Disillusioned but done!

I just left my last class at the American University in Cairo. Other than an easy exam left on Saturday I have finished all of my work. 20 page paper on how UNHCR doesn't meet basic human needs according to A Theory of Human Need, 7 pages on why International and Regional 'support' has only hindered the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts from being resolved, presentation on Iraqi novelist Alia Mamdouth's novel Naphtalene, a summary of Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz, (both, especially Mahfouz, HIGHLY recommended) and an Arabic final were just part of my work for this week.

I'm not posting this to say "look at what I did" because I know others around me had much more taxing finals, but I just think that it is a good insight into the kinds of things that I've been thinking about all semester. Last night my Forced Migration teacher asked us if we had become completely disillusioned with the world of humanitarianism and refugee issues in general and the answer was a resounding YES. Congratulations to Barbara, Ray, James, and the most reading I've ever done for a class, for making me question my future and my beliefs in a way noone else has. They say you have to break down before you can build back up again, right? : ) The class ended in a really interesting discussion of Christian fundamentalism ( in part because of a lecture given by Karen Armstrong, scholar of religion that I missed out on because of class) . I'm starting to know that I'm about to go home... soon my work won't resemble at all what I've just done here, and instead lectures on "Islamic fundamentalism" will seem more foreign.

In celebration last night for having my brain completely destroyed by finals and my Refugee class in particular, I decided to try out some more of my Eritrean and Sudanese recipes. While the end result did not taste like what I had had at my cooking lesson, and didn't look the same either, it was still fantastic. I had to make some meat-substitutions which changed things around a little bit, but I thought were successful. It didn't hurt that on the last day of my English class one of my favorite women gave me two different kinds of special Eritrean shatta (red pepper) . Wow. So wonderful. I hope this week is full of more cooking experiments, now that I finally have an Egyptian cookbook. Too bad everything has meat in it!

P.S. Good luck to everyone at UGA finishing up exams and getting ready for graduation!