Good news and bad news

Bad news first:
my eMail never reached Sami.
I got the following message in an automated reply:

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 550
Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable

...which might mean he's still in prison, or anyway hasn't accessed his eMail account in over a month - hotmail have a funny policy about that and just sort of close down your account if you don't access is regularly. I guess they don't care much about people in political custody in Syria. But then who does?

Well, I only do because I happened to meet some of them and find out about their existence, their stories and their conditions, otherwise I'd never have known they even exist. But when I did find out and when I sat with them, on the floor in their stuffy cell and talked to them, I realised that experiencing this was a kind of priviledge and - as priviledges usually do - it came with a certain responsibility or even duty: to tell others about it.
You might wonder why I haven't done so already, especially because that experience is now more than a month old, but for various reasons, mostly to do with the fact that I had to deal with the security services there, I was hesitant to publish anything on this issue while still in Syria. So now that I've left and that I find myself - against my expectations - at home in Bavaria, now is the time...

Unfortunately though, things aren't quite that easy... now that the right time to finally get it out has come, I don't have the time to fulfill that duty, because - and now we come to the good news - I'm about to leave again... tomorrow morning I'm flying to Cairo, where - with the New Year - a new chapter of my life will start, which fills me with hope, joy and anticipation. I have a 6-months intership 60km north of Cairo on a farm-community project, which is establishing a university and has kindly chosen me to be their international communication assistant in that undertaking. I guess they must have heard about the many universities I have established around the world in the course of my life, so I was of course the obvious choice for this job. Lucky them I was available, eh?!

So as I sit here in my mum's office on my last night in Europe for at least 6 months - the house is silent, everyone's asleep, not a single thing is packed into my backpack and my plane leaves in 12 hours exactly - I realise that from the minute I get off the plane in Cairo I will be flooded with new and exciting experiences - after dozens of lonely airport arrivals in the last year, tomorrow someone will be waiting for me a the airport in Cairo with a sign that might have my name on it, or just SEKEM - the project's name. I've been thinking about the drive from the airport to the Sekem village, which is at the edge of the desert somewhere, built in a style totally unusual for Egypt and for Europe, too - somehow a merger between the two but yet something entirely different, I imagine. I wonder how green it will be now, how warm and how cold at night? Where will I be living? Who will my flatmates be? what will the food be like? and all the people working and living there? How will I cope with the Egyptian Arabic dialect, which is so different from the Syrian one? How and what exactly will my job be? And what I am most curious about is the atmosphere of the place... in some way I have great expectations with regards to this, but on the other hand I am just curious - will it be a completely free and liberal place, envigourating with its unique mix of Islamic culture and European knowledge and practices? Or will it be limiting with lots and lots of rules about how to be a 'good human being' and what 'they' consider 'good' and what not? .... etc.
With all those questions awaiting answers I know that there will be no time left to reflect much on the last two weeks spent here - at home - inbetween Syria and Egypt. Time to relive the events and encounters, rethink the thoughts and relisten to the conversations or the Christmas carols. All of that will be redirected to the department of 'possible re-consideration at a later point in time', which has been storing things going back a decade and more and which is still from time to time hopeful that they will one day be re-considered, re-thought and re-used. So this means I have exactly 12 hours to make the best of all that, all those conversations about various scenarios of my own and other people's futures, all those reflections on the bygone year, all its many events and their many implementations on the year to come, all those encounters with old friends I hadn't seen in years and with locations that carry dense memories from teenage years... and last but not least, all those wonderful hours spent with my family, especially my sister's 4 children (for the elder two of which and another eight little munchkins me and two friends performed a hand-puppet theatre piece, with a crocodile, splashing water, smoke and fireworks at the devil's entrance and Grandma's pancakes for everyone in the break...).

Well, I guess I've got 12 hours... better get going.