Deep breath.
I'm not a fan of waiting. Waiting and keeping poise, continuing life as normal while your future rests outside of your hands, knowing there is absolutely nothing you can do to alter decisions and no more that you can do to impress, charm, or convince. It's become a battle of wits, a stare down with my own imagination. "What if?" Yeah, what if. The endless combination of possibilities run laps in my head, each time distorting slightly, rerouting their sequencing depending on my mood and level of mental exhaustion. Every day it's the same story. Awake for morning prayer at 5:30. Wake up at 8, hit snooze. I slip into my sandals, boil the coffee, shower, dress, and catch a cab with the girls on the corner. I start to smile, compartmentalizing my worries about the future, the things I haven't accomplished yet, and hoping I'll get out of class and find the email: "Matt, don't worry, we'll cover you. We know the stipend wasn't enough." Between subtracting 7 hours to find the approximate Ann Arbor time, budgeting in my head, and trying to maintain my sense of humor, I recognize that this email probably won't come. Business is business, and my fate has been left in the hands of an old fossil of a professor who is set in his ways and with whom I don't really have the best rapport. Chances approach the zero-point of no return. "What are they waiting for? Can't they just tell me no now?" I really would like to have that piece of mind so I can at least reclaim some sleep.
I'm torn about coming back to America so early. I would like to go back to Ann Arbor and resume my life as normal, re-acclimate to my own culture, go running and to the gym, plan for school, and take a much needed break from 6 years of higher education to focus on things that don't involve an exam or lecture. My mind is very tired and very full. Yet there's still that other voice inside of me that pushed me to apply for this program in the first place, pushed me to write that thesis and apply for graduate school, and kept me thinking critically and positively during my first 4 months here. It's that part that wants to keep going. I've accomplished so much in Egypt: my Arabic and Egyptian dialect have improved far more than they would have taken classes in the States.
Perhaps the greatest thing that I will take from this program, however, is how to deconstruct and make sense of another culture. I watched myself grow throughout the 8 months I've been here: from feeling at home because of my time in Morocco for the first month, to complete alienation from the culture and people and language around me, complete hopelessness and confusion in August, inner and outer rebellion inside the classroom and in the streets, to a general callousness through which I couldn't feel any emotion, positive or destructive; total, perfect indifference. These events and responses were not triggered by the general feeling of being "different" that I felt inside, but the way I was treated on the outside. My main complaint during my time here was the "casual" contact that I had with Egyptians: people screaming trite English phrases at me which drew a vivid Sartrian gaze to my presence in the streets. Children running up to me and throwing pebbles at me. Cab drivers and ticket vendors not giving me change and ripping me off. Confusion led to alienation led to anger. I always kept asking myself, "Why are you doing this? Just let me alone; Why am I so interesting to you? Haven't you ever seen a Westerner before?" These thoughts drove me Mad, and there was a time I was afraid I would never be happy here except in my apartment with my call to prayer loud speaker.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped noticing my Strangeness. Thinking back, I've developed an air, a walk, and a Gaze of my own. My whole comportment says "I've been here for a while, I'm really not that interesting." People don't pay attention to me as much; it has to be that; my freaky superhuman powers of perception and peripheral vision sometimes can border on the line of paranoia. I'm going to credit Starbucks for that one. All in all, things started to get good. The depressing lessons about unemployment, class divisions, bread prices, starvation, lack of education, the unfortunate 30% illiteracy rate, and the endless Jewish, Zionist conspiracy theories didn't exactly become a joke, but I began to use them to evaluate the larger picture of what Egypt is. Tying these classroom lessons to the streets slowly shaped a more diverse, and even logical, mosaic of what this country is going through. The most important thing that I've taken away from this experience is that logic and truth are not universal terms, but whatever a population decides it is. My logic, my system, my Truth, was almost never that of an Egyptian. It wasn't until I was able to think like an Egyptian that I was able to live here. It is one of the greatest accomplishment of my life. I've developed quite a thick skin. Thank you Egypt.
Here I sit, wondering if this life altering experience is going to come to a crashing halt, or if I will continue with a group of some of the most inspiring people I've had the privilege of fraternizing with. America, here I come? It looks probable, but I think the biggest hurdle and accomplishment I could have achieved have been surpassed. I finally mastered the impossible: Myself.
I'm not a fan of waiting. Waiting and keeping poise, continuing life as normal while your future rests outside of your hands, knowing there is absolutely nothing you can do to alter decisions and no more that you can do to impress, charm, or convince. It's become a battle of wits, a stare down with my own imagination. "What if?" Yeah, what if. The endless combination of possibilities run laps in my head, each time distorting slightly, rerouting their sequencing depending on my mood and level of mental exhaustion. Every day it's the same story. Awake for morning prayer at 5:30. Wake up at 8, hit snooze. I slip into my sandals, boil the coffee, shower, dress, and catch a cab with the girls on the corner. I start to smile, compartmentalizing my worries about the future, the things I haven't accomplished yet, and hoping I'll get out of class and find the email: "Matt, don't worry, we'll cover you. We know the stipend wasn't enough." Between subtracting 7 hours to find the approximate Ann Arbor time, budgeting in my head, and trying to maintain my sense of humor, I recognize that this email probably won't come. Business is business, and my fate has been left in the hands of an old fossil of a professor who is set in his ways and with whom I don't really have the best rapport. Chances approach the zero-point of no return. "What are they waiting for? Can't they just tell me no now?" I really would like to have that piece of mind so I can at least reclaim some sleep.
I'm torn about coming back to America so early. I would like to go back to Ann Arbor and resume my life as normal, re-acclimate to my own culture, go running and to the gym, plan for school, and take a much needed break from 6 years of higher education to focus on things that don't involve an exam or lecture. My mind is very tired and very full. Yet there's still that other voice inside of me that pushed me to apply for this program in the first place, pushed me to write that thesis and apply for graduate school, and kept me thinking critically and positively during my first 4 months here. It's that part that wants to keep going. I've accomplished so much in Egypt: my Arabic and Egyptian dialect have improved far more than they would have taken classes in the States.
Perhaps the greatest thing that I will take from this program, however, is how to deconstruct and make sense of another culture. I watched myself grow throughout the 8 months I've been here: from feeling at home because of my time in Morocco for the first month, to complete alienation from the culture and people and language around me, complete hopelessness and confusion in August, inner and outer rebellion inside the classroom and in the streets, to a general callousness through which I couldn't feel any emotion, positive or destructive; total, perfect indifference. These events and responses were not triggered by the general feeling of being "different" that I felt inside, but the way I was treated on the outside. My main complaint during my time here was the "casual" contact that I had with Egyptians: people screaming trite English phrases at me which drew a vivid Sartrian gaze to my presence in the streets. Children running up to me and throwing pebbles at me. Cab drivers and ticket vendors not giving me change and ripping me off. Confusion led to alienation led to anger. I always kept asking myself, "Why are you doing this? Just let me alone; Why am I so interesting to you? Haven't you ever seen a Westerner before?" These thoughts drove me Mad, and there was a time I was afraid I would never be happy here except in my apartment with my call to prayer loud speaker.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped noticing my Strangeness. Thinking back, I've developed an air, a walk, and a Gaze of my own. My whole comportment says "I've been here for a while, I'm really not that interesting." People don't pay attention to me as much; it has to be that; my freaky superhuman powers of perception and peripheral vision sometimes can border on the line of paranoia. I'm going to credit Starbucks for that one. All in all, things started to get good. The depressing lessons about unemployment, class divisions, bread prices, starvation, lack of education, the unfortunate 30% illiteracy rate, and the endless Jewish, Zionist conspiracy theories didn't exactly become a joke, but I began to use them to evaluate the larger picture of what Egypt is. Tying these classroom lessons to the streets slowly shaped a more diverse, and even logical, mosaic of what this country is going through. The most important thing that I've taken away from this experience is that logic and truth are not universal terms, but whatever a population decides it is. My logic, my system, my Truth, was almost never that of an Egyptian. It wasn't until I was able to think like an Egyptian that I was able to live here. It is one of the greatest accomplishment of my life. I've developed quite a thick skin. Thank you Egypt.
Here I sit, wondering if this life altering experience is going to come to a crashing halt, or if I will continue with a group of some of the most inspiring people I've had the privilege of fraternizing with. America, here I come? It looks probable, but I think the biggest hurdle and accomplishment I could have achieved have been surpassed. I finally mastered the impossible: Myself.
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