St. Andrews

Class 9-1.

After class we visited St. Andrew's Church. We were supposed to be tutoring refugees (mostly from Sudan) in English, but unfortunately they cancelled their summer classes. I was really looking forward to doing the tutoring, but what can you do? We met with a woman named Stephanie who helps people gain refugee status and helps them to lobby for relocation. She seemed to be very put together and organized even in such a small facility, and I couldn't get over how noble her work is. She talked about how hard it is to listen to people's horrific life stories and know that the people who ultimately get to decide if they can be relocated just might not care. I don't think I can even describe how much respect I have for her.

After St. Andrew's, I just came back and worked on writing a paper for the rest of the day.

1. always the optimist: I am a firm believer in the idea that far too often people assume that things will never happen because they believe that other people think they'll never happen. Pessimism is a cycle. I will admit that I am probably the biggest offender of having thoughts that begin with "this wouldn't be a problem if everyone thought like I do", but it's because of the fact that if every single person was optimistic about the integrity of every other person, we could fix so many things. I had a lot of those thoughts today when we visited the refugee center. The position that the refugees are put in is wrong, and if everyone thought this way then it would be resolved. It's wrong that some people think that it's ok.

2. Reconstructing Islamic Cairo: That was the title of an interesting article we had to read for the dialogue course. Apparently, the Egyptian government is trying to drum up tourism by renovating several monuments and creating "open-air museums" in Cairo. The problem is that they've hired general contractors instead of people who specialize in renovating historical structures, so the renovations are being done with materials that are not historically suitable. The govenment also has plans to displace the inhabitants of portions of the city to make way for these museum areas. Reading this article was interesting because just a few days ago I visited some newly opened renovated Islamic monuments, and they were absolutely beautiful. I know that some experts in historical preservation would probably be appalled that I think that, but as long as the new materials will last, I really can't tell the difference between the original and the renovated parts. Displacing residents is a whole other story, but I thought the renovated monuments were gorgeous.

3. Utensils: Note to self-- Next time you travel for an extended period of time, bring utensils. After a while you will get bored of buying street food and going out to restaurants, and you will purchase peanut butter, bananas, and yogurt at the Metro Mart. You will then realize that you have no knife to spread the peanut butter and no spoon to eat the yogurt. Then you will be hungry and will disappointedly succumb to another falafel sandwich until utensils are obtained.