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.