I'm going.
"Did Sullivan tell you how how hard this is going to be?"
"We didn't really talk that much--he thought you could explain things better."
You can't just waltz into rural villages and start asking questions. She told me about a time when she was the first Westerner a village had beheld.
The whole village came out to see me. It can be freaky, especially when you don't understand the Arabic.
And even if the villagers have seen Westerners, the government doesn't want you asking questions. People are suspicious.
"It'll help you look partly Egyptian."
After a 5 week Journalism dialogue through Northeastern where we'll go to Egypt, Qatar and Syria, I will return to Cairo to independently research barriers to education and evaluate different initiatives--for example one-classroom United Nations programs and community funded schools sponsored by the Egyptian Ministry of Education.
Stephanie suggested I scale this down a bit...
"You need to really get to know these people to do that kind of research. Your Arabic will need to be good--you're priority the first 3 months. Otherwise the government could intimidate you really easily.
She said I could contact her, she'll be in Cairo when I am. Even if you just want to know where a Starbucks is. Starbucks! I don't want that..... I mumbled something about City Stars Mall--the most nightmarish place I'd been in Cairo. (Which I'm guessing is slightly awful and offensive to say considering the widespread poverty and hardship elsewhere).
I've been toying around with the idea of just staying the summer, coming back and doing a 4-month co-op. I can picture frisbee after work and beaches and nuhoc on weekends, time to see those people I haven't all semester...read those books lounging on my shelf, work on shaping killer abs. It would be easier....
My junior year of high school I wrote a short story for my English class about a guard at a Nazi concentration camp. After hours of writing and changing and mincing words the way I do, I was frustrated. Couldn't I have written a traditional research paper with a summary at the end instead of an alluding twist? Whether for good reason or not--I haven't read it in years--I liked that story better than anything else I wrote for a while.
It's not just about challenging myself--I could do that many ways. It's taking risks, prioritizing, casting away routine.
I know this will change me and it scares me because I'm not too sure I want to change. Yet putting it off when I know I want it is putting my life on hold.
"Change is the only constant," Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher. Brought to my attention by my favorite T-shirt of a stepdad I no longer have. Fitting.
4 weeks and counting. Down.
