Have you ever started a meeting by eating fresh passionfruit picked from the rooftop garden? Well, I hadn't either until last week.
One afternoon, I found myself teaching English to some of the local children at the summer camp. With my Arabic still limited, and their English along its own journey, conversations expired at "enti min ein?" (Where are you from?). Then came Lamine Yamal. Suddenly, we had a shared vocabulary. Football did what my carefully rehearsed (google translated) English/Arabic sentences could not- giving us something to laugh about and connect over. It was a small interaction, but one that made me think again about what "community engagement" looks like when removed from the LIA-planning metrics. Sometimes, apparently, it looks like arguing about football with young people.
The geography of Megawra itself has also made it difficult to separate "work" from the neighbourhood in which that work takes place. The Sayyida Sakina shrine (which I am unable to insert a picture of since my phone is overheating) sits between the two offices, so does the 700-year old Price Taz Palace, and the equally ancient Takiya Al-Mawlawiyah, dedicated to the practices of the Mawlawi Sufi order. When on the move between the two buildings, I interact with worshippers, tourists, the mango juice seller, and the local children eating koshary after the summer camp. There is no clean boundary where the office ends and Historic Cairo begins- I think this is precisely the point.
This has become particularly interesting through my work on Megawra's GIS platform. Over the past two weeks (and currently), I have been tracing the existing GIS infrastructure, inputting information to create polygon layers and maps. GIS is something I have encountered repeatedly in my degree (Geography), internships and climate work. It is frequently advertised through corporate language: efficiency, optimisation and spatial intelligence. Maps become products, and places become layers of data. But here, I begin to see what GIS and science-technology-studies can mean when created and placed at the heart of community action and heritage conservation- for people, and by, people.
The agenda is no longer simply, "what can we map?" but for whom, and for what purpose? How might a software capture years of architectural conservation, groundwater interventions, community relationships and knowledge without reducing the neighbourhood to points and polygons? How can this system be utilised to help create and argue for better policies for those residing here? As I think through some of these questions in my day-to-day, I'm motivated by seeing it become embedded in the tangible, the local, and the relational.
Now, perhaps this brings me back to the passionfruit.
Three weeks ago, I think I would have measured the productivity of this experience through maps created, hours worked and layers produced. Yet some of the most valuable moments so far have happened between those very things: eating passionfruit kindly picked by a colleague, connecting with the offices' caretaker over Pakistani food, debating the FIFA World Cup with teenagers, walking past a shrine in between work, or having a conversation that unexpectedly changes my worldview.
My co-workers have been very kind and patient throughout- touring me around bazars, museums, historic palaces, and parks. We're all taking a trip to Alexandria next week. But for now, I turn back to my maps, hoping the next three weeks could become three years. Yet, the excitement (and stress) of my final year of university preoccupies my thoughts as I question what the next three years will actually entail...