It occurred to me on Saturday when I went to yoga that I’d missed an important catch up post. My internship. An essential requirement of the program here is that every student participate in an internship to help improve their Arabic in an authentic workplace. Some students are working in charitable organizations, others with journalists or lawyers. Quite a few are doing translation work in the Library of Alexandria. Most of them aren’t doing much though, and are overall unsatisfied. I, however, am having the exact opposite experience.
I mentioned in a previous post that the American Center in Alexandria hosted an internship fair for us our first week here. The Voluntary Youth Service Initiative (VYSI), founded and run by a young Egyptian girl names Suzan who has since become a good friend of mine, invited a number of their partner organizations to come talk to us and recruit volunteers (i.e. interns). At said fair I talked to a number of organizations, but found myself drawn to Hayat Center, the first wellness center in Alexandria to holistically treat the mind, body, and soul. Do I sound like an advertisement yet? I’ve repeated that last phrase ad nauseum in Arabic, but I still like the way it rolls off the tongue.
Anyway, I picked Hayat Center for two reasons: the boss and the message. Hayat is trying to spread the word of what we would probably refer to as “new age” treatments. They offer classes in everything from yoga, meditation and tai chi to cupping and candle making and mind mapping and I could go on and on and on. The yoga classes by the way are awesome. They’re obviously much different from yoga classes in America, and a little expensive by Egyptian standards, but I get an amazing discount because I work there. I’m paying about $3 a class, but I would pay much more for the weekly escape and relaxation it offers.
Hayat Center takes great pride in its yoga, mostly because of all the courses they offer, it incorporates the mind, body and soul more than any other. The class usually begins and ends with meditation, and in between we do a mix of stretching and strength exercises, but nothing as official and the series’ you find in most yoga classes. Our trainer learned most of her yoga from books, so some of what I considered essential to yoga is missing, but at the same time I’m learning a variety of new poses and exercises that I’d never heard of before.
I wanted to work for Hayat in large part because I thought I might have a lot in common with the types of Egyptians who would take yoga, and it can be difficult to find Egyptians that we have a lot in common with. I wasn’t disappointed. The staff alone are some of my favorite people I’ve met in Egypt. The center is small, just the owner, his wife, and three female employees, but that means joining the center was kind of like joining a family. They’re all so genuine it makes me want nothing more than to sit down to tea and chat for hours every time I see them.
The owner, Mister Wesam Elgendy, is a successful engineer who lived in America for a couple years and started the center, I assume, as a side project for his wife Marwa. While he certainly believes in the message and is highly involved in the business end of things, when we want to schedule a class or refer someone to the center we always go through Marwa. Mister Wesam was the one I met at the internship fair, and his friendly and open attitude made me want to be a part of Hayat. You could tell just by the way he spoke about it how invested he was in the project, and that kind of enthusiasm always leads to good results. The center only opened a year ago, but it already seems to be flourishing. Our work there, in sha’ Allah, will help it flourish more.
My partner Emily (also from the program) and I are responsible for marketing some of Hayat’s classes to international schools in the area. We think we may have been chosen because Americans are naturally attractive to the international schools, but we’re happy to use our foreignness for the benefit of the center. We spent a few weeks with Mister Wesam writing, editing, and practicing sales pitches, in Arabic of course, and then we started calling up schools to set up meetings. We had our first one with the Alexandria House of English last week and I’m happy to report that they definitely want us to come teach their students yoga. We’re still working on getting them to implement a healthy cafeteria and/or offer speed reading classes, but for now we have our foot in the door.
It can sometimes be difficult to get together with Mister Wesam to work. He always makes time for us, but meetings would often get pushed back or rescheduled. At first we assumed he was just busy with work, but then Emily stumbled across an interesting Facebook page. As it turns out, Mister Wesam is running as an independent for the Egyptian parliament - elections to be held today. It gives me hope that someone so invested in the good of others is running. I hope he wins, but competition is stiff judging by the fact that each district has at least fifty candidates. His has eighty. Still, we’ll have to see what today holds.
On the topic of politics… well, there’s a lot to say, and I’m not even sure where to begin. As you might imagine with the number of candidates, the streets are plastered with signage. Banners hang across all the major streets and posters are plastered everywhere. One of the interesting things I learned from the posters is how they’re solving the problem of illiteracy. Every candidate has a symbol (Mister Wesam’s is the mobile phone) that voters can use to indicate their choice on the ballot. This should also help for those who aren’t very good at remembering names. Campaigning, of course, isn’t limited to signs and posters.
On our drive to the American House of English, Mister Wesam told us that he’s been spending most of his time going out to talk to the people of his district. One of the biggest problems facing the candidates is that they’ve had almost no time to campaign; it’s been something like a month and a half since candidacy was announced. Parties, therefore, have had an even bigger advantage than usual. If you remember, the Eid al-Adha celebration I went to was sponsored by the Muslim Brotherhood and their Freedom and Justice Party. Hizb al-Nour, the Sufi party, has also been very visible. Last night there were vans with speakers strapped on top driving through residential areas broadcasting platforms. It’s all been very hectic.
As for the elections themselves, that’s why we have two days off of school. The University is definitely closed today, but since the elections will last two days the program has told us to stay inside for both of them. As I’m sure you’ve all heard, there have been a lot of demonstrations in Egypt over the last week or so. First and foremost, in case the fact that I hadn’t gotten to it yet didn’t tip you off, I’m perfectly safe. The protests tend to take place in very specific places, the potentially violent ones in even more specific places, and no one in our program is stupid enough to go looking for trouble. I saw a tiny and rather peaceful protest at the University when people first started demonstrating again (see below), but other than that I didn’t see hide nor hair of a protest until Thanksgiving. I can sometimes hear them from my balcony, but that’s to be expected as the usual marching route falls between my apartment and the Corniche.
Thanksgiving was fun though. As expatriated Americans, it’s no surprise that we organized a gigantic cover-dish Thanksgiving Day celebration. Since many of us have classes on Thursdays, however, and therefore would not have had time to cook, we had the party on Friday. In case you haven’t heard, Friday is protest day. What’s more, we were expecting upwards of fifty guests (we probably had more around eighty) and the only place available to us that could hold that many was a pair of apartments connected by a huge balcony situated on the above mentioned marching route. Oops?
Once we noticed this little faux pas we took precautions. There is, of course, nothing wrong with fifty foreigners being on the marching route as long as we’re inside, but we didn’t want to be coming or going during the protests. As such, the party got moved up from 7 PM to 3 PM, and then again from 3 PM to 1 PM, and then we were told to try to make it by 12:30 just in case. Friday prayers, which are usually the launching point for the demonstrations, take place around 1:00, but for a couple of hours after that we didn’t see more than a few small groups of ten or so individuals wandering down the street waving flags. Then came the commotion.
It’s really something to see thousands of people moving en masse, and we had a perfect vantage point from the balcony. I don’t have too many pictures, because even inside we didn’t want to draw too much attention to ourselves, but I managed to snap a couple (see above). It was entirely peaceful, as the marching routes usually are. When people have a goal (i.e. getting somewhere) they don’t tend to get restless or violent. The laissez faireness of it all caused some of us to dub it the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Muzaahiraat (Demonstrations) – credit to Laura Chen for the name. It really was like watching a giant parade right down to the banners, flags, and people shouting things from the backs of convertibles.
Just as the tail end of the crowd passed, the afternoon call to prayer went off and it was amazing to see everyone buying newspapers to use as prayer mats in the streets before continuing on their way. I’m not sure why I enjoyed the sight so much, but their ingenuity astounded me.
I don’t want to comment too much on the reasons behind the demonstrations. I’m not Egyptian, and therefore it’s not really my business. But suffice it to say for those of you who are curious that the country is much more divided this time than the last. I’ve talked to a good number of Egyptians who don’t agree with the protests at all. As I heard an Egyptian put it in a café last night, the people got their biggest demand, and now they’re trying to protest for the details on which not everyone agrees.
Whatever happens tomorrow, it’s going to be monumental. The first free elections in Egypt in more than thirty years. I hope you’re all watching, because this is one of those time periods that our children’s children will ask us about. I for one am ecstatic to be able to say I was here to see it all.
No comments:
Post a Comment