Day 2 of Arabic class was another success! My class (there were only four of us today, as one student was sick) managed to have a (rather stilted) discussion with our teacher about poverty and globalization... all in Arabic! I think this was my most advanced dialogue in Arabic to date, which makes me even more excited to continue studying at Arab Academy. Although the discussion was far from perfect - we worriedly explained to our teacher that we didn't have the vocabulary to describe the nuances of our arguments, so we might make some obnoxious generalizations. She laughed us off and said that wasn't really the point of the exercise, and in retrospect it may just have been our desperate American desire to speak in politically correct terminology. The only not-so-wonderful part of the class was getting assigned a lot of homework, but since we don't have class again until Saturday it shouldn't be that bad.
The work continued full steam at St. Andrew's, where we went to meet with our community facilitators, all refugees themselves who have successfully integrated into Cairo society, and work with them on our lesson plans. Though there was some confusion at the beginning of the session between our team and our facilitator, an Eritrean named Jamal, we had made a lot of progress by the end of the class. Jamal is very soft spoken, but very knowledgeable about the population with which we will be working. He told us that most of the Eritreans and Ethiopians will probably have a high school level of English and little Arabic, but want to improve their conversational skills and most importantly their confidence with English. The only concern I have at this point is that the few Iraqis in the class will be at a dramatically different level, making our lesson planning very complicated.
So while both school and work started moving in the right direction, our excursion to a coffee shop called Cilantro, located in Zamalak, took a definite wrong direction. Though we got kind of lost and ended up having to take cabs (good thing I've been practicing taxi-cab-dialogue!), the walk across the Nile and then the bridge over Zamalak is gorgeous, and very cool and breezy at night. We ended up staying at Cilantro until about midnight, chatting and laughing over our super fancy and mildly expensive coffee drinks. (In reality, I think they cost about as much as they would have at home, if not less, but it just feels odd putting down 35 Egyptian pounds for a fancy cup of hot chocolate - about $7.) Regardless, it was the perfect way to unwind after a long day of work. I guess you could say we all ended up back on track and ready to work again tomorrow.
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