Not a Valedictory Dispatch: Reflections on a Year in Egypt

Where I spent my third year at Uni.

All photo credits: Josh Moreton with permission for the CLC.

For many years British ambassadors in the service of the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office would pen, on the occasion of their retirement from a posting, a kind of farewell to the country they were leaving. These letters, as the former top diplomat Sir Christopher Meyers point out, were often

“larded, where the wit was willing, with humorously pungent observations on the character of the local population.” 

To the modern AMES student, trained to identify unconscious bias and stereotyping against the Middle East, the sweeping character studies in these dispatches from representatives of a colonial power can often induce a wince or two. 

There is however, I believe, something to be gained from this niche corner of historical record. They provide us with a taste of the authentic: windows into the lives of our service men and women abroad. 

I will not be trying to recreate a valedictory dispatch, that would be a mistake. What I propose here to do instead is provide a kind of summary of this unique adventure. To spend an extended period of time in a country so different in so many ways to my own, as a fundamental part of my degree course, is a privilege that I will always be grateful for. Consider this a love letter to the AMES year abroad. 

Welcome in Egypt.

My introduction to Egypt was a perfect metaphor for the exquisite chaos of the year abroad that would follow. Indulge me for a second. Having failed to find an internship in France I turned my sights back to Blighty, and was undeservedly lucky to land a place at a consulting firm which happens to specialise in corporate events. So within two weeks of my introduction I was off on a plane, on my lonesome, to COP 27 in Sharm El Sheikh. My experience in Sharm was both incredible and incredibly frustrating. The lack of organisation was marked and maddening, the lofty rhetoric inspiring and the reality of achievement deflating.

On arrival to our accommodation for the week I was made to wait, with no explanation, for two hours in front of the reception desk. When that apparently arbitrary period had passed the receptionist, without stimulus or warning, suddenly announced that my room was ready, and produced a key from the desk from which he hadn’t moved since my arrival. Head still spinning with anticipation of all the foreign dignitaries, heads of government and C-level executives I was to be brushing shoulders with over the coming days I entered my apartment to find it devoid of running water, bed sheets, electricity and somehow - despite having seen it with my very own eyes - devoid of a key. This was luxury compared to the state of the apartments in the complex’s other block, which a production company - having booked one hundred rooms - had found covered in blood, shattered glass and rat droppings, having not been entered in the four years since their construction. 

Now it has been suggested to me on the occasions on which I have relayed this story that my astonishment of the situation betrays an ignorant privilege, and that there are millions - if not billions - of people in this world who live in much worse conditions than those I describe. I don’t deny that. My point is that there is a strange, somewhat incomprehensible juxtaposition between these kinds of living conditions and the pomp and ceremony of this level of international conference. And that paradox seems to me to be a perfect metaphor for life in Egypt. Very often, things just don’t make sense. It can be incredibly frustrating. And yet, if you submit yourself to the chaos of the tide, there are no limits to how far it can take you. 

So onwards I marched to my study placement in Cairo, more than anything confused from my first encounter with this country, and heady with the anticipation of what might follow. 

First: bureaucracy.

Obtaining a visa is among the most daunting of tasks for a Year Abroad student. Stories of European mega-state obscurity churning out rejection after rejection fill any prospective traveller with dread. For the unlucky ones the placement can be curtailed entirely, forcing a student to stay at home for the whole year. Mercifully the RecDep challenges of an AMES student are less ‘computer says no’ and more human-facing. While still frustrating, it can often simply take a strong word to get the ball rolling. And there’s always bribes, or so I’m told. 

With that hurdle cleared, orientation in your city of choice is perhaps the part a student looks forward to most. But here’s the rub. We are generally less aware in the UK of the reality of Middle Eastern or Asian cities. What we may know is likely a concoction of garbled memories from the distant visits of our relatives, vignettes from the forgotten past of a 20th Century history book and the Platonic surreality of a travel TikTok. Living in the Middle East is not like living in Europe. Forgive the blatancy. There is not much that can prepare you, for example, for the violent alacrity of the Cairo traffic. This city is bursting at the seams in every way. It can be overwhelming. Unknown sights, sounds and smells sag heavy on your mental battery. And yet, within the chaos there is true beauty. 

Somehow, despite the crumbling infrastructure, things generally work. The people are generally brilliant and most of the time the complete lack of any health and safety regulations just means it’s more fun. 

And with those hurdles cleared, the fun really did start. 

Despite what you may expect if you had read the dispatches of many of our former Men and Women in Egypt, the experience of the past months has been nothing short of remarkable.

How many graduands will be able to boast that as a fundamental part of their degree they wrestled with the attempts of an obstinate horse to throw them off into the lone and level sands of the Saqqara desert? How many language students have treasure hunted in the musty, impenetrable rooms of the Egyptian museum? Dragged their fingers across millennia-old graffiti? Stumbled across a forgotten ruin? 

How many can claim to know the mixture of humour and bewilderment as their Uber driver, having offered to clean up their empty drinks cans, precedes to chuck them straight out of the window onto the barren desert below? Who else will have jumpstarted their own tour bus by unloading, running round the back and pushing, only very narrowly avoiding a temple to the criminally underrated goddess Hatshepsut? 

If you’re not studying Arabic, how will you ever drift to sleep after a long day of work and play, drunk on the bittersweet sound of the traffic below and the beauty of the call to prayer? Or sat, shoulder to shoulder, on a table two hundred-strong for a sunset Ramadan meal? Who else can boast that they’ve snuck through the barriers erected at the world’s largest temple complex to find themselves alone among the wreck, the spell of their daydream shattered by the shuffling of a lonesome jackal? What other degree allows you to set off on your walk to work brushing shoulders with next door’s camel? Or float high in a balloon above the wheat fields of Luxor, bathing in the misty tranquillity of this ancient land? Party all weekend on the Red Sea, bankrolled by visiting troops from the UN peacekeeping mission? Which other degree allows you time to pick up your PADI qualification, practising your Arabic on the local turtles? 

The point at which many of our ambassadors have gone wrong over the years is the trap that many of us fall into, thinking about what it must be like to go and live Over There, with Them. In 1985 Sir Michael Weir, our man in Cairo, wrote this of the Egyptians: 

“The Pharaonic tradition has given them a sense of security and identity that allows them without shame to accept their incompetence, indecisiveness, lack of foresight, and public squalor as part of the natural order of things: the rest of the world can take it or leave it.”

Sir Michael is wrong. The ‘public squalor’ that you might come across in Egypt is not a result of the Egyptians’ fundamentally Pharaonic character. Yes, there are vast and potentially unknowable historical and geographical currents which lead a certain people at a certain time to behave a certain way. But no, it’s not possible to boil that immensity down to a simple character study. 

What this year has taught me is that no matter how much you may think you know about a people and a place: forget it. Just get out there and see it for yourself. 

And if you take on the journey by way of Arabic studies, then I salute you. There is no better degree in the world. 

Check out @goshtakescairo on Instagram for some of the best snaps from my trip.