Amidst all the mangoes I ate, the ‘ahwa (Arabic coffee) I drank, the felucca rides I took on the Nile, the cafés I wrote my thesis from, and the metros I took with my co-workers, I never did encounter ‘the unfamiliar’. For it was upon arriving at Megawra that I was able to trace connections to Oxford, to Oman, a country I grew up in, and even to the literature that I was so familiar with as a human geographer studying critical theory. Cairo was not unfamiliar; it tasted, smelled, exhaled like my home city of Karachi, its language and customs akin to the Gulf, a region I called home for nearly a decade. My LIA experience was not one of homesickness, or fatigue, or ‘culture shocks’ (which too have problematic undertones), but of déjà vu, unaware of where I had encountered this city before. Was it in my climate organising in the UK? After all, I was working with a collective and an architectural office rooted in community. Or perhaps in the big feasts my co-workers (and now lifelong friends) prepared for me, just like how Pakistanis open their homes to guests. Or was it in the warmth of those who extended their kindness to me despite my broken Arabic (and that too in the wrong dialect!)?
This time last year, I was robotically sending emails to potential organisations, stressed about how my summer was going to pan out whilst I also carried out fieldwork in the Gulf. I knew one thing for certain: to be with an organisation that was rooted in community, not in the extractive sense (whatever that means in such uncertain times) that is extensively critiqued by critical scholars, but one rooted in place-based action, akin to a relational view of space, place, the local and the global, so eloquently put forth by Doreen Massey (1991). After all, my disciplinary training is in Geography, and my work thus far has been on equity in climate justice spaces, spanning the energy sector, climate education, and philanthropy. I therefore wanted to be surrounded by those rooted in pedagogically engaging with the community, expanding on the literature, whilst targeting these otherwise ‘abstract’ terms. Just like my quest to materially root myself, the material became the main lens through which I looked at the community, through heritage conservation. Just like the changing donor patterns in North Africa, a reality I too could understand as a Trustee of a climate philanthropy organisation, so too was Megawra’s work project-to-project. This made the initial ‘what I was going to do’ ambiguous until a few weeks before I arrived. Yet I decided to trust the process and realise that leadership need not always follow a structured path.
Upon reflection, it was not the technical work that stayed with me, but the interactions I had with my co-workers, friends, the ‘aeesh’ (bread) seller, and the (very patient and kind) young people of the community. From being able to engage in teaching and developing materials, to conversing on how to expand Megawra’s reach internationally, to doing my main job, mapping community-focused GIS, the diversity and the in-field reality consolidated my passion for a ‘career on the ground’. I hope one day to return to Cairo, either in a research capacity or for professional work. “Everyone who came to Megawra returned to Cairo,” reassured me my co-workers and friends, who too, on the last day, felt sad about this departure.
Writing this a month and a half after my departure, my work in Cairo shows up not just in memories or exchanges with friends, but in my very essays. From discussing the state-controlled aeesh bread, to discussing the urban politics of ‘umm al dunya’ after the revolution, and even how my experiences at Megawra inform my conceptualisation of a politics of solidarity. What I previously understood as technocratic showed me its emancipatory potential: GIS. Never had I mapped relationships or community engagement on a map. Maps which were presented before policymakers and urban planners. Coming from an intense term at Oxford, I was becoming disillusioned about theory’s, or even my discipline’s, revolutionary potential, especially in the current global conjuncture. To know that my 9 am GIS computational labs were put to use did selfishly satisfy me, for I still ask ‘what am I going to do with this?’ (not just about Pythagoras’ theorem only).
What stuck most with me, however, was work culture. Due to the heat, we shifted to a 9 am to 6 pm workday, four times a week. This additional day off meant weekly trips to the Saqqara pyramids, to Alexandria, to museums in Zamalek, to Greek food and bookshop-hopping in Maadi. To work amongst people who, despite being a continent away from my birthplace, looked so much like me, practised their faith like me, and treated those from every background equally was a welcome indeed. As someone who has worked with the ‘People and Culture’ and EDI teams of organisations, Megawra opened my eyes to what ‘working as a family’ looked like, not in its sinister, coercive sense, but what it means to care for one another. The caretaker of the building kindly got me the contact details of a South Asian restaurant, where later my team and she (and even her friends!) joined me for dinner. They even kindly brought home-cooked food for me. “You won’t find this in the restaurants,” they would say as they refilled my plate for the tenth time.
On Mondays, I used to teach English to young people from the community, all of whom hailed from various backgrounds. These classes later became a co-creation: I taught them English (and even Urdu, as they were intrigued by it), whilst they taught me Arabic. During the closing ceremony of their summer camp, the young people toured us around their neighbourhood, sharing stories of eating koshary under a tree, playing in the community garden (that Megawra established), and feeding pigeons. To see primary-school-level children lead a group of at least fifty people around the busy roads of Al-Khalifa with such confidence was a sight to watch. This was it. This is how community engagement is done, with teams from the area teaching the next generation how best they can utilise their experiences to re-engage with their places.
As a geographer, I had spent considerable time reading about participatory planning, the right to the city, and the politics of knowledge production. Yet witnessing these ideas materialise in Al-Khalifa prompted me to reconsider the relationship between academic knowledge and lived experience. Who gets to define what constitutes heritage? Whose memories are represented on maps? And importantly, whose futures are imagined when we speak of urban regeneration? These questions became particularly central as I worked on mapping community engagement through GIS. What might otherwise appear as a collection of coordinates, spatial datasets, and visual representations was, in reality, an attempt to make visible the relationships that sustain a neighbourhood. Of course, maps are never politically neutral, and the act of representing communities through spatial data carries its own limitations. Nevertheless, I began to appreciate how these tools, when situated within longer-term relationships of trust and accountability, could contribute to more grounded forms of urban decision-making. Yet for this to occur, and for a system to be truly accessible, I re-made the GIS system and maps for the organisation, so everyone on the team could access and contribute to map-making. Although this process meant that I had six weeks to learn and create solutions, my team were very supportive in this process. As anyone familiar with GIS knows, fixing a small issue can at times take hours. And such was the reality. But it was through an iterative processes, and my colleague’s patience, that we got it all done.
Coming from Oxford, where learning takes place in intense tutorials, cramped deadlines, and a cycle that is then repeated over, it was humbling recognising how much of my learning in Cairo took place beyond the formal boundaries of my work with Megawra. It happened over cups of ‘ahwa, during conversations about Egyptian politics and Pakistani dramas, whilst navigating Cairo's perpetually bustling streets with volunteers, and in the moments when my colleagues patiently explained the histories embedded within the buildings we passed. These exchanges complicated the distinction between the professional and the personal, between learning and working, and now upon reflection, between the researcher and the researched. They reminded me that solidarity cannot simply be theorised into existence. It must be practised, negotiated, and sustained through the seemingly mundane acts of showing up, listening, sharing, and caring.
I arrived in Cairo hoping to understand what community-centred practice might look like beyond the academic literature I had become so accustomed to citing. I left with more questions than answers, but perhaps with a greater appreciation for the value of those questions. Megawra did not offer me a neat model of community engagement that could be extracted, replicated, and applied elsewhere- nor should it have. Its work was inseparable from the particular histories, relationships, and political realities of Al-Khalifa- but realities also seen in my own home country. I think therein lay its significance.
Perhaps my LIA was never about encountering the ‘unfamiliar,’ but about recognising the familiar in new configurations. From Karachi to Muscat, Oxford to Cairo, I began to see how places are constituted through connections that transcend geographical boundaries, without losing their particularities. I had come searching for a way to bridge theory and practice. Cairo taught me that the two were never quite as separate as I had imagined- that I had to turn to the South, its theories, its inhabitants, its work, to understand.
