The first call to prayer and howling dogs wake me earlier than my alarm

and I lie there wondering how long it could take me to fall back to sleep so I can wring a precious few more minutes in my bed. Outside I can hear Shabaan the bawab (a doorman), for my apartment building already washing cars - in the dark - before sunrise. The dedication to car washing here is almost an olympic sport and my trek to the bus stop every morning usually involves some sort of weird dance to avoid stepping in puddles - there are no smooth roads in Cairo and despite the dry arid environs, water seems to be everywhere.

My puddle-avoidance dance also extends to the dog-poop avoidance dance as I walk the seven minutes to my bus pick-up point, not chosen for convenience but rather for its proximity to coffee and my requirement for caffeinating before the work day begins. I pass by bawabs spraying each other with hoses, laughing with the enthusiasm of young mischievous boys. Such joy and fun found in the simple mundane task of car washing. A task they do with pride.

My favourite street dog ‘Momkins’, relaxes under a car to avoid the afternoon heat.

The other attraction - and probably a far greater one for me - is the pack of street dogs that dwell in the area. A seemingly outcast bunch of misfits who have found their way to each other, these dogs have positioned themselves in a high-trash zone and as a consequence are hardly bereft of rotundness.

Their tails wag at the recognition of me - perhaps my walk or body shape - but they can spot me 250m away and some even manage to hoist their barrel-shaped selves onto their legs in order to waddle over for a scratch behind the ears. At least I know it’s not cupboard love with this lot. I have never fed them - no need to with the wasted offerings of Cairo’s trash pantry merely metres away from where they loll about all day.

A pup sits amidst a smorgasbord of trash.

The scratching duties are duly timed to enable me to fetch my morning flat white with enough time to be on cat-patting duty with an ever-changing array of street cats who hang around an apartment building lorded over by the ginger beast himself - Bob. This caffeine and fur-fuelled start to my day fills my cup and I climb aboard bus 61 (which is a bus from the school where I work), and plonk into MY seat (creatures of habit) and turn on my phone to check in with my world in the Antipodes.

I enjoy the hiatus provided by this journey to New Cairo from Maadi and the occasional glance up from my phone catch-up with the world, offers me the fascinating view of Cairo waking up to its day, usually festooned with a magnificent sun-rise coloured sky.

Congested traffic, dogs stretching and yawning on the sandy acreage of Cairos perimeter, the sun ever-present and the promise of what lies ahead. The bus is quiet as people sit absorbed in their own worlds - usually by Thursday (the last day of the working week) people don’t have much to say - such is the life here working at an international school which sneakily steals all your energy during the week.

I think that energy gets re-directed into a bank and siphoned into the students, who by the end of the week are just getting their groove on.

Come Monday and the teachers walk in battle-ready and refreshed, whilst the students slump on their desks in extended slumber; hoodies pulled over their eyes and a make-shift backpack pillow propping them off the desk. The bus deposits us outside one of the main entrances to school to be greeted by security and we proffer our finger tips or eye balls for scanning. The automated ‘thank you’ in response to the recognition of my own unique body patterns turns out to be the only thank you I generally get in a day. Well - thank YOU.

That is generally the most organised part of life here.

The daily round up of wayward students then begins as they all put maximum effort into hiding so as to avoid the 15 minute daily assemblies where the Egyptian and International School’s anthems are sung. This part is like herding cats. It’s the same daily mess and the same daily battle. I am always left thinking about how it is such a negative start to the day as kids get shamed into compliance.

But still - isn’t it just easier to do the right thing?

The school day is a battle-field of varying approaches to warfare, with the odd oasis of calm (generally the 30 minute ‘break-that-isnt-a-break’) we get which divides the teaching day into two even halves.

If we are lucky enough to garnish a FULL non-contact lesson, we may even be able to prep for the next few days ahead or attempt to stay ahead of the marking, but more often than not I find myself covering someone else’s class, and even if only for 40 minutes of it, it is enough to add more burden onto the shoulders of us already exhausted teaching crew.

It is unheard of to be a sub-teacher, whilst being a full-time teacher in New Zealand, and it would only ever happen at the end of the school year if teachers of senior grades find themselves with too many free hours on their hands.

Fair enough then.

The students roll into the classroom with nonchalant enthusiasm for the day ahead, and usually spend more time on games and trying to hide their phones than engaging in actual lessons. Toilet visits punctuate their otherwise extremely busy day, and often this turns into a man-hunt, as students use the opportunity to visit friends, call their drivers for food deliveries or to play a quick game of football on the field.

Anything rather than being in a classroom - yep, I get it.

The energy dedicated to doing everything but the task at hand, is truly noteworthy, and the follow-up groaning heard during reporting time is also impressive, especially when they realise their messing around DOES have consequences. I am sure the students never hear the word ‘NO” at home. They are more than happy to argue, in your face, at grades you give them - swearing to God they worked so hard (on chat GPT), to produce the essay they handed in, and when you suggest they sit with you for a verbal assessment, they somehow suddenly can’t speak.

Break time however is always a time to be treasured if on field duty - not only just to break up any fights which often occur, but to watch the physical skill and flamboyance of the kids playing football. They use their whole body, in huge sweeping open movements - a style of football I have never seen in New Zealand kids (perhaps we don’t play enough there to get this good at it!); tricky footwork, speed and agility coupled with untamed investment into this short hiatus of other-place transporting, I truly appreciate the athleticism of the boys I teach.

I barely ever see girls out there. In fact the girls usually sit around in small huddles on the edges of the field, oblivious to the football landing almost on them, catching up with the latest school dramas. It’s a microcosm of fascination. A sea of dark hair and tall lanky bodies - such is the Egyptian phenotype - and a penchant for laughter and good humour.

There is never a dull moment.

If I am lucky enough to get some teaching in, it has only been because I had had to stop and consequences kids a dozen or so times; send kids out; separate kids; warn kids - just so I can gain some sense of sanity. Self-regulation is a foreign concept here amongst these kids and when you take a look outside into the streets of Cairo you can see why.

We cannot hope to change a well-embedded culture within an anglicised school system.

And neither should we try to.

However, some sensibility would go a long way, especially when meeting botox’d and lip-filled baby-doll Mums who clearly spend more time on their faces than they do bringing up their kids to be decent respectful humans and they cannot understand why their little muffin is not an angel at school. Its all about how things look here. Once you can accept that, seeing everyone doing selfies every second on the streets in random places, becomes the norm.

My teaching day is over by 4.20 on a ‘late’ day but usually by 3.30pm and we board the bus in exhausted silence to be dropped off back in the calming surrounds of Maadi with its overhanging trees filtering through the softening afternoon light.

Sometimes a little chatter on the bus to debrief or discuss an occurrence might poke holes in the silence, but generally most people are lost to the world outside as it passes by the bus window.

Horns honk, four people on a motorbikes all with no helmets, squeezes between the side of the bus and a car trying to break for a narrow gap. People wander relaxed weaving between cars whilst staring at their phones to cross the roads, and drivers also use one hand for the phone and other to steer the vehicle - lost in a dream-like state of in-betweenness - not really doing either task with commitment; a kind of place-holder state.

Descending into Maadi from New Cairo we can catch a glimpse of the pyramids of Giza.

Sometimes, on a clear day, as we descend from New Cairo down to Maadi, we get a glimpse of two of the three larger pyramids, a reminder that here I am in one of the worlds oldest cities and I remind myself to just marinate in it rather than attempt to fight it.

There is a story and energy around every corner.

My journey home usually always ends with a stop at the cafe to re-caffienate, something I never would do in New Zealand at that time of day, but something here that provides me with a little bit of control. It’s like a reset button.

I am greeted again by the same crew who were at the cafe in the morning and my attempts to speak Arabic are thwarted by their attempts to speak English. We usually meet somewhere in the middle even though this awkward language dance has been going on for nearly two years. Even though I don’t rate the coffee as highly as other local cafes, I totally rate the friendliness and welcoming attitude of the people who work there - always so happy and positive.

A great start and ending to my day.

Sometimes I run into locals I know - Tamer - the guy whose Scottish Mum comes to stay for half a year every year and who looks after Bob the big ginger boy, has become somewhat of a friend and I enjoy chatting with his highly intelligent perceptive 10 year old son Ferris. Fathy, who owns a shop around the corner is often on my list of people to visit during the week and if I do not see him for breakfast during winter on a Friday, I will usually visit for a cup of tea during an evening - we sit and chew the fat so to speak, and I watch the world go by from his viewpoint inside his shop door.

He has at times entrusted the shop to me as he has gone off and run errands!

The nut guys in Rayahen on Street 233 who always know my order before I order it, and always try to teach me a new Arabic word laugh with me as I say “bukrah insha’allah” in response to their telling me there is no ganzabeel (ginger) yet, and tomorrow it will come.

Always tomorrow. Insha’allah. But never tomorrow. We laugh anyway at the absurdity of hope.

I walk the familiar streets home, past the American college, past the security guys on the corner of 253 and 213, down past the park where people walk their dogs, past the old bawab who sits outside the house on the corner by the park and waves at me daily, up to the intersection of 207 and 208, with its collection litter and the endless fight to keep it clean by several street cleaners, and climb the stairs to my 3rd floor apartment oasis. Ahhhhhhh……

If I’m not too tired, a game of padel may come later, or a spin session at Ryda or maybe nothing at all. Sometimes, like all the Egyptians, I take to the streets in the evening and enjoy the cooler temperatures of a waning Egyptian day, wandering the brightly lit streets and enjoying the atmosphere. Egyptians love to stay up late - and do not tend to go to bed until the wee hours of the morning.

Could explain why students come to school and sleep.

If I feel super organised I will make my breakfast and lunch for the following day and sometimes I will order out through the super efficient Talabat (like Uber eats) system and enjoy food that someone else has created. By the time I get to my bed ready to sleep I feel like I have squeezed a world within a world into my day and wonder how life here ever became so ‘normal’.

Now - I no longer notice the life-threatening act of crossing a road in Cairo at rush hour; the dogs relentlessly barking at each other at werewolf o’clock; the mad mistimed orchestra of noise as traffic builds to max density on the roads, the whistles of traffic police, the teenagers who gather outside on the streets to pose with their cars until all hours of the morning and the calls to prayer which if I do manage to notice them - send their eery ethereal call across the rooftops - floating like an old grandfather reminding his family to behave.

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