Tonight I’m set to have my first interview with one of the African heads at the Arab League. I was told to meet him at the Egyptian Diplomatic Club – but no address was given. No one where am staying seemed to have any idea, I couldn’t reach my contact person, and google offered me a street name and nothing else. So I set out this afternoon to see if I could find it.
To contextualize a little – Today has been my day for doing the thing I always love to do whenever I hit a new city. Get out and walk. I always keep the address of where I’m staying handy, but other than that the basic aim is to keep following my nose until I’m just lost enough to have to start talking with people about how to find my way. (I’m conscious as I’m writing this that it may sound strange, but don’t knock it before you’ve tried it!) Anyway – having orientated myself pretty well through this tried and tested process, I worked out where the street google pointed me to was and set off to find tonight’s meeting place.
30 minutes of walking later I was starting to mistrust google. Gawdy souvenir shops, check. McDonalds, check. Nothing resembling any diplomatic club was in sight. So I stopped to ask. Within a few minutes I had a crowd of young men offering advice (all very friendly, albeit not all related to finding my meeting place!). But it’s an older man who eventually joins the group that seems, in my assessment, to actually know what he’s talking about. He offers to take me there and we start walking together.
Weaving in between honking cars and minibuses over the five lanes of traffic at a time, we strike up the usual introductory conversation. Where are you from? being early on the list. Sudan, he says. Where in Sudan? Darfur. You can just imagine how the conversation goes from there. . .
We found the diplomatic club together, and I got a solid briefing on the key issues facing the Darfuri refugee community in Cairo along the way. Ibrahim (not his real name) has invited me to come and meet his family and other members of the Darfuri refugee community here when he has a day off from work next week. I’m so glad he stopped to help me.
[…] of a Darfuri family of twelve who are struggling to make ends meet in Cairo (the head of which is the man who helped me navigate my way to the Egyptian Diplomatic Club on Monday). More later, Bec This entry was posted […]