UVA Young Alumni Newsletter Post

My response to "What have you been up to in the past 24 months since graduation?" for UVA's Young Alumni E-Newsletter...

When asked what I miss most about Charlottesville, I never imagined I would respond, "The air quality." Sure, the quirky town, the Lawn lit with autumn leaves and the classmates made into lifelong friends are qualities we Cavaliers appreciate from Day One of first year.

But when I was back in Charlottesville and northern Virginia over winter break, I never expected to lament the lack of car horns, chaos, and Arabic. And it never crossed my mind to miss a midnight sun or grueling hikes after a full work day. Yet those are the marks that Cairo, Egypt and Anchorage, Alaska have left on me. These weird urges can be blamed on the travel bug I caught during my semester abroad in Australia, where I had my first taste of unfamiliar air.

Itching to visit another country post-graduation, I found myself in what looked like another planet without even having to flash my passport at Customs. In my seven months in Alaska, I found rugged individualists, midnight suns and midday moons, moose, bears, home brewed beers, untamed wildernesses and a job at the Alaska Building Science Network. As the Energy Efficiency Assistant I arranged the materials and logistics of my manager's trips into Alaska's native villages, where he and a team of local residents retrofitted their public buildings to be more energy efficient. Such cold and rural places have unbearable energy costs for the low-income Eskimo or American Indian families. Fortunately new doors, windows, insulation, water heaters and compact fluorescent lighting cut their costs so dramatically that the savings paid for the grants within three to five years.

Come December 2009, I was newly adjusting to the five hours of daylight, testing my courage at skiing from Alyeska Mountain's peak to base, playing Ultimate Frisbee in a half foot of snow, and making weekend getaways to rural towns or isolated cabins. I didn't feel ready to leave Alaska yet, but I had to answer the call to live outside the country while I was "still young and full of energy", as my elders' ominous advice always went.

A year ago I landed in Cairo, Egypt with a newly-printed English teaching certificate and a spinning head from all the noise, smog, crowds, harsh heat and reckless traffic encircling me. After the month-long TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) course in Alexandria, Egypt on the Mediterranean Sea, I felt ready for that great big ball of dust and 17 million inhabitants and bittersweet reputation known to Cairo. What a roller coaster of a year it has been. I should have received a what-to-expect pamphlet before coming...

Welcome to Egypt! Say "Salaam aleikum". Or don't bother; your accent is atrocious. Let's begin: start your day by intentionally confusing yourself. Switch your toothpaste with face wash, for example. Embrace the feeling and expect it to revisit you repeatedly throughout your day. You will not understand the meaning or rationale of the majority of things around you. Smile sheepishly as compensation for the appropriate verbal responses you lack in Arabic. Find an apartment and roommates; feel hopeful about finding an income. Lose hope over ever finding an income, despite your piece of paper that suggests you teach English. Gradually pick up teaching gigs and be grateful that people would subject themselves to being guinea-pig first students. Intersperse attempts to learn Arabic, exterminate bed bugs, and survive bouts of food poisoning.

Your family will visit in July. You will be an unpleasant travel buddy and tour guide due to your newfound obsession with protecting them like children from tourist prices, scams and sexual harassment. But they will loyally follow you on trains and buses, praise your perplexing choice of residency, and hear your throaty spluttering as proficiency in Arabic. In August spontaneously escape the sweltering city streets to be an unqualified bartender and nervous SCUBA diver in Dahab: a touristy, backpackery little town on the Red Sea. Get Advanced SCUBA certified. Dive with hammerhead sharks. Watch sunsets from the bar balcony. Feel happy. Look sunburnt.

Return to Cairo to teach adult English classes and make new friends and somehow forget how life in Cairo seemed so tough. Develop a constantly changing schedule of private English tutoring for students of all ages and nationalities. By random luck become a Vinyasa Yoga instructor at fitness centers and gyms. Feel at home; forget how food poisoning felt. Fall in love with Cairo again and again without asking why. Praise the cooling weather and evening breezes from your plastic chair at a sheesha (hookah) cafe in the street. Anticipate spending Christmas in the States, and returning to Cairo for another year. Or two. Wait for the travel bug to bite again and see where it takes you.