Summertime (continued)

I was saying that summer had begun... and that that means I've been here for 4 months. Well, now it's almost 6 months and not far ahead - less than two weeks, in fact - I can already see the end of my time here.

So --- what have I done in the last 5 1/2 months?
Some people seem to think I'm growing vegetables on an organic farm or something like that - well, it's not quite true. SEKEM does grow organic almost everything: vegetables, cotton, all kinds of fruit including grapes (for juice only!), herbs, nuts and of course cows and chickens, too - but the newest idea is my favourite: Snails - ORGANIC snails, for export to France!!!
But apart from all that, it is establishing a university, that I am involved in.

So - back to what I was actually going to ask (more rhetorically, than actually):

What have I actually done here?

I've written a good few hundred eMails to places all around the world, made a few dozen phonecalls and received a good dozen international guests, mostly professors from prospective parter universities, talked to them about cooperation opportunities between their and our University. I gave a bunch of tours of our farm to guests like those, which always impresses everybody (it's an amazing place, if that hasn't become clear yet from my previous entries). I made a few attempts at writing brochures or other publication materials for the university, some more successful than others. Finally, I have just finished writing/assembling a 92-page document about out university, with all the financial, legal and HR details, for a collaborative partnership with Liverpool John Moores University.

Apart from that, I have spent many hours after work worrying and thinking about this university, how the hell it could/will work, why it's so complicated, how I can deal with the hierarchical structres in it or cope with the lack of clarity and transparency in that structure.

Who am I in that structure?

I am a Coordinator of International Affairs.
Nice title, eh?
I chose it myself.
My boss is the Vice-President of Heliopolis University, the name of my official employer, although till this day, the University does not exist, since the president Husni Mubarak himself has as yet refused/not had time to sign the registration documents. Anyway - let's not get depressed about this very central issue to the whole thing - I was speaking about my boss - Hani. He is responsible for 'International Affairs and External Programs' and a really fantastic chap. Yesterday him and I sat in his car in the University's car park for a while before he left. The motor was running and the air condition blasting freezing cool into our faces, we were talking about energy efficiency and renewable energies (the irony seemed to condense on the windows). Then we resumed what we'd achieved in the last 5 months, because he had pretty much just started before I came, too. And we realised: nothing.
It was a bit frustrating... all the eMails and phone calls and guest receptions had not yet lead to anything tangible, apart from meaningless Memorandums of Understanding. The collaboration CONTRACTS we are hoping to sign in the next 3 months are still a long way away and I might long be gone by then.
But I realised a week ago that, although I'll be gone in 12 days time, I will still be the Coordinator of International Relations, because there is nobody to take my position at the moment and we are in a bit of a screwed-up situation...

For me, though, a new window has opened up... I am going to become an expert in Water Management. I got a place in a great 3-semester M.Sc. program called "Integrated Water Resource Management" and which is co-funded by the "German Ministry for Development and Technical Cooperation". This means that I will be in Amman, Jordan, from late July 2007 till early 2008, then in Koeln (Cologne), Germany, for the second semester and then back in the MENA region somewhere to write my Master's thesis.

So much for now.