A place is any location defined by a unique characteristic. A region is an entire area that shares common characteristics. Global—well, global is just everything else. This is how I explained to my classes the three levels at which geographers study the earth. Attached to that lesson was a homework assignment: Draw or somehow produce the mental map of your neighborhood that you hold in your head. Include the places in your neighborhood that are essential to daily local life. The assignment was first met with the customary excuses. I don’t understand. But I can’t draw. I don’t live in a neighborhood, I live in an apartment. I’ve grown accustomed to swatting down the excuses as the bell rings and I scramble to write the assignment down in simple, legible English. Usually I get the second barrage of excuses the next day at the start of class. I left my copybook in my locker, can I go get it? Yes, I reply, get it quickly and quietly. When they return with the copybook, I ask for the homework. I left it in my copybook at home. Oops, caught in a lie. I was quite pleased and surprised, though, when almost every student handed in a map the next day. I received three types of maps. The overachievers drew and occasionally colored in cookie-cutter houses assembled around neatly gridded streets or web-like roundabouts. Several of the more enterprising boys printed out blurry overhead satellite images of their street from Google Earth, and labeled their otherwise indistinct building. The bottom tier of maps included pencil sketches on loose leaf paper, with one street and a few trees and houses, all bookended by a McDonald's and a Baskin Robbins. There was not a single mosque, post office or street name. Street names, I told them, are crucial for knowing where on earth a place is, and for people to move from one place to another. It helps us connect local to global. The individual places on their maps, or the larger sense of place captured by the maps, were the glossy things that they thought would jump off the page: Adidas Store, KFC, President’s House. I didn’t know what this meant. The president of Egypt? The president of our school? The unit manager of KFC? Everything was quite anonymous—quite global. I told my students that I was happy to receive the maps, happy at the effort they put in, but that they should strive to be more detailed with their work. I drive through these very neighborhoods every morning and afternoon on the school bus, and the truth is I love Cairo’s anonymity. I wait for a bus at a roundabout that looks exactly like the one to its North, South, East and West. A steady stream of a dozen or so school buses huffs and puffs by, each one briefly engulfing the entire area of the circle. I can’t say exactly, but they’re going somewhere in the same direction I am. Around 6:45 I actually hop on the bus. It takes about 20 minutes to squeeze and angle our way onto the highway, performing a series of what one of my colleagues calls ’95-point turns.’ In the next part of the journey we enter the 7 AM smog, which possesses the mind-bending power to meld together bridges and apartment complexes. I must admit that the only I way I can gauge progress on this route is to identify the Western logos and the international school signs. Canadian School of British Columbia. German University in Cairo. American International School. Each of these is located somewhere out in Greater Cairo in a place where foreign curriculum meet Egyptian students and culture. My school, in fact, is separated into an American, Egyptian, and German section. I can’t speculate as to how to true to form each of these ‘foreign curriculum’ are, but what you do have in each section is a bunch of students in uniform, out in the desert, communicating in a mixture of Arabic and something else, celebrating a mixture of Egyptian and Western holidays. It is utterly placeless, and I want to say this is one certain characteristic that makes Cairo a place. BM
