Always Smile At a Man With a Gun

Today was slightly more relaxing than the past few have been, but I still had an Arabic lesson in the morning and attended a lecture at night. During the discussion part of our class, we got onto the topics of political correctness and swine flu. It was nearly impossible to describe political correctness in Arabic - it is so foreign to all other cultures and my Arabic vocabulary did not include words like "offend," so I'm not sure our teacher understood. Even Google Translate couldn't save us on this one, although our teacher tried looking up the term. Then we somehow got on the topic of swine flu. For those of you who don't know, following the swine flu epidemic of last winter, the Egyptian government chose to slaughter all of the pigs in Cairo in order to prevent spread of the disease. However, it is not possible to contract swine flu from pigs; the human disease is merely a mutation of a disease that used to affect pigs. Our teacher, who is neither uneducated nor unintelligent, did not actually believe us when we told her that you couldn't get swine flu from eating pork. Then we started (or attempted) a long biological explanation, which was less than successful.

Later in the afternoon, we drove an hour out of the city to the American University of Cairo for a lecture by Prof. Abdullah Schleifer, formerly a conflict reporter for various print and television media. He was self-admittedly a little crazy, but his lecture about the challenges of reporting on catastrophes was very interesting. He gave many anecdotes about shady meetings in Beirut, barely escaping death, and his many other life experiences. Even more intriguing were his allusions to an earlier stage of his life, when he may have been (if I read between the lines correctly) in the Cuban military fighting for the Communists. He told us that he only had one rule which had kept him alive all these years: "always smile at a man with a gun." Prof. Shleifer was by far one of the craziest individuals I've ever met, and his lecture certainly inspired me to pursue more adventures in my life.