted!  So I left the grammar book at home to collect dust and began bringing in linguistics articles, music and poetry!  We studied historical linguistics, sociolinguistics (I taught them all about Labov’s “r”) and linguistic politics (they have all joined the army anti-prescriptivists!).  We read the play “Harvey” and watched the movie (Can you believe there are a couple of them who actually make a show of holding the door open for Harvey every time they enter the classroom?) and discussed the concept of health.  What is sick and what is healthy?  Is it black and white or is there a spectrum?  What is mental health?  I feel like I gave them all a crash course on liberal arts education in 5 weeks! 

 

There have actually been a series of magical moments throughout the course of the past 5 weeks.  Take yesterday, for example, when I made them get into groups and perform “The Farmer in the Dell,” “The Ants Go Marching one by one” and “I’ve been working on the Railroad.”  We had so much fun with this that I decided to teach them “Three Blind Mice” and got the whole class to sing it in a round!  I swear to you, I have never seen a group of university-aged men so excited!  And over nursery rhymes!  Yay! 

 

The first of the magical was, as you may have guessed if you know me well enough, thanks to Billy Joel!  I made it a habit of dedicating the last 45 minutes or so of class to listening to a song and making them fill in the blanks on lyrics sheets.  Then, we discussed the songs and what they meant.  They seemed to enjoy “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Feelin’ Groovy” (which we did the day I taught them about slang) enough, so I decided to give Billy’s “Goodnight Saigon” a go.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the song, it’s about the soldiers in Vietnam.  It’s a beautiful piece and quite moving as well.  He talks first about the American soldiers and then about the Vietnamese, asking “Who was wrong?  And who was right?  It didn’t matter in the thick of the fight...” and weaves both stories together with the chorus, “We will all go down together…” This actually sparked quite an animated class discussion about enemies and how they’re envisioned as opposites really we’re all in the same boat, so what are we doing killing each other?  It turned into a beautiful deliberation on war and peace, and I left the class thinking, you know, why not just travel the world over teaching Billy Joel and peace? 

 

Since then, we have had some pretty cool discussion on some pretty awesome songs, including Boston’s “Peace of the Mind” and Don McLean’s “American Pie.”  For their final writing assignment, I printed out song lyrics to 9 different song and made them each pick one to analyze.  It was quite apparent that they’d never been asked to do anything even remotely like this, since they all freaked out a little bit.  I tried to explain that there was no correct answer, something I’m fairly certain they’ve never heard a teacher say.  Overall, they really got it, and I was so proud of them!  Tomorrow is their final exam (which I didn’t write and am obligated to give), so I played “We didn’t start the fire” for them; sent them home with the lyrics and said I’d give extra credit for any explanations they brought it about any of them events mentioned in the song.  

The Little Cotton Rocket that Could

Today, the dumpster that is usually conveniently situated just inside the gate of our apartment complex was missing.  Annoyed, Jessamy and I began trudging down the street to the garbage dump on the corner.  About 15 seconds into the trek past the staring men in gellabiyas, I realized two things: 1) I was lacking an undergarment from the waist up and 2) I was carrying a reasonably transparent bag full of female bathroom garbage.  This would not ordinarily have been an issue save for the fact that many Egyptians think that tampons violate a woman’s virginity.  Whatever, we agreed rolling our eyes, half the male population in Egypt thinks it’s ok to reach out and touch us like shiny saucers in a china shop, and the other half expects us to just climb into their cars and spend the night with them every time they flash their lights at us on the Corniche, there are NO way they would even CONSIDER that we might be virgins.  So what are we hiding?  So we dumped out trash and parted ways as Jessamy headed to class and I shuffled back towards the apartment all by my onesy.  And what did I find waiting for me just inside the gate of our apartment complex?  A stray tampon!  Silly bugger must have decided that the inside of a see-through plastic bag was not a conspicuous enough location for itself, so it leapt to freedom in a shockingly successful to display itself more openly.  I still don’t know if the doorman saw me pick it up and run inside.    

Tell Him to Tell

A kitchen rant composed by Jessamy and me over dirty dishes and soap bubbles after our landlord called (and also sent the doorman) to tell us to turn down our music because his brother was sleeping.  It was 11:30 a.m. and our music was NOT that loud.  Certainly not as loud as Egypt, where the audio stimulation at any given point is about comparable to the inside of a funhouse at a seedy carnival.

 

Tell him to tell the ruba vecchia*

To stop shouting

There is enough old junk in the streets to fill a thousand odd shops!

 

Tell him to tell the children

To stop exploding sawarikh**

In which Holy Book does it say that Ramadan is the month of throwing rockets at people?

 

Tell him to tell the people

To stop shouting ALL THE TIME

EVEN WHEN THEY”RE NOT ANGRY!

 

Tell him to tell

The taxi drivers to tear out their horns

And use them as earplugs!

 

Tell him to tell the women

To put on their hegabs***

And LOOK for Mahmoud****!

 

Better yet, tell him to tell

The women to TAKE OFF their hegabs

And surely Mahmoud will come to THEM!

 

Tell him to tell his country

That if people were quiet at night

Then they wouldn’t have to sleep in the middle of the day!

 

* “Ruba vecchia” (Stolen from the Italian “old things”) is a man who wanders the streets with a cart collecting old things that people don’t want to be sold in the antiques district.  In order to be a “ruba vecchia,” the only requirement is that you are able to shout “vecchia” over and over again, an average of 7,000 times a day, while imitating a goat with laryngitis. 

**”Sawarikh” are the rockets/firecrackers that the boys throw constantly during Ramadan.  Remember the Vagina Rocket poem.  Apparently, they are also thrown at Christmas and New Year’s.  I am told that it is well I am leaving Egypt just before this, because in addition to throwing sawarikh, they also apparently throw random things out their windows onto the unsuspecting passerbys on the sidewalk below.  My friend swears her uncle once threw a toilet out of his 8^th story window.  

***”Hegabs” are the headscarves the women don before going out.

**** Mahmoud was the name of the doorman at our apartment complex.  The women, unwilling to go step outside in search of him when they needed something, could be heard shouting his name out their windows , again, an average of 7,000 times a day.  Mahmoud has recently disappeared into the great mystery that is Alexandria and was replaced by a considerably less-smiley doorman whose name has not yet been discovered by the women and so they are, for the moment, unable to summon him from their windows alhamdulillah (Praise God)!  

Woman on the Tram

You in the corner

You with the long face

Reading your Quoran

Whispering the words 

Into the pages from whence they came

Does it say anything in there 

About giving up your seat

For the old lady with the cane

Hunched in the aisle beside you?

The Falling of the Rain

Yesterday evening, when I walked out onto the teacher's patio at work, I noticed a strange edginess in the air and the color of the aftersun sky reflecting off the sides of buildings seemed somehow different from usual.  "It feels like rain," I announced.  Of course, I was joking since not one drop of rain has fallen over Egypt since I arrived in mid-July.  There is no such thing as a summer rain here.  Rain in Egypt can only mean one thing: the coming of winter.  

In Uruguay, I remember missing peanut butter; in the States, mate and dulce de leche.  Here in Egypt, of all the things there are to miss, I find myself most often longing for two things: red wine and rain.  I awoke this morning just before dawn to a strange sound.  In my sleepy daze, I wondered if there was a giant cobra hissing just outside my window.  But I thought about it again and realized that the closest I had ever come to seeing a cobra in Egypt was doing the cobra pose in yoga in a vain effort to straighten out my back after a long night atop my unfriendly mattress.  No, there was most certainly not an enormous cobra outside my window.  What was that sound then?  A battery-operated chainsaw?  An electric toothbrush?  There are so many babies in Egypt that for a moment I thought that perhaps it was a baby wailing, wanting milk, wanting more attention than his five baby brothers.  At 5:00 a.m., I suppose any baby who has not yet gone to bed (since children in Egypt have no bedtime and frequently stay up til all hours of the morning) would certainly be at least a bit cranky.  But this would have to be one cranky baby.  Pity the mother.  Yet, this sound, somewhere between a swooshing and a gushing and a pounding, did not sound human.  Nor did it sound mechanic.  What in the name of whichever God you pray to in Egypt could it be?  And then a twang (or was it a twinge?) of nostalgia waltzed up my spine and ended in a smile on my sleepy face.  Could it be rain?!?  I leapt up and stumbled glasses-less through the dark to the patio where I stood for a moment (but only a moment, for already it was passing) beneath the beautiful, heavenly falling of the rain.