English

I’ve been thinking about language quite a bit recently—not so much Arabic this time, but English. Five members of the Anafora staff are getting ready to travel internationally in the upcoming months: Rowis is going to Calgary with IVEP (SALT’s sister program), and Martha, Tasony Aghave, Tasony Barbara, and Ragaa will all be in various parts of Sweden this summer and fall. So I’ve been spending some time each day with a few of them, doing one-on-one tutoring to help them build confidence in their language skills before they go. I love it. I love that I get to hang out in the kitchen with Tasony Aghave each evening, who I usually wouldn’t see because she’s working all day long. I love reading Narnia with Rowis, and brainstorming contemporary Canadian alternatives to phrases like “absolutely beastly” and “pray tell.” And this morning Tasony Barbara and I sat in wicker chairs in front of the library, talking about her family, her decision to become a nun, her work here as a seamstress. I love it.

I didn’t know that this was going to be part of my life here—I just arrived in September, got introduced to people as the English teacher, and that was that. It was a little terrifying at first. I’ve got zero experience in ESL and pretty lousy Arabic to boot, which made the prospect of explaining an indefinite article (there is no word “a” in Arabic) fairly daunting. Now, I teach two levels of English twice a week, as well as the daily tutoring and an English Conversations group most mornings. (Of course, with Anafora schedules being what they are, it’s a rare week when all of it happens.) It’s gotten easier and I take a lot of joy out of it, but there are still moments when I realize that I am really flying by the seat of my pants. How do you explain the verb “to be” in a language where it’s usually implied in the present tense (and doesn’t really fit the easy definition of a verb as an ‘action’ word)? Is it actually helpful to be teaching the alphabet for people who are mostly interested in conversational English? No? Then… how do we take notes? A couple weeks ago I mixed up the Arabic words for ‘minute’ and ‘hour’ in a time-themed lesson with Mervat and Rezka—a mistake that I had no way of correcting or even identifying myself, and which was only put right a couple days later when Rezka was talking with a bilingual staff member. And sometimes, shamefully, I forget I’m teaching English altogether. Yesterday Tasony Barbara was telling me about St. Barbara and St. Juliana, and I got so wrapped up in the story I forgot to help her fix her verb tenses.

Who thought I was qualified to do this stuff?

(I mean, full disclosure: I’m also a little tired.)

And then last week I had an epiphany. I walked into the church for evening prayers, and Mamdoh handed me the NIV Bible again so I could give the English when we got to the Scripture passage. I do the English reading a lot, I thought as I sat down. Am I being selfish? What if one of the other English speakers wants to do it instead?

Which is when I realized: I am one of four native English speakers at Anafora.

FOUR.

BUT FOUR.

Maybe it took me so long to realize this because, aside from Arabic, English is Anafora’s lingua franca. Tasony Theodora, when she takes reservations from German guests, or Spanish guests, or French guests or Swedish guests, communicates in English. Mama Helena, Finnish though she is, gives her icon lecture in English every morning. And I was sitting in the back of the Lyon-diploma classroom last week, pondering what an absurd world this is, where two French women can lecture in English to a room full of Egyptian priests. (With a translator, of course, but most of the students are fluent enough to ask their questions right back in English.) My mother tongue is everywhere here, and I don’t have to think twice when I use it—whereas Apolline, a French volunteer who’s here in Anastasia with me right now, told me the other day that her brain is so exhausted from trying to keep up in English that she barely has the energy to work on Arabic.

So, I guess all this is to say: I’ve been astonished and humbled all over again recently. I am continually in awe of the fact that so many people around me are bilingual, and have put in the hard work to master a new language. And it’s also a good reminder that even when I feel woefully unqualified, of course I should be helping my coworkers learn English. Anafora is about bringing what you have to the table, and sharing it. What I have is an innate grasp of this slippery, slithery, for-better-or-for-worse important language, and, for as questionable a job as I do of it sometimes, I’m happy to be able to give.

Field Trip

Confession: I have a less-than-stellar attitude about the pyramids.

I don’t mean this as a back-door hipster brag, i.e. the pyramids are so overrated  / not-the-real-Egypt / whatta tourist trap. The pyramids are very huge and very old, and decidedly NOT overrated. There is a reason they are famous.

But I still have a bad attitude, because going to the pyramids takes a lot of energy. You have to do all this coordination beforehand, like figure out how to get there and set up a tour guide, and decide ahead of time what you want to buy tickets to do (go inside? see the Solar Boat?) and then once you actually get there you walk around out in the sun a lot and I’m always exhausted by the end. Boil it down, and I’m just lazy. Too lazy for impressive ancient world heritage, it’s cool.

So when they announced last week that the Anafora staff would be going on an educational field trip to Giza and the Egyptian Museum, my first fleeting thought was do I have to go? The answer, of course, was no: it’s entirely voluntary. And I’ll be going to the pyramids again when Chelsea and Katie come. It might be nice to have a quiet day in the office and get a lot of work done.

But I went, and I’m glad I did. I woke up early on Tuesday morning and climbed onto a giant tour bus with half the Anafora staff (the other half had gone on Sunday). By 7am we were barreling down the Desert Road, and … dancing? Marianne blasted music over the speakers, all the women crammed into the aisle in the center of bus, and we just went for it. There was clapping and cheering and ululating, and several call-and-response wedding chants with the words adjusted to celebrate Anafora, Bishop Thomas, the pyramids, et cetera. The girls tried to teach Shea and me how to dance. Shea and I tried to show them what American dancing looks like, and learned that American dancing takes up a lot of space—or at least, more than a crush of women in a bus aisle will allow. We’d hit a speed bump and everybody would go tumbling into each other’s arms and laps. It was joy.

Dancing on the bus set the tone for the day. It was my favorite pyramid outing by far—we walked around hand-in-hand, chatted, laughed, sang some more. We took So. Many. Pictures. (Seriously, Facebook is awash.) Everyone was thrilled to see the pyramids, to climb up on the pyramids, to take pictures ‘holding’ the pyramids, to buy kitschy souvenirs. It was a personal mercy, too, to feel inconspicuous in a tourist setting. Nobody will look at you twice when you’re arm-in-arm with Egyptian women. I never imagined I would feel so at home in a tour group of forty-five people.

And it was a different experience to be visiting Pharaonic sites with Egyptians. Most of my coworkers had never been to the pyramids before. “I’ve seen them on television,” they told me over and over again. But this was their first time seeing it in the flesh. I’d be hesitant to make a sweeping claim about why that is. I don’t know that it’s necessarily too expensive—it’s 2 pounds for admission if you’re Egyptian—but it’s possible that there’s a lack of opportunity. Most people at Anafora are from Qosseya, after all, and haven’t spent much time in Cairo or Giza. And there’s not really a field-trip mentality in the Egyptian education system, from what I can tell. It made me a little abashed, actually. Abouna Sherobim told me he hadn’t been to the pyramids since 1996, and here I was on my third trip in seven months. It certainly made me rethink my drag-your-feet attitude about it.

“Well,” said Bishop Thomas in the morning meeting after we got back, “and what did you learn?” We went around the room and everyone related something that had struck them: how the Solar Boat was held together without a single nail; the marvel of getting all that stone down the river from Aswan; how vibrant the colors of the hieroglyphs still were after all these years; the way that the sculptors portrayed men and women as equally strong; the quality of work that has held up for thousands of years. There is a real sense of ownership in all this. I don’t know how strong it was before, but since going to the pyramids I am picking up on a sense of true pride in my coworkers, that they can lay claim to this heritage; that people flock from all over the world to marvel at the ingenuity of their forefathers.

It wasn’t a very educational trip for me in the traditional sense; the tour guide spoke Arabic and so I understood snatches and phrases but wasn’t able to follow along perfectly. (Caught a lot of numbers. It took them 25 years to do something, and something somewhere is 46 meters long. It was 3000 years before something else happened. There were 150 somethings inside the pyramid.) But I did get off the bus with a deeper appreciation for my community. I’ve seen Anafora at work, but this was my first real chance to see Anafora at play outside the gates. So many of the girls (who have a real nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic that totally puts me to shame) were positively radiant with the chance to unwind a little. They wore their hair down and put on makeup and lost whatever residual shyness they still might have around me and Shea. It was exactly what you would hope for in a field trip: we came back renewed, and appreciative, and empowered.

Already Not Yet

Happy Easter!

Or, you know, Palm Sunday.

I’m in the middle of a very holy week and a half but I’m not really sure what goes where and when to observe what. On Friday I woke up early to go to Anafora’s holy unction service, in which we pray for the sick and prepare our hearts for Holy Week. This morning I ducked into the Mogamma in Tahrir Square to apply for re-entry on my visa, and then walked over the bridge to Zamalek to sing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” at the Anglican Cathedral. Tomorrow in Anafora we will go through the story of the fig tree. And after that the woman washing Jesus’ feet in Simon’s house, and on and on until next Sunday—Coptic Easter.

It’s pretty easy to flip this into a metaphor for doing life here, caught between the Coptic Orthodoxy of my community, and my own Protestant roots. And I do feel a little torn, or at least woozy. Apolline, the French intern working with me in Anastasia right now, termed it “Christian jet lag,” and it surely does feel like it.

Still, I’m trying to resist the impulse to see these two calendars as inherently at odds with each other. Today, April 5, is Palm Sunday, and Resurrection Sunday. I’m reading through both stories together and trying to make sense of it all. The story of Jesus coming into Jerusalem feels almost like the nativity all over again. Hope. Expectation. The promise of deliverance. And then the Resurrection is the fulfillment of these things. But couched between those two Sundays you have the Passion, which is honestly the piece that feels most real to me most of the time. There’s Garissa. And I watched an ambulance, sirens blaring, sit in gridlock traffic today. Sometimes it just doesn’t feel like promise or fulfillment.

I don’t remember much from my freshman survey Bible courses, but I do know we talked quite a bit about the already-not-yet. The kingdom of God is at hand; the kingdom of God is here. Christ has already redeemed us; Christ has not yet made all things new. This is the tension, and it’s been stretched out over two thousand Palm Sundays and Easter mornings now—nearly four thousand, if you’re counting both Eastern and Western calendars. And already-not-yet is what life here (everywhere?) really feels like at the end of the day. There is hardship, and there is hope, and they don’t always happen in the order you’d expect. But every day there’s the witness of Christ on the cross, and every day there’s the comfort of the empty tomb.

See, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt. And he is risen indeed.