MENAXLDS 2009!! I love my Aiesec

Wow. Another AMAZING MENAXLDS Conference!!
I just returned from the Middle East & North Africa Exchange and Leadership Development Seminar held in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt and it was a great international conference! Over 150 delegates from 27 countries gathered in Sharm, where just a few weeks before World leaders convened to talk about peace in the Middle East region. The purpose of this conference is for young people from the MENA region and around the world to continue developing their potential by expanding their leadership, personal, and professional skills during sessions. Even though I was only able to attend this week long conference for 3 days, I know I gained and learned so much from the sessions and the people around me.
The conference started with Global Village, which is an opportunity for the delegates from each country to represent and show their culture, food, dances, etc…which was held in Cairo. I was so excited to see my old friends from last year’s conference and see all the new @ers ready for the conference! There was only 1 delegate from Yale University to represent the U.S.A. so I’m glad I was able to be there ☺
It is really sad to make all these connections and friendships and then they are taken away from you just as quickly as they started. Hopefully I will be able to see these amazing people again in the future, abroad or in the states. International Conferences like these remind me how absolutely awesome and unique this organization is and how lucky I am to be a part of it. The opportunities & possibilities of AIESEC are endless and I can truly say that I have changed for the better as a leader and benefited from @.
Okay, that was my AIESEC spiel ☺

Le tour de Beach

I had quite the beachy weekend!
After my ear infection prevented me from going to the ultra-cool desert camping trip, my roomie and her boyfriend invited me to take a weekend trip to Dahab with them instead. Don’t I have a great roommate!? So we packed up for a couple days and left promptly at 4am to begin our unnecessarily long journey to Dahab in the Sinai Peninsula. Of course I passed our in the back seat only to awake 3 hrs later to the gorgeous view of the Red Sea Mountain chain that runs all through Sinai.
I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it before! After a quick stop in Sharm-el-Sheikh to get my shot in my ass, we arrived to Dahab. The beach was not your typical beach beach. It was more rocky than sandy and it kind of went into a 2 foot drop off into the Red Sea. We stayed in a German hotel on the small bay and it was quite possibly the most relaxing weekend of my life. Thank goodness we had Amr there to bargain for our delicious seafood dinner that night, he seemed to make friends with every vendor on the street…friendly Egyptians! I just have to share this piece of alarming information I received from our Egyptian version of a ‘cabana boy’ the next day at the beach: Beduoins use camel boo-boo to make hash. Not implying that I take part in these activities but I just found it disgustingly interesting.
Our adventure back was just that, an adventure. We left Dahab at 8pm only to be greeted by a flat tire around 12am in the middle of the Sinai Desert FML. That only held us up for about 2ish hours, during which Anna & I were subjected to nasty policemen. After another hour, we were about 3 inches from a terrible accident and yet another flat. Praise God we were fine and we reached good ol Nasr City at around 4:30 am. Good trip tho!
THEEEEEN a friend of mine who is actually from Atlanta too (we didn’t kno eachother at home) called me up on Sunday to ask if I wanted to go to the beach for a day…for free. Of course I said YES so we were off to Ain Shokna on Monday morning. Leave it up to Egyptian timing to cause us to arrive at the beach at 4pm, really. It would’ve been a great day at the beach if we had gotten there like 4 hours earlier! But it was still a great day and made some new friends. This beach was even more beautiful than Dahab, the water was turquoisey-blue with sandbars and starfish! I’m sure I’ll be back soon enough.
Now I’m just trying to get ready for MENAXLDS 2009!!! And I couldn’t be more excited to attend this conference and see everyone! GT will be well represented!

Health Care in Cairo, there's nothing like it!

I am sick. Kind of. And here is the story of how health care is run in Egypt.
I usually hate getting sick or having health issues in foreign countries, not like it happens very often. But being under the weather away from home is never fun, I even get a little sad when I’m sick at college and that’s only 25 minutes away! As many of you know I have quite a number of piercings in my ears, and only in my ears. And the one I got last October apparently has not healed completely so it got infected ☹ so my dear friend Hend, I swear she’s always there to save the day, takes me to her trusted family doctor. The office was in between a schwerma shop and a smelly barber shop on the 3rd floor. So I signed myself in on the ripped piece of wide ruled paper on the front desk and looked around at the random pieces of furniture as I was wondering what kind of doctor’s office this really was. There were no nurses or anything like that, just the doctor and his one employee taking my $13 fee. After a 20 min wait, I finally got to see him and he was this middle-aged, balding, homely man with a friendly face ☺ He explained to me that I have an infection in my cartilage that was most likely caused by bacteria in the water or dust, Egypt in general. The most interesting part of this story is my medical protocol; I have to get an augmenten-like antibiotic shot in my ass ever 12 hours for the next three days. Great. In the U.S. I would most likely be coming back to the doctor to get this shot, but no this is Egypt, I get the shot from the pharmacist. I looked at him like he was nuts, there was noooo way I was going to let some boo-boo pharmacist stick a needle in my butt! Unfortunately, I have no choice so off to the pharmacy I went. After looking at my prescription, he takes out the syringe and bottle of antibiotic, and without washing his hands or even putting on some latex gloves, he continues making my medical concoction. I was not happy about the lack of sanitation whatsoever. He points to the back room of the pharmacy, which was honestly a small, gross storage room where he proceeded to tell me to bare my behind for this injection. Not fun. Just wanted to pass on this interesting piece of info about how apparently all dirty pharmacists in this country are ‘qualified’ to just stick needles into people without using any kind of sterilization procedure, I’m praying I don’t get some kind of random infection in my ass.

Remember that One time I went to an Akon Concert in Cairo, for free?!

This past weekend I was so lucky to see Akon with a free VIP pass. Very Nice. My friend Hend, the same girl who I was living with when I first arrived to Cairo, got her hands on some free tickets and we had quite an interesting time. With our duty free bottle of Bacardi and Concert-ready spirits, we were set to endure an Akon concert…which none of us are huge fans of. Akon is one of those artists that just guest stars on a lot of songs, but never really has their own hit album. But as many other Egyptians stated, when an “American” artist comes to Egypt, you just go! So we did as the Egyptians did, and just went! We show up at 7:30pm to a crowd of extremely underage children with their botox-ed mothers and 60 year-old fathers. The majority of the people in the VIP were like 8! There is no way in hell that my mother would have taken me to an Akon concert when I was that age to listen to songs about sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll!!
Anyways, after about 1 hour of lame DJs, we feel a huge rumble and crash on our VIP stage…the front of the stage where all the kids had congregated had collapsed.

It wasn’t a serious fall, but we were all kinda freaking out. During the chaos, we moved our way to the ultra-VIP section on the other side of the stage. And as we were walking…the second VIP stage falls. At this point we decided to go on the ultra-VIP stage anyways and take our chances like idiots. We waited until 12:30 for Akon to come, never would we have waited this long in the states, ever! The concert was quite good and we were sooo close to his stage (which never collapsed). We realized that our stage would probably fall next, so we jumped off and stood literally 2 feet from Akon’s stage. And 1 minute later, our stage falls; Cairo needs to get GT civil engineers to properly construct some stages!!
We had a great time though, and it was really cool to see all the Senegal pride in the crowd (Akon is from Senegal). But it really was such a change from how a concert like this would have gone in America. For example, it was just wayyyy too easy for me to walk backstage, and I did lol. And people would be suing left and right if their child had fallen when the stage collapsed. Now that I think about it, I don’t even believe the concert would have happened if the stages fell! Good times nonetheless!

I decided to go desert camping this weekend. Anyone who knows me well knows that I HATE camping. But I decided that there is nothing really in the desert that can hurt me so I thought it might be a fun weekend trip.