Day 26

February 14th,

I have grown to love Thursdays. Not only do the represent the end of the week and the start of the three day weekend but I also only have class for 2 hours. This gave me the opportunity to finally search for internships in Cairo. I had heard that AUC offered internships or volunteer opportunities through the Desert Development Center. So after my first class I set about on a mission to find this place.
Nothing in Cairo is clearly labeled. If people thought finding addresses in America was bad, they haven't seen anything until they came to Cairo. No one uses addresses, instead they use relative locations, like next to the shesha store or in my case above the garage. I honestly have no idea how delivery or the mail system works in this country.
So I set about looking for the Desert Development Center, knowing that it was on Youseff el-gendi street across from the AUC library entrance and above a garage. I found the garage and found the stairs next to it going up. I started going up and could not find it. However, what I did find was how the rest of Egypt lives outside of AUC. Nobody on these floors spoke English, and this office building was not what I would say most people conceptualize an office building to look like. Instead it looked more like the building in the first Matrix where Morpheus gets captured. Everything was dirty, covered in trash, dark, and had a certain reek to it. It looked like it was built rather quickly in the 20's and never cleaned or renovated since then. However, there were legimate companies who had their offices in this decaying building, including the Arab Foreign Trade Company. The real threat still waited when I got to look out of the windows on the stairs onto the large open- air-shaft that is in the middle of most buildings. This place was absolutely disgusting. It looked into the adjacent building's staircases, which from the looks of it were never completed. Instead the entire staircase was just filled with trash. You would look down the shaft and every possible horizontal surface had trash on it. I think people just throw stuff out the window and if they can't see it then its dealt with. The building looked like an apartment building, but I hope to God that no one has to live to conditions like that. This experience also made me realize how the environmental movement that is picking up steam in America doesn't stand a chance to make an effect on the world as a whole, unless developing countries are included in this changes.
After going back down the stairs and into the building next to the garage I was able to find the Desert Development Center. Let me tell you, as soon as I told them my last name is Water, they said that I had to work here and that a summer job would be quite easy to come by. Let me explain what exactly the Desert Development Center is.
97% of the 80 million people of Egypt live on just 3% of the land. This Land is the Nile River Valley, where the land is fertile enough to farm. Agriculture accounts for 60% of the Egyptian GDP, but as of late the booming population is putting a strain on the food supply and I believe know that Egypt actually imports more food than it exports. At the same time 80 million people are putting an extreme strain on the land itself and many have become dependent on the socialized nature of government hand-outs.
One prominent solution to this food problem is de-desertification projects, or plans to develop the desert into actual arable land. The AUC department is one of the fore-runners in this approach, trying to research and train ways to use the desert water efficiently and effectively to produce sustainable development. This is so important because it deals with harnessing the most important liquid in the middle-east: Water. Water is critical to survival and critical to producing food. Food and Water issues have been pin-pointed as a major cause of many of the conflicts in the middle-east and Africa including Darfur and Israel. A country that can't eat or drink is a country in a deep crisis. So the AUC project could potentially solve all problems in the middle-east if it can develop a way to provide food and water to lacking countries.
In other news I also got an arabic tutor for 2 hours a week to help me with my colloquial. Once I start this, I will be taking 17 hours of Arabic alone.