School: My Ostensible Reason for Being Here

Classes at the American University in Cairo are hardly worth writing about but not much else has been going on lately. So here we go. The campus is divided into at least four different segments. First you’ve got the Greek Campus, where most of my classes are. It’s a big quadrangle, much in the American university tradition, and it has a large open courtyard in the center where the cool kids hang out. It’s generally bustling, and getting to class often involves threading one’s way through clusters of cigarette-smoking Egyptians. Greek is also home to the AUC library, which I’ve been told is the largest collection of English-language books in Africa. Unless they’re hiding part of it somewhere, it’s only around two thirds the size of the Topeka public library. The Georgetown University outfit makes it look like a seven year old’s collection of Bernstein Bears books.

People not cool enough to chill at Greek spend their time hanging around Main Campus, about a block down the street. This is where most administrative offices are located, and it’s home to a gym, a soccer/basketball court, and a tennis court. Although well maintained and aesthetically pleasing, Main is pretty boring. Whether I’m at Greek or Main, I can’t help noticing the USAID stickers that adorn everything from computers to chairs to the machine that made my student ID card. Most of AUC’s equipment seems to be “a gift from the American people.” Egypt does receive around $2 billion in aid from the US every year (putting them third, behind Iraq and Israel), and I guess a fair bit of it goes here.

The Egyptian students remind me of American high schoolers. Outside of class, they tend to congregate in cliquish clusters and clog up stairwells. It depends somewhat on the class, but most of the local students don’t seem to care about school at all. They come in late, don’t open their notebooks, don’t have pens, play with cell phones, get up and leave randomly. I can’t much blame them though – most of my classes are fairly boring. My history class is particularly bad. The professor is a late middle aged Arab woman with shoulder length black hair parted severely to the left of middle. Always clad in multiple waist-length necklaces and several gaudy golden bracelets, she wears glasses on the end of her nose and doesn’t make eye contact with anyone. Instead, she stares at a point in the upper back of the room where the wall joins the ceiling and recites her lectures as if she were doing a PBS special. Unlike my other professors, she doesn’t get angry when people come in late, but rather plows inexorably onward in her speeches.

My Arab Society class has a fluttery female professor who likes to complain about the flaws of the Egyptian educational system rather than teach us anything. Ironic, no? The most interesting occurrence so far was a big argument on the first day about whether Egyptians are Arabs or not. Half the class said yes. Half the class said no, Egyptians have a unique heritage as descendants of the pharaohs. Identity politics is huge here. Ask two people what it means to be Arab and you’re guaranteed to get different answers.

International Politics of the Middle East is taught by short Egyptian man with squinty eyes, a respectable mustache, and a receding hairline. He has a high, nasal voice, and he always dresses in a suit. He’s a bit of a cynic, frankly admitting to us the first day that he’s bored with teaching this topic and he’s relying on us to make the class interesting. We haven’t succeeded so far. He ends up spending most of the class lecturing on random disjointed topics. It’s unfortunate, because it’s my last class of the week, from 4:00 to 6:25 on a Thursday afternoon, and I tend to zone out after a while. I tried doodling to stay awake, but I’m a terrible artist so I switched to writing poems. Here’s one I composed:

My True Love

The beauty of thine eyes
Shines forth with radiant glow
The luster of thy skin
Doth rival purest snow
To gaze on thy fair form
Unloosens my mind’s load
O who wouldst ever guess
That thou art but a toad?

I’m going to preempt any criticism of lines 3-4 and state that the subject of this poem is a rare African albino toad. I swear they exist. I’m going to preempt any criticism of the rest of the poem and say that anyone who doesn’t like it can go jump in a lake.

My favorite class is called Peasants, Nomads, and Rural Change. It’s an anthropology class, and I ended up in it for complicated, nonsensical reasons. It doesn’t even transfer back home except as elective credit. But I love the professor. She’s a small Egyptian woman with a sweet British accent. I don’t know why she chose peasant studies as a field (or why anyone else has, for that matter), but her passion for the subject is palpable and electric. I frequently forget that nothing we talk about has any relevance to anything ever. The kids in here actually care for some reason, and we have good discussions. This is my only class that I would say really promotes active use of my gray matter, and that’s why I like it.

My last class is Egyptian colloquial Arabic. I don’t even know what to say here. We spend 90% of our time repeating simple phrases until our heads explode or the professor decides we’ve finally gotten the pronunciation right. I can’t remember the latter option happening with any great frequency. My ability to correctly pronounce the words, bad enough as it would ordinarily be, is made exponentially worse by my two years of exposure to Modern Standard Arabic. Although the two dialects share a substantial bit of vocabulary, the intonation is different and it’s hard not to pronounce things the way I originally learned them. Sadly, I’m far from the worst in the class – in fact I’d say I rank fairly high. Sometimes it’s just maddening. I do like the class dynamic though; the kids are lighthearted and friendly and the professor is a riot on most days. Unfortunately, this class meets four days a week, and we’re in a different room in a different building each day. This can be confusing, as the following incident illustrates:

Log 02-20-08

15:54 Arrive at usual Wednesday room, same one utilized for prior three weeks. Area occupied by another class. Unacceptable.
15:56 Commanding officer not yet present. Rank and file unilaterally make decision to exchange fire with hostile occupying forces. Initial assault repulsed.
16:03 General Khaled arrives. Parleys with enemy commander. Negotiations unsuccessful.
16:04 Situation dire. Enemy fortified in encampment. Our forces outnumbered. Many hostiles wielding laptops, granting technological superiority. Morale low.
16:06 In the midst of planning highly sophisticated flanking maneuver designed to recapture room. Interrupted when enemy soldier launches preemptive strike with internet-based evidence indicating our assigned classroom has been changed without notice. Defeat.
16:07 Dispute in ranks over proper course of action. Many troops in favor of tactical retreat to café in order to obtain provisions and discuss strategy. Proposal vetoed by commanding officer.
16:08 Forced march to alternate building with purpose of locating new base camp.
16:20 Forward scouts discover new base camp is overrun as well.
16:21 Engage in skirmish with hostile forces and exchange fire for period of several minutes. Opposing commander advises we check with admin to confirm accuracy of our orders. Blatant chicanery intended to get us out of the room so the enemy can construct defensive fortifications.
16:27 Further hostilities prove pointless. Temporary ceasefire declared.
16:28 Rank and file again suggest café option.
16:29 Proposal vetoed.
16:30 Rank and file attempt to override veto.
16:31 Override of veto carries.
16:32 Override of veto vetoed.
16:33 Class commences in courtyard. Weather: cold and windy. Environment: noisy. Attention paid: none.