I've tacked this on to my old blog as a "service" to teachers who may be thinking about making Cairo their home. I hope it helps.

The Bad:

1. International schools in Cairo are businesses. Nothing more. They do not exist for any other purpose than to make money. You are an employee of that business first, and a teacher of children second. The business these schools are in is to graduate kids with A's. These kids need these A's in order to get into engineering or medical school, which is the only degree any of these kids, or more specifically their parents, want. (Sort of like how being a doctor or lawyer in the U.S. was so important to rich parents back in the day.) The customers you are serving as the employee of this business are the parents of the children you are teaching. The school may alter the grades to insure the child gets his A+ to get into engineering school. (Businesses need good word of mouth; you do not get that with unhappy customers.)

2. Many of your students know that the work they do in your class may not reflect their final grade, so will do no work. Or they have come from schools where the work they do did not reflect their final grade, so enter your room assuming they need to do no work.

3. American schools here in Cairo have a reputation as "easy." And in many ways, compared to the National and IGCSE systems, it is easier. Your kids, especially ones new to the American system, are probably kids that could not make it in other systems or schools or  come into your school assuming it'll be a piece of cake.

4. The kids you will be teaching are the rich of Egypt. Many have no concept of personal responsibility, honesty, or hard work. Wealthy Egyptian society does not reward those types of behavior, especially for the children of the rich. This is especially true of the boys. (I'd give anything to teach in an all girl’s school. Anything.) The boys here grow up in a family atmosphere where anything they do is good and where all their needs are catered to, where they know that no matter what dad will have bought them the apartment they need in order to get married, the car they need to get around, and probably the job they need to earn a living. Their only job as adolescents is to get into engineering school. You’d think this would drive them to excel, but you’d be wrong.

5. Egypt is a very class conscious society. People below your class are there to serve you. Egyptian teachers are part of the servant class. Your kids will have probably come up through what is known here as “The National System.” The public schools in Cairo are a nightmare. Horrible places. So anyone with any money sends their kids to private schools. The national system is the private school version of a public Egyptian school. They teach the same curriculum, take the same exams, only in rooms with windows, fans, chalk boards and books. Parents usually send their kids to these schools from K through 10^th or 11^th grade as they are far cheaper than the IGCSE (British) and American schools. Many then dump them into the American schools if it looks like they will not be able to pass at their current school with a grade good enough to get them into university. The teachers at these national schools are not trained teachers. The vast majority of them are engineers who could not find work, mathematicians who could not find work, and doctors who could not find work. These people are being paid slave wages and are working in conditions not much better than the public schools. They have rooms packed with unruly children who have no respect for them, are being forced to teach subjects they do not know and are not trained to teach, and know all that matters is the exam at the end of the year. So what do they do? They beat the kids, yell at the kids, and only teach half of what the kid needs to learn for the final exam. The other half of what needs to be learned is taught in “tutoring sessions” at the teacher’s home, which cost extra. All this means is that when little Ahmed comes into your classroom the first day of school his only experience with many teachers are the ones who hit him, who are a lower class than him and who never really gave a damn about him or his grades. In other words you get students who are used to running amok, used to little to no actual learning going on in a classroom and are used to telling their teachers to go to hell and getting away with it.

6. Discipline is a nightmare. “Full of energy” is the nice way of describing these kids. Unruly and disrespectful is a bit more accurate. They’ll lie to your face, ignore your attempts at management and will argue with you for hours over anything that happens that may adversely affect them (arguing is a national pastime here).

7. Cutting corners is also a national pastime in Egypt and your kids will do the same. Plagiarism? Nothing wrong with it at all. Cheating? Perfectly acceptable under any circumstances.

7. Forget any kind of critical thinking learning or active learning. These kids have absolutely no concept of it. Thinking independently is not a valued trait in this country and the educational system does not reward it. Group work is unheard of, so the first time you try it you’ll be in for a nasty surprise. The first time you ask a student’s opinion on anything you’ll be answered with, “where do I find that answer in the book?” Anything that requires an independent thought will be met with stunned silence or a class wide freak-out. The educational system here is based around “The Final Exam.” Nothing else matters. Your students only have experience in rote memorization. Nothing else.

Now for the good stuff:

1. I love all my kids. Hard to believe after what I’ve said above, but it’s true. I teach about 100 kids a day and with maybe one or two exceptions I love them all. Sure they’re Unruly, but they’re also truly full of energy and life. I cannot tell you how out of control these kids are. But it’s not an evil out of control. It’s just kids who’ve never been taught to sit still. If you treat them with love and respect, they’ll give it back to you in spades. (Sure, they’ll still lie to your face, swearing their dad really was in the hospital so they could not do their homework, but they’ll do it with love.) Sometimes I end a class early and let the kids do whatever they want. Suddenly the whole class will burst into song and dance. Kids will start banging out a beat on the desk, the girls will begin to dance, the boys will sing along, it’s magical and I would not trade those moments for anything. I go home on many nights totally beat from spending my day trying to get my kids to care, but I’ll try to remember that these are kids who’ve been really given the short end of a real education, have rarely been disciplined for anything, and… they’re just kids.

2. As a teacher here, you can teach  pretty much anyway you want. It really is pure teaching. No real standards. Very little oversight. I’ve experimented like crazy since being here. I’ve learned a lot about teaching. It’s great. You gotta be a very flexible teacher to survive teaching here; if you are you’ll go far. If you are not, you’ll quit and go home.

3. Discipline will be your biggest challenge, but as I mentioned above, the kids are not evil or scary. You will have no pregnant girls, no weapons, no school cliques, no girlfriend/boyfriend issues, no racial issues… The kids, at least at my school, bond very well.

4. Egypt is a great country! Egyptians are fun loving, friendly people. Your students will be the same. Again, the trick to making it as a teacher here is to gain the respect of your students. They will not learn for the sake of learning and they will not follow your directions because it’s what you are supposed to do in a classroom. They’ll only do it if they like and respect you.

5. Egypt is really a great country! Everything is dirt cheap here. With your wages you can live very very well here. You can have a nice flat, a housecleaner, a cook… You can eat out every night and travel every weekend if you choose. All of Europe is a $250 flight away. All of the Middle East, the same. Egypt has 5,000 years of history at your doorstep and some of the best diving and snorkeling in the world only hours away. Last July, at the end of the school year my wife and I stayed at the Ritz-Carlton in Sharm el-Sheik for a week. With my work visa we got a $750 a night room for $95 a night. In a hundred years we’d never be able to afford anything like that back home. We’ve taken long weekend trips to resorts, beaches and dive spots just for fun. Again, back home we’d have to save for years for the same experience. It’s a great lifestyle.

6. The expat community is large in Cairo, but very friendly. There are a number of clubs just for expats that are great places to escape the grind of living here. (While Egypt is a great country, it’s also a real pain in the neck sometimes. It’s nice to “escape” the reality of the place occasionally.) There are hundreds of excellent restaurants that serve up any type of food you’d be interested in. Once to get involved with the expat crowd, you’ll have a blast. We rent yachts for parties on the Nile, sail the same river on Thursday night felucca parties, go camping in the desert, take deep sea fishing trips on the Red Sea and drink a lot of beer.

There majority of schools here are pretty bad. Truly schools that operate as only businesses. They’ll lie to you. They’ll screw you. They’ll treat your contract as only a theory, not binding. So you gotta be careful. My school was a nightmare. Every day my stomach would knot up as our bus got closer to campus. Every night I’d swear I was quitting. But after about four months I got into a groove. I began to understand my students and they began to understand me. It was never easy, but it became tolerable, even fun.

To survive teaching and living in Cairo you have to be chill, flexible and patient. You have to be the type that can roll with the insanity. If not you’ll be miserable. Don’t take a job here expecting a wonderful, enriching, teaching experience. It probably won’t be. Don’t take a job here thinking Cairo “can’t be that bad.” It is. Which is one of the things I love about it. It’s an insane, overcrowded, polluted, dirty, city. But I know that every day I’m going to see something I’ve never seen before. And for me that’s the reason I live overseas.

For those of you who have stumbled upon this blog, I welcome you to an interesting read. Start at the beginning and read through two years of love, marriage, expat adventures, suicide bombings, pain, recovery and finally separation.

I am alone now and living in South America. If you are interested in following my new life please leave a comment with your email address and I'll send you the link to my blog. The comments do not get posted, so no one will see your address but me.

Enjoy.

There may be a few friends out there who have not checked this blog in a while. As you may or may not know I've moved to South America. I started a new blog, but it was too public, with too many people from my new city reading it. So I all but took it down, as well as removing any links to the new blog that were on this blog.

I will be begining a new blog in the next few days, which will be an invite only type thing. If I know you and I have your email address you'll be getting the link. If for some reason I don't have your address, leave a comment telling me who you are and I'll try to get you the new secret blog address.

Sorry for the complete lack of updates on our lives. Things just seem to be moving too fast for us, yet nothing much seems to be happening at the same time. But there’s good news for all of you dedicated readers- Uruguay! The move is coming soon. In some ways too soon, but not soon enough at the same time.

We’ll be heading South around the 25th of January. We’ll both be going down to Montevideo, but only one of us will be staying- me. Betsy will be coming back to the USA two weeks later. I’ll leave out the details, but Betsy wants to go to grad school at DU beginning in the fall. I need to work. So for the time being we’ll be sadly separated. Hopefully not for long.

South America. Wow. Except for a terrifying day trip to Tijuana when I was 12 I’ve never been south of the border. (All I remember about that trip was being warned not to drink the water. Which I took to mean not to drink or eat anything. Which I took to heart by refusing to eat or drink anything all day. The scary part of the trip for me was a secret trip to a shop to buy a switch blade knife. Man, for a 12 year old that was pretty dangerous stuff. It was only after buying several big and small blades did I realize that we’d be crossing the border with me in possession of illegal weapons. If we’d been stopped at the border I’m quite sure I would have peed myself and then confessed to not only owning a sharp object, but also ‘fessing up to breaking my sister’s Barbie, not feeding the dog and being the second shooter on the grassy knoll.) And despite all my years of travel I’ve never been south of the equator. So this should be a pretty cool experience.

I’m especially excited to leave behind this western winter for a southern summer. I’ve been told that for the first three months in Montevideo I’ll be living in a house the school has a lease on that they can’t get out of. So not only do I get to leave the frozen tundra of Colorado for the gentle summer of Uruguay, I get to do it in style by moving into a four bedroom home with a swimming pool. How sweet is that? Too bad it’s only for a few months, but I’m not going to complain. The pool will actually be great for me as walking in a pool is good physical therapy for my ankle. (Maybe I can talk the school into resigning the lease for therapeutic reasons.)

Speaking of my ankle- I saw my doctor a few weeks back and he’s declared me officially healed. This is not to say I’ll be running the 100 yard dash anytime soon, but I am free of the crutch, cane and cast. I’ve still got a pretty righteous limp and my ankle isn’t very flexible, but as time goes by and I walk more and more the limp will get better. It remains to be seen how much flexibility I’ll get back down there, but I’m pretty confident that it will get better.

We went to Wyoming for Christmas. We spent a few days in Casper with Betsy’s family, then up to Story to see my parents and sister, then back to Casper for a few more days. It was great to see family and friends again after my post-surgery self-imposed exile. But Wyoming was pretty miserable as far as the weather goes. Cold, cold, cold. And then there’s the good old Casper wind. Not fun. I’ve decided that winter and I are no longer a good match. After the bombing the nerve damage makes getting and keeping my hands warm pretty much a lost cause. My fingers get numb and stay numb. Fortunately my chosen profession does allow me some flexibility in climate options. I’m hoping Uruguay will be home for a good long while. Then I’ll head to someplace pleasant in Asia to work out my golden years in warmth. (Uruguay’s winters are supposed to be cold, I can live with that. I can not live with ten degrees Fahrenheit in the sun and thirty mile an hour winds blowing snow into every exposed area.) We did have a great time though and I loved being up in the mountains again. It’s always hard to leave, especially knowing it’s going to be a while before I see “home” again.

As promised in the post below: here is the photo that was most popular at the show. (Click on it for a larger view.) It is a pretty great shot I must admit. Betsy said lots of people asked if it was photoshopped. Nope. I just turned and clicked, what you see is what I saw through the lens. (Please give credit where credit is due if you copy this picture.)

We were at Giza on a school field trip. It must be once a year that the pyramids are opened up for free to Cairo's schools. The place was crawling with kids, literally tens of thousands of them. I think, as these kids have seen the 'rids dozens of times on field trips, that we were far more interesting to see. Most of the kids were from regular state run schools, so were very poor and they probably don't see a lot of white faces around. I swear both Betsy and I had our picture taken, posing with a group, at least a couple of dozen times.

It was cute and fun the first few times, then it just got old. By the end we were rudely saying "no!" to the photo requests. Actually the last straw was when a boy tried to cop a feel while putting his arm around Betsy's shoulders. We should have known better- an Egyptian female would never have allowed a boy/man to touch her in any way. But despite the fact that we were seasoned and culturally aware expats, we allowed what would be pretty innocent in the USA. The kid probably could not believe his luck. A white girl letting him touch her! Of course he's going to go for some boob action. Betsy pushed him away and said something rude to him in Arabic and that was that. No more pictures.

I seem to recall being sort of gropped as well at some point. As a male in that region it can at times be hard to tell the difference between the signs of same sex affection and covert/overt homosexual overtures. I know 99.9% of the time it was affection, but a few times it seemed to be a bit more. (I always got a kick out of watching my stud boys give each other kisses and hugs in the morning. I'd think, "you guys would so get your asses kicked if you tried that in a school in America." Those types of things were always fascinating to me. The kids had a different term for erasures in Egypt. You should have seen my face the first time a female student asked me if I had a rubber.)

Here's some shots of the photo exhibit

Above is my ankle before the last operation.
Here's what it looked like right afterwards. A bit straighter eh?

Betsy went to a pumpkin carving party before halloween. She won first prize.

First off- this is funny:

http://www.jobkite.com/catsinacdstore.htm

Now on to our life…

The photo exhibit opening up in Casper was a great success. And the credit goes to Betsy who put it all together. (My only contribution was taking some of the pictures and helping her narrow down the final selections.) Our good friend Tony deserves some kudos as well, he was a great help to Betsy. We had about 35 pictures up when all was said and done. Everyone who came to the opening was blown away by the quality and style of the stuff that was up. According to Betsy the biggest hits were a picture I took of a door in an old madrasa in Islamic Cairo and another shot I took at the Giza pyramids of a mass of people in front of the sphinx. But everything up was raved about. It was also nice that the photos showed the good and positive side of “our Egypt.” We avoided any mention or reference to the bombing. The idea behind the show was to let people see the fun and beauty of Egypt.

You’ll notice I did not mention myself being at the opening. Because I wasn’t there. The night of the opening I was supposed to be preparing for wrist surgery the next day. It’s a long story, but I’ll try to make it short.

About two weeks before the opening I decided I should get my wrist fused. It’s the last procedure on the list of things I have needed to get done to my body. (After the leg surgery I’d decided against getting the wrist fused. It’s something that can wait. Not required, but would be nice. I was just sick and tired of seeing the inside of a hospital and constantly recovering from one thing or another. So the leg surgery was going to be it. The wrist could wait a few years. ) But as I thought about it I decided that the smart move would be to get the wrist fixed now while I have the time to recover and I know it will be paid for by Medicaid. So I got a hold of my doctor. The only date he could do it was the day after the opening. We could not wait any longer as it would take me about 3 months to fully recover, which would put me into my arrival in Uruguay. So the day after the opening was the date picked. Which means I could not go to the opening. A bummer. But I had to make the right move and surgery was the right move. On Monday, the day of the opening, I went into pre-op to get checked up on before surgery. I wheeled into the clinic and thought to myself that I just could not do it. I just could not go through another surgery and another 3 months of pain and misery. It was something that had been in the back of my head for a few days. Just thinking about how much it was going to hurt. Thinking about at least 6 weeks without being able to use my right hand at all. Thinking about rehab and therapy and … you know. The thought of them sticking me over and over again with a needle trying to find a working vein for the IV almost put me over the edge. The last straw was when I wheeled into the pre-op waiting room and saw at the end of the hallway a waiting room with a bed, blood pressure machine, medical equipment and so on. I just could not go through with it. I think I’ve got some sort of post traumatic syndrome that is not due to the bombing, but due to my 13 operations and extended hospital stays. I just can’t handle it. I’m not sure I can even go into the hospital for check-ups anymore.

Yeah. Wild eh?

So Betsy, with the help of Tony, did all the work for the opening, and deservedly received all the glory. She had Egyptian snacks, juices, tea, incense and music. She thinks about 100 people came. The staff at the café that hosted the show said it was the best photo exhibit they’d ever had. We had some great press on the show. Both local papers did stories and Betsy was interviewed for a radio program that played this last Sunday.

I hope South America has the same level of photo ops. That’s the thing about a place like Egypt. It’s pretty hard to not take good pictures. Everything is photogenic. The only bummer about the show is that we did not sell anywhere near enough pictures to cover the cost of putting it on. But a lot of people said they’d be back to buy. It’s good timing for us what with Christmas coming up. Hopefully some of the pictures will be under Xmas trees on the 25th. (As soon as I can figure out how to copyright the pictures I’ll put them up for all to see, and take orders from anyone who’d like to buy copies. [I know some of our pictures on the blog have been “borrowed,” which is fine, but it would be nice to get credit.] I don’t want to just put all of them up and let anyone copy them. In fact as I look back I probably should have put some sort of copyright type thing on quite a few of the really good pix that have gone up on the blog.) The show ends at the end of November, hopefully I’ll be able to go up then and see them all up and framed. Betsy took pictures of the show and it looked cool. I’ll post some of those pictures and others soon.

What else is up? Not much I guess. I’m beginning to walk a bit with one crutch. It’s been going slow. My leg hurts after a while. My right calf also gets really sore after not too long due to the fact that I’ve not been walking much for 3 months. I have been going to the gym quite a bit. Lifting light weights, but lifting. So my leg is coming along nicely.

Betsy is keeping pretty busy babysitting and picking up a friend’s boy from school every day. She also just got a very part-time job at a swank second hand clothing store. It’s the kind of place that only sells Prada and such. You know, high end clothing. She had her first day there on Sunday and hopes to work maybe one or two days a week. She was told that working there will get her networked to the Denver upper-class gals. Everyone who is anyone sells and shops there. That should make for some interesting stories. Betsy is also preparing to take her GMAT exam to get into grad school. She’s looking into going into the international MBA program at the University of Denver. Yikes. It’s like thirty grand a year. I certainly hope she does well on the exam and gets more than a few scholarships.

We’ll be spending Thanksgiving apart this year. Both our families are having mini family reunions. Hers up in Casper, mine here in Denver. I’d love to hang out with the Lamberson clan in Wyoming, but I’m looking forward to seeing my aunts, uncles and especially my nephews Liam and Noah. We’re all staying at a hotel in downtown Denver, which will be fun as we’ll all be together. I’m going to look at it like a little vacation for myself away from this apartment I’ve been in for so long.

I think that’s it for now. Look for some pictures soon.

I know it's been a while since I've written anything. I promise an update very soon. Until then, enjoy this blast of Bollywood fun: