Nu-Clear and Present Danger

Well as a way to take a break from teaching, I volunteer once a week at an NGO where I .... teach. This experience differs from my day job though as the class is focused on conversational English and is geared towards university students. The idea behind the NGO is to offer lesser privileged university students with the skills needed to find better jobs. These skills include English, French, or German, as well as computer and communication skills.
The other night, despite the NGO guidelines, our conversation in class turned towards the political. Having recently been through somewhat of a crash course on all things nuclear this past spring, I was eager to take Egypt's nuclear temperature. My fellow teacher and I posed the question, should Egypt have a nuclear weapon? The response was a resounding yes. The main arguments were two-fold. First, they argued that Egypt needs to defend itself against its enemy: Israel, and second, that every country has the right to build a nuclear weapon (no matter what the United States might say) and that right should be exercised.
What I found surprising was the student's multiple references to the "couple" countries who have nuclear weapons. In reality many more countries maintain nuclear arsenals. Conversely, the students included Iran as a country that has nuclear weapons. Perhaps the most awkward pause though came when we asked them: why do you consider Israel your enemy? Aren't both countries at peace? This question was met with resounding silence.
The discussion could have easily continued through the night but unfortunately we had to cut it short. Not only did we have grammar exercises to do, but the discussion was turning down a dangerous side street as indicated by the question, "why does the United States think it can tell other countries what to do?" I told them that was another topic for another day.
Overall I was excited to get some insight into how young Egyptians view their country and the world's nuclear ambitions, and I look forward to continuing nonproliferation studies. It may be one of the only fields that allows for a unique combination of hard power, strategic know-how, and the rare but somehow familiar trait of idealism.

The $10 ticket home

As an expatriot I was very happy last night. You see I attended my first American Embassy (Halloween) party. This is perhaps embarassing, but I had assumed that all Embassy parties would resemble the Cold-War-Germany Embassy Christmas party scene from Spy Game. As in Generals, politicians and spies holding cocktails mingling with foreign service staff and their guests. In reality it is much more like a frat party. Though I would have preferred the former, there is nothing quite like dancing with a bunch of Marines to Britney Spears to remind you of home.

Not-so-rhetorical questions

My mom forwarded me a NYT Op-Ed from Monday's paper. Naturally, I just now got around to reading it. This particular article was simultaneously heartwarming and cause for thought. Nicholas Kristof wrote again about Dr. Greg Mortenson's effort to build schools for girls in Afghanistan. More than that though Kristof implied that education will be an important component to ensuring peace and stability in a country that has known neither for a while now.

So if education is powerful enough to break through barriers that even the United States military cannot break, what happens when education becomes neglected? If education can change the face of a country and perhaps even increase its security and prosperity, will those same things suffer if education is not given the sense of urgency it requires?

I ask because once again I am grappling with the fact that what will be the future ruling class of Egypt, approaches education the same way a 5 year old approaches cough syrup - with protest and disdain. Perhaps I am being naive and overly idealistic in the face of what is surely a universal teenage reflex. But if not, is this a subtle yet ominous sign of things to come?

Proximity

This is going to be one of those things that may be received with a resounding, "well, yeah, obviously," but here it goes. Proximity matters. I studied issues faced in the Middle East in the comfort of my posh DC university and later in the comfort of DC offices. But the gravity of the issues never rang so true as when I am here, actually in the area. For instance, President Ahmedinejad recently visited Beirut. He was met with crowds of support and well-wishers. I am going there for vacation next month. So that's creepy.
I am finding that this is a hard idea to convey. Sarah and I discussed this on the cab ride back from Arabic class one night. It is not that people are more or less educated about a place or situation the closer or farther they are from it. I would argue the people in DC are just as if not more educated about what is going on in this region than some of its citizens. But from a safe distance it feels like we are studying characters from a fiction novel. We wonder perhaps what that certain eccentric Ahmedinejad will do next. Or, we suggest a given policy towards Syria, believed to be at least somewhat geopolitically strategic.
In the comfort of our own home, the world feels like a chess board. And we are free to suggest where to move the next pawn. But here you can feel the implications of what's going on. You can see the pawns, and the knights, and the bishops coming towards you and from where I'm standing, they look awfully big.

My backyard

This is a scene from Al-Azhar park, one of my favorite places in Cairo. Good place for sweeping, panoramic views. Also a good place to remember what the color green looks like.

Remember that one time?

So I had an interesting experience yesterday. I was actually sort of expecting it, and knew that it would occur at any time, just didn't know when. Generally speaking it was neither a positive nor negative experience, instead a catalyst for thought.
My 11th graders have been studying speeches these past couple of weeks. We had been looking specifically at American Revolutionary speeches, ie Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Yesterday however, I decided to bring in an example of a modern day speech. I chose the speech Elie Wiesel gave last year at the site of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp on the anniversary of D-Day. President Obama was in the audience (having just come from Cairo where he gave his famous Cairo speech) as well as Chancellor Merkel. The speech is beautiful and I do recommend giving the transcript a look. Wiesel talked about the feeling of optimism people had for the world after the end of WWII. Maybe after such horror and devastation, the world would have learned its lesson that "all wars are absurd" and that peace would reign. But the world hadn't learned he argued. Instead, destruction and war became the stories of decades upon decades. He hoped however, that today with new leaders promising 20/20 moral vision, the world would finally seize the opportunity to leave war, hatred, and dominance aside and finally learn the lesson that history has so vehemently tried to teach; that peace and understanding of others is both possible and imperative here on Earth.
The students liked the message, only its impact was somewhat lost for one particular reason. They didn't know what a Concentration Camp was. How can you understand the plight of peace and the paradoxical optimism Wiesel felt after his liberation if you had never been introduced to the original suffering? Now, having to explain to a group of Egyptian students what a Concentration Camp is without discussing religion or politics (school rules) is a verbal feat of acrobatics. My sentence went something like, "It's where they took the Jews and other people during WWII."
This incident sparked a discussion in the staff room, not so much about the Holocaust, but about history in general. Is there such thing as a common world history? Or even a commonly acknowledged history? Should the African continent study the same history as the North American one? More importantly, if history becomes regionally or perhaps even politically motivated, will we ever really understand each other?

Is our Children Learning?

There is a trend developing in Egypt. I recently had my students write a one page essay comparing Chinese, American, and Egyptian proverbs. By doing this I told them that they would better understand the three countries' values. My students gave me one page summaries copied and pasted from Wikipedia. Ironically this assignment about values taught me a lot about theirs.
The students I teach attend a private school and pay a significant amount per year. The school is a for-profit institution, which I believe to be counterproductive. Mohammed Yunus, pioneer of social business, has some interesting ideas about how to revolutionize business models so that they do actually contribute to the social good. But that is a long way off from the system the school has now.
Unfortunately the feeling I'm getting is that an education here (at least with the class of kids I'm working with) is just a check in the box. Something to be either completed or not completed. Which is odd for me, because here I am convincing a group of 90 students (total) that actually you can become very well educated, and that the key to that is critical thinking. Maybe for the first time ever they are being asked to draw conclusions, make inferences, and apply lessons learned in literature to their own lives. The process is painstakingly grueling.