Sharpening Pencils

The boys were processing the shampoo bottles at the school today, which means the big green machine in the back was running, chewing up Pantene scented plastic and spitting it out in confetti sized pieces. The noise was loud and constant, making conversation, English or otherwise, rather difficult. So I decided to sharpen all the colored pencils in the room.

But as I was sharpening the pinks and yellows and blues, I realized that I was creating a rainbow array of yet another weapon the boys could use to stab each other with. I know at normal elementary schools, small incidents are bound to pop up. Here, it's almost every day. Everything's fine and dandy, the room is dark and the boys are watching yet another American or Hindi movie from MyEgy, and the next thing you know, chairs are scraping linoleum, voices are bouncing off the walls, and one of the 'peacekeepers' as I call them, is pulling one of the younger boys out of the fray- said culprit flailing his arms and half shouting angry words in Upper Egypt accented Arabic. Half the time, blood has been drawn, and more than half the time, the skirmish continues as three or four older students begin shouting as well in their attempts to subdue the defiant anger sparking throughout the room. 

My first week or so I thought, "This is nuts-o!" Now it's just run of the mill. I've occasionally ripped a broom handle out of somebody's hand as they were brandishing it in their pursuit of someone out the door, and I've sternly said "BAS!" more times than I can count to two who were just beginning to argue heatedly over something silly. I think the word 'enough' coming out of the foreigner's mouth has a bit more shock value. They stop at least a moment longer than usual before resuming their pettiness until crazy Ibrahim comes up to one and drags him by the collar back to the green machine to get to work. It's fascinating, this dynamic. Working, learning, yelling, laughing, dumping gargantuan bags of shampoo bottles onto the floor... Today was one of those days where I wouldn't trade this for anything. 

93 Degrees

I woke up to the sound of water splattering the concrete in the courtyard garden area. I looked up to the roof and saw my friend Hanna (who's nickname for me is 'strong one' in Arabic) apparently attempting to water the plants on the ground from four floors up. Curiosity getting the better of me, I climbed one flight higher and emerged into summertime on concrete. One of the men who works at the organization asked me why I had short sleeves on (short as in hitting my arms just above the elbows). "It's still winter," he said, gesturing from his leather jacket. I had been on the roof for less than 60 seconds, and I was almost sweating. "Well," I said, "It's hot outside." He still looked at me like I was a bit nuts. Really? I thought. Because it makes no sense to me why people are walking around in sweatshirt hoodies just because the calendar says it isn't even spring yet. All I know is my thermometer says it's 93 degrees, and the really intense sun ball tells me it ain't lyin', so call me crazy, but even observing the rules of modesty here, I'd rather dress for the temperature, not the season. 

It's been one of those days where everyone has been moving around like molasses, sluggish and tired. Even my mind hasn't been working as sharp as usual. I spent an hour trying to decide whether or not to put a border around an image in the organization's newsletter, and afterwards almost flushed my flash drive down the toilet. Bravo a liki, as they say here. Had that happened, I seriously would have cried. I cried a little last night because I let my friend cut my hair with a pair of safety elementary school scissors. It wasn't until I was able to work on it with my curling iron and pair it with make-up this morning that I realized things weren't quite so dire as they appeared last night. All that to say, losing my flash drive to the bowels of the Egyptian sewer system would have just been icing on the cake especially with the heat sapping all of the energy I have for emotional defenses. 93 degrees. NINETY. THREE. Geez oh Pete's. And as my friend Rania says, "This is just the beginning." 

Intangible State

I take long weekends. One reason is because much of the communication work I'm doing for the Association is much better accomplished in the relative quiet of the guesthouse as opposed to the ebb and flow of chaos that rolls through the office in Manshiyet Nasr. Also, the internet is much more reliable at 'home' and a thousand times less frustrating than walking into the office and being unable to do anything but sit and watch people. As a result, every time I'm away from Garbage City for three days, on my first day back, it seems as if I've been gone for weeks. The smell is as pungent as the first time, the waste is shocking, the slow, exhausted gait of the people is hard to watch, especially when I'm being chauffeured through in my clean, white taxi. There's a small part of me that thinks I should be living like the people. Yet in all honesty, if I were, I wouldn't survive this place. I couldn't do this, I couldn't be here if I were waking up every morning in this atmosphere, if I didn't have the escape that is offered to me every day at 3 o'clock. 

There are things that feel wrong about this. Why even though this is an uncomfortable country, compared to almost everyone I meet, I am quite comfortable in comparison. I meet people at the guesthouse who's entire life for a family of four fits into five suitcases. I used to marvel at the amount of clothes and shoes in my friend Christie's closet when I was in college. Now I feel like the one with the unending wardrobe for the simple fact that I don't have to start wearing the same thing after three days. And the several pairs of shoes on my floor are almost embarrassing. I can see someone coming in to replace a light bulb and thinking, why in the world does one person need more than three pairs of shoes? The funny thing is, most of my wardrobe, actually most of what I own regardless of where it may reside on the planet at the moment, was free. Or found. Or given to me as a gift. I'm not sure telling people that makes my excess any more acceptable. Then they wonder at the generosity of my friends and the state of income that must exist if people are just giving this stuff away. Some of the kids in Manshiyet Nasr already think I'm a digital camera Santa Claus, since I had three donated ones with me when I came the first week. I tried to be as discreet as possible in distributing them to their new owners, but word gets around quickly in a place like this. I had kids I'd never seen before telling me they wanted a camera. I wanted to say, "no, you don't understand." But what else are they supposed to think? Tourists come here and walk through their streets practically reeking of wealth. Even though by US standards I'm rather poor and made so little last year I'm pretty sure I could have qualified for food stamps, even I, in my cleanliness and restedness, look like I should be able to hand out dollar dollar bills ya'll without even blinking. 

I know I write about this a lot: the dirt, the disparities, the absolute inability words contain to describe what this feels like. It's because it strikes me so often. There is no getting comfortable with this. There is no getting used to how much better off I am than them and how everything I say, every opinion I have, is coming from a mentality that was developed in a world of ease and relative prosperity. I don't know what it's like to be from here. I don't know what it's like to live here every day knowing that regardless of how much I may want to, it would be really difficult for me to leave and change my circumstances. It's easy to sit on the outside and say, 'Well of course there's a choice. There's always a choice.' There may, indeed, always be a choice. But having grown up in a place where choice is on every corner, I cannot understand the difficulty it is to break deep, ingrained cultural responsibility. From the outside, it looks easy. From the inside, I imagine it looks as if the picture will never change. What good does a room with a view do if all you're looking at is a brick wall?