I feel like I've been able to get the ball rolling on my project in the past week. I went back and looked at my blog for inspiration, and then talked to my mentor, Carrie Clark, about her thoughts on my record of my journey. Between the two of us, I've been able to draw up a list of maybe 10 or so topics for essays. The topics that are currently dominating my thoughts include the status of women in the Middle East, the effect of satellite TV and internet on the region and Egypt as a military state, especially regarding its relationship with Israel.

I'm also playing with the idea of writing an essay using the Cairo cityscape as a metaphor for Egypt's modern history. In successive layers one encounters the gorgeous but often crumbling colonial architecture of the period of British influence and occupation, tower blocks, a brick and mortar legacy of the era of Nasser, Arab Socialism and Pan-Arabism, urbanization and war and, finally, the more recent buildings of neighborhoods such as Heliopolis and Nasser City, evidence of the rule of Sadat and Mubarak, privatization, economic reform and growing inequality. I sketched this idea out in more detail in my portfolio, with accompanying visuals for each.

An important event this week was finally getting to meet with Ken Dorph, who I've been trying to contact since August. Ken is an expert consultant on the Middle East and fluent in Arabic. He just returned from a several week sojourn in Iraq, where he's working on attracting Western investment. I told him about my project, and he had some fascinating things to say about the status of women (he believes the wearing of the headscarf is more often an act of identity expression rather than religiosity), sexuality (world's number two consumer of pornography: Saudi Arabia) and Egypt's government (not a fan). I hope I can use him occasionally as an outside consultant, despite how staggeringly busy he is, and maybe get feedback from him on my essays.

TO-DO
1st draft of essay on women in the Middle East-sometime next week

From here on in, I will be using this space to note my achievements, obstacles and plans for my senior project. First, however, I will recap what my project entails.

I traveled to Egypt for 6 weeks this summer through NSLI-Y, the National Security Language Initiative for Youth, a grant program of the U.S. State Department. During my time there, I recorded my experiences and impressions in the posts below. I intend to use my experience as a jumping off point for a series of essays, taking certain events or observations from my trip and using them to expand on broader issues of Egyptian (and Middle Eastern) culture and politics. Stylistically, I'm inspired by writers such as Eric Larson, who use personal narratives in much the same way to explore moments in history.

Right now, my project is still in the formulative stages, and I've yet to do any writing. Nor do I know exactly what I will be writing about, or how many essays I will write.

TO-DO
Preliminary list of essay topics-Tues.
Re-read journal entries, annotate-Tues
Finish the last 70 pgs. of Bernard Lewis' "The Middle East"-non-urgent, within the next week if possible