GRAD STUDENTS EVACUATED FROM CAIRO THANKS TO UC
When Oliver Northrup agreed to accompany department alumna Lauren Winans (UCLA) on a fieldwork trip to Egypt this summer, he did not expect that he would spend much of it at an internet cafe in Spain instead. This week, he shares details about the trip.
Lauren and I had opposite reasons for traveling to Egypt; she went to elicit data on the semantics of Egyptian Arabic (as part of a Lenart Graduate Travel Fellowship from UCLA), and I went to get further away from everything so I could write. Armed with laptops and sunblock, we arrived on June 18th and checked into a rooftop hostel two blocks north of Tahrir Square. The square sat between us and the downtown campus of the American University in Cairo (the institution sponsoring our visit), so we crossed it every day and watched the number of tents grow in anticipation of the protests scheduled for the anniversary of of Mohammed Morsi’s inauguration on June 30th.In spite of the tents, for a while it seemed like the protests would be unremarkable – they were a weekly occurrence in the square, and political apathy was on the rise again. But the square’s tent hamlet became a tent village, and then the banners with the American ambassador’s face crossed out started going up, and we got concerned.
So did Lauren’s local sponsor Bob Williams. But luckily for us, Bob happened to be leaving the country on sabbatical and he needed a housesitter. The day before the protests, we relocated to a posh neighborhood called Maadi, 30 miles south of downtown.
Lauren and I became even bigger news junkies than usual for a few days, mainly because there wasn’t much happening around us; in Maadi the days were quiet and the protests at night were mild. Watching the protests in Tahrir Square on TV and contrasting them with our relatively placid surroundings was surreal at times. Things were so calm, in fact, that Lauren was still able to meet with consultants, and I got plenty of work done on my dissertation.
When the military removed Morsi from power on July 3rd, the protests in Maadi turned into street parties. Everyone seemed happy – except for the folks working at the local grocery store, which was run by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Suddenly, questions. What would the military do now? How would the Brotherhood respond? The pundits had a field day, but the University of California didn’t want to speculate, so they decided to break the glass on their travel insurance program and get everyone out of the country. Did you know we have travel insurance? It’s very good. Keep your receipts.
Lauren and I started getting emails from UCLA and UCSC, checking up on us and providing options. We didn’t have to leave, they said, but if we didn’t go by July 6th, they wouldn’t be able to help us when things got dicey.
We vacillated for a while. July 6th was almost two weeks before we were scheduled to leave, and Lauren had a lot of data left to collect. But everyone was pretty sure it was just a matter of time until the Muslim Brotherhood’s counter-protests got out of hand, so in the end we decided to accept the University’s offer.
Getting evacuated was actually pretty pleasant. We were taken to the airport by a “security team” of two guys and an old travel van, and the insurance paid up front for our tickets out of Egypt. We drove up to the terminal (past a tank), checked in, and several hours later landed in Barcelona, Spain.
We traded our kosheri for paella because we’d originally planned to fly from Cairo to Geneva for the International Congress of Linguists, and we needed a less expensive place in Europe to hide out for those extra two weeks. We spent most of that time at a cafe in the Gothic District called La Clandestina, which lived up to its name the second time we tried to find it. We also did a little sightseeing, and after an overnight bus ride along the French riviera, we rejoined our original itinerary. Lauren gave a successful talk at ICL19, and I ate a lot of croissants.