Imagistic Homesickness

Over the last few weeks I have begun getting a little inkling of what it will be like to be home this summer for a while. It does not exactly feel like homesickness but it has that form. It consists just of images:

visiting friends at their apartments
green plants in parks with lakes
miracle whip
guacamole
fried tofu
iced tea
thunderstorms
sailing
lemoncello and wine in the back yard
lighter fluid smell from the neighbor's grill
baseball on the radio
college radio
the public library
news hour
street fairs
driving
bicycling and drinking out of my water bottle
internet at home
drinking beer at concerts
free thursday nights at the walker art center
monday movies at loring park
listening to tapes in the car
talking with mom and dad about politics
mowing the lawn
ice cream from grand old creamery
the errand trifecta: groceries, post office, library

Miscellaneous Photos

Here are several photos I have been unsure of where to post so I'll put them all together.


These are the grounds of Ben Ezra Synagogue, rebuilt at the site of an earlier synagogue. This is one of many ancient churches and synagogues in the neighborhood of Coptic Cairo. Around this corner and to the left is where Moses as a baby is said to have been found in the reeds.


The strange and wonderful Sinai town of Nuweiba at dusk.


This grocery store near my apartment in Cairo was one of many that redecorated to sell treats in advance of Moulid (Muhammad's birthday).


My parents visited in January. This is my favorite picture from then. We were in the back of a 4 x 4 driving through a bumpy patch in the Black Desert in central Egypt.



Beautiful people wearing beautiful hats helped me to celebrate my birthday. Here are just a few of them.

"I See What You're Doing There"

Brogan and Sherief, pictured above, are the originators of this banal, yet entrancing gambit. And I think it's fair to say I'm its chronicler. We've been hashing out the details here at parties, workshopping it among the AUC expat community, and are now ready to unveil it to the interweb community.

1. Someone does something slyly referential and possibly edgy or self-deprecating, likely taking the form of a joke at a party.

2. To enhance a spirit of playfulness, you address them with the following speech acts:

A. "i see what you're doing there"
(sometimes alt. "i don't see what you're doing there,")

B. "i understand it"
(often alt. "i don't really understand it")

C. ". . . and i like it."
(often alt. ". . . but i don't really like it.")

Glasses are knocked against each other and teeth are revealed. . .

3. The other parlor game participant can respond IN THE SAME WAY in which you referred to them. Specifically, Did THEY see what YOU were doing? Did THEY understand IT and did THEY like what YOU did?

TIP: Deviating from the form stated here robs the tradition of a certain weightiness and comedic timing but you can do two of the three for the sake of variety, or change the wording, so long as you keep each unit of meaning in order.

Now you're ready - Make it your own!

Mugabe continues attacks on MDC

The ruling ZANU-PF party's Robert Mugabe has been President of Zimbabwe since the first post-independence election in 1980. Here are a few links on the recent detentions and tortures of members of the MDC, Zimbabwe's major opposition party.

Sokwanele/Zvakwana features a good slideshow recap of media reports. There are some rather graphic images of people who have been beaten by police, but this is a really good capsule on the recent spate of beatings. Things like this make the internet valuable - highly recommended.

The BBC offers this roundup of blog opinion from Zimbabwe.

This background article on Zimbabwe's prospects for political change from the Globe and Mail is more realistic than the chirpy and somewhat ill-informed backgrounder from CBS News. If a transition of power was simply based on the public's recognition of growing problems in Zimbabwe, there might have been a change of power in Zimbabwe some 15 or 20 years ago, before hyperinflation, before shortages in food, oil, and concrete, before massive refugee flows, and government-sponsored demolition of housing, and so many cases of rape and torture of citizens.

Here are some better background articles from the Guardian on Zimbabwe's political crisis.

People like Mugabe rule with the correct calculation that - at best - people outside of Zimbabwe are simply not paying attention - and at worst - that people outside of Zimbabwe operate on the assumption that Africans are unable to govern themselves and that whatever happens in one Southern African nation will have a negligible impact elsewhere. I am doing a paper this term on Zimbabwean refugees and I hope to post more on the subject soon.

The Law Students Association

Some of LSA's high board in the P. R. glitz of Club Week.

Finally - my first posting in weeks. One reason for this lag has been that I'm a bit busy right now as President of something called the Law Students Association. We host lectures and films and we are a vehicle for student concerns, and hope to link current students with internships and other opportunities. Its been very satisfying so far to hang out with students and faculty and learn more about the future of our department, but it is currently consuming about 20% of my free time with emails and meetings and so forth.

We recently helped the department host a lecture and discussion with Aaron Page, on the plaintiffs' team of the Aguinda v. ChevronTexaco case. An NGO partner of the plantiff's team maintains an interesting website on their case. Among other charges, the plantiffs, indigenous people in Ecuador, claim that toxic waste from Texaco's oil explorations has given them cancer and prevented their access to clean water. (I'll let you guess which side of the case has deeper pockets.)

Finally, here's the webpage for a group some of us are volunteering for currently, the Sudanese Community Development Project. They operate a small school that I visited recently. As many Sudanese people live here in Egypt without the refugee status that would allow them to attend public school, places like this are their best option for learning in a structured environment. Unfortunately I don't have much time to help just now but they have a very good thing going.

Last but not least, there's even a modest LSA webpage on the Law Department website now. We are proud of this little technocratic miracle. More "content" to come there so stay tuned . . .