Trek Update: City of the Sun (July 12, 2006)

Heliopolis: City of the Sun

Acclimatization: n : adaptation to a new climate (a new temperature or altitude or environment)

Adaptation: n. 2 b) A composition that has been recast into a new form: The play is an adaptation of a short novel. 5. Change in behavior of a person or group in response to new or modified surroundings.

-dictionary.com

Tomorrow, we leave for our mid-trip retreat. I don't know where we're going. But I realize that you also don't know where we've been. In honor of having to pick up and move soon, this entry will be more stream-of-consciousness than usual.

We are staying in a part of Cairo called Heliopolis. It's a pretty nice part of the city. We're a couple blocks away from the metro running north and south, which many of us take every morning to the schools we work at (Everytime I notice, the TVs in the Metro station are showing either Shaolin Soccer or music videos). Brian, Tiff, Jeremy, Dawn, Angela, and I take the Number 10 bus from a stop just down the road. You don't have to look far to find bakery/pastry shops or fruit stands. I want to know where they get their fruit from because it really all looks like the same to me. The bakeries are awesome. I hope I can learn enough Arabic to ask how they make their pastries...

Fear not, Parents. We are staying in nice apartments. Each one has a kitchen, bedrooms, beds (some of us have nice sleeping pad/matress things on the floor), and a bathroom. We aren't using air conditioning, but we have these really awesome fans to blow air around. I am now a huge fan of fans. The only downside is that we have to leave our windows open and some of us seem particularly susceptable to bug bites.

The apartments are connected to a 7th Day Adventist Church compound. We get to hang out with the Adventist youth group sometimes. Some of them have been to study in America. One guy is trying to go back to school in California, but there's been some obstructive visa paperwork involved.

The girls stay in the apartments that are connected to the church. The Pastor and his family also live in our apartment building. Or rather, we live in theirs. Tiff, Tiana, Angela (whom I shall refer to henceforward as 'Ange'), NaKhia, Anna, and I live in the flat on the 3rd floor while Tiffany, Jenny, Kristin, Sanaa, Lauren, Dawn, and Lori share the flat on the 2nd floor. The 2nd floor dining space is where we have our group meetings and is also being kept as a guest welcoming room.

Just today, several Egyptian women came to visit. We need to have space to invite them to sit and have tea and chat with us. Egyptian hospitality is difficult to live up to.

The guys (Jeremy, Brian, Ted, Charles, Jared, Stephen) live in the apartment across the street. It's less of a street and more of a shared, paved driveway. Their apartment is also connected to the Adventist church, but not physically. The 'shared paved driveway' ends in this Sports Club-like thing.

They have space for various sports and activities, as well as a pool and we could tell whenever there was a World Cup playoff game because lots of people would gather on the second floor and scream at a screen that we could not see from our balconies. But now I am writing from 'Ted's Perch' and if I walk over to the edge, I can look down from the top of this building (maybe 3 stories tall?) onto the Sports Club grounds. It's pretty cool. There's gymnastic-type things, an outdoor dining area, soccer, more soccer, and basketball.

One of the things I love about Cairo is that everything looks like it's made of chalk pastels. It's night now, and past the edge of this building, I see the others rising above on the other side of the Sports Club. They look like balconies stacked on top of one another.

I think the soft lighting effect is probably aided by pollution, but the end result is that whenever I look at building scenery for the first time, I feel like if I breathe too hard, the chalk pastel dust will blow away. Even now, the colors all seem so soft and powdery that if I hold up my hand too carelessly, I might smudge the architecture.

Ted discovered this place a little while ago. He likes to come up here and pray for the city. It's easy because you can just look out over so many places. As a bonus, there is also a clothesline up here.

During the day, I'm sure it gets very hot up here. It's been in the high 90's, low 100's, though recently we went through a couple of days of relatively cooler weather. I have accepted the fact that I will sweat all day.

Apparently, South Sudan has much nicer weather than Cairo. Jared says that civilizations like those around here which have survived for thousands of years in hot weather make him realize that people are stupid. I think he means that if they were smart, they would just move. I think he means people like me who accept the fact that we will live in hot weather. I think this is a dimension of the self-claimed ability of humanity to adapt. Physically, I sweat all the time. Mentally, I accept this fact as normal. I've even started to think that sometimes the temperature is cool - even during the day. I know that this is only in comparison. I could go somewhere else, but in my acceptance, I have become complacent. I think I will use that as a prompt to go consider the idea of settling for something which I could make better if I so decided.

But right now, it is night: cool and breezy by my new standards. I'm surrounded by a 360 degree pastel backdrop of Cairo, and I don't want to go back inside. I asked Ted why he ever goes back. He said that we're not allowed to wear shorts up here. That's ok with me, because I almost never wear shorts. We're trying to be good American Africans and dress appropriately because that's the cultural language here and because we want to be allowed to come back.

Elia is the guy who sort of manages these apartments. He lives downstairs in our building. We went to his house to watch the World Cup, which was really cool because back home, I couldn't get any channels that had the World Cup. I watched 2 taped games on VHS that my Dad brought home. That's how far behind the United States is in soccer (in arabic, kura) availability: I had to go to another country just to watch the World Cup. Football is a really good language to speak, though. One of our adult English classes picked up on "Good, Better, Best" so quickly when we could compare those words to "Germany, France, Italy."

Anyway, Elia is about 29 years old. He's lived in Cairo for about 5 years and is a refugee from Sudan. He's really cool. Hopefully in August, he will finally be able to get out of here and go to Beruit to finish school. He wants to go for Business Administration. I will write more about him and our other Sudanese friends in a later update.

In other news, I think I have almost recovered from a cold. It's kind of ironic that I go to Egypt in the summer and catch a cold. We seem to be divided between people who have colds, people who have stomach problems, and people who have already had colds or stomach problems. Nothing serious though.

I'm sorry I haven't written more about what it is that we're actually doing. I'll give you the summary here, and maybe I can tell you what it actually means later.

mornings: teaching at 6 different schools

afternoon:

*
various domestic activities
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visiting with Egyptian or Sudanese guests

evenings:

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teaching adult English classes at at least 3 different schools
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working with different ministries at Immanuel House
*
teaching crafts at a women's ministry
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attending Adventist youth group events
*
a study of the Book of Amos. This is hard stuff.

It seems that we will not be able to work with clothing distribution to refugees this year. It was cancelled.

I'm going to go pack my things for our retreat.
Thank you again for your prayers

Please join us in praying for the welfare of Cairo and continuing provision for the refugees from Sudan.
Please pray for us as we are trying individually to sift out the reasons that God has called us here and the work that we have to do.

Salaam, (Peace)
-Tracy

P.S. This week's full hack count: 1 On the Great Pyramid! I don't remember who exactly was there though. It was at least Brian, Jenny, Ted, Kristin, and myself.

P.P.S. If there's something you'd really like to know about, you can contact me though the trek editor at editor@urbana.org.

"When Israel was yet a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt"
-Hosea 11:1
I hear Christians telling people that to follow Jesus, you have to be born again, because Jesus said that once in the New Testament. So I think I can tell them to sell everything they have and give to the poor. Jesus said that once, too.
-paraphrase of a comment by Rich Mullins