You Can't Make Mistakes.

Day 4

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

Jeff wanted to discuss development with the kids today. I really didn’t know how to go about this, so I let him have at it. He decided to start—I’m not joking here—with a listen and read the lyrics exercise involving Jack Johnson’s “The 3 R’s” from the Curious George soundtrack. I was skeptical. It’s a pretty weird song. The guy obviously wrote it while stoned—he’s a frigging surfer turned songwriter; of course he is stoned—and the lyrics are pretty confusing and convoluted. There is all this math and then somehow we are discussing recycling? The song ends with the singing of a bunch of numbers? Really weird.

‘Reduce,’ ‘Reuse’ and ‘Recycle’ were the only three words that EVERY one of the students would remember on their final assessment the next day. Well done Jeff.

The day continued quite pleasantly. Dr. Arafa returned from Cairo and surveyed the progress. We continued to make spreadsheets of vocabulary words, which everyone seemed excited about—as this activity would provide a list for them to use as a reference for studying.

In the afternoon, pursuant to our chosen theme of the day, Jeff had the students decide on what sort of things that they would like to see in the future in New Basaisa. He used the map that the girls drew the other day as a base and had them draw new buildings and features on pieces of paper which they then tacked on the map in place. These included such frivolities as a hospital and a police station and such necessities as a night club and a cinema on the beach. It got everyone thinking forward though.

Meanwhile, I compiled their vocabulary lists and printed them. Immediately after distributing the lists, I was told, by everyone, that there were wrong translations, wrong words. I explained to them that these were not lists that I made myself, but rather the compilation of all of their lists. It took a few times explaining what I meant before they figured out that if there were mistakes, they belonged to the authors, and it was up to the authors to correct them. They proceeded to do so, collaboratively, arguing over words here and there. Eventually they came up with a decent list of errata which they shared between them.

After the students left we sat around and worked, preparing for the last day of the workshop, waiting for the sun to get a bit lower in the sky. Dr. Arafa wanted to take us on a walk to the beach. Behind the village, there is an expanse of planted olive and palm grove with several wells dug in it. Beyond that, he told us, there was an expanse of dunes and virgin beach.

So around six we began walking west. The groves are really pretty, even when they are out of season. The olives are coming into season shortly and we could see fruit starting to sprout on the branches. I hadn’t realized until this week that olives don’t flower. There are just buds and then suddenly olives are growing on the branches. Dr. Arafa and several of kids confirmed this. Odd plants that grow in the desert.

When we got to the edge of the dunes it was like stepping onto another planet. I realized that I have never really seen virgin beach before in my life. I have been around a lot of dunes, but they are mostly in preservation areas in the States where they have been destroyed to some extent. This was unreal. Like some alien landscape.

The scrubby bushes and tall grass were well rooted causing great huge hills and hollows in between. There were all sorts of animal tracks in the sand: some kinds of lizard, dogs, a few that I couldn’t recognize. The tracks that most interested me were the snake. They were everywhere. Snakes are apparently pretty busy when there aren’t folks around. Based on the size of some of the tracks, I was not particularly interested in coming across their makers.

We finally crested the last dune and came to the tide plain. It was like nothing I have ever seen. There were shells and pieces of dead coral everywhere. The reef is quite deep here, so the and the sea floor are quite bare and sandy for a long way. It is great for swimming: I’ve never been a big fan of reefs because I don’t tend to like the way that you have swim near them. This was ideal for my aquatic tastes.

Beyond the beach we could see ships approaching the mouth of the canal to the north. On either side of us a kilometer away, there were settlements or developments that went right up to the beach. Compared to where we were standing, they were ugly concrete boxes. They looked out of place.

We walked back into the village just as the sun set and wandered by a few more wells and were shown the site of a future desalination plant right in the middle of the tiny settlement. The walk to the beach and back was not an easy one, given the terrain, but it was a good time and place to be. I have seldom seen more interesting and beautiful natural places here.