You Can't Make Mistakes.

[UPDATE 25 August 2010: I have added a gallery of photos. Enjoy.]

Jeff and I are spending this week in a village called New Basaisa, north of the town of Ras Sudr, on the coast of the Gulf of Suez. We are both teaching at a week-long English and Technology continuing education program for local folks of varying levels of education and skill.

New Basaisa is a sustainable development project that started nearly 20 years ago by Dr. Salah Arafa (who is also a professor of physics at the AUC). He set up an NGO called the Kenouz Sinai (Treasure of Sinai) Development Program which is now engaged in activities like the one in which we are participating now and the continued development of this community.

New Basaisa was constructed after a similar development and education program was begun in the original Basaisa, a Delta village near Zaqaziq. Salah decided that what was needed was a new beginning for a great deal of people. New Basaisa is that new beginning. The idea is simple: create an environment which will allow a group of people to collectively build a community that is based of principles of sustainability.

Salah called this “building an infrastructure” yesterday, but he is not talking about what we think of as infrastructure in a modern major city. Those infrastructures are not flexible and adaptable. In many cases they are completely immutable. What he was referring to was a set of methods by which a community would decide, as a community, to use in pursuit of having a life. In this case, independence and self-sufficiency is a major part of the operation.

It is thrilling to see this sort of thing happening in a place where the common answer to questions regarding education and economic opportunity is: “Move to Cairo,” a city which can already not sustain the rapid geographic expansion and population explosion that is occurring at present. All future development plans for the city are equally unsustainable as they appear to disregard this simple reality, preferring instead to regard Cairo as a magic city just waiting for psychotically expensive hotels and shopping malls to be erected adjacent to historical monuments that span the run of human history. That is, of course, as long as the monuments are not in the way…

It seems that everyone is ready to take the magic pill or drink the Kool-Aid these days and live in blissful ignorance, able to dial the phone and have anything delivered at any hour, never having to life a finger to accomplish anything. If the Puritans and Calvinists who settled the United States taught us anything, it was that building something with your hands is valuable and hard work is the measure of a person.

This place is like a breath of fresh air, not because of its fresh air—though that doesn’t hurt—but because it is a return to self-sufficiency on a sustainable and maintainable scale. That is the measure of any community, and very few are measuring up these days.