1/11/11

Today, when I woke up for the Fajr prayer at dawn, I made sure I didn’t go back to sleep because I knew I had to study for the quiz. I studied the alphabet, greetings, numbers, personal pronouns, and possessive pronouns. I was able to study it all before the quiz. At first I was a bit nervous about the quiz because I thought it would be difficult, but I found it fair—long but fair. I felt proud that although Hasnaa allowed us to look at the alphabet chart, I didn’t need to because I remembered all the letters. So we spent most of the class taking the quiz. And after that, we began learning about the demonstrative pronouns. I had no trouble with them at first, but when Hasnaa started to talk about how whether the demonstrative pronoun comes before or after the noun depends on whether we’re talking about a sentence or a phrase, I got a bit confused. After a good 15-20 minutes, I finally understood where to place the demonstrative pronouns. At this point, my only confusion was how to make words plural.
   
For lunch, I just had a bag of chips and some chocolate that I grabbed from a kiosk on my way to Leslie’s apartment for Dr. Sullivan’s lecture on Egyptian politics. He began from the beginning when Nasser overthrew the monarchy of King Farooq on July 26th, 1952 (also the name of a street in Cairo). Nasser made all political parties illegal, except his own and said he would create policies for the common people, but didn’t know anything about economics. He unwisely applied Soviet policies to Egypt and got most of his revenue from the Suez Canal. But by 1967, even though education was boosted and he’d created policies to empower poor people, through the ‘60’s the economy came crashing down. In 1967 he resigned after a humiliating defeat from Israel. He died three years later in 1970 and Vice President Sadat became President.
   
Under Sadat, Egypt defeats Israel in a war but does not gain back the Sinai. Ultimately, Egyptians got back the Sinai in ’82. So basically, Sadat flipped politically in foreign policies from Nasser. He created the Open Door Policy, created a combination of capitalism and socialism in which he promised free education and a job for life, but this promise was not kept, so the Egyptians don’t believe in government anymore and turn to the private sector. Also, although Sadat still kept Nasser’s one-party system, he allowed left, center, and right planks of that party. However, Egyptians were upset with him because he signed the Camp David Accords, in which he declared peace with Israel. We don’t know for certain if this was the reason Sadat was assassinated in 1981 and Mubarak became President.
   
I’m really glad we had this lecture because this lecture combined with the presentation given by Dr. Dina at the office of Al-Ahram really helped shape an idea of Egyptian politics in my mind. I can truly understand the great changes Egyptian politics have gone through in just the past 50 years. Dr. Denis mentioned that Egypt has seen unbelieveable economic growth in the past five or six years and I hope this growth can continue well into the future because not to sound like a pessimist, but based on what I’ve noticed during my short stay here, the blue collar Egyptians deserve more rights and opportunities.