So today was my first day of class... hooray! I know, it was supposed to be yesterday, however a massive power outage made my classroom unusable, so I had to postpone. Actually the process of spreading the word about the cancellation taught me an interesting lesson about Egypt: the infrastructure and information spreading mechanism is essentially non-existent. The whole question of whether we had class and whether our students knew was up in the air for an extended period of time. At one point I was on the phone with our community facilitator, who hadn't heard about the power outage, while my friend was on the phone with the program director, who said that the community facilitator was calling all the students. I think that this lack of structure and over organization that exists in my life at home is actually very descriptive of Egypt as a whole - the way that there is never one definite process of how to solve a problem (for example, why don't we have our own WiFi, even though we've called the company everyday), and the way that people always run late, and the fact that there aren't really crosswalks... the people and the cars just kind of flow together. Which sounds horrifyingly dangerous to my American view point, and it might be, but somehow it all just fits in Egypt - I think that living here in the Cairo heat without that kind of lax attitude would be miserable. But back to my teaching experience...
I was more than a tad nervous to start teaching these kids; although they all seem very sweet, making lesson plans is far more overwhelming than I had imagined. The class started out a little depressing - 15 minutes into the period only 4 students had shown up. However within the next 15, we had a full classroom. We got the kids started on some basic introductions ("Hi, my name is" and "Nice to meet you.") Even though I think most kids already knew these phrases, what they really need is practice and a chance to build confidence in their English speaking ability. We drilled these phrases again and again, and by the end I think most of the kids were a little bored with the subject matter, even if the activities were enjoyable. However there is one student who speaks almost no English, and he is one of the few students not from Eritrea in our group. That makes the class dynamic a little awkward - the students generally understand what we say, and then our community facilitator can translate the more complicated instructions into Tigrinya (their native language), but then he must explain the instructions again in Arabic to the one Sudanese student. However I think it'll all work out, and having one day of teaching under my belt makes me more comfortable planning lessons for the future. At the end of the class, we asked the students for their suggestions - anything they wanted to talk about in particular, places we could go on class trips, songs or TV shows that want to watch or understand better. The responses we got in regard to song requests were the following (in the order they were told to us): Eminem, Eminem, Eminem, Lil Wayne, Miley Cyrus, Hannah Montana (who is the same person as Miley Cyrus, but whatever), and Bryan Adams. Personally, I'm all for teaching pop culture to these kids, but under no circumstances will Lil Wayne teach anyone English - the hard-ass grammarian in me will not allow it. Maybe, just maybe, I will find a heavily edited version that lacks egregious grammatical mistakes, and we can sing a few lines, but I think that might be pushing it. "Summer of '69" it is... gotta run for now, I have to be up early and head to Ana Al-Misri. Masa al-khair!
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