End of year Khan shopping / wander

We wanted to take a final wander through Islamic Cairo before flying home for the summer to buy a few things and to browse the stores, so today we headed off on the Metro.  Jona_Cairo joined us as he too fancied an explore.

We did the usual wander from Attaba up Mohamed Ali street and then across towards Bab Zuweila, but just before reaching Bab Zuweila we that about a dozen shop fronts had turned into vending points for the Ramadan lanterns that will be displayed in most shops and homes in about two months time. We tried to capture them on the small camera, but some of the photos don't really do them justice.

The sun was beating down and on the way back we stopped in Gad for a drink and air con. Just before getting on the Metro again I found a few books; a Tintin in Arabic (one that I remember reading over and over as a kid) and then two Ladybird books (one about the earth / underground and the other about camping - which I also remember reading avidly before going on Woodcraft camps!)

Making A Difference

We don't really post about work, but I thought I'd make a little exception to put up a few things I have been working on this term. When I took on my role for this year I was most interested in the CAS/IB aspect of it, but I have really "got into" the charity work. I like making real links for charities and trying to find ways of helping them and showing our students how they can help.

At the start of Term 3 we had a clothes drive (very American I know!). Scotty and I went to donate all of the boys and adult clothes to The Recycling School. A few weeks after that visit I arranged for the young children from an orphanage we have been working with the last few years to come and visit us for a play date. At the end of the visit we donated to them all of the toys and girls clothes we recieved.

A new link that has been set up is with a school on the outskirts of Cairo in a very poor area. The school is for the children of the workers at a military factory and the school is located, along with run down concrete housing blocks, withint the military factory compound. Money raised at the end of Term 2 went towards re-paving their outside yards (which was previously a dust bowl) and money raised this term has been going towards finishing the outside area. I then spent two days with a group of 20 CAS students painting murals on the walls of the yard.

On the first day of painting this girl (who goes to the school) walked by with a huge smile on her face. We invitied her back the next day to help with the painting.

The finished mural along the main wall. Housing overlooks the school-yard.

The finished "free" mural that divides the main yard and football area from the basketball court area.

An idea that was taking its time to come together and final is happening is selling charity t-shirts. We held a competition to design a t-shirt that in some way fitted the theme of working together to make Egypt better. Two boys came up with the idea of a design showing people cleaning the streets and painting them (which is what all the young people in Egypt have been doing). The Head of Art and good friend, Lucy, then translated these ideas into a final design. My original idea was to sell to Secondary students for a marked up price with all profits going to charity, but then I managed to get Primary involved too. They sold 15 times as many t-shirts as we did which meant that we made a really decent amount of money for the military factory school project. Nothing runs smoothly of course which meant I spent about a week getting letters sent out and then another week tallying orders. Things are never plain sailing and although "all" the t-shirts arrived by the deadline it seems that this wasn't actually "all" the t-shirts. A day then spent trying to work out what did and didn't arrive, but at the end of the day nearly everyone has their t-shirt and the orders keep pouring in for the great design.

And a final idea that got off the ground in the closing weeks of term was to ask for donations towards Ramadan boxes. Money will go towards buying boxes of food that will be given to the families of the children who go to the military factory school. This is a tradition during ramadan to give donations and the boxes will include rice, oil, beans, sugar, apricots and lots of other ramadan staples. The idea that our students came up with was to also include some school supplies in each box - so that the children are ready for school after Eid.

I'm really pleased with what we have managed to achieve considering all the disruption and difficult nature of school at the moment. It has been hard work and stressful, but I think it has been worthwhile for us, and really worthwhile for the help we have given to the groups we are working with.

Lunar Eclipse

Well last night there was a lunar eclipse! The P's had given us a "head's up" a few days before that something was going to happen, but we honestly weren't sure (didn't have much success initially trying to google to find when it would take place in Egypt as no newspapers ran the story until the day before - typical Egypt - so I tried looking at some complicated maps and charts.....). Finally we located something and figured out that about an hour after sunset it would kick off. Just before dinner the sun was setting but we weren't sure where the moon would be in the sky so we had a quick look out of the windows which cover about 260degrees. No sign.....hmmm maybe we'll have to go out to the wasteland by the satelites to see it. After dinner though we spied the moon - great uninterrupted view from the balcony off the living room. Brilliant! So we set up our camera for some still pics (jobby fixed to the deck chair) and then the video camera too (tripod in the flowers).

Our set-up

It took a while to get the cameras set up and then we were taking photos every 30 seconds to try and get a time lapse thing going on. This was sort of the conversation at one point during the set up....

Allstar 1: "Look. This really isn't working. The stand keeps slipping"
Allstar 2: "Really? Oh" :(
Allstar 1: "Yes. Look I try and line the moon up in the middle of the screen, but then it slips and it's off into the corner"
Allstar 2: "Right. Well the moon is moving. It's rising in the sky."
Allstar 1: "Oh"

Problem solved (we just had to move the camera every now and then to reposition that darn moon that wouldn't keep still!) We took loads of photos as the earth moved in front of the moon. The light off the moon was really bright, so it was hard to see the rest of its outline at times.Once it got to the beading stage and the last of the try light disapeared it was easier to see the moon again which now was a kind of brown.  At this point we saw that the colour of the moon wasn't too far off the colour it can be when the sunlight on it is coming through the heavy pollution of Cairo!

Just 20 minutes later though and we start getting some real "red moon" shots like this one:

Creating the time-lapse video has taken ages.  Each image needed to be cropped and the moon centred on the screen so that when all the shots were put together (and there were 140 of them) they would flow easily between each other and not have the moon jumping around the frame.  There are some exposure jitters as the eclipse approached totality, but overall I don't think it's a bad first attempt at doing this sort of thing.

Brewing "House Elfish"

We were inspired in the summer when Laura and Aaron took us to Brew It Up - a bar which has its own brewery which is used for the beers sold behind the bar and hired out to individuals who want to brew their own. So there are lots of beers on tap which the brewery have brewed themselves and then in the fermenters are beers that people have come in themselves to brew!

The first friend to take advantage of Brew It Up at the Grand Malt was Dave last year who bought a cider kit along. Now we are onto our first Brew It Up beer for Rob. Rob wasn't able to join us for the brewing, so we documented the afternoon with photos. The beer was a dark ale and we've named it House Elfish because of his love of Dobby the house elf in Harry Potter.

Getting Ready

Heating a pan of water with the brew can in it. This heats the wort which means it is runnier when you try and pour it out of the can!

Sugar (and a bit of honey as we didn't have enough sugar!) ready to add to the canned wort and give the yeast a tasty meal!

Water getting cool (something not required if you brew in the UK as "room temp" is about 10C lower!)

All the essentials have been sterilized ready for use.

Chucking it all in a bucket a.k.a. brewing! Part I

Yummy, runny, sticky wort!

Sugar and honey are already in the brew bucket, so we add the wort and some boiling water.....

...and give it a good stir!

Chucking it all in a bucket a.k.a. brewing! Part II

Brew bucket moved from the kitchen into the brew room and our cooling unit (aka a box with lots of cardboard, foam, polystyrene, bubble wrap, etc. to trap cool air from the ice packs we put in!). Adding the cold water.

Stir and add. Stir and add.

Checking the temperature. We need to cool the liquid from boiling to 20-25C. We add mainly water from the fridge, but don't want to cool it too much or the yeast won't wake up. Too hot though and the yeast will be killed. This is bang on.

Checking that we're up to 23L

 Chucking it all in a bucket a.k.a. brewing! Part III

A quick hydrometer reading (after moving all the bubbles out of the way - this thing is taking off!). Knowing the original gravity means we can work out the percentage alcohol content and helps us see when the brew has finished fermenting.

All looks good, so it's time to pitch the yeast.

Yeast pitched.

A final stir to get the yeast in there.

Air lock in place (with a shot of vodka to keep things clean) and we're set!

Kit brews say they take 7 days, but ours always seem to take a little longer. We spend the week checking it three times a day (before school, home from school and before bed). We check the temperature using a digital thermometer stuck to the side of the brew bucket. Most times when we check it we change the ice pack and either add one or two ice packs to keep the temperature between 20-25C (no mean feat when the average temperature at this time of year is 30+

8 days on and we're ready to bottle. Rob has been working hard to get enough bottles ready for the brew and we have washed and rinsed them. To serilize we bake them in the oven with a foil cap on each to keep any final nasties out. When we bottle we add about 18 teaspoons of sugar for "priming" which means you get the final fizz when you open and pour the beer.

Jungle Aqua Park

In September we had a week-long break in a random, small hotel between Al Gouna and Hurghada. It was a great break to get away from everything and totally relax as there wasn't much to do at the hotel. But one day we decided to go on a "day trip" to what sounded like it could be brilliant, or just plain terrible....The Jungle Aqua Park.

It turned out to be just brilliant and so we decided as a last weekend away of the year, we'd go back and actually stay at the Jungle Aqua Park Hotel and slide our hearts away for a few days. So, 2.50pm comes and we're grabbing our bags and heading out to the front of work to pick up our bus and for the weekend fun to begin.

We'd decided to get the bus down as the flights weren't at good times (a 4.15pm flight would have been tight to get after work and then the 8.30pm flight seemed very late). The bus would take us 6 hours we knew, but we had books and food and innane chatter to fill the time with!

A few hours in to the bus journey and we stop at a service station. These are always mines of random-ness so we scower the shelves for something interesting (we bought a great dive log in one before and there's always some random sweets on sale). This time we find some interesting looking CDs. They have the Egyptian flag on them and the dates of the revolution, so we assume they must be revolutionary songs etc. They guy overcharges everyone (as ironically the cash machine stops working when we arrive, so he has to manually note the code and tell us the price rather than scan the bar code....dodgy!) so we put back the chocolate bars we were going to buy too (he wanted 10LE and they are normally 2.5LE) and keep the CDs (30LE each). Later when we get home and play these they are a good buy - 100 mp3 tracks on one of them and a dozen videos on the other - all great tracks that we like the sound of.

7pm and the sun sets, so no more reading for us. 9pm and we're close. I've checked it out on a map and so we know some rough directions and landmarks to look out for, but who would have known there were so many russian-themed hotels in one area?! With only one wrong turn we manage to find it (and discover that you can't just ask for directions to "water park" as there are so many, and that you pronounce "jungle" as "jun-ge" if you want to get to the right place!).

We get ourselves checked in, grab some food and collapse into bed. No need to make a big night of it tonight when we've got sliding to do tomorrow!

So we wake up on Friday morning and wander out for some breakfast and to take a look around, and this is what we find:

 

Our room was huge - we had a queen bed in the main bit of the room and then a small curtain divides it in half to another section with a sofa bed, bunk beds and small table. In this section there are huge sliding doors that opened up onto our own pool area. Brilliant!

Our massive room

Area outside our rooms

We didn't hang out by the rooms much longer though, because there was sliding to do!

This is what excitement looks like!!!

The Slides.

Slide time!

Slides!

Kiddie Slide Area

Sliding reviews (note that slides are either on a single inner tube, a double ring which is a figure of eight, or a mat that you sit on):

The tsunami (big blue one): Best to do on a double ring to get maximum momentum. You drop off a near vertical slope and then head straight up the other side. After a few back and forth in the open and spinning you generally fall into the pool at an angle. Generally considered to be the scariest but the most fun.
The yellow one: Again best to do in a double and you drop straight down this slope. At the bottom you find yourself going up the other side and you continue to yo-yo until coming to a rest at the bottom.
The blue/white toilet bowl: Can be done in a single or double ring and starts with a sharp turning tunnel to gain speed and spin. You then enter a "toilet bowl" and spin round and round until you go into another tube at the bottom and are finally deposited in the pool below. Something was a little off with this ride as nearly everyone said they were getting stuck in the bowl and missing the turn off so were having to scott themselves along to the second slide (only adds to the excitment when you can see the next person bearing down on you!)
The red/white toilet bowl: This one is donw on a mat and you enter a kinked tube that gives you speed and spin before descending into the toilet bowl. At the bottom of the toilet bowl is an open hole into the pool below. This ride saw a number of casualties this holiday with two friends claiming bruises and Scotty scraping skin off his knee from the side of the slide and getting a huge bruise on his hip from when he landed into the toilet bowl from the first tube. Possibly one to be avoided in the future.
The family slide - two different sized rings to choose from (3 or 4 persons) that are wide and open for you all to sit in. The best is with four people to get a bit of moment going and at times we manage to get the ring to almost fold in half as it goes around the corners!
The white up/down one - you have to do this in a double ring (a figure of eight with me in the front and scotty in the back) as with just a single you don't have the momentum to finish the ride. You shoot down the white slide and then shoot back up a steep slope, but as you crest the slide you are squirted in the face by water jets!
The blue and white mat racers - you do these on mats and have to hold on to the bar above you while you get set up on the mat. If you shout loud enough the person in the slide next to you can hear and then you try to let go at the same time and see who splashes down first!
The yellow spin-y one: One for the mat again. You have to lie as flat as possible on this one to get the speed up, but can be a good ride.
The green spin-y one: For a single or double this ride. In a single it is very sedate, but done properly in a double (i.e. with Scotty calling to lean right/left/back) then you get some good speed and go high on the sides.
The back hole: A double or a single and you head down in pitch black. A few nice spins but hard to get up momentum when you don't know which way to lean.
The orange one: A double or a single. Not as steep a fall as the other "big ones" but after descending you go up the other side and are then taken backwards over a hump, have water squirted in your face and then fall out into a small pool. Good fun.


To the evening and we shower and get ready for our big night out (well, you've got to have one when it's all inclusive!) Flossie's plan is that we all dress up with a "jungle theme" so Scotty is doning his Indie gear and I've converted an old pair of socks into a snake costume! It's a riot seeing what everyone else has dressed as (we have a few jungle-prints, a GI Joe, George of the Jungle and a Mowgli!!!) and we head onto a bar for pre-dinner drinks (and a quiz written by Frenchie with the two teams being the Brits and the Yanks).

RHS gets behind the decks to sort out some half-decent music

The Snake!

Overall a brilliant weekend that proves the equation: water + gravity = fun! and we will now forever be chanting under our breath "jun-ge, jun-ge, jun-ge"

The world is a jungle.....but if only it were also an aqua park!

Visit to The Recycling School

It has been a long time in coming, but this week we had a lovely visit the The Recycling School with our donations from the run.

The revolution started while we were doing the fundraising run (literally!) and with everything so up and down in the months after that it didn't seem right to get in touch with the school for a visit. When it seemed things were going well, this was swiftly followed by religious clashes which were really quite worrying. So all in all we didn't take our donations to The Recycling School as soon as we'd have hoped.

About two weeks ago I emailed Mr Ezzat, who is the Director of the charity that runs the school and I met when he visited our work with the film Garbage Dreams. Through him I arranged for the money we raised to be transferred to the school's account; 7,000LE in total.

Generally our donations are going towards "supporting the activities of the school as you suggested because we need the money in organizing field trips and sports days for the boys and for buying some teaching supplies as well". But once the money cleared Mr Ezzat told us that actually they need them for two very specific purposes "the school is in an urgent need to organize field trips and they started training the boys to learn singing old Egyptian songs and we have a good trainer is training them to have a singing team of the boys and we needed the money for this two purposes" It was really great to hear that the money raised would be going to something we enjoy too - singing and music.

It was great to hear back from him that the school were so grateful for the donation and our continued interest. It made me think that other schools / organisations must have got in touch with them before to give donations or show interest, but that they don't always maintain the links. It made us both feel good that we are able to keep the link going - why wouldn't we? We think that they are an amazing charity - doing something so simple, but so effective in changing the lives for these boys.

When it came to our visit we had some additional donations that had been collected at our work. We weren't sure how much there would be at first but it soon dawned on us that there would be too many bags of clothes and shoes to fit in a small minibus (the only size that can fit in the streets easily) and so we arranged to take a larger bus to the entrance of Mokattam and then be met by some boys from the Recycling School.

So there we were - sat on the autostrad - not sure what was going to happen. Our arabic was just about enough for our bus driver to convey to Leila (the school manager - featured in Garbage Dreams for her roel as a social worker) that we had arrived and couldn't see anyone. Suddenly though a truck pulls up in front and a famliar face greets us with recognition! It is Ibrahim, who visited our work to talk about his life after we had watched the film, and who I also met when I came to the school with three students in December. We smile at eachother and exchange a little arabic to say we are well and ask how he is, but then we are down to work transferring all the bags from our bus into their truck.

The truck full with bags, Ibrahim jumps in the back with them and we are welcomed into the front. Our arabic is less than the young driver believes, but we manage to put together what he is saying; that he is a happy christian (he gives us a sticker with Mary on it and insists that we keep this) and that he works here with his family. As we approach the entrance of the "area" he slows down and points to burnt out cars and piles of broken bricks. His voice and language conveys to us that this is where the religious clashes first took place. There are banners up depicting the martyrs and we are struck by how people are still affected by the revolution and that ma ny died in unprovoked attacks or in acts of self-defence.

We come into the area now and we both feel welcomed and at ease in the front cab of this truck as people cross in front of us and sit in the doorways to their buildings sorting garbage and going about their daily tasks. My heart jumps for a moment when we stop beside a building that is full of rag rubbish. I'm worried that maybe they didn't realise we have bought with us good clothes, and not rags to be recycled. It is just a donkey cart in the way that is stopping us and we move on.

At the school now and we are greeted with smiling faces that run out. They want to see us and say a few words in English, but then quickly they get "hands on" to the bags of clothes we have bought with us and a chain is set up to get these into the school building.

Ibrahim emptying the "truck load" of clothes, shoes, blankets and jackets that our work donated

In the school and we realise that our arabic is about as complete as Leila's English and so she finds one of the other teachers to help with translation. Together we all manage to bumble through and generally understand eachother.

We have bought with us a few school magazines as these have photos and articles in from when we showed the film Garbage Dreams and they visited us. The boys gather round and point at the pictures then scan the rest of the magazine.

The boys are all loving the attention we are giving them and they show us some of their books and then some of their work on the computer (how they map their garbage collecting routes across Cairo). They then start posing for the camera and love getting together with their friends for a photo and then rushing round to look at the picture on the view button - we have a good laugh with them!

Posing with the washing machine and the water heater bought for the school with money raised from the film screening in December

The boys all gather together then to have a large group photo taken with their recycling in the background and our clothes donations all around them. This leads onto a few photos by their plastic chipping machine which prepares the plastic shampoo bottles for recycling.

Having had enough of me taking their photos, Ibrahim asks to take a photo of us :)

The boys then gather together and sing one of their songs that they have been learning with their music teacher. This is a really lovely moment for us.

The whole visit has been just great and our cheeks are aching from smiling so much at the enthusiasm of the young boys. Although the language barrier has meant we cannot always ask exactly the questions we want - or convey good answers to their questions of us - we have tried hard and generally understood eachother. This is definitly a reason to try and learn more arabic!

As the bus we came on had to go back to school our plan when we are finished is to get a taxi from the main road, the autostrad, which is just outside the "area". We ask which way to go and Leila gets Ibrahim and his friend to walk us to the road. We step out and a man offers us a glistening apricot which we accept and nibble a few bites from. The boys walk with us and we convery how hot it is then exchange words for sun and heat in english and arabic. We feel really welcomed and at ease because we are with the boys. They too seem relaxed with us and although it sounds like a simple thing, this was a real highlight of the visit - not feeling like an outsider.

We get to the main road within the area and Ibrahim spots someone he knows in a truck and asks him to take us to the autostrad. We jump into the front cab and the guy gives us a lift much further than we expected. He won't take any money as we get out, but we know he has gone out of his way, so we give him 5LE as a thank you and hope we have not offended him.

The whole trip has made us feel so welcomed in such simple ways. We want to continue to do more for the school when and in what ways we can, and start thinking about possible future steps we could take in the time we are here.


Update: Just read an excellent book about a teenage boy in the Zebelleen - a very good read, well worth getting. The Glass Collector by Anne Perera review on Read the Casbah soon.