The Reality of Egypt (for me)

view from my balcony

As I’m sure you may have noticed, my blog posts have been lacking (both in number and frequency). Do you want to hear the bad news or the good news first? I always prefer bad news, so here goes. Upon arriving in Egypt LATE Friday night, I came to learn that the place I was supposed to live when I signed my contract was not in fact where we were going. Instead of living in Rehab (as I described in detail in this blog post), I am instead living in Madinaty (pronounced mah-din-tee). You can read more about the city of Madinaty here. The bad news that comes with this is that Madinaty is sparsely populated, has only one (small) grocery store, and cannot support home Wi-Fi networks because there are no phone lines installed yet. You can buy portable Wi-Fi (which I have done), but there are also few cell towers so the Internet connection often does not work. The good news is that Madinaty is even farther east than Rehab, which means I am even farther from greater Cairo and much safer. The negative to this is that it is extremely expensive to travel into Cairo by either bus or taxi. Though these past couple days have not been what I expected, I am not as upset as you might think. I’ve met some wonderful girls who look for the positive and we are making it all work to the best of our abilities (and laughing a lot along the way).

In the meantime until these things get sorted out (though some might not be “fixed”), we have been bussing to and from school each day to start getting ready for the year to begin! For the past two days I have mostly been wandering around the school trying to figure out where things are as the classrooms are opening up (they were not fully cleaned yet) and doing things like setting up my school login and checking out my teacher edition textbooks. (By the way, how cool that I have the teacher editions!!)

first ever staff meeting at Dover!

the entryway/lobby of Dover!

I’m looking forward to the first weekend starting Thursday (isn’t that crazy- my school week runs Sunday to Thursday because Friday is a holy day) because we are planning to go to a big Carrefour store in the city next to us. I need a ton of stuff like towels and actual food (the tiny market we have has almost nothing I can eat except eggs and fruit). It’ll also be nice to have actual time to settle in and get a little more comfortable with where I’m living.

Again for those of you that are trying to contact me, I’m sorry that this is so much more of an issue than I thought. Please refer to my post here about communication abroad, and hopefully I’ll be able to talk to many of you soon!