articles-2

I Am From This Country.. .. أنا من البلد دي

An Article by Dina Ghobashi

(Click on images to enlarge)

It was 7pm on Friday September 18^th, when I received the ‘Congratulations you have been selected out of 200 applicants’ email, two hours after the deadline had passed along with my hopes. I jumped and danced from joy! I have been asked to be the project manager for the Intel Education Service Corps team going to Egypt.

It’s always been a desire to find a way to merge my information technology experience with my passion for education development in my country and the rest of the Middle East.

500 Intel-powered classmate PCs had been donated to Egypt’s Ministry of Education, and the Ministry generously allocated them to CARE Egypt for this program. These classmate PCs (CMPCs) will benefit 13,000 students, over 56% of whom are girls. CARE places special emphasis on investing in girls out of a strong belief that their empowerment benefits whole communities. Together with four other Intel employees and our NGO partner, CARE Egypt, we spent a little over two weeks working in rural villages outside the governorates of El Minya and Beni Suef in Upper Egypt (a couple hundred kilometers south of Cairo).

“Where are you going?” says the train driver. We must have had puzzled looks on our faces, standing with our luggage on a platform at the Cairo Train Station looking in vain for platform numbers. We answered “El Menya, is this where your train is going?”. No, but I can drop you off there if you like…

Five long hours later, we stepped out of the train and took a deep breath. To our surprise; the air was clean and crisp. My lungs would be much happier here than in Cairo, I thought.

While El Menya and Beni Suef cities are much like some neighborhoods I frequented in Cairo, the villages where the middle schools were located reminded me of scenes from some old movies: women washing their clothes and dishes in a ditch, dusty narrow roads or no roads at all to get to school, kids playing with street dogs, car tires or broken tree branches...

I forgot who I was and where I lived, even more recent memories from the night before of my brother’s wedding at a 5 stars hotel in Cairo and the 2 hours of sleep in the comfy bed in my room with a view vanished.During the several hours it took us to set-up each school (those access points never work the same way twice!), we had the pleasure of getting to know students, teachers and school personnel. Among which were many self-studied programmers, Mahmoud: a Cisco certified network administrator, Amr: a student who created a math presentation using advanced PowerPoint techniques and proudly carried it on a CD, teachers and students with Facebook accounts that they access on dial-up lines, teens who study German and English online at an Internet Café that’s so busy you have to make reservations at least a day in advance.

The biggest surprise for all of us is that we finished! Sometimes the electricity went out. One time there was a bird’s nest on top of the school’s Internet router. All the time there was dust – a thick layer of dark dirt that got on everything including computers, cameras, clothes and, especially, hands. But somehow, ahead of schedule, 500 Intel-powered classmate PCs, 20 access points and 20 teacher laptops have been configured and installed in mobile carts in 20 schools. At least one hundred teachers have been trained on how to use technology to enrich their education and their lives.

We had extensive set-up help from our CARE partners, teachers in each school, the computer lab personnel, and, in one case, our driver Shaban who became a charging-cart-wirer extraordinaire. Even our tourism police escorts offered to help. “Are you done yet?” they asked every half hour, but only on the 3^rd day which made us suspicious. Our Care contact, Hanna, clarified that El Ahly and El Zamalek are playing that evening and everyone wants to watch the big game. Ah!

Most of the villages had never seen foreigners before and we were instant celebrities with a teeny bopper following, eat your heart out “Twilight” cast! Students crowded around us shouting, “What is your name?” “Where do you live?” “Welcome to Egypt!” “I love you!” They were almost as excited to meet us as they were to have new laptops in their schools. Several students told us, “I will never forget you.” They froze as soon as I spoke in Arabic. “What? You speak Arabic?”. “Yes, I’m Egyptian and I live in the US” I answered. “No you are not! How is the US different than here?” hmm.

At breakfast one day my teammates were discussing in amazement the attitude of the teenage students we met. How come these middle-high school kids are not - like those we may find in first world countries - “too cool” to be kind and affectionate to each other? I made the same observation when I moved to the US 12 years ago. I recalled how high school years in Cairo were the best of my life.

“Should we teach people how to use technology in education or teach them technology basics first?” asked me the reporter from Egypt Today. I smiled since I’ve been thinking even one step behind, ‘what should come first: better life conditions like clean water and reliable power supply or technology?’

Thinking development actions should be done in a serial way could prevent us from moving forward. I believe education is at the heart of the change needed to sustain development in underserved communities. The kind of education that teaches people how to learn not the one that teaches facts. Give them tools that open up new windows of possibilities, watch as they discover knowledge then guide, encourage and challenge them.

Like most people raised in Cairo, I had only ventured outside of it to visit beach locations; Alexandria, El Sahel, Sharm El Sheikh and Gouna or to go on school trips to historic sites like Luxor and Aswan. I had no idea what to expect in El Minya and Beni Suef. All my friends said: "El Minya is Arouss El Sa'id (Bride of Upper Egypt), you should be fine there, as for Beni Suef, good luck!"

How hard can it be, it’s all Egypt, right?

About the Author:

Dina Ghobashy was born in Cairo, Egypt. She earned a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Cairo University then she moved to the US to complete her masters in Computer Engineering at West Virginia University (WVU). Since her graduation, she held several positions at Intel Corporation in California and is currently a Program Manager in their Sales and Marketing Group. She is also the president of the diversity group ARABIC (Arab @Intel Community).This is her second education assignment with Intel, in the first, she was the project manager for an online learning solution in Arabic www.skoool.com.eg

Dina enjoys volunteering in the community, she taught at the Islamic Sunday School of Stanford for several years, translates for MECA (Middle East Children Alliance) and is a big sister. When she is not in the office, you can catch her running, teaching a group exercise class or reading at a coffee shop in San Francisco.