Eaten alive (Cairo, 05.15.09)

...by work. That's the best way I can describe this week. I looked at my internship hour log last night, and it claims that this was a 52-hr week. I beg to differ. It sure felt a hell of a lot longer than that.

The interesting thing about working here and at AYB-SD is that the work is fun, interesting, important, and engrossing, and Egyptians are incredibly warm, friendly people. What is the upshot of this? Well, I start my day at the office around 9am, with either my immediate boss/supervisor/partner R.Abd-N. or my 'qamuusa'(dictionary) Alya' rolling in shortly thereafter. This means that relative peace and quiet reigns, and we get to plug away pretty efficiently all morning. Time usually flies, and it's often around 1pm or 2pm before I notice the clock. The rest of the staff has rolled in around noon, at which point 'breakfast' is ordered.

Breakfast is a jovial affair, with 6-8 people sharing two or three dishes of a puréed black bean-and-tahine mixture called fuul, a plate of sliced tomatoes, a large block of salty cheese mixed with diced jalapeño, and a sesame-based dip, all of which are scooped up using hunks of hubz baladi, which is essentially a very dry, pita-resembling bread. No silverware, no problem!

After breakfast, everyone goes to work, but Egyptian culture is such that people are constantly wandering in and out of each others' offices. Work at this point is generally significantly less efficient than earlier in the morning, but also very enjoyable. This may be why work is still going strong at "lunchtime," which is between 6-7pm. Dishes eaten at lunch vary considerably. Two days ago we had kushari, which is a very famous Egyptian dish consisting of lentils, chickpeas, pasta, onions, and tomato sauce, all covered with a spicy vinegar dressing very reminiscent of Eastern North Carolina barbecue sauce. Last night it was a sandwich of spiced ground beef stuffed into a pita soaked in some kind of indescribable sauce. Again, one or two dishes are ordered for everyone to share, and it appears that people take turns paying for dinner.

(It would have been rude for me to not accept my friends' offers of food all week, so starting on day 2 - Monday - I began joining them wholeheartedly instead of just nibbling at something they offered me. This is fine, but a meal for the entire office can cost 40-50 L.E., or 8-10 dollars. This doesn't sound like much, but my coworker makes something on the order of 200 bucks a month, so I feel guilty letting everyone pay for me all the time. I put my foot down with R.Abd-N yesterday - in private, because she and I work well enough together that we can be completely open about cultural expectations and the like - and said that I insisted I be allowed to "handle" dinner for everyone. So, alhamdulillah, I was able to feel like I was contributing rather than just taking. I think I'll plan to put my foot down once a week or so, just so I don't feel like a parasite...)

At any rate, work after lunch generally turns into meetings (at which I am usually too tired/fried to have many useful insights) or cultural explication sessions. Two nights ago I sat with a couple of guys and discussed the importance of individuality to Americans in comparison to the importance of communal life for Egyptians. We also had an interesting conversation about homosexuality in Muslim countries, which I think may have been a tangent from comments about the hole in my ear and the inappropriateness of men wearing gold (rings, necklaces, watches, etc.) in Muslim cultures. According to my friends, the proportion of the population that practices homosexual behavior in Egypt is on the order of 0.1% of the population, and even that is in private. When I expressed my utter disbelief, they hemmed and hawed and said that maybe it was 1%. But THEN they said that pre-op transgendered individuals are probably about 5% of the population. SO...what I THINK may have been going on is that they were reluctant to admit that men may wish to have sex with men (and women with women) WITHOUT those individuals actually being pre-op transgendered individuals. (Why the latter should be more culturally-acceptable than the former is a mystery to me.)

Anyway, meetings/cultural explication time generally lasts until 8 or 8:30, at which point I have to begin my hourlong trek home. There is a metro stop about five blocks from the office, so that's not bad. But the metro itself takes another 20-25 minutes to reach my downtown stop, at which point I am faced with a 2-mile walk home. Despite the fact that the walk home is beautiful - Cairo at night is gorgeous, and there's a powerful breeze of the Nile most of the day, so the temperature is often in the low 70s or high 60s by the time I'm heading home - I was often too tired to deal with it, and just decided to pay the dollar it costs to get a taxi ride back to my hotel.

The taxi rides have been informative, as I've been exposed to tons of different regional accents among the cabbies, but they can also serve to ruin my day. It's easy to come awfully close to tears (especially at the end of a day that began about 14 hours earlier, with 10 of those hours having consisted of intense focused effort) when you realize how hard you have worked over the last two-plus years and how little you can actually understand or express.

The hotel requires you to leave the key at the desk when you head out for the day, so that means I've got to interact with a couple more people before bed. At this point, even though it's 9:30 or 10pm and I'm exhausted, stupid extroverted Tim goes into People Mode, and I usually spend another hour or two chatting with the hotel staff in mixtures of English and Arabic. Bed has not been happening before midnight, and the next day begins at 6:30 with a phone call from my beloved.

I need to leave the computer aside for a bit and work on reviewing some Arabic, so I'll leave installment number 1 of 'Cultural Potpourri' for later this evening.