Brian Cassels

Orientation week has been awesome! It has been a good intro to the Cairo. Not speaking the language makes it a lot tougher to get to know a place. However, the staff here have organized activities that have helped me to already feel comfortable making my way around the city.

Our first day we took a bus tour around the city. We were able to see many of the sights from the bus, such as the great pyramids and the citadel. We also made our way to a busy street market for the girls to buy “Higabs”, or head covers. The next day they put those to use because it was Friday mosque and women need to have their hair covered (almost all Egyptian women have their hair covered in public always). We all went to one of the many mosques here in the city and got a taste of the typical service. It is manditory for Muslim men to go, so it was quite crowded. Later that day we went on a boat in the Nile as a group and ate our dinner on the river. Followed by a trip to the khan el-khalili, which is the biggest marketplace here in Cairo, it is also quite historic.

Saturday we had a scavenger hunt in pairs to get more comfortable with our own neighborhood. We had to find an internet café and the hourly rate, a pharmacy and the price of a certain medication, the local supermarket, the British council, buy a fruit we’ve never seen and know its name in Arabic, and take a taxi. It was a good way to get to know the area-not to mention my partner and I won by almost an hour…

Today we went to apply for our temporary residence, followed by a trip to American University in Cairo to visit their bookstore and buy novels for an upcoming project. After that we split up into groups of four to familiarize ourselves with the metro system. they have a very modern Metro system, as opposed to most other forms of public transport! The trains are really crowded, but it is easy to use.  The girls were happy because there is a separate car available for women and children. Nice for them to get out of the sweaty crowd and endless gawking from Egyptian men.  It also only costs only costs 1 pound, which is 20 cents. My group went exploring and ended up in Giza (think pyramids), where we found a restaurant that served pizza  and baklava. For all four of us to eat our fill and drink a soda cost 20 pounds or 4 dollars. Lunch yesterday in town only cost 2 pounds, which is 40 cents. Basically, they have some cheap eats!

We have a service project every Tuesday. Everyone goes to different places in town to serve, I don’t know exactly where I will be yet, but I signed up for teaching English somewhere. I figure it will be a good way to meet some friends who can speak some English and help me with Arabic and I can help them with English. Class starts on Wednesday, I’m excited to get into the studies, particularly Arabic! Stay tuned…

يمابش مابخة

Greetings from Egypt!

Me and a group of 30 students from the states landed in Cairo this afternoon at around 2:00.  The landing is basically in the desert, and when we got out of the plane it was around 105 degrees.  Right now its past 8 and dark and still in the high 80’s.  It was exciting to drive through the city to where our neighborhood is.  We live about 4 blocks from the Nile River.  I live on the 7th floor of a high rise apt. complex with 7 other guys.  We have a 3 bedroom/2 bath place that is pretty sweet.  We are right above a main street, so its pretty noisy, but awesome!  Pretty tired right now, but wanted to just let everyone know I made it.  This week is orientation, so I will be getting to know the city and learning more about what to expect living here.  I will definitely be updating with reports and pictures soon.

If you haven’t noticed, there are a few nifty updates to the site I’ve made.  For one, you can access never before seen Mozambique photos and some other goodies from my time home in San Diego in the “gallery” section of the site.  The “contact” section now also includes a form for sending me e-mail that is extremely easy to use.  If you just follow the obvious instructions (a 2 year old could do it), then i will receive your message from you’re e-mail address – awesome, huh?  I want it to be easy for you to e-mail me for a purpose, I don’t want to fall out of touch with you, so drop me a note, ask me a question, and let me know what’s up!  I have wireless in my apt…although it’s sketch (I’m sitting on the balcony hijacking some neighbors signal).

Anyways, enjoy the site, and hope to hear from you!  Love from Egypt,

Brian

PS – Don’t give me too much credit yet about the Arabic I wrote at the top, it’s jiberish, I just figured it looked pretty impressive.  I’ve been here one day, I’ll learn though.

I am home! Got in last night at 9:00PM after a 40 hour trip. I was pretty tired, but not too tired to miss getting up to go surfing at 5:30. When I went to unpack my bag I had my last taste of Africa. It had four Nokia boxes in at that were not mine. They were for really nice phones, but the phones were missing, I have all the accessories though: chargers, headsets, and USB cables. I’m assuming someone at the airport stole them from another bag and stashed the unimportant stuff in my bag. Pretty weird…

The last couple weeks in Moçambique were great. The camp went quite well. There were 14 kids who came and spent two nights at Rio Tembe Outpost (That’s the name of the camp). We had them do whole range of activities; from capture the flag, to a 10km trek following clues though the bush, to challenge activities and a relay. They all really enjoyed it. It was also a good opportunity for me to see what we have to work with and what a camp can look like there in the future. After the camp we had a meeting to debrief how the camp went, what we can change, and lay out a vision. Once I had a reference point to work off, it helped us to talk through some important issues, and I am really excited about the future potential of the camp. We weren’t able to finish the climbing wall before the camp, but we did finish it on Saturday. We are pretty sure that it is the first climbing wall in the country, so that will be a big draw for people to want to come to camp.

The last couple of days I was able to go on a trip to Ponta do Ouro, a beach town bordering South Africa. It was nice to get to see some more of the country and relax on the beach.

I am glad to be home, but I will really miss Moçambique and my friends there. It was tough to say goodbye to everyone from the organization I interned with and the Bowers. If you have any questions about my trip, let me know!

It looks a lot more impressive when it is up then on the ground

The classic camp group photo

At Ponto do Ouro with the boys (Ismael, Me, Mark, Cory)

This entire week has been fully dedicated to building a climbing wall out at the camp.  None of us have built a wall before, but we put our heads together and came up with something.  It actually looks pretty professional and I think it will be quite a success.  It will be 8 meters tall, and quite possibly the first climbing wall in the entire country, so that is an accomplishment in itself.

Today I finished the my last bit of schoolwork-a ten page paper assessing my internship.  After finishing that, and five days of work at the camp I was ready for a celebratory adventure.  So this afternoon I got Cory, the Bowers’ 13 year old son, and we decided to kayak to an island off the coast of the city.  The Island is called Xefina, and it is about 4 miles away.  We got there around 3:30 and started exploring.  It used to be a prison, controlled by the Portuguese during the revelutionary war here, but has since been abandoned.  We were exploring the ruins of these enormous cannons and met up with some fisherman who offered for us to sit with them and eat fish they were cooking over a fire.  We were loving life, eating fish with the natives but realized that we should get going because it was getting late meaning we would have to kayak in the dark if we wasted too much time.

We followed the fisherman through a road to the other side of the island where we had hid our kayaks and parted ways when they reached their house.  As we were nearing the beach, some guy saw us and told us that it was prohibited for us to be there.  I told him, sorry, we didn’t know.  No worries, he replied.  We reached the beach and were heading towards out hidden kayaks when someone yelled for us from behind.  It was a guy in a military uniform.  He came over and started giving us a lecture because we were not allowed to be on the island without coming to him first and asking permission, that he is the commander of the island.  I apologized and told him we didn’t know, but next time we’d let him know.  However, he was a)drunk, b)unreasonable, and c)had a henchman with an AK-47.  He had no intention of letting us go on our own terms.  So he starts going on this monologue about he can kill us and any other white who comes to the island without permission and that we cannot leave-he is going to make us stay at least one night, I’m making my case before the court about us being innocent-how could we know this ‘law’, Cory is keeping his mouth shut and giving me a look of-’is this actually happening’, and some bystanders are pleading with “comandante” to leave us alone and let us go this time since we didn’t know.

There was about 15 minutes of discussion and confusion where he refused to budge while I layed on every reason why he was being unreasonable in as friendly a way as possible.  “Listen, my friend, look at this boy, he’s my friend and just a kid (pointing to Cory), he needs to get home to his parents tonight, it’s getting late”.  Finally, he somehow decided to let us go as we walked to our boats and paddled away under guard by his armed henchman.  We just paddled as quick as we could away from the island on pure adrenaline, in the dark, and have been laughing about it ever since.  This rivals my homeless night in Jo-burg on the rediculous scale.

Our climbing wall, which still needs hand holds

The men hard at work erecting a post

Scaling the post