You Can't Make Mistakes

Day 2

[UPDATE 25 August 2010: I have added a gallery of photos. Enjoy.]

Today is food and agriculture day.

They grow olives, date palms and jojoba here, all of which are particularly well-suited to the climate and soil—which is hot as hell and dry as a bone. Crops can be raised with little water and they are relatively saline-tolerant, which means that they don’t have too much trouble with the very salty water that comes from the shallow wells. The wells tap into the sea-water table about a kilometer inland and provide most of the water needed for irrigation. We talked this morning about putting together a grey-water system that would collect water from sink-drains and store it to be used when needed. Dr. Arafa was pretty excited about the idea and wants to introduce it to the kids.

Since this is a farming community, Jeff and I decided that it is probably a good idea that everyone know how to discuss their surroundings and what they do here. Being other than farmers, we are unsure about how to go about this. I thought that perhaps even a cursory discussion of what different types of farming is like in different places. We’ll talk about different crops and where they grow, soil types, irrigation methods and needs. Oddly enough, though not a farmer, I have spent a good deal of time on and around them. I love irrigation systems; probably more than is reasonable, considering. Perhaps this will be an advantage in attempting to construct a lesson around this concept. Hopefully this will work and bring the global perspectives angle in, which Dr. Arafa likes to incorporate.

Speaking of food and agriculture: I am not as hungry here. In Cairo, we are being continuously blasted by air-conditioning. I think that this has made my body think that we are preparing for winter, given the amount of times a day that I feel peckish. I will have to rectify this upon our return. I prefer this way of being. We have been eating a little bit in the morning with some tea and then something substantial in the late afternoon. In the evening we usually take a snack. I like it. Preferably my body likes it as well and will drop a few of the resentful kilos it is carrying around these days.

My favorite part about being out here—aside from great students, beautiful surroundings, fresh air, forward-thinking community, etc.—is that I am tired at the end of the night. Also the quiet. The two are not unrelated. Even in the most pleasant places in Cairo, I have only tricked myself into believing that they are in any way quiet. If I sit and make my mind quiet in Cairo—anywhere—I immediately hear the sounds of distant traffic, bicycle bells, a whistle, someone shouting, honking horns, etc. These things are impossible to escape there.

I have just moved from Mohandiseen to Maadi, and though I have high hopes that my new flat will be very peaceful, I know better. Maadi is terrifically quieter than Mohandiseen or downtown. I hadn’t realized just how utterly mind-bendingly loud my old flat was until leaving it. The noise of traffic on my street went on all night. Even though the bedroom was twenty or more meters from the street, the sound was still deafening compared with the new place. The problem is that now I apparently have a new standard for quiet. This place is simply amazing. It is not silent, of course: the wind is all but constant once the air begins to cool at night, but that is a different kind of sound altogether, and not a disturbing one.

The accommodations on-site are not bad either. They have constructed a sort of dormitory, with ample room to bunk about sixteen. There are plans to expand it further to house even more. It will be an excellent place for guest instructors to come and stay. Presently, it is quite comfortable. It is still a bit rustic, though the accommodations are modern. It reminds to some extent though me of living in a barn one summer in France. All of the students slept in bunks on a sort of mezzanine in a converted barn. This sort of living is a couple of steps up from camping. Big steps. I hate camping. This, I like.

Also, I may have to play soccer tonight with some of the kids. This should be interesting, as I have not played soccer since I was their age, which is approximately half my life ago, which is terrifying. If it is not so hot that I will die of heat-stroke, we will go ahead with this plan. Otherwise, it may be postponed until tomorrow.

[UPDATE 25 August 2010: I have added a gallery of photos. Enjoy.]

Day 1

The first day of the program at New Basaisa got off to an uneven start. We were unsure what to expect but figured that we would play it mosltly by ear. If we did not have enough students the plan was to reschedule the program after Ramadan over the course of three weekends instead of all in a five-day course. Several students arrived in the morning, and a few more trickled in.

At one stage we piled into a pickup truck Sinai-style and drove to another NGO community center nearby where we thought we might conduct the assessment exam since there were participants coming from near there. Jeff and I wedged ourselves in the back seat with two of the participants and the rest hopped in the back and sat around the edge of the truck-bed. Most of the students we had with us lived here in New Basaisa.

After some discussion regard what everyone was expecting and what they were willing to do, it was decided that we would go ahead with the program this week as a pilot and then continue with one after Ramadan as a follow up. We now had twelve students as participants and the three guys who work at New Basaisa with Dr. Salah Arafa—Nasser, Mamdouh and Mubarak the Bedouin—would also take part to improve their English skills. Everyone introduced themselves. There was a wide range of ages, from late primary school age to first-years university. Most of the students identified themselves as being in secondary school.

We eventually decided that in fact we would be conducting the program at New Basaisa after all so we all piled back in the truck—now with more passengers—and rode the few kilometers back to the village. Once there, we administered a basic skills assessment test and did a brief interview in two languages to get an idea of where everyone was at. We learned that most of the participants were starting out at a relatively basic level, though they were all quite enthusiastic. Sometimes this enthusiasm came across as shyness, until asked a question in Arabic and then the answers and explanations became effusive.

Armed with our new knowledge, Dr. Arafa stood in front of the group and gave a tremendous introduction. It was a vocabulary lesson, primarily. The theme throughout, however, had nothing to do with vocabulary and everything to do with understanding the ways we are connected to the people and the world around us. He started with “I/my” and eventually worked his way through “neighbors” and “community” to “region” and “world.”

Jeff and I were up next and went through the introduction to the computing component of our program. It gave us a pretty good idea of what level all of the participants were at and how to move forward. By the end of the day, we were ready with a plan for the rest of the week. We decided that since this is a pretty hands-on bunch and since they live in a farming community that we will do some outdoor excursion type lessons where we go out and have the participants describe their surroundings and what we do out of doors. Tomorrow we will water and tend to a garden and talk about it the whole time. Should be good.

The thing that amazes me the most about these students is how attentive and eager they are. I have dealt with students their age, younger and older both here in Egypt and substitute teaching, as well as at the university—AUC and Western Michigan—and I have never come across students like these. I had almost given up on the idea that anyone ever came anywhere to actually attempt to learn something. With these students, I get none of the sense of entitlement that typically accompanies university students these days, nor the affectations of not caring which is customary for high-school students.

I find it very likely that this phenomenon has to do with what I wrote about last time: living in a community which is based on self-sufficiency and self-sustainability. A number of these kids grew up here. Half of them live here. There other half are here visiting family, but live in Zagazig, where the Old Basaisa is. Theyse are folks who want to have a good, solidly happy life, but who don’t expect anyone else to provide it for them.

I love it here.

[UPDATE 25 August 2010: I have added a gallery of photos. Enjoy.]

Jeff and I are spending this week in a village called New Basaisa, north of the town of Ras Sudr, on the coast of the Gulf of Suez. We are both teaching at a week-long English and Technology continuing education program for local folks of varying levels of education and skill.

New Basaisa is a sustainable development project that started nearly 20 years ago by Dr. Salah Arafa (who is also a professor of physics at the AUC). He set up an NGO called the Kenouz Sinai (Treasure of Sinai) Development Program which is now engaged in activities like the one in which we are participating now and the continued development of this community.

New Basaisa was constructed after a similar development and education program was begun in the original Basaisa, a Delta village near Zaqaziq. Salah decided that what was needed was a new beginning for a great deal of people. New Basaisa is that new beginning. The idea is simple: create an environment which will allow a group of people to collectively build a community that is based of principles of sustainability.

Salah called this “building an infrastructure” yesterday, but he is not talking about what we think of as infrastructure in a modern major city. Those infrastructures are not flexible and adaptable. In many cases they are completely immutable. What he was referring to was a set of methods by which a community would decide, as a community, to use in pursuit of having a life. In this case, independence and self-sufficiency is a major part of the operation.

It is thrilling to see this sort of thing happening in a place where the common answer to questions regarding education and economic opportunity is: “Move to Cairo,” a city which can already not sustain the rapid geographic expansion and population explosion that is occurring at present. All future development plans for the city are equally unsustainable as they appear to disregard this simple reality, preferring instead to regard Cairo as a magic city just waiting for psychotically expensive hotels and shopping malls to be erected adjacent to historical monuments that span the run of human history. That is, of course, as long as the monuments are not in the way…

It seems that everyone is ready to take the magic pill or drink the Kool-Aid these days and live in blissful ignorance, able to dial the phone and have anything delivered at any hour, never having to life a finger to accomplish anything. If the Puritans and Calvinists who settled the United States taught us anything, it was that building something with your hands is valuable and hard work is the measure of a person.

This place is like a breath of fresh air, not because of its fresh air—though that doesn’t hurt—but because it is a return to self-sufficiency on a sustainable and maintainable scale. That is the measure of any community, and very few are measuring up these days.

This is the first post that I am writing from my phone, a Nokia N900. Initially, when buying the phone, I had hoped to do more of this. The WordPress interface was akward to handle on this device, though, so I never did it. The interface has gotten better, so here we are.

I hope that this might encourage me to write a bit more, particularly while on the bus on the way to the university in the morning. This activity may also cause an early onset of arthritis of the thumbs or carpal tunnel syndrome, which will be horrible. You takes your chances, I guess.

I also hope to find a bit of spare time to build a new theme as well. This one has had a good run, but it’s time for something new. Maybe a cleaner theme, or a trash style. Lord knows that all I would need to do is look around me for inspiration for that. That’s not a bad idea actually. I’ll call it “Banks of the Nile.” It can have bits of garbage and Bebsi cans and sand and murky water. The possibilities are endless.

I should be moving the site to a new server at some point as well. This should be interesting and may fail terribly at first. Who can say? it will be better though: and I do like trying stuff that I have never done before. It is kind of my motto after all.

For all of those of you out there who are interested in owning your information again, please check out a new project being developed by four NYU students called diaspora*.

Diaspora will allow you to take back control of your social networking data by allowing you to run your own instance of its service on your personal computer/home server. For more information about what it will do, check their project page. You have to give these guys credit for using a Back to the Future reference in their prospectus.

As you might know, I am an ever bigger advocate for open source projects that actually serve to put control into users’ hands and to sate that DIY spirit that so many people have. This is a project that I am very enthused about. If you have ten bucks lying around and want to help out a project that has the potential to change the way we do social networking online, then give it to these guys. Click on their project below to get involved through Kickstarter.

Please check out the new satire in the May edition of Intuition:

Disrael: A new solution to an old problem brings hope

Daemons: Tech-wars against evil in the intertoobs ramp up

Also, if anyone out there would like chance to write satire for Intuition, please contact me for further details.

Enjoy.

I took a bunch of my friend Peter Waters‘ mates mosque-walking around Fatimid Cairo the other day. We walked from the north gate to the south gate of the old city—Bāb al-Futūḥ to Bāb Zuwayla and then into the Qasaba. We then continued on from there and wound up near Sayyida Zeinab Mosque, but only the first part of our walk is documented here.

These are some snaps that I took with my new camera. I’m trying to get the hang of geotagging and recording walking maps with the pictures in, so this is still a little disjointed. I marked all of the spots on the map that appear in the photos. You can zoom to see the route better if you like and click on the little blue markers for the names of individual places.

Bab to Bab

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I have two new articles in the April edition of Intuition:

Census Cookies – A breakthrough new method of data-gathering is being pioneered in the United States

Cosmic Rays – They’re coming from outer space to break your electrical goods

Enjoy.

The other day Jeff and I took a walk down al-Darb al-Aḥmar, one of the city’s most famous streets, and one that I had never walked before. I had gone to a talk about the street and the orientation and placement of its mosques and mausoleums given by Dr. Nasser Rabbat, Agha Khan professor of Islamic Architecture at MIT, and wanted to take a closer look at some of the the monuments themselves. This was also the last part of the medieval city that I had not previously walked along the path from the northern gate to the Citadel.

View Larger Map

So, Jeff and I went. He took care of the photography and I took care of the pointing and saying words that probably meant a hill of beans to him, but it was kind of him to humor me. Along the way we meant a guy named Gamal and started talking to him. He worked at the reconstruction of the Mosque of Amir Aqṣunqur (1347, a.k.a. – Blue Mosque) and I told him what we were doing. He knew many of the faculty members in my department at the university and was thrilled about that so he grabbed us by the arms and took us inside the reconstruction projects and showed us around.

Aqṣunqur is in a terrible state of disrepair, but still stunning. It is called the “Blue Mosque” because it was restored and rebuilt in 1652 by Amir Ibrāhīm Aghā Mastaḥifẓān and the qibla wall was redecorated with blue Ismet tiles. these tiles show up all over Cairo during the Ottoman period and can be seen adorning doorways and windows, though not to the extent that they are present in Aqṣunqur. We didn’t take any pictures of the interior since we weren’t really supposed to be there anyway and sometimes folks here get touchy about things being photographed if they are in any sort of state of disrepair.

Next he took us into the mosque and mausoleum of Amir Khāyrbak (1502-1520). The interior is completely restored. It is stunning. You can see it pictured below. We went from there to the House of al-Razzāz (1494-1778) and wandered around the palace where a number of Mamluk sultans and Ottoman rulers spent their days. There is a passage that runs from there to the citadel. Scary and unstable looking.

After this we continued back up the street and climbed into the minaret at the mosque of Amir Altunbūgha al-Maridānī (1340) so that we could have a view of al-Darb al-Ahmar from above. What we saw is a little disconcerting. This is a part of the city that was hit hard by a 1992 earthquake. Many of the buildings which collapsed then are still in terrible disrepair if not completely demolished. In 18 years, very little has been done to rectify this. You can see some of this in the pictures below.

We then continued back down the street toward the Citadel and exited in front of Bab al-‘Azab and caught a cab to Bab al-Lūq. The last photo is from the front of a restaurant in Bab al-Lūq. I have seen the restaurant a million times but have never noticed the hilarious advertisement for brains.

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This piece originally appeared at Intuition: http://www.intuition-online.co.uk/article.php?id=1018. I am reposting it here because the links did not make it into the final edit properly.

When I was asked to write satire for Intuition’s January edition, I thought back to my undergraduate years and reading Aristophanes, Terence and Menander—classical satirists, in case anyone needs a primer—and wondered what on earth they would write about in this day and age. I often find myself reading the news in the morning, thinking of the three of them, throwing their hands in the air and saying “Gods! It can’t get any more ridiculously surreal than this!”

My brother, a visual artist, brought up exactly this topic after reading my first piece on Intuition. The example he chose: former (quitter) Alaska governor Sarah Palin becoming a talking-head on Rupert Murdoch’s precious flower, FOX News. He noted that during her inaugural appearance—let us please pray that this is the only context we ever hear “inaugural” associated with her name—fellow talking-head Glenn Beck asked if he could read something to her that he wrote in his journal the night before which included the words “tomorrow I meet Sarah Palin. I am a little nervous. I know she is the right person to lead our country out of the mess we are in but I wonder if God has given her the strength.” He said this with a plainly frightened look on his face. This comes right after watching a video clip in which Pat Robertson told faithful followers that the recent devastating earthquake in Haiti was to be attributed to a pact with the devil struck 200 years ago.

How would Aristophanes write about this this now? Well, for a clue, I looked to the the clip of Tina Faye spoofing then governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin in an interview with Katie Couric during the 2008 U.S. elections. Faye’s performance was a perfect example of modern satire carried off in a classical style. It is so much more subtle, though, and doesn’t need for characters to be caricatures of their intended victims because said victims are already caricatures unto themselves. It would appear that imitation is no longer the sincerest form of flattery, it is just a form of satirical insult. Another great example: the episode of South Park titled “Trapped in the Closet” in during which the core beliefs of the Church of Scientology are explicated while a notice flashes at the bottom of the screen that “THIS IS WHAT SCIENTOLOGISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE.”

Not intending harp on Palin, but the only thing simpler than this form of satire are those gorgeous occasions where an individual can participate directly in their own satirizing, as she did in the lsat presidential election cycle during a prank call from a radio show. We only have to look to the “W” years of the American presidency or to the humorous treasure-trove of North Korean news propaganda. All of these people have either made themselves or been made into caricatures. They need only to be mocked.

So why bother?

Well, it turns out that a lot of people the world over don’t have a sense of humour. It would appear that they simply do not understand how to look at the world around them in such a way that they could find it funny. They see the world as a serious place filled with serious people to be taken seriously. They don’t want to hear any snickering in the back rows. They are also very, very boring (see the above reference to Glenn Beck’s interview with ex-governor Palin).

All of that said, I shall propose a methodology for writing satire so that you too, humble reader, can flex your creative muscles and slag off the idiots that surround you by lobbing insults above their pathetically stupid heads.

First, read a book. Strike that, read a lot of books. To write well you have to be able to read, and be well read. Sci-fi works best because it hits that weird dystopian spot that only it can, but Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, Oscar Wilde: these will also work. If you want your writing to be really smart, read some philosophy as well, and of course The Classics, so you can be a snob. Reading Ulysses—that’s James Joyce, by the way—will give you the biggest boost in terms of snob-rating. Or you can just do what everyone else does and buy a used copy and the Cliff’s notes (remember those from before the internet?) and just tell everyone that you have read it. That is way easier.

Second, develop a superior attitude. It helps a great deal to feel superior to all of those idiots you are writing about. Reading Mencken and Oscar Wilde, as mentioned above, will help with this. Also see above regarding Ulysses.

Third, have a pint. On second thought, have two or five pints, or maybe several whiskies; preferably while reading the news online or (GASP!) a newspaper (I realize that this is an online publication. Give a brother a break). This will help you to see just what maddening depths to which the world around you is sinking. N.B.: the number of pints you hit the bottom of is proportional to the depth to which the world has sunken.
Now you’re ready. Pick a topic and let fly. Anything can happen. You might be reading an article on how some idiot doctor wants to petition to have butter banned as a toxic substance, and write a story in which some animals have revolted against their farmer oppressors and is now poisoning the rest of their human oppressors by putting saturated fat into the butter and melamine into the milk. You’re on a roll! A few hours later you might wake up on the floor of your flat and shout “Eureka!” and begin writing a dystopian tale of the future in which washed up politicos no longer have fade away but can become internationally famous news pundits and yap all the garbage commentary they like about things they know nothing about! That is almost certain to never happen. What absurdity.

Aristophanes, Menander, and that other guy are dead, but that doesn’t mean that their art has to be. Their world was completely ABSURD too. Once a year, people gathered, got trashed and had a public orgy while the rest of the town looked on from box seats. Men only married to perform their social duties and then buggered off with their youthful compatriots. Some of those men went around town asking questions until everyone decided that it would be best for society if they drank poison. They had good material to work with, and so do we. So, let’s get to it.

As I wrote that last line, I heard a BBC announcer mention that butter should possibly be banned as a toxic substance, given that we have so many healthier substitutes.

I rest my case.