Because I'm Also Just That Cool

Cairo, Egypt

My brother's not the only one who made an appearance on national television recently! One of our teachers stopped me in the hallway today to say that she'd seen me on Egypt's Channel One. Funny story, that, actually....

We CASA students were all sitting in the "press room," translating a couple press releases but mostly on hand to translate for journalists as needed. Only one journalist actually requested the assistance of two of us, so Kirsten and I volunteered. The TV journalist took us out into the lobby and took our names. Kirsten asked who we would be translating for, and he said, "Maryah first, then Kirsten." Thinking he hadn't heard us clearly, she asked again, and he said, "Maryah first, then Kirsten." We looked at each other. "Who are we translating for?" we asked, and he said, "Maryah first, then Kirsten." We were starting to get the picture, so I asked him in Arabic who he wanted us to translate for, and he said, "Oh, you speak Arabic? Can we do this in Arabic?" And then we were pretty sure we knew what was going on, and I asked him in Arabic if we were translating, or what? He looked confused and said, "Translating? No. I want to interview you. Can I interview you in Arabic?" And so he did ... me first, then Kirsten!

Sadly, her interview did not air on Channel 1. I'm still trying to get a copy of mine.

We also made it onto CNN, apparently, but typically enough, even this hopeful event got linked to terrorism. I'm told the story said something to the effect that, despite recent threats on Egyptian Coptic Christians by Al Qaeda, the big interfaith Cairo Meeting took place anyway. I looked for it on cnn.com, but came up empty.

Volunteerism in Egypt

Cairo, Egypt

Wael (in the white suit), the other organizers (front row) and some of the many volunteers

Wael told us today that the Egyptian volunteers of the Cairo Meeting have been calling him all weekend to say that they don't want the spirit of the meeting to end. They got such a charge out of volunteering, they said, that they couldn't wait to do it again! They'd never done something like it before, never had such an experience, and they didn't want to wait for next year's Cairo Meeting to get together again.

Wael had been disappointed at what he saw as a lack of organization in the event, a lack of coordination and communication, and a general lack of professionalism. We saw quite the opposite, and Alex really captured it when she started talking about the leadership she saw displayed over the weekend.

In Europe and the United States, we take values of civic responsibility, volunteerism and leadership for granted. They're taught to us from the first grade, and throughout our school years we're pushed by our parents and teachers into all sorts of opportunities for leadership and civic engagement. By the time we get to university, they're skills we take for granted.

In Egypt, on the other hand, most students reach university without ever engaging in volunteer opportunities, let alone leadership opportunities. In Alex's estimation and mine, the Egyptian volunteers stepped up to the challenge very quickly and efficiently, considering how inexperienced they are! Even better, they loved the experience, and they want to do it again!

I was reminded of Questscope and Ruwwad in Jordan, and the success they've had at encouraging civic engagement among refugee populations in Jordan, of 7iber, which has been hugely successful at mobilizing Jordan's blogosphere to civic involvement on a wide range of issues. It makes me even more disappointed not to have gotten the position I interviewed for at Ashoka Arab World, which is encouraging volunteerism in Egypt and other Arab countries.

The Most Amazing Volunteer

at the Cairo Meeting
Cairo, Egypt

As I think back on the events of the Cairo Meeting, there's one man who stands out as the hero of the affair, even moreso because everything he did was as a volunteer, a concept quite new to Egyptian culture.

The Cairo Meeting included volunteers and participants from Egypt, Italy, Belgium, the United States, and surely other countries I don't know about.  Most of the Italians didn't speak Arabic - or, apparently, English - and organizers didn't have high expectations of the Egyptians speaking English, let alone Italian. So a great deal of translation was needed. That was why CASA students like me were brought in, actually, although in the end we didn't translate  much of anything because none of us speak Italian.

VP of the Cairo Meeting Wael Farouq, Pres. Guanieri of the Rimini Meeting, and the amazing interpreter!

But the interpreter above was amazing. In this speech, Pres. Guanieri spoke for a good five minutes under the assumption that her speech was being simultaneously translated, until the translator was found for an impressive feat of consecutive translation on stage. More amazing was the next day, though, when the astrophysicist who was scheduled to give a presentation on the Milky Way in English decided at the last minute to give his presentation in Italian. Suddenly our friend the interpreter was needed on stage to translate about astrophysics and philosophy, with no preparation of the material, study of the vocabulary, or warning about the content of the speeches. And he was flawless. Not only did he translate, but he did so in incredibly elegant fus7a Arabic, the kind no one speaks as a native language, and few contemporary Arabs even master as a language of rhetoric. It was amazing. And he did it as a volunteer, just like the rest of us.

Check out more photos here and here, and on the Rimini Meeting's Flickr feed.

the upcoming Cairo Meeting

Beauty as a Space for Dialogue

Cairo, Egypt

Have you ever heard of the Rimini Meeting? I hadn't. It's a pretty cool event, though. Every year hundreds of thousands of volunteers and students descend on the Italian city of Rimini for some inter-cultural inter-faith fun. There are famous speakers like the Dalai Llama, Mother Theresa, Pope John Paul II, and Cardinal Ratzinger before he was Pope Benedict XVI, as well as politicians, intellectuals, humanitarians, artists and others. They also stage sporting events, concerts and art exhibitions.

So, our teacher Wael attended the Rimini Meeting while he was studying abroad in Italy. This year, he's decided to stage his own version of the same, and he's asked for volunteers from the CASA program to assist at his Cairo Meeting. It will be smaller, naturally, this being the first Cairo Meeting, but even still Wael is expecting the biggest gathering to ever take place in Cairo without the presence of Suzanne or Pres. Husni Mubarak … or Pres. Obama. Just at the preliminary volunteer orientation alone we had over 200 people. There will be a concert, speakers, an art exhibition, and opportunities for journalistic exchange.

The meeting is next weekend, and I've volunteered as one of the interpreters for the meetings between Italian and Egyptian journalists. In the meantime, we've been asked to do the translation of several articles to be published among the conference papers, with our bylines as translators. Rachel and I are working on Wael's editorial on the struggle of Arab intellectuals to balance Islam and modernity, and it's not easy! Give me newspaper articles to translate any day … straightforward and plainly written, even if perhaps not as deep.

Stay tuned for dispatches from the conference itself next weekend!