International student Sara Carere has never experienced a month quite like Ramadan in Egypt. Living in wust el balad, or downtown Cairo, Carere has fasted with friends from Assiut, eaten suhoor on the street with her neighbors and watched hours of musalsalat (Ramadan TV series).
“I was most surprised by how special and collective fasting feels,” Carere says. “Back home in the Netherlands I had some Muslim friends who fasted, but seeing Ramadan on a country-wide scale is incredible.”
Carere fasted the first two days of Ramadan to understand what her Muslim friends and neighbors were feeling firsthand. “It was really hard for me,” Carere recalls. “Maybe it's because I haven’t done it before, but not drinking water was so tough. That first iftar was incredible, though; water and dates have never tasted so good.”
As a Middle Eastern studies student from the University of Groningen, Carere has spent her study abroad year at AUC making friends from all over the world. Her iftars have included traditional Egyptian foods and sweets, like molokhia, mahshi, kunafa and atayef, in addition to international foods, like Spanish omelets and pasta bolognese.
“I’ve really enjoyed this month because my roommates and I always have dinner together at iftar. Planning the meals, going grocery shopping and visiting the local market in Sayeda Zaynab to see the lanterns has been a lot of fun,” Carere says. “The fresh fruit juice from the street vendors is so good. My favorite is the coconut drink, sobia.”
Living in downtown Cairo has immersed Carere in the Ramadan spirit. “The first night we walked around downtown until suhoor. Everyone seemed so happy and energetic,” Carere recalls. “We spent the night playing dominoes at an awha (local coffee shop) and drinking tea. It’s been a great chance to practice my Arabic.”
Ramadan has also highlighted some amusing cultural differences between the Netherlands and Egypt, particularly with regard to watching musalsalat. “In the Netherlands, we usually watch a show in silence and discuss it after,” Carere explains. “Watching the shows here with my Egyptian friends involves a lot more commenting and asking questions. I like it; it's more engaging. My favorite shows so far are Al Maddah and Al Soffara.”
At other times, the month feels bittersweet for Carere. “Seeing everyone breaking fast with their families and spending so much time together does make me a little homesick,” Carere says. “Thankfully, my dad is coming to visit next month, and I am so excited to show him how special Egypt is during Ramadan.”
Armed with fruit and a desire to help the small Egyptian village of El Bahtiny in Ismailia, seniors Yara Yousry, Heidi Mahmoud, Aliaa Moussa and Mariam El-Halabi are working to fashion biodegradable fishing nets out of locally sourced, cost-effective banana fibers in order to revive the village’s ailing economy.
The four AUC students will be setting sail in Norway this fall after being selected among 15 teams for the World Federation of United Nations Associations (WFUNA) program, Under the Starry Sky. The project also placed second in this year’s Student Union Real Life Competition at AUC.
The nine-month WFUNA program aims to empower young people who want to help promote the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by helping them implement an innovative and impactful project.
“El Bahtiny village is beautiful but underprivileged. Our project aims to revive the village’s fishing community,” Mahmoud said.
Traditionally, fishing nets are made from nylon and silk — costly materials that recently, due in large part to the devaluation of the Egyptian pound, have become too expensive for the local community to purchase and use. “Sixty percent of the biomass of a banana tree goes to waste. It's locally available and a great solution to Egypt’s import and export issue,” said Moussa.
Transforming a Village
Beyond developing the nets, the quartet is handling the logistics of sourcing banana fibers from the city of Sohag in Upper Egypt, as well as providing training for men and women alike in weaving the nets. “We especially want to incorporate women into our project,” Moussa said. “The village is very conservative, so teaching women how to make the nets at home will allow them to join the economy without breaking social norms.”
Down the road, the women hope that El Bahtiny will become an eco-tourism hotspot, similar to Fayoum’s Tunis Village. “We want it to become a place where people can spend the day fishing and getting to know the hospitable local community,” Moussa said.
With Mahmoud, Moussa and El-Halabi representing AUC’s mechanical engineering program and Yousry hailing from architecture, the group has received support from AUC faculty from both disciplines on the project, including Sherif Goubran, Momen El-Husseiny, Salah El Haggar and Hanadi Salem. Additionally, the program itself held an intensive four-day training in January to boost the team’s project management skills.
“When I found out that we were selected, it felt like my future had just started – like this is what I'm gonna be doing for the rest of my life,” Moussa said.
Currently in the design and testing phase, the team will present the project at sea in Norway this September, with plans to create different types of nets for different fish down the line.
“Working on this project has made me feel more ambitious in enacting change and impact within my community as an Egyptian,” Mahmoud added. “I am eager to seek more opportunities."
An AUC team is working to produce green hydrogen at low cost without the use of fossil fuels.
Why Hydrogen?
Hydrogen can replace fossil fuels in essentially any area. It can be processed into fuel for airplanes and ships. It can be burned to generate electricity, power cars or facilitate industrial processes that require a large amount of heat. Factors related to the storage, transport and safety of hydrogen, as well as how it compares economically with other fossil fuel replacements, will determine where it becomes common.
Like natural gas and oil products, hydrogen can be burned to produce heat or electricity. Unlike other fuels that produce CO2 when they combust, hydrogen reacts with oxygen in the air to produce H2O — good old water.
For hydrogen to serve as a climate solution rather than a problem, it must be produced using renewable energy or fossil fuels offset by carbon capture and storage systems. At present, producing green hydrogen from renewable energy sources is expensive, which is why 95% of hydrogen globally is produced from non-renewable fossil sources.
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Two courses aimed at informing and empowering AUC students to lead the charge against climate change won this year’s Core Curriculum Course Competition during AUC’s 2023 Research and Creativity Convention (RCC).
“Climate change is certainly one of the most pressing concerns which urgently requires raising a new generation of educated, responsible and proactive youth who are willing to make a real change and aspire for a promising future,” explained Amina Saleh, assistant professor in AUC’s Department of Chemistry, who co-wrote one of the winning courses, Climate Change: From Interdisciplinarity to Action, with Tamer Shoeib, professor and chair of the department and Noha Omar, assistant professor in the Department of Economics. “Ultimately, we want to inspire students to conscientiously contribute to the betterment of their communities by solving problems of both global and local concern.”
Taking place at AUC’s New Cairo campus this week, RCC is a weeklong convention that showcases research from faculty and students across disciplines, in addition to hosting competitions, performances and discussions.
“The competition is an important opportunity for faculty to engage in the process of curricular innovation to provide our students with high impact learning experiences,” explained Ghada Elshimi (MA ‘93), dean of undergraduate studies and The Academy of Liberal Arts. “In line with AUC's liberal arts mission, the competition promotes examination of human issues from the perspective of multiple disciplines and encourages faculty to employ project-based learning teaching styles and inquiry.”
Alongside Saleh and Shoeib, Noura Wahby, assistant professor at the Department of Public Policy and Administration, and Sherif Goubran ‘14, assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, co-wrote the other winning course, Sustainability in the Cracks of Urban Policy: Communities, Bureaucracies and Adaptation.
“We hope that the course will inspire both us and our students to dig into the reasons behind our relationships to our surrounding built environment and understand how socio-technical factors shape our attitudes, practices and beliefs of the environment,” the duo wrote.
Winning Course: Climate Change: From Interdisciplinarity to Action
Developed by: Tamer Shoeib, Amina Saleh and Noha Omar
With the aim of creating and empowering more environmentally conscious students, this course will explore climate change from multiple disciplines, focusing on filling information gaps about the crisis in addition to the specific context of Egypt. “Filling these gaps would allow for a better understanding of the climate change crisis in Egypt and therefore a better management of it,” the course description reads.
A major part of this course is centered around community-based learning; students will work with different organizations and groups of people around Egypt, gaining real-life experience while leaving a lasting impact on their communities. Projects will span the industries of wastewater treatment, fish farming, recycling and waste management, among others.
“In this course, we leverage the connections that AUC has forged over the years with communities and NGOs across Egypt to provide relevant, intriguing and challenging real-life based learning opportunities for our students,” Saleh said. “Through field trips and literature-based research, students will tackle real-world issues that are of great relevance to the environment, the local economy and human health.”
Winning Course: Sustainability in the Cracks of Urban Policy: Communities, Bureaucracies and Adaptation
Developed by: Noura Wahby and Sherif Goubran '14
This course explores and challenges the norms, regulations, policies and laws that inform unsustainable behaviors, from the overuse of plastic at AUC and in Egypt to the pricing of water in urban areas.
“For example, although we are constantly reminded of the importance of recycling, the fact remains that not many people do,” Wahby and Goubran explained, pointing to both individual behavioral and systemic issues contributing to this problem.
“By tackling these underlying notions, we hope that we will build active citizens who better understand how sustainability works, the larger obstacles hindering more progressive policy-making, and what we can do ourselves to contribute to climate justice in Egypt,” they wrote.
Focusing on solutions as well as problems, the course will also take into account how policy loopholes can be used for good. “It is this sense of critical reflection and activism-driven learning that we hope to explore in this AUC course,” they concluded.
The Core Curriculum Course Competition is responsible for a growing number of innovative courses offered at AUC, including a few new classes introduced last fall and this spring: The World of Naguib Mahfouz, Social Problems of the Middle East and Building for Underdeveloped Egyptian Communities.
With COP27 taking place in Sharm El Sheikh just months ago, AUC’s Climate Change Initiative is still going strong, producing new research, projects and initiatives at a steady pace.
