My colleague Tim Brookes, director of the Professional Writing program and co-founder of Writers Without Borders, is presently in Egypt on the Faculty Internationalization Initiative. You'll enjoy his observations of a day in Cairo:

When I threw open the curtains I had no idea what to expect. Perhaps the kites wheeling overhead that I saw in India and Pakistan. Instead, perched on the roofs of every house and hotel, tall and short, near and far, left and right, were satellite dishes. I counted roughly 550. All beige, all tilted more or less the same way, they had the alertness and keen sense of purpose of anti-aircraft batteries, yet without any aggressive barrel they seemed benign, earlike. It was as if everyone in the city had signed up for a futuristic interstellar monitoring project, and was straining for signs of extra-terrestrial life.

After gazing in astonishment for a few minutes it dawned on me that my legs, where the 9 a.m. sunlight was falling, were starting to burn. Sunburn at 9 a.m.? It didn’t seem possible. It was the title of a bad thriller.

I tottered off to breakfast, which had that small-European-hotel muttered-conversation feel, croissants and eggs and bad coffee, until I tottered back out of the breakfast room and saw a couple of people had taken their breakfast onto the potted-plant fifth-floor terrace. Sunburn and eggs at 9:30. Couldn’t imagine it, myself.

Napped again, found out how to work the wi-fi internet, got the helpful guy on the desk to write out directions in Arabic to the WHO, which came out as World Half Organization, and directions back to the hotel, printed in Arabic and English on a card with a map. Maps are, of course, a Western vanity: the taxi driver used the time-honored method of pulling over every few minutes to call to someone on the side of the road and ask directions. Luckily, I’m now more or less used to this, and was pleased at my lack of panic and dismay.

In fact, I was getting more and more excited. Laura was right: the novelty, the challenge that brings out the best in you—this is what it’s about. I was even starting to enjoy the heat, or at least to redefine it, to take it on as part of the journey: it was a badge of honor, even—given that it enveloped my whole body—a uniform. As my Aberdonian friend said, “It was guid.”

Taxi $30

Unlike the WHO country office in Karachi, which has been built on an unused bit of desert on the outskirts of town and my taxi driver couldn’t find it even when we were parked out front, the Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office of the WHO is a marble monument, a cross between a mausoleum and a bank. Very reassuring. I could sense infectious diseases being daunted by its very façade.

My contact, Jane Nicholson, had kindly agreed to see me right before shooting off on holiday, and there was an air of great activity in her office, which included lists of publications in progress. I wish I had written some of them down: technical stuff, they tended to have titles such as “Incidence of Boll Weevil Fever in Rural Areas beginning with the Letter F,” and “Ground Water Testing Using Only a Cotton Swab and a Toothbrush.” She herself had that English habit of saying “Yes,” and “Right, then,” to sum up and convert conversation into planning into action. She listened intently to my explanation of why I was in Egypt (an absurdly rambling affair that includes autobiography, bibliography, travelography and pedagography) and at once began to suggest a list of people I should see.

She was joined by her colleague Dr. Kassem Sara, a short man with a high forehead, an energetic manner and alert eyes, who had just returned from prayers.

Kassem had several endearing habits. Every time we were alone in his office he immediately asked, “Would you like something sweet?” and offered candies, freshly-baked breadsticks, tea, coffee. He also had that Arabic physical familiarity, taking my arm, guiding me into a room or an elevator. He was from Syria, he explained, pausing at a map to show Damascus, the road across the desert through the ancient city of Palmyra to Xxxx, his home town on the Euphrates. Right in the cradle of civilization, I offered. “Yes, we are very proud of that,” he said. But now he had been in Egypt for fifteen years and saw it as his home. Egyptians are friendlier than Syrians, he said, and besides, his children refuse even to visit Syria. I got the impression, though I may be wrong, that Egyptians see Syrians as backward.

He also taught me to say “Bism’allah.”

“It is what we say when we begin something,” he explained. “It means, `in the name of God.’ You and I are beginning.”

“The French would say, `Allons-y!’” I said. I’ve always liked the phrase for its energy, its élan.

He nodded. “Allons-y!” he repeated, committing our collaboration to energy, and to God.

He had his driver take me home after he himself was dropped off at his family’s home, which was above a mall. “It’s noisy and there are too many people,” he said, “but….” As he got out he asked me something I didn’t catch. He repeated: “Do you have psoriasis?” Psoriasis. No wonder I didn’t understand the first time. No, I said, I’d had an accident, and ran my hand down the length of my right arm to show where the scabbing had been. “Ah,” he said, his face lightening. Then, as if apologizing as well as explaining, “I am also a physician, you see.”

In the meantime, Kassem and Jane had drawn up a list of roughly eight dozen people I should meet, and Kassem had started me on the journey of meeting them. The eminence grise and collective memory of the organization, they said, was Dr. M. Haytham Al-Khayat, a teddy-bear of a man who was downstairs in an office the size of a library, sitting low in an armchair with that posture some academics develop in which they seem torpid but are watching everything that happens with such awareness that they observe the movement of microbes, and know the end of your sentence before you have thought of the beginning. He listened to what I said, but I could tell he knew it all and was absently using the unused portions of his mind to play Tetris.

“Yes, but the person you must talk to is Dr. Zuhair Hallaj,” he said, with the air of one solving a chess problem involving checkmate in a mere sixteen moves. So Zuhair, the head of communicable diseases, was called in, and within minutes had grasped everything and was calling the head of communicable diseases at the Ministry of Health so arrange for me to meet him the following day.

Let me explain something. Much travel literature by Europeans features the author waiting in some dim and stiflingly hot governmental corridor for days waiting for the lowliest functional to return from tiffin and stamp a crucial document that will, in a fashion that can only be described as Oriental Kafka, allow him to visit another governmental functionary who will likewise be out for tiffin, but will finally return and stamp the document with a stamp that cancels out the first stamp. These accounts are by no means exaggerated. To have me visiting someone barely below the level of the Minister on my first full day in the country was staggering. To tell you the truth, I was already a little daunted, and began wondering, in the corner of my mind usually reserved for Tetris, what on earth I should wear.

The four of us came up with a list of the top public health stories in Egypt: traffic accidents (a recent crash on the road to Syria had killed 44 and left more than 200 in hospital), street children, Hepatitis C (one Egyptian in three is infected), schistosomiasis (a success story in Egypt, which might have implications for dozens of other African countries), and avian flu.

Kassem, meanwhile, was extending the mental list he was making of people I should meet. Even as their names came up in conversation I was starting to feel uneasy, all over again, about my lack of Arabic. Names they threw out sounded suspiciously similar to each other. I wrote them down, spelling phonetically, as quickly as I could—a method that, combined with my appalling handwriting, pretty much guaranteed future confusion.

Back at his office, Kassem offered me sweets all over again, and showed me some of his work, including a monumental project: a unified medical dictionary in Arabic, English and French. Knowing how much perception and understanding of disease is affected by the assumptions and history of one’s culture, I could begin to imagine the difficulties involved. Not to mention the fact that our understanding of disease is dynamic, changing so often and at times so rapidly that when I was working on my asthma book I discovered that the entire conception of asthma was in the process of changing so dramatically that the current edition of Morland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary was already hopelessly outdated. A panel convened by the NIS even wanted to change the name to Reactive Airway Disease, which might have been more self-explanatory but ran into the difficulty that nobody in the real world would have known what they were talking about.

Kassem agreed, and came up with a subject that showed an entirely different range of difficulties. How were he and his colleagues to name clitorectomy, widespread in Africa? They wanted, frankly, to choose a word that was accurate but ugly, to indicate that the practice was repulsive to them. “Clitorectomy” sounded far too scientific, as if those practicing it had good medical reasons for doing so. “Female circumcision” likewise sounded too acceptable, as male circumcision is standard practice in both Jewish and Moslem faiths. Even to go with the phrase of choice, though—“female genital mutilation,” or FGM—posed problems, as religious conservatives might feel that by using such a phrase, the dictionary was implicitly criticizing male circumcision. (Fine by me: speaking as an uncircumcised male, I’d regard any assault on my foreskin as genital mutilation.) So the editorial team had to have a series of consultations with religious leaders, who (and Kassem sounded a little surprised at this) unexpectedly endorsed the FGM language. Shortly afterwards, perhaps by coincidence, the Egyptian government even came out and issued for the first time an explicit condemnation of FGM. The more I looked at Kassem’s robust volume, with its more than 100,000 terms unified in three languages, the more I imagine Dr. Johnson looking on and being pretty damn impressed.

My final act of the working day was to buy a cell phone, which I achieved with the help of no fewer than four guys at the Mobilini office two doors down from my hotel. One told me of the virtues of the individual phones, and I argued him ("Simpler! Simpler!") down to a Nokia that did not include a flat-screen plasma TV or GPS system. (Though it may include Tetris, come to think of it.) He was the one who also showed me how to insert the chip. He, however, had no understanding of my question, "How do I pay for the actual calls?" This only evolved over time. He told me I needed a SIM card, which spoke in Arabic, so another of the guys took over the task of making my new phone speak English, which was a Rosetta Stone experience that took ten minutes and left his thumb exhausted. Somewhere in there I had to buy yet another card that seemed to be for actual calls once the phone was all chipped and chipper, and I got my actual phone number off something that looked for all the world as if guy #3 was offering me a stack of free CD's to choose from, all apparently identical. I was wrong about that, but now wholly off base as they *did* then offer me a free Mobilini backpack, but even that confused me as guy #1 had clearly been badly work down by my state of basic incomprehension of cell phone technology and he began to lapse into French, called the backpack a cadeau (gift). By the time the whole transaction had been accomplished, I half expected a new generation of cell phones to arrive by truck, making my Nokia obsolete. Then guy #3, who had been in a kind of silent supervisory capacity until now, stepped in and advised guy#1 how to create a receipt on the computer and print it out. Finally, I signed a contract that was completely in Arabic, so I may well have signed away my rights to a fair trial, or the Egyptian edition of my next book. I walked out feeling immensely pleased with myself, but not as pleased (or as sensible) as the hotel desk clerk, who asked to see the phone, gave little chortles of glee, declared Nokia a good make, showed me how to access my menu and my messages, and finally did the most important thing of all: he called me on it, and we had a very jovial brief conversation on our cell phone, three feet away from each other across the counter. I was so grateful I gave him the free Mobilini backpack to pass on to his children. We both agreed it had been an excellent day.