Monday, November 24, 2003
Gulf humor , which sounds even better than the Kuwaiti South Park rip-off and the (also Kuwaiti, I think) stand-up comedy by the Ariel Sharon impersonator (I saw part of it once, and it was more making fun of the obese than anything).
Mubarak fell sick with "severe flu and pneumonia ... but is in good health", according to government statements, while delivering a speech the other day. The Egyptian reaction has been one of thinly veiled hope that he'll finally kick the bucket or have to resign. I've been here almost six months, and gotten into plenty of political discussions, but I have yet to hear a single person say a nice thing about Mubarak. I'm trying to get the powers that be to throw in a line in our story about Schevernadze resigning like: "The long-awaited resignation of the ailing 75-year-old dictator was met with widespread relief" but I don't think it'll run. There is a Strongbad quote hidden in next week's Travel supplement, though.
Also, regarding an earlier post on the shortage of Arabic speakers in Iraq (well, on the coalition side, that is), a friend of Sean who had finished maybe the equivalent of four years of Arabic, and so was pretty good at comprehension and reading but not at all fluent, was offered $90,000 a year plus daily expenses to work as a "linguistic specialist" for the Army.
Mubarak fell sick with "severe flu and pneumonia ... but is in good health", according to government statements, while delivering a speech the other day. The Egyptian reaction has been one of thinly veiled hope that he'll finally kick the bucket or have to resign. I've been here almost six months, and gotten into plenty of political discussions, but I have yet to hear a single person say a nice thing about Mubarak. I'm trying to get the powers that be to throw in a line in our story about Schevernadze resigning like: "The long-awaited resignation of the ailing 75-year-old dictator was met with widespread relief" but I don't think it'll run. There is a Strongbad quote hidden in next week's Travel supplement, though.
Also, regarding an earlier post on the shortage of Arabic speakers in Iraq (well, on the coalition side, that is), a friend of Sean who had finished maybe the equivalent of four years of Arabic, and so was pretty good at comprehension and reading but not at all fluent, was offered $90,000 a year plus daily expenses to work as a "linguistic specialist" for the Army.
Thursday, November 20, 2003
At least Arabic is turning out to be a valuable skill (Wayne, you can only hope that Clash of Civilizations is right and China will soon join forces with The Islamic Civilizations versus The West, as seen in the popular computer game Civilization, not created by Samuel Huntingdon).
At least the Army and State Department (which has a grand total of almost 60 people who can speak Arabic fluently) has its priorities straight. Oh wait.
"In spite of the shortage, six soldiers trained to speak Arabic were among nine Army linguists dismissed from the service for homosexuality within six months of the U.S. invasion of Iraq last March."
At least the Army and State Department (which has a grand total of almost 60 people who can speak Arabic fluently) has its priorities straight. Oh wait.
"In spite of the shortage, six soldiers trained to speak Arabic were among nine Army linguists dismissed from the service for homosexuality within six months of the U.S. invasion of Iraq last March."
Monday, November 17, 2003
I had an interesting iftar (Ramadan dinner/breakfast) yesterday, with mostly people from work. A photographer who's the husband of an Egyptian writer on our staff had just gotten back from Iraq, doing work documenting USAID projects there. He's been in Egypt since the late 70s, planning to stay here a year but settling for good--there seem to be a lot of Westerners like that in Cairo. Anyway, he and Nyier (an Egyptian-American woman who graduated from Cornell in the mid-90s, one of our best reporters) were talking a lot about Iraq, since Nyier had done stories from Iraq and Kurdistan for about a month in the summer.
Nyier said that before she went to Iraq, she had been involved in the anti-war movement, covering and participating in the huge rally in London that drew well over a million people. She recalled one panel discussion at the rally where there were two staunchly anti-war speakers, and one (the only one of them who had been to Iraq before) who was in favor of removing Saddam, though he thought the way Bush/Blair were doing it was wrong and unnecessarily rushed, given the absurdity of the WMD argument. He said that he had changed his mind while visiting Iraq with a peace delegation and talking to a lot of Iraqis, who somehow made it clear enough with body language, despite the government minders standing behind them, that they were generally really pro-intervention. Nyier said that nobody in the audience believed this guy and people were mad that he was trying to take away their "voice of the Iraqi people".
She told us that when she did reporting in Iraq (this is in June, before things got nasty), she was shocked at the depth of anger and sense of betrayal most Iraqis felt not only towards the anti-war movements in the West, but even more so towards the Arabs, especially the Jordanians and Egyptians; the Arab governments had not only long tolerated the Saddam regime, refusing to remove or punish it themselves, but had actively tried to stop what many Iraqis saw as their golden opportunity to get rid of him. If the Arabs weren't going to do anything except for deliver windy speeches about Arab unity, Iraq and Palestine (as always), then the Americans were better than no one.
Nyier said that before she went to Iraq, she had been involved in the anti-war movement, covering and participating in the huge rally in London that drew well over a million people. She recalled one panel discussion at the rally where there were two staunchly anti-war speakers, and one (the only one of them who had been to Iraq before) who was in favor of removing Saddam, though he thought the way Bush/Blair were doing it was wrong and unnecessarily rushed, given the absurdity of the WMD argument. He said that he had changed his mind while visiting Iraq with a peace delegation and talking to a lot of Iraqis, who somehow made it clear enough with body language, despite the government minders standing behind them, that they were generally really pro-intervention. Nyier said that nobody in the audience believed this guy and people were mad that he was trying to take away their "voice of the Iraqi people".
She told us that when she did reporting in Iraq (this is in June, before things got nasty), she was shocked at the depth of anger and sense of betrayal most Iraqis felt not only towards the anti-war movements in the West, but even more so towards the Arabs, especially the Jordanians and Egyptians; the Arab governments had not only long tolerated the Saddam regime, refusing to remove or punish it themselves, but had actively tried to stop what many Iraqis saw as their golden opportunity to get rid of him. If the Arabs weren't going to do anything except for deliver windy speeches about Arab unity, Iraq and Palestine (as always), then the Americans were better than no one.
Sunday, November 16, 2003
Sorry about no posts for a while. I tried on Thursday, but blogger was down. I'm at work now, so I can't put up much, but you really have to see this video of Bush and Blair singing "Endless Love"
Otherwise, I haven't been up to much. Fasted the first week of Ramadan, then gave up, my lamest attempt in four years. I'm in pretty bad shape right now, having jogged twice for a grand total of 7 km during my five months in Egypt. For the first time in my life, seriously at least, I was told that I have a pot belly. This while I was at the gym (well, a room with a few weights open two hours a day) in Abu Seer. I was lifting on some machine and a guy there pointed to the sit-ups board and suggested I go do a few, and called me "Abu Kirsh" (One with a / Father of a pot belly). I think he was exaggerating the matter, but still.
Otherwise, I haven't been up to much. Fasted the first week of Ramadan, then gave up, my lamest attempt in four years. I'm in pretty bad shape right now, having jogged twice for a grand total of 7 km during my five months in Egypt. For the first time in my life, seriously at least, I was told that I have a pot belly. This while I was at the gym (well, a room with a few weights open two hours a day) in Abu Seer. I was lifting on some machine and a guy there pointed to the sit-ups board and suggested I go do a few, and called me "Abu Kirsh" (One with a / Father of a pot belly). I think he was exaggerating the matter, but still.
Thursday, November 06, 2003
We found a new source of amusement the other day at work. The notoriously bad Egyptian Gazette , founded in 1880 as the Arab world's first newspaper, has a daily crossword puzzle. In keeping with the semi-literate nature of the paper, the crossword clues seem like incredibly hard The Nation-style puzzles with clever answers with double meanings, until you look at the solution the next day. Many of the answers have different numbers of letters than they were supposed to, and they just don't make any sense. For example, yesterday we were trying to figure out "A droopy young creature; frequently chased by the constabulary?" before finally giving up and looking at the answer, which was "flaccid".
As part of the deal I get living with a family in the rural outskirts of Cairo (the equivalent of $85 a month for a mid-sized apartment all to myself, including meals with the family, laundry, and concerned Egyptian parents), I'm supposed to be tutoring Ahmad and Olfat a little bit each day in English. This goes against my principle of avoiding English outside the workplace at all costs, but luckily the kids aren't too interested in making the effort to really learn English. I end up getting more Arabic than they get English from the lessons, both because their English levels are pretty low and I have to explain everything in Arabic, and because Ahmad in particular gets sidetracked a lot and talking about anything but English during the lesson. He's almost 17, and hoping to enter the College of Translation after two years and enter the tourist trade like his father, but isn't yet really pushing himself. Olfat's a little more promising (since girls are generally pressured to study and succeed in school a lot more than boys are) and is aiming to become a doctor, but still has minimal conversational ability. I want to start pushing Ahmad to work harder on his English, but that might involve me speaking more English with him, and he's so easy-going and content with his life I don't have the heart to pass on my fascist Swarthmorean study habits. The English books both have seem well over their heads, and I suspect the English teacher doesn't speak so well. While the uptown Cairene dialect is sprinkled with English (the most commonly known phrases besides the basic greetings are "businessman", "girlfriend", and "sexy film"), Abu Sir has mercifully been spared from this so far.
I've showed the family and neighbors my photo album from home--they're always amused to see how long my hair used to be, most enjoy seeing pictures of my family, and are taken aback by the ethnic diversity of America, but the most predictable reaction is confusion over a picture of a long-haired, blond Michael Wollenberg playing a guitar during Ultimate Spring Break:
Egyptian: Who's that?
Me: He's a friend of mine on the plate team.
Egyptian: He? You mean she?
Me: No, he's a boy.
Egyptian: But she has such long hair and effeminate features.
Me: That's just Wollen. Normal in America. It's a boy.
As part of the deal I get living with a family in the rural outskirts of Cairo (the equivalent of $85 a month for a mid-sized apartment all to myself, including meals with the family, laundry, and concerned Egyptian parents), I'm supposed to be tutoring Ahmad and Olfat a little bit each day in English. This goes against my principle of avoiding English outside the workplace at all costs, but luckily the kids aren't too interested in making the effort to really learn English. I end up getting more Arabic than they get English from the lessons, both because their English levels are pretty low and I have to explain everything in Arabic, and because Ahmad in particular gets sidetracked a lot and talking about anything but English during the lesson. He's almost 17, and hoping to enter the College of Translation after two years and enter the tourist trade like his father, but isn't yet really pushing himself. Olfat's a little more promising (since girls are generally pressured to study and succeed in school a lot more than boys are) and is aiming to become a doctor, but still has minimal conversational ability. I want to start pushing Ahmad to work harder on his English, but that might involve me speaking more English with him, and he's so easy-going and content with his life I don't have the heart to pass on my fascist Swarthmorean study habits. The English books both have seem well over their heads, and I suspect the English teacher doesn't speak so well. While the uptown Cairene dialect is sprinkled with English (the most commonly known phrases besides the basic greetings are "businessman", "girlfriend", and "sexy film"), Abu Sir has mercifully been spared from this so far.
I've showed the family and neighbors my photo album from home--they're always amused to see how long my hair used to be, most enjoy seeing pictures of my family, and are taken aback by the ethnic diversity of America, but the most predictable reaction is confusion over a picture of a long-haired, blond Michael Wollenberg playing a guitar during Ultimate Spring Break:
Egyptian: Who's that?
Me: He's a friend of mine on the plate team.
Egyptian: He? You mean she?
Me: No, he's a boy.
Egyptian: But she has such long hair and effeminate features.
Me: That's just Wollen. Normal in America. It's a boy.
