Teaching English

“I want to learn English,” he said to me. “Can you help me?” This was during a rare moment of peace at the Recycling School for Boys in the heart of Manshiyet Nasr. I could feel intimidation and panic creeping up behind my eyes as I contemplated this task that felt herculean in scope. 

“Umm, sure... I’ll try,” I replied. 

I wasn’t even sure where to start. How do you teach someone an entire language, especially when they aren’t the incommunicative toddler walking around that shares your DNA? Yet I knew I really wanted to help him, this teenage boy who would never get the chance to go to government school and may never have another chance to choose a future besides his family’s recycling business. If he could learn to speak English on a conversational level, it could open doors that would otherwise remain locked and unexplored. But where to begin? 

I know my language well. I’m a writer and an editor, and I understand my native tongue and its idiosyncrasies better than most. I picked up German after 8 months of self study and another 8 months in country; I began teaching myself Egyptian Arabic this summer after feeling compelled to return. Yet throughout all of this, I had never considered teaching until the day I realized that I could use some of this innate ability to help improve someone’s circumstances. I’ve never cared much about advancing a career per se or climbing a corporate ladder or rising through the ranks of government service. I just wanted to find something that made my heart sing and do that. The search has proved long and my goal elusive until I showed up at a dusty school in the middle of a garbage collectors’ community, and after a few impromptu English lessons, watched with pride as my student successfully navigated his first real world English conversation. Every time comprehension dawned in subsequent lessons, I knew that not only had I found a previously unexplored gift within myself, but I had also managed to make someone else’s small, littered world a little bigger. 

For some of us, the world and all its possibilities lay wide open. For others, it is dull and exhausting, and dreams of better things are squelched by the realities of circumstance. But I’ve seen the lights in their eyes when they begin to realize that this might be possible, that they may learn how to communicate and understand a world outside their country’s borders. And then I, too, begin to understand just a little bit more...

Returning...

I'm returning pretty soon to the land that challenges me, frightens me, woos me and sneezes dust into my hair. I'm being asked a lot of questions about it though, from friends on both sides of the pond. 

"What are you going to do there?" 

"How long will you stay this time?"

"Did you find a job?"

"You should have a plan."

"How does your Mom feel about this?"

"We miss you too much, but why are you coming?" 

The answers to these things are murky at best. Friends on this side understand somewhat better than friends on the other. There isn't a whole lot of process of self-discovery and journey for purpose over there. All of this choice we have to decide - who it is we're becoming and how it is that we're becoming and whether or not God is in charge of that process or we've taken it upon ourselves - is missing from their vocabulary.  

What I know for sure is that Egypt is part of my future - the immediate part of it anyway. It's in my gut, has been since last April when I was standing 60 to 70 concrete stairs up in an auditorium carved into the side of a mountain. But the path isn't always clear. There's a great quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. that I feel I need to adopt as my mantra: "Faith is taking the first step, even when you don't see the whole staircase." The last decade or so of my life has looked like this. And God never shows me the whole staircase. 

So I'll go and I'll serve and I'll wait and I'll become. I'll join alongside other brilliant dreams as I wait for my own. I'll gain fluency and understanding and experience in navigating the undercurrents of being human in different circumstances. Perhaps I'll be a part of someone else's dream coming true. It's a step. And even in the not knowing, it's a step upwards. 

Comparisons

I have been back in the states for over two weeks now, and I'd like to make note of a few comparisons.

1) Cleanliness. My mother scoffed at this statement as we drove by two pieces of litter on the side of the interstate, but Cairo makes the US look like a freshly scrubbed hospital room. If this were Charlie Brown, they would play Pig Pen to our Lucy. 

2) A serious decrease in the amount of autotune on the radio. It happens here, mostly in R&B and hip-hop abundance, but omg, in the middle east it seems that somebody has duck-taped the 'record' and the 'auto tune' buttons together. DJ Mahmoud, have you been messing with the sound equipment again?

3) Comprehension. I don't have to run everything my friends say through an internal translation service. Of course, part of the fun with my Cairene friends is trying to slow down space and time so that I can put the sounds I'm hearing into familiar patterns. Usually there was somewhat of an awkward silence after I was asked a question before I was able to offer forth an answer that made sense. I think they got used to me staring intently off to the side. 

4) The presence of an amalgam of cereals other than unsweetened Corn Flakes. Oh amazeballs, I forgot how colorful and downright fun a walk past the rows of cereal could be. The fact that this food group has it's own entire aisle makes this the place where dreams come true. 

5) Yeast. Maybe it had much to do with ancient and/or Biblical tradition, but I sorely missed bread that fluffed and bounced back when I grazed it with a butter knife. I learned that bread shaped like a frisbee goes with everything... except peanut butter and jelly. And cream cheese. And cold cuts. 

6) Cars in neat, single-file lines. There have been several times since being home that I've been caught in what we hilariously call a 'traffic jam' when I thought, "Dude, there's room for at least 55 more cars in this space."

7) A lack of large groups of people in the streets. People are protesting here, but on a much smaller scale as in only on the radio, or in their living rooms, or in response to yet another news broadcast attesting to the inefficiency of Congress. Maybe we should scream a little louder because people on the Hill seem to be walking around with cotton balls stuffed in their ears.

8) Real coffee. And I mean the stuff that comes from dark crunchy beans that are ground into a fine powder and shot through with hot water. It's dark, it's smooth, it tastes like hot caffeinated goodness on the tongue. Not Turkish coffee (sludge in a cup with cardamum) or Nescafé (gross). How they call the latter anything that even sounds like coffee is one of the mysteries of the universe. 

9) And last but not least, transparent, breathable oxygen. Air, by definition, should be something you can't see, but Cairo's complete lack of emissions regulations ensures that this invisible element is constantly tainted with a grayish - brown haze in the off chance that one would begin to doubt its existence. 

Despite all of this, Egypt has left its dusty fingerprints all over me and my boots that were made for walking (through refuse and animal guts), and I can hardly wait to return and discover more of its idiosyncrasies. So glad you guys are with me for the ride.