Experience: Diede Sterenborg, Alexandria, Egypt

This is the story of my experience from my two months in Alexandria, Egypt. With the selection
for the Nour Project and sessions about the Middle East before the internship, it made the whole
experience bigger. My choice to go on a AIESEC internship to the Middle East was made rather impulsively; I just decided I wanted to go. Maybe the fact that I already studied in the United States for a semester made it somewhat easier. However, this would of course be a totally different experience; whereas studying in the United States is often not considered a very big challenge as it is a Western culture, this internship would take place in a completely different culture. Although the decision to go on an internship with the Nour Project was a bit impulsive, the Middle East has always drawn me; its religion and its people always fascinated me. As I only heard negative stories about the Islam and about the Middle East I wanted to see it for myself so I could judge for myself, instead of letting the media sculpt an image of the region for me.
When I found the internship at Rotaract in the AIESEC Database, I noticed that the
description was something different from other internships, although the job description was a bitvague. I spoke to an intern who had been there last year and he told me that he had a lot of freetime so it would come up to me to make it an experience worth it. Rotaract is an NGO for people
between the age of 18 and 30. When I learned that it was a youth department of a Rotary club I
was at first a little disappointed; I was worried I would only meet the upper class layer of Egypt.
However, because I would meet people my age through this internship and I considered that they could take me anywhere and show me Egypt, I made the decision to go for this internship.
I had no idea what to expect when I left for Egypt; what would the people be like? Would
they be very strict? I expected them to be very conservative and strict Muslims so I brought my
lightest-longest clothes with me. I arrived at 4 o’clock in the morning in Cairo.

Amr Koheil, the contact person from Rotaract, told me they would pick up me as a service from
them. Amr and another boy from Rotaract were indeed waiting on the airport. I remember very
well that I was very enthusiastic and they were not so much. We walked to the car, they lit their
cigarettes, the music was put on at maximum volume and we drove off to Alexandria (very fast). I
guessed they were tired from driving and waiting and their distant attitude was probably something Egyptian, I figured. Still, it was a remarkable welcome. I still had no idea where I was going to sleep but when we arrived in Alexandria it turned out I would be sleeping at Amr’s girlfriend and her family for a while. She was born in the Netherlands and lived there for 12 years. A very modern looking girl with Adidas clothes on welcomed me (in Dutch) and took me to her bedroom. The next day we went to a private beach where I met quite some people from Rotaract. It turned out that the first two days of my experience in Egypt were not so conservative as I thought they would be.

After a week, the other three interns also arrived in Alexandria. One from Belgium,
one from Romania, and one from the Netherlands (she was half Dutch, half Colombian but
she was supposed to represent Colombia; her birth country). We hang out a lot with the people
from Rotaract. The average age was 20 and we spent most of the time with the boys from the
organisation, who took us everywhere. After a week they found us a very nice and clean apartment,
where we would live with the four of us, one girl from Turkey would arrive two weeks later.
Rotaract was a very nice group of people who guided us and took us wherever we wanted to
go and through this way I and the other interns made quite some friends with them. Every night we
went to eat somewhere and to a café to just sit and talk. They also arranged several outings for us.
We went to a farm from one of the guys, a very nice region on the country where his family grew
orange apples and dates beside the Nile. We went to Sharm-El-Sheigh for a weekend by bus where
we snorkelled, rode on a buggy in the desert followed by dinner in the desert, went to the beach
as it was awfully hot and even went to a club one night where there were no Egyptians accept the
Rotaract’ers; everyone was from either Russia or the UK, a reversed culture shock right there in
Egypt. Another trip was to Siwa, an oasis in the Libyan desert very close to the Libyan border. It
was a very conservative village which was only put out of its isolation in the 1980s when a highway
was built. We also went to Cairo with a big group of people from Rotaract where they had arranged
a bus that took us everywhere during the whole day.

As I said in the beginning, I was scared I would only meet the upper-layer of Egypt. At the
beginning of my internship I was told that AIESEC was more the group of the
richer western-orientated people and Rotaract was more conservative (and not so
rich as AIESECers I got the impression). This was a relief as I wanted to see Egypt and not the
western side of Egypt. Of course, Egyptian students have to be a little richer than the average
Egyptian as they have to be able to afford university. So Rotaract’ers were richer than the average
population and, in consequence, also more western than the average population. They were all
Muslim but not very strict in practicing it. Also, around forty percent of the Egyptian population
is extremely poor to nearly poor but I hardly experienced this. Still, I was so happy I got the
opportunity to experience Egypt and the Muslim society. Hearing the prayer calls five times a
day, seeing the traditional background of the veiled women, experience the division between men
and women, the donkeys on the road, the chaos in traffic, feel the social control and see a very
unorganized country (in comparison with the Netherlands) made the experience worth it. Also the people I met, both the interns and the people from Rotaract who tried their best to help us and guide us made it a very good experience.

Experience: Catherine Endtz, Egypt, Cairo

Same Same but Different

Cairo Airport, June 2010, around nine pm. With the usual sense of traveller’s

excitement I walk into the airports’ arrivals hall. A brown-haired, blue-eyed girl

speeds up to me, a smiling face I recognize from a Facebook picture. No time for

extensive welcomes and chit-chats. My plane was an hour late and we have to rush

to Khan el Khalili, the large and very touristic souk that hosts some very nice shisha

(water pipe) places. Let’s go, yalla yalla! In the car my new AIESEC friends try a nice

joke on me involving one AIESEC’er pretending to be mute, and the other pretending

to be an Indian cab driver. The first intercultural exchanges of laughs. Twenty minutes

later I am walking through little back-alleys in the old Islamic centre of Cairo,

absorbing all the new sights, smells and sounds.

I was in Cairo for my internship with AIESEC. For two months I would take

on the position of fundraiser for the small NGO El Nafeza. My main reason for being

in Egypt, however, was to have the “AIESEC-experience”, to meet people from all

over the world, to get emerged in a culture that was not mine and to get challenged

in my ideas about normality. Additionally, I had been given the unspoken task to

discover that Muslims aren’t that different from us, that more than anything we are all

humans and that we should all be friends.

Quite an obvious message I thought. As anthropologist-in-the-making,

having spent about a third of my post high school life travelling through third world

countries, I was a model cultural relativist. Polygamy or female circumcision, nothing

could get me shocked anymore. Who are we to judge their cultural practices? We

have our things, they have theirs.

My AIESEC experience, however, was very different from all my other travel

experiences. The friends I made in Cairo didn’t wear red and blue checked cloths;

they didn’t have holes in their ears the size of oranges, or live in cow-dung huts. They

were just like me: they went to college, wore the same kind of clothes and listened

to the same kind of music. Because the friendships were based on a strong feeling of

sameness, my ‘us versus them’ cultural relativism didn’t work anymore. They had

become part of the ‘us’. So, when, under an initial layer of sameness, I did discover

quite some cultural differences in the end, for the first time in my life they bothered

me.

One of the most obvious differences was the gender issue. The many

differently shaded hijabs on the streets I could culturally put in perspective, and

the male stares and occasional ‘I love you’s started to grow on me. I did feel weird

however, when, just before we left the house to hand out Ramadan meals to the poor,

my male friend ordered my to put my cardigan on; when during a weekend at the

beach I was subtly pulled out of sight when the neighbours knocked on the apartment

door; or when at a Tiesto concert two other friends acted as my personal bodyguards

with every step I took, afraid that something would happen to me.

All of this was clarified during the last week of my stay by yet another friend

during our weekly shisha. He shared with me the well known facts that “Men are

worth twice as much as women” and “Men are just better in everything than women,

that’s why they always have to take care of them and protect them.” Adrenaline going

from my head to the tip of my toes: how could a friend of mine say something like

this!

The interesting thing here was not to which extent this guy’s opinion reflected

popular opinion in Egypt or for that matter the whole Islamic world. What is

interesting is the situation itself, and how to handle it. What is the limit to cultural

relativism? How much difference of ideas can you handle, and can you accept? Do we

have to get rid of foreign ideas to be able to live in harmony with their owners? I there

really such a thing as respecting without accepting: the well known Dutch ‘tolerance’.

And how do we deal with our own convictions in the face of difference?

Exactly this is, in retrospect, the main lesson that I brought home from Egypt. I’ve

learned that, faced with a difference of conviction, it is no crime to embrace your own

point of view. We should however, when doing this, accept the tension this leads to,

and instead of denying it or running away for it, embrace it, learn to live with it, and

maybe even enjoy the constant debate, change, and reflection this tension leads to.

Because in the end, we’re all human and we should all be friends.

Experience: Adam Verhaar, Alexandria, Egypt

Ever heard of Egyptian planning and timing? Well, there is something that they call Egyptian
planning and timing, but in no way you can compare that to the standards of our modern
western society. Egyptians do make plans and schedules, but one thing you can be sure about;
that it will never go the way they planned it. Egypt and the Egyptians surprise you every day
in every way! This made my experience in Egypt one of the best ever!

Egypt is a very interesting country, an exploding population of over 85 million people on
a habitable surface the same size as the Netherlands (you can only live on the banks of the
Nile or in the delta, not in the desert!). The first thing I noticed was the gap between the rich
and the poor, the gap is huge. There is virtually no middle class in Egypt. And if you live in
Egypt and are able to spend your time and money on AIESEC you must be rich and from the
upper class. I met many AIESEC’ers and they really became my friends during my stay in
Alexandria. They helped me out with finding an apartment, introduced me at my internship
and took me around town to see sights, theatre shows and other cultural activities. We still
keep in touch through Facebook of course!
The internship I did was at the Egyptian American Center in Alexandria: A private
language institute, where I taught English to both youth and adults. Teaching English was a
informative experience. Not only did I improve my own English grammar and vocabulary, I
also learned a lot of teaching methods and skills. But the best part of teaching is of course the
interaction with the students. In my classes I always ended with a group discussion that could
be about any subject, but we often ended talking about the differences between my culture
and their culture. They gave me wonderful insights in their lives, how they deal with their
daily lives, how they feel about politics and about their attitudes towards family, marriage and
the relation between men and women in Egyptian society. But we also talked about shopping,
sports and movies and other things people normally do in their lives. They’ve showed me
that they do not differ from us as human beings. They want to live a happy life in which they
want to give the best to the people they love, and living in a chaotic country as Egypt that
can mean a life full of hardship, where you have to bribe someone every day to get what you
need. Nevertheless, wherever you go, the hospitableness and openness of the Egyptians is
heartwarming.
During my internship I had enough time to travel around the country. The history and
diversity of this country is amazing, and I am not only talking about the pyramids! In the
south you can meet a black Nubian at the Abu Simbel temple complex, in Siwa oasis you see
very conservative Muslims that descend from Berber Moroccans that take you for a desert
safari in a jeep, while Cairo is populated by 18 million ‘real’ Arabs who smoke shisha (water
pipe) in a bar every night!
Living in an Arab/Muslim country for some time is something I would recommend
to anybody! The NOUR project gives you an excellent preparation where you’ll learn about
Islam, Arabic language and the practicalities of living abroad. Make sure you have a well
arranged internship, combine it with some travelling and an open spirit, and you will have an
unforgettable experience!