Rethinking The Plan

Courtesy of Rong Cao

The Unexpected

It’s been a while since I wrote an update on our activities here in Cairo. We’ve visited the Giza pyramids (camels galore! We toured for nearly 3 hours on camels that were well treated by very friendly men) and finished our needs assessment. We’ve been working for three weeks now, and we just received a document that would have drastically reduced the amount of work we have done thus far. We were told that working in the real world always reduces your productivity because other people’s actions affect your work, but I don’t think I really could have anticipated this kind of frustration. The document we received was basically all of the information we’ve gathered thus far. Having it from the beginning would have turned three weeks into a week of fact checking, but it’s not the end of the world. We have decided to completely redesign our purpose and deliverables. We’ve learned that a lot of what we had wanted to help them with is not really in our control. As the mantra we’ve become familiar with goes: it's just context.

So what now?

We had been planning a lot of big picture stuff and pure data collection for the summer. We were going to give them a program evaluation that was supposed to help them plan for the future, but the document I was referring to is a program evaluation that was done by an outside organization for them. They talked about how it was useful to see where they were at, but it really didn’t help them with planning. Well, if we want to be useful, then we need to come up with something different that they can actually use. We spent a day writing up the last of our interviews, mapping the information and resources we have currently, and discussing next steps for the team. We came up with a list of short and long term planning documents that would prove very useful to the CEDO if they were provided to them. Now we just have to do a little bit of data gathering and start sitting down with different team members to start designing the things they said they want/need. We are planning to set up a staff meeting to debrief them and ask for feedback on our new plan, but I suspect that will prove more difficult than useful. We’re trying to make this participatory, but in the end everyone is just too busy for it to be very participatory. They seem to prefer having us make things that they can then review rather than being part of the design process, which is understandable in the high stakes world of development and poor economic conditions.

In other news…

Statue of Alexander the Great, Alexandria, Egypt. Personal photo.

We went to Alexandria for a day trip this weekend. It was a low-key, cool, and friendly city. I had quite a few people ask to take a picture with me, which doesn't normally happen while I'm in Egypt (much more common while I was in India), and when we were leaving I had a woman at the train station deliberately block my path as I was navigating the crowd just to inform me, “Inti gameela! (You are beautiful!)”. This was quite surprising considering I was just wearing jeans and a baggy t-shirt with my hair pulled up into a bun, but hey, it made me feel good.

Some children whose parents asked me to take a picture with them (and you thought your parents were embarrassing!). This was after they snapped a shot.

Heating Up

99° isn’t so bad

The weather has been surprisingly agreeable, with 99° being the highest until today. It was still getting into the low 70s, even the high 60s, at night, which made it bearable to sleep without the a/c. We had been joking that this wouldn’t last, but we didn’t realize how soon it would be before the real heat of Cairo summers kicked in.  Today is supposed to be between 108° and 114°. It barely got below 80° last night, so we all piled into the one bedroom with the good a/c. I slept pretty solidly until about 7 a.m. when I would normally wake up, not to mention Edwin had started snoring. The only reason I didn’t want to wake up was because we hadn’t gotten to sleep until after 1 a.m. last night.

Visitors

We had a late night because Andy, who recently graduated from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, came over to visit. He didn’t arrive until after 9 p.m. because he had been tutoring a student in English. He then stayed very late because he’s a chatter and we happened to have another guest who really interests him. Razan, Josh’s friend from Syria who has been in Cairo for several months, helped us find the apartment, so we are hosting her fiancé while he is in Cairo. He works in SaudiArabia, and he is on his way back to the UK for some R&R before starting his new position with some British agency that provides English training to young Saudis. Andy was very interested in what Alex had to say, so he stayed later than he intended.

Coffee and Sheesha

Razan came all the way from the 6^th of October to visit with us today, so we went out to the Syrian restaurant Josh had found the day before. We had a pretty delicious lunch, and then we caught a taxi to Khan el-Khalili. The Khan el-Khalili Bazaar is part of Islamic Cairo, and we were going to Fishawy, the oldest coffee shop in Cairo, which is surprisingly small and unassuming. Josh, Edwin, and Rong walked around a bit when we got there because they’d never been. I sat with Razan and Alex and made small talk. It was enjoyable, but Alex prefers listening to his own ideas rather than having a genuine engagement or discussion about topics. Razan and Alex had sheesha and drinks while we talked, and when Josh got back he partook of Razan’s lemon sheesha. It took Rong and Edwin a lot more time to get back to Fishawy. They apparently walked along the road and the outside of the bazaar, which is probably a good thing since wandering into the interior can get you lost quickly.

Winding down

We came back later in the evening around 6 p.m. We basically sat around the rest of the evening because it was still quite hot. We decided to pile into the a/c room again for the night. Josh and I have the toughest time staying asleep in the morning, but we usually get solid enough ours until it gets a little light outside. 

What can we actually do?

The best laid plans

Our minds at ease after finding a place to live, we were able to earnestly apply ourselves to our summer work. We met with the staff of Nahdet el Mahrousa’s Innovative Social Incubator and the National Program Management Unit (NPMU) in charge of the Career and Entrepreneurship Development Office (CEDO) program. Each team gave us an overview of their work and gave us an opportunity to ask questions. In the end, we will be working with the NPMU, so we reserved most of our questions for them. As MDP students from the previous year had warned us, the information we gathered left us with the feeling that all of our plans and work up to now were fairly useless to them. We came away wondering how we could actually help them. Their problems felt almost insurmountable.

We spent the next two days discussing their problems and ways to tackle them. We ended up decided that a program evaluation was probably the only thing we could really do that had the potential for being any use to them. Then Sunday night (5/26/2013) our professor, Ragui Assaad, came to our apartment after arriving in Cairo and spent the evening discussing plans and ideas with us. He thinks that the preliminary work for an impact evaluation is also possible. Basically, we would design a tracking system that they could implement to begin collecting data. With these two ideas in mind, I felt much more at ease.

Burning the Midnight Oil

We ended up working until past 11 p.m. Sunday and Monday. We had finally settled on a proposal, so we spent some time writing it up to present to the NM staff. Then we compiled a list of questions we have and information we still need. Next, we started working on interview protocols. It’s amazing the amount of time that is spent just writing and talking about things. Both days we’d be working diligently, with very few tangents, and it would suddenly be time for lunch or after 6 in the evening and time to go home. Of course, even after we got home we realized we still had things to talk about, so we continued working late into the evening, almost 11:30 p.m. both nights. We’ve talked and decided to do better about stopping by 8 p.m. I’m sure it was mostly a symptom of feeling rushed now that our first week is over and we’ve barely started our project, so we shouldn’t have too much of a problem managing our time better in the future. Perhaps we’ll find ourselves more distracted by the workers in the office though. They come in much later than us, and we haven’t had much of an opportunity to chat recently, which should change in the next couple days.

A Night Off

Today was the first day since we started planning that we were all done by 8 p.m. Josh wanted to go out for some sheesha, and Rong just wanted to be out and talking to someone. I just wanted to be alone, so all the guys, including Edwin, ended up going out to a hookah bar nearby. It was nice to be alone listening to the bustle of the city while I did laundry, checked my email (I got a job offer!), and got ready for bed. Hopefully, this is a sign of more to come. We already have plans for lunch or dinner with Eirik, the Norwegian intern with an Australian accent, for tomorrow, so who knows what awesome adventures are ahead us!

Summer in Cairo

Image courtesy of: Egypt Travels

Sure there are pyramids, but why Egypt?

As a Masters of Development Practice candidate at the University of Minnesota, my degree requires that I complete a field practicum. For the summer 2013, I will be working with a team of four at Nahdet el Mahrousa, an Egyptian NGO. We have a vague idea that we will be working on youth labor market needs in Cairo, but we’re still not sure exactly what we will be doing for them. We plan to figure that out in the first few days of our stay. We know that we have to present the work we completed this semester, but what we are going to do after that is still undecided.

Lost in transit

Each member of our team left the States on Sunday evening on a different flight. My teammates left from Minneapolis, and I left at 10:30 p.m. from Atlanta’s new international terminal, which is very spiffy and not crowded at all. Even though we all left at different times, three of us had a layover in Amsterdam's Schiphol airport and took the KLM red-eye to Cairo together and landed at 2 a.m. Tuesday morning. If you are ever traveling internationally, I highly recommend Delta/KLM. For an average-size female, even the economy seats have adequate room. Plus, the food is the best airplane food I’ve had. I also discovered that the little bottles of wine are free when Josh pulled one out our first night in our new apartment. I had always thought people were buying them (New trick for future travels!).

We stayed our first 3 nights at the Tiba Midtown Hostel in Downtown Cairo (Wast el Balad to locals). A major selling point for this hostel was that it offered free airport pick-up, which was so helpful at 2 in the morning, and breakfast. Our first day was spent attempting to find an apartment and getting familiar with the area. We found the NM office fairly easily, but none of our apartment leads panned out. Our second day, Josh’s friend Razan, from Syria, met us at the Egyptian Museum and helped us search for an apartment.

Now where do we go?

Razan was so wonderful. She walked all around with us and talked with random strangers to find someone who knew a guy in the apartment finding business. We ended up in a small perfume shop rather quickly. We waited and had tea while the man called his connections. After an hour we started to think that his connections were probably going to prove unprofitable, so we left. However, as we walked down the street, the man and a friend of his chased us down. They explained that they would take us to the man with the key to the apartment. We followed them a few blocks to a random alley, which doesn’t sound like the best of ideas, but after only a few moments of waiting we were following the man and additional men another few blocks to a tall apartment building near Tahrir Square.

Several floors up in an old-school elevator, we came to an apartment that had become stuffy from the midday heat. It had everything we would need, but it still wasn’t really what we were looking for. There was no a/c, and there were only 2 full size beds. While one could look past the poorly kept facilities, it would be a cold day in hell before I was willing to live a hot summer in Egypt without even the option of turning on the a/c. We thanked the men and asked to see the other option they had. Once again we followed them down winding streets filled with cars, children, and food.

The One

The building was even taller than the last, and the elevator was not one I’d be sending pictures of to friends and family. Of course we stepped off on the floor with a flickering light and a suspect smell. However, it was as if the anticipation and accumulated concern was simply to make the apartment glow in comparison. The hardwood floors were surprising, the balcony kept the living room and two bedrooms cool, and the kitchen was one in which I could clearly make meals. It only took a few moments to bargain and agree that this was the apartment we needed. It was only a few blocks from our office and the Metro.