For The Dog Lovers

Cairo is known for its stray cats and dogs. The cats are pretty good unless they get into your building and leave a smelly deposit on your doorstep. (Yes it has happened and Tony picked it up). They are everywhere! You can't walk out to the street without passing 2 - 3 lazing in the grass or on the steps at the front of our building :-) Goodness knows where they find their food. I guess they go through he rubbish like the dogs do. And speaking of dogs...

this morning I thought I'd stop and take a photo of this group who were sound asleep ...

on this empty lot, not a worry in the world, with a main road full of cars buzzing past them.

You can see our building on the far side of the empty lot, in the centre. It's a pretty big block of desert sand and is just full of old building debris and rubbish (with the odd dead cat and sleeping dog).

This last photo is the outside of our building with the front door below our sparkly clean lounge window. The tyre shop is on the right and the jeweller is on the left. As you can see everyone has air conditioning and it's not unusual to see wiring hanging down the fronts of buildings.

 

 

Hard Day at the Office

Today, being Tuesday, means we are over halfway through the week. We left school at 2pm, stopped in at Grand Mall for a falafel sandwich and ended up with foul, eggplant & egg. Not sure what happened there ... lost in translation I suppose. Anyway we made it home and plonked ourselves on the sofas and haven't moved since. Tony is now snoozing away, with his tablet on his tummy, spread out on the sofa. I think I might have worked him too hard today :-) It's very easy to just collapse on the sofa in this climate.

The last couple of days have tested my patience with "the Egyptian way". The man from the bank came to sign us up for bank accounts yesterday so our pay can be direct debited at the end of the month. As usual we needed 2 copies of our passports, which no one had because the HR department has had our passports since last week, so we all had to line up at the photocopier and wait while they copied them for us. Tony isn't able to get a joint account with me because he doesn't have a work visa neither do I yet) so I had to fill out the 3 page form which in the end only allows me to have a debit card - no cheque book or Visa because I am not Egyptian. To add to the experience we were then told it would take up to 20 days before the accounts open ... inshallah.
Today we had a full staff meeting at 9:30am which went til 10:15am. The meetings we've had so far have been very short but I'm not going to expect them to stay that way. The rest of the day was spent talking to people about inventories, lining up for blood tests (they check for Aids), lining up to sign off IT equipment that I use in my room, and making resources with Tony. The best part of the day was finally meeting Katie who is the other Grade 3 teacher. I'm sure she's slot straight into
Gladstone really easily. She reminds me of the Americans you have on staff - great attitude!
No lining up tomorrow and no red tape ... hopefully. Am off to get some more passport sized photos just in case.

7 September Update

Oops ... had to be reminded to update my blog by 3 different people ... sorry!

These first 2 photos are of school. I snapped them on the way out at 2pm on Thursday.

The corridor outside my room looking towards the junior library. The desks and chairs are for the "naughty kids". Imagine a corridor of naughty kids :-) 

Leaving school to catch a cab home. Check the rubbish on the sidewalk by the car - there is much, much worse. One day I will build up enough courage to take a photo of further up the street the school is on.

This morning Tony & I took a cab to Shara (Road) 7 which is a market area where we bought cheap vegetables. The place was bustling with stalls everywhere along the sides of the street. The stalls that took me by surprise were the butchers. There were sides of beef and chunks of meat (maybe sheep or goat) hanging out in the open and at other butchers there were wooden cages of live chickens, ducks and rabbits. Next time I go I will take my camera. I am a little wary of taking photos with the locals in them because some expect a baksheesh (tip). Found some great falafels, 5 for 2 pound, much bigger and moister than at home. Deep fried and put in a newsprint cone by the very friendly vendor.

This afternoon we went to dinner at another teacher's place - very nice apartment about 20 minutes walk from here, which overlooks the prison and the city of the dead.

This is the prison where Mubarak was put after he was ousted in 2011. The rows of olive trees are a barrier between the prison and the outside. There is a large brick wall on the other side of the road you can see in the foreground. On the horizon what looks like mountains is actually a granite quarry.

The area of low buildings is called the city of the dead which is an area of tombs that people live on top of. The people that live there look after the tombs which, mostly, belong to their ancestors. It's not a tourist area to visit but apparently there is another one in Cairo which you can go to.

Back to work tomorrow, a day of meetings and finding out where all the missing books from my class inventory are. Next weekend we might head into the museum.

A Hard Week at Work ... Nearly

Been at work now for 4 days and the kids don't actually start til the 22nd. The other Grade 3 teacher hasn't arrived yet so all the resources are piled up in my room waiting to be split between us. Tony has been in every day since Monday which has sped everything up for me. The walls are done and I've got him making maths resources. The other newbies on our floor have been borrowing him to put up their wall displays and fix things for them. It's been quite funny watching him run around for all these single women. The Egyptian dadas think he's funny. The language barrier doesn't seem to matter when Tony's around.

I'm hoping he will be able to volunteer to listen to the kids read because they are all learning English as their second language and there are about 6 that need extra 1:1 support. They have been identified as "Warning / Failure" so I'd like to give them as much exposure as I can because they're not getting it at home and their parents are paying extra to have their kids at our school. The sad thing is the Reading Specialist teacher would have to be 65+ and all she has to say about the kids she's worked with is nothing but negative. I wonder why she's there.

Anyway, we are hoping to get a bank account started next week so we can transfer some money over. The bank will come into school to set them up and we don't need our work permits to do it thank goodness. Sorting out a budget has been interesting. We keep converting to NZ which makes things really cheap and then we remember that we're not earning NZ, we're earning Egyptian, so there's no point converting. Scary thought some days but we've worked out how much we can spend each week until payday... so all is good.

The museum and Saqqara are our next ventures but we have to wait to see what happens now that Morsi, etc have been found guilty. There should be some retaliation from the Brotherhood but we are not really worried about it. We just keep our heads down and don't get into political conversations with the locals unless we know them really well. The Egyptian friends we have are all happy with the current situation. They have been through so much change in the past 10 - 12 year I'm not sure they have any idea what normal democracy is. We are so lucky in NZ!

Woohoo! Tomorrow is the last day of the week and I intend on leaving at 2 again.  There's only so many hours to a working day ...

Nearly Done

Having my own personal helper has meant my walls are all done and I've managed to unpack 12 of the 13 boxes that were dumped in my room by the dadas. Dadas are a group of ladies that carry big heavy boxes, clean, move furniture, find things you need and always have a smile on their faces. I might have to start calling Tony a dada if he comes into school and helps too often. The other teachers on our floor started stealing him away to help with their rooms today ... better keep a closer eye on all these single women.
Here are the after photos of my class walls. You have to imagine half the piles of textbooks, etc taken away as I have to share them with the other Grade 3 teacher who doesn't start til the 10th (Nice for some.) Once the kids are in we can get their work on the walls and it will look more like a kids' space than a teacher's. Someone tell Louise Dempsey I have her new book all ready to sneak into my programme :-)

The Supply Cupboard

The supply cupboard is everything Anna said it would be. It puts our little teacher stationery boxes to shame.
I was able to go into the "room" and choose anything I wanted. The supply lady swapped the 4 blue whiteboard pens I took first for a whole box of 12 and when I asked if they were for the whole year she said I could come back next month for more. Permanent markers, tape, staplers, staples, pens, pencils, clearfiles & refills, huge sheets of coloured paper / card ( I only need 4 to cover a display board), dusters, pastels, felt tips - you name it they had it, except for gun staplers, and you could take as much as you wanted. Teacher heaven!
Tony spent the day at school with me cutting out all my lettering and putting up displays when I couldn't be bothered climbing on top of desks. He did such a great job I think some of the others are going to try stealing him to help in their rooms.
I'll take photos when we're finished and put them on the blog.
We were thinking of Egyptian for dinner but need to finish our pasta from last night. Waste not around here. Egyptian tomorrow maybe...

First Day at Work

The day didn't quite start as planned. The taxi driver I had booked didn't turn up and the one who dropped myself and Bonnie to school took the long route and tried to overcharge us. I say tried because he didn't get away with it. Even the LE10 I gave him was too much.
The staff meeting started at 9am and finished at 9.45am. Nothing like a fast staff meeting! The rest of the day was spent sorting out boxes that had been left in our classes, a lengthy lunch at the local Chinese and stapling up the 2 display boards in my room.
I always knew that both Edendale and Gladstone were well-resourced schools and appreciated the abundance of equipment & resources we had available to us. At MAC it's like stepping back in time to when I first started at Edendale and resources were few but we made the most of what we found (the odd wine box for reading books and maths equipment) or shared with each other. Free ice cream containers, wine boxes and plastic containers are a rarity. I had to walk up and down the corridor in search of a stapler to put up my display boards and finally found one that worked after half an hour. Would you believe there is one gun stapler in the school? If you are heading to Egypt please put one in your luggage with multiple packs of staples. Some of you know how much I love using gun staples and changing my displays :-). That should last me 2 years.
The teachers are a great bunch, mostly American but I met a Kiwi, a Swiss and a Brit today. No Aussies or Canadians. There are only 400 kids, Kindergarten (5yrs) up to Grade 12 and the elementary school has the majority of the children. I think it's between half and 2/3 of the roll are elementary. I'm looking forward to meeting my class on the 22nd as the Reading Support teacher spent quite a bit of time giving me the rundown on them this morning. I'm sure they'll be just as lively as all the other kids I've taught over the years even though there's only 16 of them.
Tomorrow is another day of sorting and trying to decipher the curriculum and planning. I'm sure I'll get my head around it in the next week before the other Grade 3 teacher arrives and we can split the resources that are in boxes in my room, between us. Last year there was only 1 Grade 3 class. Could you imagine having to share 1 class's resources between 2? Going to be a challenge!