Guy Fawkes Day Protest

“Kouchery! Kouchery! Kouchery!” I have never been big on chanting, but I joined in with the clapping and smiled wide at the change of slogan. “Kouchery! Kouchery!”

The gathering of people had now grown to the size of a large swimming pool. Most were sitting on the dusty stone ground, but around the periphery remained a constant crowed of standers peering in with interest or amusement, enjoying themselves enough to stay but not supportive enough to sit down. “Sit! Sit! Sit!” would become the chant every few minutes as those stalwartly sitting sought to summon those still standing. After an hour it became apparent that this was a protest about getting people to sit not a sit-in about getting people to protest.

Kat, Rebecca, Gillian and a few others had been working on this protest for a month. They had tried to talk with the President of AUC, called the newspapers, met with USAID, and finally taken to the streets… or the court yard in front of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HUSS) building. The agenda was tuition hikes, the corporatization of AUC, the mistreatment of staff, the food monopoly, the horrible food quality and price, shuttle bus service issues, the unfinished campus, the egregious student housing situation, student apathy, and the denial of these problems by our university.

The protest had been a long time in the making and it was good to see so much support. It was hard to tell how many of the students really cared about these issues and how many were just there for the sensation of it, but that was unimportant. People were here. The dream was here. When two of the petitions that predated the protest were passed around almost everybody signed.

Some of the organizers gave speeches from the center of the sitters, and then two of the teachers from the anthropology department talked. Finally, the floor was opened up to anyone with a complaint or a cry. It took about four people before one fiery character suggested storming the president’s office.

It is a dangerous business to create a monster, and then tell it to behave. The attempt to rally and unite AUC students had been surprisingly successful. The problem comes when you spend a month arranging a protest, setting an agenda and a plan, assembling a crowd, saying you speak for it, and then you find out that the agenda and plan of the crowd may not be the same as yours. Have you gotten too close? Have you made it personal? When an organizer yells “No! Stop! If you march on the president’s office you will ruin everything. All our plans will be wasted.” you have to wonder. You have to wonder if you are really a body being represented or simply a fuel being consumed, a tool being employed for its mechanical advantage. Was it your plan to put together a crowd that would grant someone else a ticket to see the authorities and push an agenda across a table, and was it your agenda that was slid across that table? Or, when you heard the chanting, saw the crowd and sat down in its ranks, was it your plan to feel involved? Was it your plan to skip class? Was it your plan to make a speech and let yourself be known? Was it your plan to demand rather then suggest change? Was it your plan to march or scream, to grab the administration by the collar and insist upon accountability, confession, and change? Did you care about legitimacy or respectability or rather destruction, explosion, severed limbs and lambasted savagery excusable later only because of the crowd? Or maybe you just saw a friend and thought you would sit and chat.

It is dangerous business to say you represent a protest.

The crowd grew. People pulled in giant umbrella awnings for shade. Factions arose and fell. At times it was chaos and at times suppressed. Once someone had spoken once or twice you could see them moving to a new sphere of importance, and suddenly they no longer had to sit amongst the rest of us. They stood in the middle or around the shade umbrellas with organizers and the others who had been initiated. They would peer around at the sitters and go back to talking. The fiery character formed a small cadre who stood and debated with each other and sometimes had to be hand-on-shoulder-ed or stern-word-in-the-ear-ed or sympathizing-but-serious-grasp-of-wrist-ed. It was hard not to view it as a microcosm of a revolution—initiated by idealogicians, fractured by interests and interpretations, and eventually degraded into chaos awaiting resolution or leadership. At one point we were ‘76 Iran unsure of our identity and ideology; were we struggling students or spoiled urban upper classes? And then we were swept into ‘82 Lebanon reduced to factions, passing briefly through ‘87 Palestine wondering what our leaders were doing in Tunisia.

By 3:30 PM the crowed had dissolved. Kat had returned from the president’s office empty handed. Parliament still stood. Some lost interest; others had to get to class. Only a core group remained to debate events and discuss the path ahead. A committee was created. A mission was determined. And people went their ways. Everyone agreed the protest was a success. AUC students had united and participated in a manner not seen in many years. But, no one was really sure what the success meant. Was it a first step? Was it just an experiment? Was it a sign of things to come? Was it a fleeting HAZZAA surrounded by an administration packing earplugs? Hopefully the next two months will tell.

Instant Karma

I stared in disbelief and the left front wheel, which stuck out at a forty-five degree angle from the car held on only by the shock absorber. Dina’s Fait stations wagon looked like a bond car which had accidentally started to fold in its wheels for submarine mode while still on dry land. The second problem was, with the damage contained to the front left side of the car and bottomed out half way into an intersection, none of the cars coming from behind us or from the right could see that we had been in an accident, and so they just assumed we were idiots and made a point of telling us so. Night had fallen an hour before, and in the street-lamp-lit Cairene half-gloom you, if you climbed up on the curb, could experience honking, yelling, light flashing cars stretching for half a kilometer in either direction. As each set of two cars would squeeze by and yell at us, Dina or I or one of her friends who showed up later during the two hour wait for a tow truck would point at the severed wheel and the angry driver would nod knowingly as if to say “you poor, poor saps.”

The actual accident had occurred almost a kilometer before the intersection. Dina and I were driving home from school after staying late at the library finding books for our upcoming papers. As we cruised down the homestretch of highway into Maadi listening to U2, I stretched out my seat built and pushed across the seat divide to lay my head on Dina’s shoulder. I said jokingly, “Don’t get into an accident now.” It was mere moments after this position became uncomfortable and I had readjusted in my seat that a scrawny Chinese kid in a new silver Mitsubishi, without looking where he was going, pulled unto the highway from a U-turn gap in the barrier. Dina didn’t even have time to scream, much less brake. I clutched the armrest as the impact hurled the driver’s side of the car into the air. For a moment we both thought the car would flip, and then it fell back down on all four wheels and we screeched to a halt.

Dina climbed out furious and confronted the kid. Around us you could hear glass popping and scraping as cars sped around the scene of the accident. The kid, whose name I do not recall, was nice, but showed not a fraction of remorse. Half a second later and Dina would have been in the emergency room, and he never even said he was sorry. Every now and then he would glance quizzically at the crumpled siding at the front of the car, half-connected, bouncing up and down and he would give a “well that’s Cairo” shrug. He said he knew a mechanic near so we started up the car which drove relatively fine until the intersection, at which point the wheel broke off.

Later I mentioned Karma and Dina responded that when she told her parents they would say she deserved it for driving alone with me.  For those of you who read my last post, you know this is not what I meant.

Think Unhappy Thoughts

A small boy in Canada looks at a picture, strokes a locket, prays, and fifteen thousand miles away a woman in Ashfork, Arizona tests negative for Cancer four days before starting chemo. A monastery of forty Mongolian monks meditates for forty days and the global level of depression lifts, just a fraction… but does it work in the negative. No doubt there are enough bad thoughts out there to cover the entire surface of the Earth in a fine layer of radioactive dust. The question is, can we concentrate it? Can we sweep that dust into a pile big enough to bury someone in.

Do not worry. I am not asking you all to wish someone dead. I am not that sort. I would not even request pain for another. No, something highly frustrating, inconveniencing, and costing $2,250 (12,000 LE) ought to do. His name is Tarek Amin Galel Adin, and that is how much money he stole.

You will probably need a few details to help channel your negative energy, so here goes. He is a stocky, Egyptian man, forty-five to fifty years old, who can make an outfit of belly-inflated, dirty T-shirt and gray slacks look like horns and a red cape. He has a large face, broad smile and expressive eyes well versed in ‘patronizing,’ ‘sarcastic,’ ‘reassuring,’ ‘conveniently confused,’ and ‘oh-so-sincere.’ His general appearance comes off as dusty gray-brown, but perhaps that is just the lighting of the old-fashioned furnished living room in my mind where he sits eternally smoking out of one mouth, and eating all my Toblerone with another, while the third spins lies and cotton candy promise that distort and dissolve in your determined grip. No doubt he would be a pedophile if his brand new yacht and twenty-year-younger, pink-veiled wife did not satisfy him.

He is our old landlord, and he has admitted to stealing our money, and suggested we try filing a police report against him. However, I do not want to rely solely on such a faith-based form of enforcement. I need something more certain than the Egyptian police. This is why I am enlisting your help in some negative energy projection.

Picture Tarek’s BMW’s front axel cracking in half while he is driving between Cairo and his villa on the North Coast. Focus in on that axel. It is greasy and has collected much dust and sand. It does not so much snap as tear, and in slow motion a deep black gorge grows, separating the lighter, sandy exterior. You can see the layers and patterns in the metal and then it goes blurry with vibration as it breaks clean through. As the front wheals bend outward the car crashes down onto its belly and goes into a long uncontrolled slide which rips hoses, breaks tubes, kinks shafts, and shears bolts. The car finally comes to a stop, but another minute goes by before he stops screaming. It is a hot Friday afternoon and there are few other cars on the road. He slides open his LG and gets half way through dialing a number when the lithium-ion battery dies.

Now repeat that thought.

Merry Christmas

The whether has finally cooled down, and it is brilliant, crisp. I have not woken up sweating in almost a week. As I sit in my room my shirt is off out of habit, and yet I find I am shivering slightly and nestling my chin into my left shoulder for the feeling of warmth and raspy new shavenness. There is a slight breeze penetrating the windows and a phantom woody smell of burning that Sam claims is merely the return of my tumor hangs in the air.

My sleep has been odd and off the last couple nights, and my thinking is crackly and disconnected, when it is there at all. I have two exams next week and a couple papers looming, and yet, or perhaps as a result of this, I can taste a metallic, chilly, saliva inspiring feeling of exuberance and optimistic inevitability, like the feeling I get under my tongue before tasting my fathers fresh salsa. It pervades the periphery of the profound emptiness which blossomed out of returning from school after a long three day week and half sleeping from 8:00 PM to 11:45 PM and then waking to find the house empty of everything including my sense of time and space.

It is the combination of these elements—the cold, the burning, the crackly, the anxiety, the optimism, the emptiness—that has given me the profound feeling that it must be Christmas Eve.

I miss and love you all.  Eat, Drink, Breathe and Pray, and I will see many of you a couple months after tomorrow.

Le Rêve, Le Cauchemar

Half-built Greek temples adorn the landscape, their capital-less pillars naked exposing the infrastructure beneath. Gates like ivy hang useless awaiting a wall to give them purpose. Everything is dust and billboard and just planted palm. “AUC 3km” reads the sign.

“Citi!” “Schneider Electric!” “The Smart Arabia Building!” The proud signs and plastic backlit letters call out from piles of organized bricks propped up precariously by scaffolding inspired by an Indiana Johns film.

We drive past a theater screen sized billboard broadcasting “Le Rêve” housing development. Behind it is desert.

To the left an awkward adolescent building stands lonely and self-conscious of its size. It is blue and white and brown and looks like someone dropped an airport on the coliseum. One imagines it must be filled with roller coasters and water slides and signs telling visitors what height they must be to ride. “FUE” it says—Future University Egypt—and we all wonder Will it one day be a university? Or is it a university now that will drag Egypt kicking and screaming into the year of the robot? And then we wonder why is it written in English?

We pull off into the sand 100 meters from the University’s south-west entrance, just off the turf of the Parking Mafias who have grown up out of the desert or emigrated from down town and who will break your mirrors or scratch your car if you do not pay them their dues.

There is parking inside the campus gates but at 3,000LE a space braving the protection racket seems a better deal. The school says you are paying for a service. Besides protection there is comfort, there is shade. When students ask “When will there be shade?” the school replies, “When the trees grow.” It is a good response and puts the ball in the other team’s quart, saying, “You can’t expect everything at once. You must be patient young student with BMW.” The problem is, even the love child of Lao Tzu and the Buddha would get antsy looking for growth on a dead tree.

They stand like a forest of toothpicks stuck in the sand. The landscaping project is run by the Desert Development Center whose head came back to check on the campus grounds at the end of the summer to discover that the gardeners had spent all summer water dead trees. When he said, “You are water dead trees.” they replied, “You told us to water them.” To be fair most of the trees aren’t dead, and no doubt, some day in the future, they will save many AUC an student the hassle of digging his or her D&G sunglasses out of the sand after they were expelled from the student’s head after raw skin made contact with boiling black leather. Yes, the trees are a much better situation then the ‘lawns.’ Sand drifts and blows around many areas of the campus optimistically represented as green on all the maps. Actually, to date I have only found one area that actually has grass. It is a little triangle to your left as you first enter the campus. It must take the work of half the grounds keeping staff and even some of the professors working overtime to keep it green, and it does nothing except preoccupy the mind of the passerby with trying to figure out the correct way to phrase a sentence that paints that little bit of grass as a metaphor for the whole new campus situation. The correct phrasing can not be found because the metaphor isn’t there; the rest of the campus is not receiving the compulsive attention of most of the staff and it is not green. What the passerby is really looking for is a general feeling of futility.

Inside the campus, bathrooms do not have water, teachers do not have offices, classrooms do not have internet, hallways do not have signs, wires dangle from holes in the walls and ceiling, and this is just in the good buildings. Everyday things get a little better, but it is a slow process.

Last week at one of the temporary dorms located in a Heliopolis Military hotel, a guard forced himself into the room of a young woman and began “to touch and kiss her while she tried to push him away.” Another girl was molested on the street in front of security guards who did nothing but look on and laugh. The girls are demanding accountability from the University. The girls are demanding recompense. The girls are demanding change.

When all these issues were brought to an AUC forum, President Arnold’s rash response was “If you don’t like it you can go home.”

Mansheit Nasser

A small girl with a broken arm in a sling made from strips of white cloth picks her way between the rocks collecting crushed, empty water bottles. I think, isn’t that interesting, after all this she has the time and concern to clean up trash. Then I realize, maybe she actually needs the bottles to put water in, and I feel guilty and stupid for both thoughts.

This little girl with her makeshift sling is the second sign that something of significance has transpired here. The guards standing around awkwardly with riot garb and plastic shields to ward off the glare and contempt of those that have gathered and telling me that the area ahead is mamnuaa “forbidden” is common to any normal day’s exploration. No, this is not the sign. Were it not clear of rubbish and debris and not just slightly too straight and crisp, like a new haircut, the mountain of rock surrounded by houses could have fit naturally into any informal, Cairene community… so neither is the rock itself a clue. The first hint of catastrophe is the atmosphere.

The scent of solemnity still hangs in the air, and afterimages of what has been seen or heard or felt burns in each set of eyes, blinding, overlaying all present perception and leaving their owners in a zombie-like daze. Walking from the dirt of the last intact alley onto the crunch of the first shards of rubble had been like entering a vacuum. Suddenly all the lumbering, honking, bustling, braying sounds of the city vanished, replaced by a sobering silence of straight faces and stiff backs. The cliff had fallen crushing the world beneath it into a thin sheet of city, sound and self which only the gods could ever unpeel and re-inflate.

* * *

An hour earlier they had tried to keep us from this place, the police and the plain cloths men, back at the road block to Mansheit Nasser. They had doubted that I was really a student. They had doubted that Dina was really an Egyptian.—“Ismik eh!?” “Dina,” She replied. “Dina eh?” “Dina Yehia.” “Dina Yehia?” “Dina Yehia Mahmoud Salah el Din Mustafa Amin,” she rattled off like it was a tongue twister she was proud of having mastered. That had shut them up briefly.—They had told us it was dangerous. They had told us we were not wanted, that the people would be hostile towards us, attack us, throw rocks and slander.

When arguing proved useless we circled Dina’s aubergine Fiat station wagon out of the congested barricade, navigated around a temporary metal fence, and parked out of sight of the policemen in front of a large work vehicle. The barricaded intersection swarmed with microbuses, pedestrians and officers. Vehicles piled up and released as the officers questioned and inspected the private cars entering the area. As we walked back to the intersection we saw two city buses loaded with people zoom through the road block. We walked up the street and hailed every city bus for ten minutes, but they were all continuing along the highway. Finally, we walked up the highway to a smaller road heading into the thicket of houses and picked our way through streets and alleys until we reached the side of the cliff. From there to the rock fall was easy. As we climbed up the rocks to a small plateau a number of guards tried to stop us and turn us back, but residents standing on the plateau chastised the guards and beckoned us to continue.

* * *

Dina talks intently, sometimes almost aggressively, with a man who introduced himself as Hisham. The man is skinny and dark with a patchy beard, close cropped hair and large, sunken eyes. He wears dusty shib-shib ‘flip-flops,’ gray sweatpants, and a dark T-shirt. At the front right of his belt line is a large bulge which makes it look like his hip has popped out of its socket and reminds me of a wearable insulin regulator but which I later witness to be packs of cigarettes tucked into his pants. I listen to the conversation picking up a phrase here and a sentiment there. I stroll around the small plateau watching the small throng gathered around the rock edge which drops off to the dozers and hardhats below. I return to Dina to be informed that Hisham has elected himself our guide, and will show us some of the houses.

As we walk past a boulder the size of a Winnebago Hisham points and murmurs “Taht… nas” ‘beneath… people,’ and pointing at another “Taht… nas” and at another. He tells us that crushed in the rock fall were many of his friends, his sister and his sweetheart.

He shows us in a few houses, and then takes us to the roof of a three story building with a good view of the broken rock mountain. The roof is home to a handful of goats and pen full of chickens. As we look around trying to digest the scene around us, we are joined by a swarm of five little kids. The smallest, Nadr, has a swollen eye and a gash across his left brow. The side of his face is slightly bruised and there is some orange coloring around the injuries that I think might be disinfectant. He smiles and laughs, giggling when the girls pick him up or hold him still, but grows uncomfortable and squirms desperately if they hold him too long.

I am surprised when Hisham asks if I will take pictures. I had wanted to but thought it would be inappropriate. Hisham asks if I can get the pictures into the news papers. I say maybe the school newspaper and that I will put them on the internet. He tells me to put them everywhere. I set to work documenting my surroundings and Dina continues her conversation. At one point while I am taking pictures of a small girl named Malak who proved to be both a saint and a scoundrel and quickly came to command both Dina’s and my affections, a second man emerges onto the roof and scolds me for taking pictures of the children, but Hisham says no, there must be photos of everything.

As the sun begins to set we are invited to share iftar, the breaking of the day’s fast, with Hisham and his family. Dina and I each say that it is up to the needs of the other, but it is clear to both of us that we will stay.

While Dina prays I am given more of the tour. In each room Hisham will point at things—a hose bringing water into the kitchen, a wall that has been repeatedly patched and re-plastered, a ceiling made of cracking, buckling timber, a broken bed with dirty sheets, a balcony door hanging off its hinges—and at each spot he makes me take a picture and says something that in my head sounds like “See, and deny it.” I can not determine what he means by this or even if he is speaking English or Arabic, but I take the picture and thank him.

When the meal is ready we sit down on carpets that have been spread out in the street. A woman disappears into the house where Dina was praying and emerges with hard pillows which they insist we sit on. Some of the kids leave and when we ask about them we are told that they are Saydi, from a different part of Egypt, and that the two families do not eat together. It seems an odd segregation to uphold when they have both just shared the same tragedy. The sun sets and we are brought some water and a dark, sweet and tangy drink called tamarhindi. A tray of food is placed on a stand at the center of the carpet. The tray holds flat bread ‘eish baladi,’ two shallow bowls of macaroni with some red sauce, and two bowls with thumb-sized wedges of meet. Everyone is very happy, impressed and a little amused when I eat the meat. It is mushy and crumbly and at the same time as chewy as gum. Many pieces have a thick, stretchy, white lining on one side. I discover that the best strategy is to chew until the piece begins to break down and then take a bit of bread and swallow the bite whole. After her first piece Dina has been tactfully avoiding seconds. I am later told that the mystery meat is goat spleen.

The assembled group of about ten people all find Dina and I quite amusing. They ask if we are married or engaged or live together. We tell them no we are just friends from school. When Dina goes inside to help with dishes the men switch to grilling me on weather I smoke, or drink whisky, and they are very disappointed when I again say no.

We drink tea and then say our good byes. They ask if we will return. We say we hope to, and we mean it. Dina and I are escorted back to the highway by the kids, a small boy on my shoulders and Malak and another girl named Dunya dragging Dina by each hand. They talk about when we will come back and visit. They talk about how Dina will adopt them and they will all live together in an apartment. We leave the kids a block from the highway, and walk back to the Fiat in relative silence. I ask Dina if she is happy and after an uncertain silence she says that she is happy she made the trip. It has been six days since the rocks fell. Each day we told ourselves that we would come, and each day we pushed the thought behind a growing stack of reading assignments, schedule snafus, school woes and apartment dues. When we finally came we did not find a fallen cliff but rather a community resolutely standing upright, and a moment of glaring perspective.

We turn the car around and drive back up the highway, craning our necks as we pass the place where we snuck into Mansheit Nasser, paying it our condolences and committing it to memory. The days have passed, and the stack of readings and errands once more dominates our vision. We are like the little girl with the broken arm, or Nadr with the torn brow, struggling to absorb the situation despite its immediacy. We feel the pain, but it is fleeting and then forgotten. We smile and life goes on.

—To Malak, Nadr and the rest,

May the breath of God re-inflate your luck and your lives

And thank you to Dina Yehia for seeing the excursion to fruition

Yoga Times

SATURDAY, CAIRO – I have an interesting and unique perspective on the story of tons of rock which fell on an informal community on the outskirts of Cairo that hit the new recently.  This is not because I live near ground zero, but because I co-facilitate an underground yoga studio out of my apartment.

This morning I awoke early to take a shower before Jessica and her gaggle of yoga instructors would arrive for their first meeting and practice session. Just as I was rinsing out the last of the shampoo I heard voices coming up the stairs. I threw Gillian’s lime green towel around me and ran through the studio into my room where a pair of dirty jeans awaited me. Still drying my hair and trying to figure out if I had slept in my contacts, I saw the women in and made sure they were comfortable. While they chatted about class sizes, times and the underlying ethics of various payment schemes, I hid in the dinning room with my last hundred pages of American God’s and eavesdropped.

About forty-five minutes had gone by, and things had quieted down to a point where I was starting to wonder if the woman had reached their quota of downward dogs and cosmic salutations and slipped out, when the phone rang. Eden, whose husband taught my first Philosophy class at the American University and whose family I have grown close to, crackled across the line that Michael needed to reach Wendy, but her phone was off. It was an emergency! I was not enough awake to wonder whether this should make sense to me. Instead I bumbled as silently as possible into the studio and said in my loudest whisper, “Windy, Michael needs you. I guess it’s an emergency.” One of the woman laying, eyes closed on the floor raised her head and looked at me as if to say, “is there more?” I reached out my mobile to her, and then realized that Michael was not actually on the phone, and I did not have his number, and did not even know who Michael was.

Now if you have already read the New York Times piece titled “Rescue Slow as Part of Cliff Flattens Cairo Distract” than you have an advantage on Cole Of This Morning. Although I had met Michael Slackman previously at a dinner party at Eden’s house, and although it had been illustrated, nay frescoed to me that he was the ranking Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, and although there has even been talk of an internship or the like, it did not strike me that it was this Michael who needed to get to an emergency and that it was his wife who was in my studio living room, laying on a yoga mat, eyes closed listening to the lilting melodies of distilled good karma. Wendy gathered her things and rushed out the door. That was all I knew.

After the session ended Jessica informed me as she was leaving that gigantic rocks had crushed part of the city killing over a hundred people and wounding many others. This is what had interrupted the yoga session. She joked that it would be nice having our own back door into the New York Times. Only then did I fully absorb the connection between the dark-haired woman in the studio, the calm almost timid middle aged man at a dinner a half year before and the Middle East correspondent for the New York Times.

This should have made the catastrophe feel more real and immediate, but without any explanation or details it was all too apocalyptic and absurd sounding to hit me at any emotional level. However, when I sat down an hour ago to peruse the article online and reached the words of a 36 year-old elevator technician named Muhammed Abdel Wahid—”There are the rich, they eat and drink; there are the poor, and they die.”—I saw the faces of all the elevator maintenance men who, living at the top of the building at my old apartment, I had become very familiar with and often, grudgingly, made tea for while they fiddled and tinkered outside our door, and I pictured the informal communities that I have often explored, and the packs of dusty puppies waddling around the dirt roads, and the little girls with big, round, curious eyes and rich brown curls, and smudged faces and pursed lips peaking out from the door of a scrap built shack or the gate of a renovated burial house sucking their thumb or clutching a scavenged toy, and I had to struggle to keep myself from crying.