Day 11

January 30th

Today I heard the internet went out across the entire country of Egypt. At first I thought it was just a problem in Zamalek, as the internet has never been that good here. However, when I got to school I found out that all of Egypt was affected. It’s crazy but it’s Egypt. It comes with the territory.
Orientation started today. For us, this consisted of going to a lecture on academic life at AUC. I learned only one thing during this orientation: why Notre Dame is awesome. AUC is poorly managed and doesn’t run smoothly. The Academic Advisor then proceeded to give us a lecture about how beautiful Egypt is, and how everything is going to work out, saying that there is no need to stress and we will get into all our classes. We just need to relax and know that things will work out. Note that she didn’t say this anywhere as concisely as I just did, instead she mixed this message in with a story about a wedding and some other AUC professors that made zero sense. She said that when she gets problems she doesn’t get stressed and try to fix them she just waits until tomorrow and hopes that it will be fixed then and if not tomorrow then perhaps the next day. If it never gets fixed, oh well, that is life. She said this is the culture in Egypt.
Well, to some degree I agree with her that stressing out too much doesn’t do anything to solve the problem, I also think that this is the reason there are so many problems in Egypt. Just hoping the problem works itself out doesn’t mean the problem will solve itself. People need to get a little stressed, a little annoyed, and then do something to solve the problem. You cannot just put off until tomorrow what needs to be fixed today. Problem solving requires people being active not passive.
Now let me relate this to why Notre Dame is awesome. A lady like this wouldn’t last 10 minutes at Notre Dame. She wouldn’t be hired for a secretary and she certainty wouldn’t be the head Academic Advisor. At Notre Dame, people take their jobs seriously and they want to do a good job. As of today about 75% of the people had registered for some classes. She considered this a great success. This is not a great success. It might be some of that East-Coast, American mentality that has been drilled into me, but I expect people to do their jobs and to do their jobs to the best of their ability. I don’t accept half-ass work from myself and I don’t think it should be approved of elsewhere. Americans might work too much but there is a reason that America is the country it is.
Egypt has an illiteracy rate of 45%. This is not a problem that can be solved by waiting for tomorrow.