sleepless

I have pretty seriously effed up my sleep schedule over the past few days, so after lying awake the last few hours - at first trying to sleep, then trying not to try to sleep, then reading a guidebook, which I neglected to do before arriving - I gave up and wandered out to check my email, in the process discovering that it was only 6:30. Now I'm afraid that I'll fall asleep again and no one will wake me up and I'll nap all day, like yesterday, so here I sit.

My first day here we went to Cairo's main museum, which houses all the treasure from Tut's tomb, the statues of the heretic pharoah Ahkenaten, an expansive collection of things mummified, and a numbing array of pots, miniatures, papyrus, etc. Due to the unlabeled, heaping, back-room-of-the-antique-store organization of the place, I missed my favorite piece, the carved wooden head of the young Tutankhamen emerging from a lotus. I'm not too disappointed, though, as the rest of the museum was hardly underwhelming. It's always so sublime to stand in front of my art history education at life size and just let it wash over me; to understand the light that glows through alabaster, or the proud angle of a new pharoah's chin. Before you ask, I did not buy the supplemental ticket - at about twice the price of the initial museum ticket - that would have allowed me into the Mummy Room. Why petrified cats are worth more than a collection of gilded chariots and intestine-holding mini-sarcophagi somewhat eludes me. Apart from the museum, it's been a lot of market-wandering, falafel-eating, and tea-drinking, pluz lazing around watching pirated American TV with Pamila and Dmitry. Vague plans are in the works for pyramids and coptic quarters.

Despite these outings, the company of my much-missed best friends, and the availibility and small expense of decent beer, I haven't been able to escape the classroom. I've had fitful dreams about bureaucracy and schedule changes and several of my kids, all boys. I worry most about the boys. I know that I shouldn't, and that the girls are drug and dropout risks and could find themselves pregnant or involved with the "wrong crowd," a much more significant phrase than it was in my more suburban upbringing, but still, it's the boys who I see in my dreams, the bright ones with the most academic promise, sheepishly lying about why they skipped class, offering me drugs at a discount, disappearing into strange, crowded cars with no license plates. They are out of school for two months, and of a thousand ways they might fill that time, I am picturing the worst, the reason most likely being the ill tidings I've received from my school.

On Tuesday, while I text-messaged friends through the boredom of a delayed flight, my school experienced its first "race riot." There had been rumors for a couple of months about tensions between two of the neighborhood's major gangs - rumors that administration had not shared with teachers - and no sooner had the alert died down than fights began to break out on campus, initially between the two gangs but moving towards the targeting of students based on their race. The whole thing happened at the end of lunch, resulting in total lockdown, SWAT team presence, and the arrest of about 20 students. My source on the inside - a Program teacher and one of my closest friends on campus - confirms that media reports have been fairly accurate, that there had been police heliopters and cops in riot gear, that students were on staggered release for at least the following two days, that police presence has been substantially increased and that there has been some aftershock-style fighting. She also confirms my strongest suspicion: that administration is being reticent and elusive at best, making strange and disruptive cheerleading-style announcements over the loudspeaker, and urging students and teachers not to believe "rumors" they will not name any more than they will tell anyone what's really going on.

The whole thing is just fucked up, and I'm fucked up about it. I feel like I should be there, but even if I was there in LA I wouldn't be at school, or at least I wouldn't have my own students (though I suspect very strongly that we are hurting for both teachers and subs right now;) and even if I was there at school it wouldn't change a damn thing. The problems and the anger are too deep, the gang lifestyle too enticing or at least too logical, the other opportunities too scarce; I as a person am too hesitant, too half-hearted; as a teacher I am too ineffectual. I can assign my students a schedule for completing their workbooks. I cannot help them understand the world; I cannot do a thing to change it.