A lot has happened in the past week that I have failed to blog about - sorry! An unfortunate side effect of doing all these things is that I haven't had much time. So I'm gonna do 2 blog posts in rapid succession- this one on our recent work with St. Andrews', than one later on about our vacation to Sharm el-Sheikh.
So last week was, in some respects, our last week of normal class. Tonight and the next two days are going to be review and wrap-up and a celebration of our last day, so we won't be teaching anything new. But last week's outing was really fun: we met our kids at the Sadat metro station and walked them down along the Nile to where we could take a faluka ride. 16 of our kids showed up, which was amazing - we did not expect so many of them to transport themselves all the way to Garden City just to go on a boat with us.
I think my students definitely enjoyed it, taking a ton of pictures and dancing and laughing. Even the girl who was a bit worried about the water seemed glad to have pushed her yellow zone, enjoying everything except when the boat driver took a turn too fast and her side dipped down.
Now, I don't know how much I've mentioned this, but part of our St. Andrew's summer program includes an art project component. We gave out disposable cameras to their students and were supposed to come up with a theme or idea around which they would then take pictures. Fernando and I had our students just take pictures of their lives, and then we had a day where we talked about pictures we had of our lives and they shared their pictures with us.
The project seemed like a big struggle at first - we didn't have any ideas for the project, the kids didn't really know how to use the cameras, developing the pictures was a pain, and then many of the students accidentally overexposed parts of their film so we didn't have many pictures from each student. Also, after we had already given our students their cameras, we found out that we were going to be doing an art exhibit where each center had to make some kind of art piece with the pictures from our students. So for a while I had a pretty bad attitude towards this whole debacle.
But then yesterday was our exhibit. Fernando and I came up with the idea to make the Somali flag out of our students' pictures - an idea that Fernando went wild with to produce this:
So last week was, in some respects, our last week of normal class. Tonight and the next two days are going to be review and wrap-up and a celebration of our last day, so we won't be teaching anything new. But last week's outing was really fun: we met our kids at the Sadat metro station and walked them down along the Nile to where we could take a faluka ride. 16 of our kids showed up, which was amazing - we did not expect so many of them to transport themselves all the way to Garden City just to go on a boat with us.
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| Juweria, Zaynab, Ifrah and Samira |
Now, I don't know how much I've mentioned this, but part of our St. Andrew's summer program includes an art project component. We gave out disposable cameras to their students and were supposed to come up with a theme or idea around which they would then take pictures. Fernando and I had our students just take pictures of their lives, and then we had a day where we talked about pictures we had of our lives and they shared their pictures with us.
The project seemed like a big struggle at first - we didn't have any ideas for the project, the kids didn't really know how to use the cameras, developing the pictures was a pain, and then many of the students accidentally overexposed parts of their film so we didn't have many pictures from each student. Also, after we had already given our students their cameras, we found out that we were going to be doing an art exhibit where each center had to make some kind of art piece with the pictures from our students. So for a while I had a pretty bad attitude towards this whole debacle.
But then yesterday was our exhibit. Fernando and I came up with the idea to make the Somali flag out of our students' pictures - an idea that Fernando went wild with to produce this:
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| "We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered." |
Yeah, that's right, looks pretty awesome, doesn't it? It's the Somali flag, made up of 22 pictures repeated over and over again. Fernando did most of the work - he has a computer program that helped him to put the pictures together and then he figured out how to print it all on nice photo paper. Putting it up was an absolute pain, but dear lord did it turn out well. All of my pessimism had turned out to be completely unfounded, which was good, and the whole exhibit went really well. A bunch of our students even showed up to see it, and they really liked it!
Also, the quote is from a book called The Prophet by Khalil Gibran.
Anyway, I'm super excited for all the plans we have for this last week, but it's bittersweet - it will be really sad to leave our students and Cairo behind. But I've still got a few days to enjoy!
Also, the quote is from a book called The Prophet by Khalil Gibran.
Anyway, I'm super excited for all the plans we have for this last week, but it's bittersweet - it will be really sad to leave our students and Cairo behind. But I've still got a few days to enjoy!
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