ToewsTravels

around the conclusion of the month of ramadan is a holiday called eid al adha. any family who can has an animal killed, and donates one third of the meat to the poor. with everyone killing animals on the same day, the streets become rivers of blood for a few hours.

the end of ramadan.

while in siwa we went out into the desert with some bedouins in jeeps and drove around on the sand dunes, jumping off them and such! we sandboarded down one of the steeper ones and went swimming (in our eurotrunks) in both in a hot spring and a cool spring (as the sun was setting). a great day in the desert.

while at the egyptian oasis town of siwa, we biked to a nearby salt lake for the sunset and some swimming!

we spent a weekend in siwa, which is an oasis out in the middle of the egyptian desert near the libyan border. we left cairo after class and it was a twelve hour bus ride. we stayed at a hotel in the desert that had no electricity, just candles! it was wonderful. the first day we rented bikes in the town and rode around the oasis. the oasis is an area of lush green vegetation about five kilometers in diameter, surrounded by barren desert for hundreds of kilometers in all directions. the siwan people are all related to each other and until relatively recently had essentially no contact with the outside world.

alexander the great travelled to siwa to visit an oracle that lived there, but he died before anyone found out what the message was. we went to the castle where this oracle lived, on the top of a mountain in the middle of the oasis. then we went swimming at cleopatra’s bath, which is a cold spring that was very refreshing, and in which cleopatra reportedly swam. our security guard (who comes with us on every trip and carries a machine gun) cooked us some beans for dinner, and then a local band came and played some rockin’ traditional siwan desert music. apparently the siwan music is very famous.

then we went to a camp in the desert and they cooked us dinner. they bury some chicken underground, cover it with sand, and then build a fire on top of it to cook it. we saw some jackals in the desert and conspired to go surround them. so we did, and we made friends with one of them and it wouldn’t stop following us around! we all slept in one big tent-like structure and didn’t get a whole lot of sleep. the next day i woke up with hundreds of bug bites all over, but very worth it.

we went to a huge football game at cairo stadium between two of the best teams in africa – ahly and zamalek (they are both from cairo). we got there at 6:30 pm even though the game didn’t start until 10 pm (so we could get a good seat). the reason it started so late is because all the players were fasting during ramadan and needed some time to rehydrate. it ended as a tie. the crowds were going to be crazy regardless of the outcome.

we took a weekend trip north from cairo to alexandria, once one of the most important cities in the world! now it is not even close to holding that kind of title, but is still solidly egypt’s second city. we took an early morning train and got there at about 11 am. we were staying at the a-crap-hole hotel but a few of us decided to come back the same day because we were starting to get sleep deprived at the time. first we went to the catacombs which are ancient underground burial chambers. very cool. then we tried to go to a newly built $300 million us funded library but it was unfortunately closed. the library was built in honor of alexandria’s famous library of antiquity.

note to self: a friday during ramadan may not be the best time to visit alexandria because almost everything was closed. the only place we could find any food was the kfc. it was nice to get away from the busyness of cairo and see the mediterranean sea. we walked for kilometers along the cornish, which is the main road along the waterfront. we walked out to a point where a famous lighthouse used to be. we finished the day with some chicken dinner in a back alley. a great day in alexandria!

my friend joel and i went to the episcopal training center and taught a 2.5 hour conversational english class each tuesday this semester. we got there the first night and no one told us what we were supposed to be doing so we just made it up as we went along.  it actually was quite fun. we had a great group of about 17 people who all happen to be coptic christians and are all very well educated – optometrist, accountants, etc. they all knew some english but some of them not very well. so we did lots of discussion questions and their favorite – idioms! and of course lots of new vocabulary words. we authoritatively gave them homework assignments each week. we also worked in some exciting activities! i also threw in as many simple jokes as possible during the class time. they were so passionate during one holiday week when we weren’t supposed to have class they all want to anyway so we met downtown on our own time!

this english teaching experience was one of the highlights of my time in egypt for sure.  joel and i made some friends in the class and even hung out with them a few times outside of class time. we had to be creative in ways to pass the three hour long class… we explained how to have an organized debate one week, and they loved this! we let them choose a debate topic – they chose “men vs. women – which is better?” as you can imagine that was fun. lots of laughs. they are all christian, so that means we can all talk freely about religion in the class. it is interesting to hear the different perspectives on islam from muslims and christians.

we’ve had a number of very interesting guest lecturers. a while ago we had a guest speaker on human rights in egypt.  she is a copt and is a faculty member at a local university. there are many human rights problems in egypt that are caused by the government. egypt’s government is effectively totalitarian and it has a huge internal security force to keep the regime in power. the united states supports the regime with huge quantities of aid, because we claim we need an ally in the region and also ostensibly as a reward for maintaining peace with israel. therefore, we are being hypocritical in that we are pushing for democracy elsewhere but are ignoring the fact that egypt is a corrupt dictatorship – because we “need” their support.

the president controls basically everything in egypt, from whether you can change your official religion to what the courts can say to who the next president will be. the president, hosni mubarak, wants his son to take over from him, because he is 80 and could die at any time. they claim that there will be an election, but basically this is to appease the west and the president has framed the rules for candidates in that election in such a way that all the viable contenders except his son will be eliminated by default. the christian coptic minority is being persecuted more and more. christians are easily identified because of their names, and the courts have become biased against them. they are being pushed out of academia, people are beaten for converting, etc.

a political group called the muslim brotherhood has existed in egypt for many years but has recently become very popular. they are banned by the government but many recently ran as independent candidates in a very limited token election and won huge percentages of the vote. they started as a very extremist islamist group, and though many people see them as moderating now many also still consider them to be extreme – the copts, for example, in general fear for their lives if the brotherhood ever came to power. the muslim brotherhood has branches in basically every muslim country – hamas in the gaza strip is an offshoot. to be fair, this is another reason the u.s. is propping up the regime – because if elections were held today or the government fell the muslim brotherhood would dominate and things would likely get really bad for the copts and others in egypt. we also had a guest speaker from the u.s. embassy who is quite important, and as such had to be much less forthcoming than the speaker concerned with human rights.

we also had a couple christian speakers on “faith-boundary issues.” they basically talked about different ways people interpret who is going to heaven. one of them named paul gordon chandler talked about whether it is possible to follow Christ while continuing to be a muslim.  he is very relativist theologically which has led some leaders of the evangelical world to denounce him as a heretic but others have endorsed him. he wrote a book about a very prominent muslim author, one of the most popular arabic authors in the middle east, who became a believer in Christ, but, instead of “converting,” decided to remain in the muslim tradition.

muslims here who “convert” are often ostracized from their families (which are extremely important to one’s identity in this part of the world), giving up any opportunity to get married, and often have no means of networking/fellowshipping with any other believers who aren’t foreigners. chandler challenged us – is this what Christ would have wanted? this muslim christian has huge clout in the arab world and has published the gospels in arabic in a culturally relevant style of speech and they are available places where christian or even western books would be burned. in his opinion, being a muslim and a follower of Christ can be entirely compatible if one navigates the religious waters carefully.

even if one doesn’t buy the theory, he said some things which can challenge us all. as christians, we should be trying to build bridges and focusing on commonalities between ourselves and muslims whenever possible. also, when someone asked this muslim author what about islam he had to give up to be a follower of Christ he responded: “what about christianity do you have to give up to be a follower of Christ?” i think that is a major theme of this semester for me – considering what really is important regarding our faith and what is just cultural baggage that really doesn’t have anything to do with what Christ taught.