Stabl Antar, Glass Blowing, and Arab League

It’s been about a week since the last time I blogged, but it’s been a more relaxing week then the first few. We did our service learning, had our first test, had a dialogue on Monday night, and watched the Champions League Championship, Manchester United vs. Chelsea at one of the Café’s on Zamalyk. For the service learning, I helped with the glass blowing workshop. There were about 12 of us who went, and we interviewed the workers about the community and their company. I specifically worked on taking pictures of their products and creating a type of inventory system. This was tough, because most of their products are made upon request, and so there wasn’t more than a couple of each item. We ended up splitting them up into four groups to categorize their products on the website: table sets, such as coffee, tea, and wine sets, ornaments, perfume bottles, and the manager’s specialty, animals. He made all kinds of glass animals from camels to crocidiles. These animals could be shaped into either ornaments or perfume bottles.

The surrounding area of Stabl Antar, where the glass blowing workshop is located, is a huge culture shock when we drove through. The community was even worse off than Ismalya. There was no running water in the village, and because of the food shortage here in Egypt, there were a ton of people in breadlines. I was really looking forward to going to the community, because Dennis encouraged that we talk to the kids in the surrounding area and to even play soccer with them. He had said that it would definitely make an impact on them and that it would be good to do. Unfortunately, after our first visit, when we were talking to some of the younger kids, the parents complained to the glass blowing factory and said that they didn’t want us talking or playing with the kids. It was really tough because I know it would make the kids day if we played with them, but because the parents didn’t understand why a group like us was in their community, they wouldn’t allow it. We were watching the kids playing soccer right outside for a while, and they kept signaling us out to join them and play. It was torture saying that we couldn’t even though we were just waiting around watching them for some of the time.

One thing that I couldn’t get over from the service project was how widespread brands like coca-cola are. I was mentioning how this community had no running water, and there were lines for food. There is garbage everywhere, along the sides of the roads, and in the middle of the roads (and by "roads" I mean dirt paths that are wide enough for a car, but there are so many bumps that it took us close to 30 minutes to go one mile, we could have walked through the village faster). With all these terrible conditions of the community, there is still coca-cola being sold at every stand or market. Even when we were helping out the glass blowing workshop, they offered us a drink, coca-cola. It was really strange both in Stabl Antar and Ismalya last week that they would have a brand name like coca-cola considering the condition of the communities.

Monday evening, we had our first dialogue. We met with a bunch of Egyptian students, about are age, and broke up into groups and had conversations with them. It was really cool to meet people who were the same age and were interested in talking to us. We talked about a bunch of topics, including the stereotypical images of Egyptians that Americans have and vice versa. By the end of the dialogue, we got a lot of the student’s emails and phone numbers and we’ve met up with them a couple nights during the past week.

One time we met up with the students from the dialogue was for the Champions League game. We went to a café that was down the street from us, Café Versailles. I always knew and assumed that soccer was absolutely huge over in Africa, but I never imagined it was this big. We’ve been to Versailles before, and there are usually around 25-50 people between downstairs and upstairs at the café. During the game, there were about 300 people there, crammed into the café. There wasn’t a single table open by the time halftime rolled around, and they started just setting up extra chairs in the middle of the café instead of putting them at a table. Not to mention the atmosphere, it was one of the best games of soccer I’ve ever seen. Not only was the worst player on either team 100 times better than the best player in the MLS (other than Beckham), but it was an awesome game to see. Regulation ended at a 1-1 tie, and overtime was scoreless, so they went into penalty kicks. They ended up tied after the first 5 rounds of pk’s so they had to go shot for shot until finally Manchester United won on the 7th round of shooting.

Yesterday, we had our last day of classes for the week (remember Friday is their weekend here). After class we went to both the US Embassy as well as the Arab League. The US Embassy didn’t seem anything special to me, but the Arab League was awesome. We sat down and met with the leader of the Arab League for two hours where we could just ask him any questions we had. To make a comparison, the Arab League is like the UN of Arabic speaking countries. We asked him things from all different topics, and at the end, he brought us into the main hall where they held all of their major meetings. It was an awesome experience considering how important he was to Egypt and the other Arabic countries.