A Passport to Cairo
When students attend an international conference, the true destination is political and cultural sophistication.
By Bill Kirtz
A long, draining journey to an unfamiliar place. Seat-of-the-pants conference sessions. Unfor-gettable sights. Vivid realizations and new understanding. All set against a backdrop of political chaos and bloodshed.
Experiential education, at its most experiential.
In November, six Northeastern students made the university’s annual pilgrimage to the Model Arab League
congress in Cairo, Egypt.
There, “representing” the state of Jordan, they plunged into security, eco-nomic, and social-development discussions with 250 college-age counterparts from the Arab world, Africa, and Europe.
“This is a miniature study-abroad program that introduces students to a very different region,” says political science professor Denis Sullivan. “It takes a huge leap of faith and courage for them to do this.
“The trip immerses them in Egyptian culture, politics, geography, and economics,” says Sullivan, a respected Arab scholar and consultant, and former special assistant to President Freeland. “The modern world and the Third World unite in Cairo. The students stay in the lap of luxury—then they go to the City of the Dead.”
Sullivan calls the grueling eight-day trip, undertaken last year amid escalating Arab-Israeli violence, a perfect example of the kind of international experience Northeastern can offer students. He brought the NU delegation to Cairo three days before the start of the congress, so they could soak up all the sights, sounds, and smells.
And it’s a great way to promote the value of lengthier study-abroad experiences, he adds, noting that several students have parlayed their Model Arab League stints into yearlong international adventures.
James Beaudreau, a junior political science major who was making his second Model Arab League trip in November, followed up his first experience with home stays in Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan. Brian Burleu, a senior majoring in international affairs, attended the model congress in 1999 and is currently studying at Cairo University.
Moreover, many past leaders of the Model Arab League, which began in 1990, have gone on to high diplomatic positions, a goal held by several of last year’s NU participants.
The tough got going
Sullivan’s been leading these Cairo trips since 1993, the year the Oslo Mideast peace agreement was signed. Last fall, Northeastern was the only American university that attended the Model Arab League. Worries over the intensifying Palestinian-Israeli conflict kept other invited U.S. universities away.
This wasn’t the first time a Northeastern contingent had encountered a difficult situation in the Middle East. Three years earlier, political science department chair Christopher Bosso and his delegation were in Cairo when Islamic militants killed fifty-eight tourists in Luxor.
Despite all this, Bosso calls the university’s participation in the Model Arab League a vital “part of the tapestry” of a Northeastern education. He’s pleased all the university’s international internship, co-op, and study opportunities make it hard for students to “escape” some form of intense interaction abroad.
“It’s important to get students out there in the world,” he says. “It’s an extension of Northeastern’s older theme, co-op. Traditional co-op works very well, but it’s also important to make sure students meet people of different cultures. The Model Arab League is especially intense, requiring negotiating skills and a lot of preparatory work.”
Safely back on Huntington Avenue, the students agree the Cairo trip was as educational as it was stressful.
The congress’s organizational snafus and political biases frustrated some. The kamikaze traffic that makes Boston driving look timid left others agog, as did the flocks of commuters that hang off vans and squash into buses.
All marveled at the seemingly endless waves of the world’s largest police force—sporting “Traffic, Tourist, Antiquities” badges—who did little more
than smoke, sip glasses of tea, and solicit tips for letting incontinent camels and their passengers approach the pyramids.
Off the tourist circuit
The students’ days started at sunrise, as loudspeakers at Cairo’s 15,000 mosques made the first of five daily calls to prayer.
They sometimes ended in a way the average visitor couldn’t hope to experience: a climb up five dark stories to share sweet pastries with a hard-working Egyptian family—longtime friends of Sullivan—who welcomed the students warmly, proudly presenting one with a keffiyeh, the kind of black-and-white checkered headcloth worn by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Amid the crowds, the poverty, and the stench, stereotypes dissolved, friendships grew, and career plans blossomed. The Northeastern students began to see their Arab counterparts as having similar goals, just different ways of reaching them.
At the model congress’s home base, the American University in Cairo, the students got an overwhelming sense of Arab voices—and a vastly different society.
The Northeastern delegation—along with their counterparts representing Jordan, Kuwait, Palestine, Gaza, and the West Bank—heard opening-session calls that would soon become very familiar: Boycott American goods like McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Marlboros. Remember: “The angels of the martyred Palestinians are watching your deliberations.”
However friendly the Arabs were to the Northeastern contingent, they espoused the Palestinian cause—through keffiyehs, posters, or sloganeering.
Arabs aren’t used to divergent views. The relatively liberal Egyptian government has repeatedly ignored protests against its use of criminal and libel laws to muzzle dissenters. Egypt imposes fines and prison terms for “inciting hatred,” “violating public morality,” and “harming the national economy.”
The NU students were surprised their Arab colleagues assumed all Americans think and feel the same way. Indeed, some Cairo students believe CNN censors the news to “falsely” suggest Israelis are just defending themselves from Palestinians.
Teachers at American University say they can’t convince their students that religion doesn’t play the huge part in America that it plays in the Arab world, or that Jewish writers in the United States don’t automatically toe the Zionist party line. They also say their students often don’t acknowledge the subtleties of a free American press, which has in fact roundly condemned Israeli gun-ship attacks that killed Palestinian civilians.
Pervasive restrictions
Arab students face tight control over what they can read and hear. In 1999, American University was forbidden to import more than ninety titles, including detective stories, historical works, and political studies.
Such restrictive thinking proved equally prevalent at the Model Arab League. Some NU students were told, “You’re representing Jordan wrong.” Others complained of getting arrogant instructions, not policy advice. On opening day, some were informed that their caucuses had been held the previous day. Meeting locations and times were similarly inexplicably switched without notice.
Beaudreau found the conference frustrating. “Because of the political situation, we were seen as representatives of the U.S., not as individuals, [though] we can empathize with the Arabs, the Palestinians, and the Israelis.”
He notes that although many young Egyptians he met “see us as the evil empire, their perception of the Middle East is just as skewed as ours. They don’t understand the Israeli point of view.”
Tania Dall, a middler majoring in journalism, agrees. Disappointed with the conference’s disorganization, she says she “still got a lot out of it. I met very interesting people. You’ll always find cultural differences, and it’s always difficult to integrate into foreign cultures.”
She stresses, as did the others, that Sullivan’s classroom neutrality had prepared her well for Cairo. “He doesn’t lean on one side or the other,” Dall says, “as it should be. He lets you formulate your own opinions.”
Although she found the Northeastern group had a lot in common with Arab students, she says the increasingly tense Mideast situation led to a chilly welcome. “The Arabs saw us as representatives of the U.S., a mistake many people make,” she says.
“Looking back, that was the most surprising and disappointing thing—how much politics can affect people on a day-to-day basis,” Dall says. “I thought university people would be much more open-minded.”
The power of the new
Ana Carcani, a sophomore majoring in political science and international affairs, currently in Germany on a publishing co-op, says the conference was a “great learning experience—new ideas, new people.”
She, too, applauds how Sullivan prepared them. “He was very neutral. We collected information, and got an understanding of the conflict from both sides.”
Shy at first about participating in conference sessions, Carcani discovered that the African, Indian, and Arab students respected her opinions. Expecting a totally anti-Israel point of view, she was impressed with Arab students’ “logical explanations” for their beliefs. “It’s a very old conflict, very difficult to understand from my perspective.”
Carcani says some Arab students “didn’t try as hard as other students to find solutions. Their emotions were a negative.” Still, she met “a new generation of students more open to negotiation. Some were very radical, but some were open.”
Liz Larcano had a better experience. The Arab students she got to know didn’t brand the NU students as pro-Israel. Though “some saw us as puppets of American imperialism,” she says, many of those stereotypes dissolved with personal contact.
Larcano says some Arab students thought that “it said a lot that American students are here. ‘You’re not what we think Americans are.’ The fact that we came over to Egypt during a very tense situation really communicated something to them.”
What resonated with her even more than the conference, she says, was “the experience of Cairo—the markets, the warmth of the hospitality. We had been saying ‘Arabs’ and ‘us.’ But they just want to do the best for themselves.
“I want to be someone who makes a difference,” says Larcano. “So does everyone at that conference. We’re so quick to judge people and politics. But we got to see others’ points of view, how much we have in common.”
A sobering day trip
Surprised by Cairo’s underdevelopment, Larcano was especially moved by the City of the Dead, a teeming warren where thousands live in abandoned tombs, scrambling for tourists’ ballpoint pens and candy. “The poverty, the day in–day out struggle was incredible. We could always just turn around and go back to the hotel.”
A 3.9 student who is the first member of her family to attend college, Larcano calls the Cairo trip more proof that “Northeastern has really given me a lot.” Currently an intern in Senator Edward Kennedy’s Washington, D.C., office, she has also lived and studied in Belgium and interned at the European Parliament.
In Egypt, Sarah Frye, a sophomore political science and international affairs major, was quick to defend the NU group against “evil empire” slurs. She told one anti-Israeli cabbie, “We’re not American foreign policy—we’re individuals.”
Despite such incidents, Frye says, “it’s important to make individual contacts on both sides.” She continues to e-mail several Arab students she met at the conference.
“Over half of my high school friends are Jewish,” Frye says, “but you can’t be on just one side if you’re fully informed. Being pro-Jewish and pro-Israel are two different things.”
Jonathan Sahady, a senior majoring in political science, says, “We were all excited to attend the conference, but also excited to see another culture up close and personal. We were very fortunate to have Sullivan, who’s capable of translating nuances of culture for us.
“We’ve tended to see the Middle East through the perspective of the West,” says Sahady. “We knew anti-Israeli sentiment existed, but it was still surprising how blatant it was. It was a little bit eyebrow-raising.”
He says some Arabs told him they had never talked with an American before and, having been given the chance, realized “not all of us are stereotypically jingoistic.”
Sahady had wanted to study tax law. “Now I want to study international law. It’s a bigger world than I thought: more things to see, more things to do.”
Election-time chaos
While the Northeastern group was in Cairo, Egypt held its parliamentary elections. One day, as the students attended the conference, Sullivan and a colleague went to a polling place, where they witnessed a melee that made pregnant-chad outrage look tame, including a man who angrily tried to push his way into the voting booths.
(Minor stuff compared with scenes at other precincts. One woman reportedly refused a $50 offer to cast four votes. Scores of people were killed or injured during the several rounds of voting.)
At the polling place, Sarah, a well-dressed Cairo University medical student, whose sleek attire sharply contrasted with the veils on the women around her, carried a sign in support of her politician uncle.
The sparkling twenty-one-year-old abandoned her cell phone long enough to talk about dating in Egypt (casual among the upper classes), her trip to Boston to visit her brother at MIT, Red Sox prospects, and her delight that America’s new vice president isn’t Jewish.
Every encounter in Egypt held contradictions, a realization not lost on the Northeastern students, who saw some Model Arab League participants calmly peruse pro-Hitler graffiti on the American University campus.
And many beliefs were reexamined. Are Palestinian rock-throwers “terrorists” or “freedom fighters”? Are the Israeli soldiers they oppose an “army of occupation” or “peacekeepers”? Are the homeowners they protect “pioneers” or “squatters”?
The students, like the rest of the world, mull more questions than answers.
Sullivan’s opinion? “The Palestinians should have their own land.” His commitment to creating a solution? “We have to find ways to pull people together. I feel the urge to bring people here, to search for peace and reconciliation in this troubled land.”
Bill Kirtz, associate professor of journalism, wrote about Dr. Joy Browne in the January issue.
• See related story, "Cairo without tears."
