Another bomb in Cairo

Less than a week after the Khan bombing, a mentally-ill Egyptian man who had spent time in a psychiatric hospital stabbed an American teacher there and then, today, a firebomb was thrown into a metro station. Thankfully no one was hurt in the attempted metro bombing because the device failed to explode. The motivations are unclear, but it's strange to me since it's not as though they were targeting foreigners. As is clear from the stares I get when I ride the metro, that mode of transportation is usually the domain of Egyptian commuters, not tourists. Halmiyat al-Zaytoon, where the bomb was thrown, was one of the stops along my ride to Ain Shams when I taught English there.
As for me, I'm doing fine. I didn't venture out today until later to meet Erin for dinner in Zamalek. We both worked diligently on reaction papers for law class beforehand to make ourselves feel as though Saturday wouldn't be for naught. When I did set off into the night, it was raining again and not just a mist or a light rain, but real rain. It was surreal to be sitting in traffic in Tahrir Square with raindrops on the windows. Aside from schoolwork, I did a bit of looking into where I might travel over spring break. Tunisia and Lebanon are both contenders at this point. In the nearer future, I'm joining my fellow ambassadorial scholars for a Rotary event on Tuesday. Dinner and a lecture by a Rotarian who is a doctor on one of the riverboats in Zamalek on the Nile.

News:
Foreign Policy article on the release of Ayman Nour
Secretary of State Clinton on her way to the Middle East
Netanyahu fails to persuade Livni to join coalition government in Israel

Wadi al-Hitan

Thoroughly impressed with myself, I am also infinitely sleepy for having started my morning at 6:45. Yes, that's ante meridian, believe it or not. I joined my friend Edward, a Middle East Studies grad student, and a busload of other AUC students, mostly Egyptian, for a trip to Wadi al-Hitan in Egypt's Western Desert. Along the way to the UNESCO world heritage site, we passed Lake Qarun in Fayoum, the closest oasis to Cairo. Perhaps because I didn't really look at the route, I hadn't expected a huge expanse of water complete with boats and wind-whipped waves to suddenly appear in the middle of the desert, but it's by far one of the coolest things I've seen in Egypt. Wadi al-Hitan (lit. "The Valley of the Whales") itself was pretty fascinating for its scientific value. We saw whale fossils that were millions of years old and played an important role in piecing a transcontinental puzzle about the development of marine mammals over time. A German-Egyptian biology professor from AUC brought the story and the scenery to her life with her effervescent enthusiasm and descriptions and explanations. The professor and the others that Edward and I met made the day as much as the trip as much as the breathtaking scenery. It was a fun departure from the norm that hearkened back to the days of biology field trips. It was good to work some geology, evolutionary biology, and pre-history into my other wise social sciences-dominated brain.

News:
Palestinian national unity talks begin in Cairo
Egypt rejects US labeling of Egyptian human rights records as poor
Egyptian, foreign activists continue Gaza solidarity march despite crackdown

Passport Pickup & Conspiracy Theories

Though it's often not the case, I find sometimes that I am growing impervious to the many pitfalls of bureaucracy at AUC or in Egypt. In those magical moments either a spontaneously kind action on the part of someone else or steely resolve on my part yields the desired result and I feel as though I've won a little victory. My switching courses and joining the Master's and my fellowship application confirmation are all part of the former category whereas the retrieval of my passport which has been sitting, with my student visa inside, was of the latter variety.
I'll know about the fellowships at the end of April and my visa, inside the passport that took six phone numbers and four trips up four flights of fire escape stairs to reacquire, lasts until the end of June. Lots of waiting. I don't know my summer schedule yet, but I'll inevitably be in the States at some point to give Rotary speeches and to see family and friends.

The motivations behind last Sunday's bombing are no clearer even with arrests made. Egyptians on the street are, as they do with many things, quick to blame it on the Israelis. Yes, there are huge numbers of Egyptians who wholeheartedly and sincerely believe things like this are the work of the Mossad. I may've mentioned before that I was told at a Rotary function that "it certainly wasn't Arabs behind 9/11" and the shopkeeper at the corner market across from AUC's Greek Campus told a friend that the bombing in the Khan al-Khalili "couldn't have been Egyptians. There are no terrorists in Egypt." Who then? The Israelis. Riiiight. It is this genre of regressive ideas that keeps many Egyptians from approaching regional conflict in a clear-headed way. Given the Lavon Affair, I can see where it might come from, but the sort of conspiracy-theory nonsense that runs rampant in Cairo certainly is way off base. It makes it easier to have an "Other" to blame. Americans are guilty of it too; we're big fans of conspiracy theories ourselves. Think back to the presidential campaigns and those who were alleging that Obama was a Muslim hellbent on Islamizing America. May we all be just a bit more rational and clear-headed.

News and links:
"Mubarak flexes his muscles" in Foreign Policy
"The Fear Factor in Travel" at HuffPost
Egyptian human rights NGO criticizes public prosecution office

Another Day in Cairo

Today was my first day of Migration and Development. I met both the regular professor and a anthropology/human rights/gender studies professor who will be teaching next weeks class on human rights. It seems as those it'll be a useful course and, even better, I now essentially have a four-day weekend. I have class Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Before you get too jealous, I'm volunteering and reading and writing for these classes on those other days. After class, I went out with some classmates for Moroccan food in a restaurant on one of the Zamalek riverboats on the Nile. We discussed last week's comparative migration law class since one among our ranks had missed. Beyond that, there's nothing particularly exceptional to mention, so I'll cut straight to the news.

News:
Muslim Brotherhood condemns bomb attack
Hizbullah condemns bomb attack
"The fixer in the shadows..." from The Daily Telegraph

Cairene Rain

Today it's raining out. This is only the second or third time such a thing has happened since I've been here. Apparently, people were even pulling over to the sides of the road to let the light shower subside.

I haven't ventured out much today, preferring to work on fellowship applications and reaction papers from the comfort of my own apartment. It wasn't the violence that happened yesterday that kept me inside in and of itself, but when I did go out, I felt warier than usual. It's so tragic that the murderous ignorance of a single person or a group of people can result in the arbitrary death of another human being. No ideology or personal grievance is worth more than than the life of any individual.

I mentioned a documentary in my last entry. Please check out the clip below if you have time. Maquilapolis is about the women who work in maquiladoras just inside the Mexican border, the exploitation they face, and how they go about seeking justice.

News:
Al-Jazeera report on market bomb (video clip)
Sudan's Bashir leaves Cairo today after talks with Mubarak; arrest warrant still in question
Cairo University students protest Interior Ministry security presence on campuses
Egypt takes small step in direction of religious freedom

Note: The whereabouts of imprisoned Palestine activist and blogger Diaa Gad are still unknown. For more information check out Amnesty International's article and the appeal for action at Prisoners for Gaza blog.

Explosion at the Khan

I'd intended to talk about a documentary I saw at the New Campus today, my program-switching, and the English class I taught tonight in Hay al-Asher, but I'm sure the majority of the readership will be more concerned upon hearing news that there was a fatal explosion in Cairo tonight. Everyone I know here in Cairo is safe and sound. Grenades were thrown into a crowd outside a café at the Khan al-Khalili and at least one French tourist was killed. The Khan is where I did my Christmas shopping and where I was the week before last with my friend Alia. It's obviously more than a little unsettling, but I'm sure the security presence has been beefed up.

News reports on the explosion:
from Huffington Post
from Le Monde (in French)
from Euronews

Church, a House Party, and Research Ethics

Hours ago, I had all kinds of delightfully witty and insightful things to put in this entry. Unfortunately, I've filled the intervening time with reading about research ethics, writing a reaction paper, and trying to finesse the germ of what will eventually be my Master's thesis into something submittable to my Methods professor. It follows thus that my brain is mostly of a mushy consistency at this point. Nevertheless, I'll recap the recent goings-on:
I went to Ma'adi Community Church with a relative of my Egyptian friend, Maged's, and his American wife. My friend Phil came with me. It reminded me of many a community church back in the States, except that we were in the middle of a Cairo suburb, no doubt in some proximity to where Jesus Himself actually walked while He was in exile, and surrounded by the Egyptian police (as many churches in Egypt are, for the protection of those within). Graham Kendrick, author of the song "Shine, Jesus, Shine" is currently a guest of the church and led worship which was all fine and well except that the service turned out to be exclusively a worship service with no sermon. It was strange to take everything in–trying to reconcile what seemed and felt like a distinctly American phenomenon in the midst of Egypt which, despite its emulation (or in fact caricaturization) of American consumerism and its adoration of various of our pop stars, is a world apart. The lack of Egyptians was conspicuous and felt wrong somehow. There are other evangelical churches with services in Arabic, though, which have a preponderance of Egyptian attendees. They are by and large converts from the more liturgical and traditional Coptic churches; the fact that conversion to Christianity from Islam is punishable by death in this country is something of a deterrent for Muslims.
Afterward, Phil and I went to a party there in Ma'adi at the apartment of a Somali-Norwegian friend of his. Several other Norwegians, a Swede, some Americans including a girl from Puerto Rico, many Egyptians, a German, and a Congolose guy made for excellent conversation. Many of us are AUC students and we ended up discussing aspects of our various graduate programs and how they fit with one another (I'm not even joking, we're huge nerds). Religion, African politics, gender, and a host of other issues kept us around the table chatting until well past 3 AM when the downtowners among us caught a cab back together. At one point, I met an Egyptian whose paternal grandfather was a Czech Jew who'd converted to Islam in order to marry an Egyptian Muslim woman, changed his named, and moved to Egypt. This same Egyptian's maternal grandma is Italian. It's stories like this that make me love studying migration. The converging of diverse cultures and the interplay between them is fascinating.
For lunch today, I went with friends to the French culture institute for galettes. I got to use my French with the waiters, but was reminded that I was in Egypt by the salade verte which was, in fact, shredded iceberg lettuce, and the fact that the establishment had no change when we were trying to pay our bill. Ma3lesh! I caught a cabride to Zamalek, did some grocery-shopping, lugged a few bags and a box of 12 1.5-liter bottles of water up to the fourth floor (by American reckoning) of my apartment building and into my apartment and then realized I had reading to do, a reaction paper on that reading, and a preliminary outline of my thesis proposal to turn in all by tonight. And so it was that I spent hours reading and writing about research ethics, which was ok by me because its actually quite an interesting topic. Tomorrow we have a Saturday class to replace our Monday class because our professor will be traveling elsewhere in the region.

News:
Sec. of State Clinton to come to Cairo in March for Gaza-rebuilding donors conference
Tourism in Egypt slumps compared to last year, global economic downturn blamed
Still no word on the whereabouts of Diaa Gad