I just got off the phone with my Gilman person, Jennifer. She made me feel a whole lot better about everything. I have the option to stay here if I want, and I will eventually have to pay Gilman back, but I will have time. I am still leaving. There is no guarantee there will be a semester here, and I can’t miss one. Jennifer did inform me that Gilman will defer my scholarship (if I can pay it back in full) so that I can attend a separate semester abroad in the summer. I just don’t know that I am able to save it up before then. I do however want to pay them back.
I feel a whole lot better after talking to her. I answered questions for her, and she answered a lot of questions for me. Several Gilman scholars have gotten into other programs. When I spoke to Ryan about those options, he said they had worked together to find a program in Greece. It’s in a town called Thessaloniki. (Very fun to say.) I don’t even know what courses they offer. They are REALLY affordable though, especially for Europe. Unfortunately, I don’t think affordable will be good enough. In Egypt I was able to subsist in 5 L.E a day if needed. That is equivalent to $1. I can’t get that in Europe. The euro is .72EU to $1. The cost of living for me goes up exponentially. I will probably end up back at home. I wish I had three or four thousand more dollars. The tuition/housing there is equivalent, I just have to support myself and buy books.
A big shout out to the Gilman Scholarship program. I thought they were forcing us to leave by pulling our scholarships, but in reality they are awesome. She is now my “team on the ground” for getting me where ever it is that I am going. When I get to “safe haven” which is one of four locations that the embassy flights will take us (we won’t know which til we are on one,) I am going to call her and she is going to arrange and pay for a hotel room for me. If necessary she will also make sure I have a flight home. I’m hoping that isn’t necessary because I will already need to pay back the US government for the embassy flight. I may complain about that at a future date, I just have to see how much it is they are charging us to get out of Egypt. I feel like the Israelites being led out of bondage. Jennifer and Ryan are playing tag team as my Moses. It is nice to know that someone is helping me out because right now, I can’t help myself out and it is really difficult.
I am really glad that I got out of the dorm and ate every kind of Egyptian food I could today, you laugh, but I’m serious! In the two hour window that was left before Egypt’s curfew (1PM now) and after the President of AUC’s Q&A session, Cat, Christine, and I ventured out in search of phone cards. They weren’t anywhere we checked so we ended up wandering to 26th of July street and finding them in a little shop. being in such high demand, the shop owner was not really very cool on price. He had jacked it up 20%. We bought them anyway. After phone cards we went in search of food. They knew a tamaya place and so we headed towards it. On the way we passed Alex Top and decided we would stop there, eat koshary, and then head to find tamaya. So we did. Have I mentioned how much I love koshary? I also picked up a container of milky rice and ate it when I got back to the dorm.
On the way to the tamaya place from Alex Top, Christine sidetracked us into a bookstore! Joy!!! I bought my roommate back home an awesome book and I got my kids The Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle in Arabic. Both my kids are too old for that book, but it is really awesome and I am going to buy the English version and show it to them. I was really happy to see a book store. I love books.
After the bookstore, we continued on with our journey towards tamaya. Tamaya is the Egyptian word for falafel and the Egyptian version actually tastes a lot better than most I have tasted. Two is a meal. We all got two, after eating koshary, and we ate them when we got back to the dorm. Like I said, I ate a bunch of my favorite Egyptian food today. I am sad that there will be no every other Thursday Indian food date.
It’s so hard to believe I have only been here just over a week. All these people I have met are incredible and I am excited to know them and they feel like the kind of friends I have had forever rather than people I only met in the past week. I hate that Mubarak won’t be kind to his people. I hate that it has come to this for them and I hope it gets resolved. I wish that things had ended up better for us at AUC this semester but I have friends that I will always have regardless of how this ended.
So, to both of my Moseii thank you for all your work for me. I won’t be able to get anything done without your help. I wish there was something I could do to show you how much this means to me.
The next time I write this blog, I will either be at the airport waiting to get out or in another country. I wonder if I will get a new visa or immigration stamp?
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