Fight The Power

So, I'm trying to keep up with my students in terms of blogging this semester. I think frankly I'm doing better than many of them are but we'll see how many play catch up by the end of the semester. I was planning to discuss their blogging silence during my next class on Wednesday. But now it appears I may have to hold off until next week thanks to a little thing called a strike scheduled for this Wednesday among the students.

The thing is, I don't really blame them. Life at AUC has been hard this fall. From incomplete classrooms, to food shortages to housing nightmares in which international students are asked to move out of their roach-infested army hotels in order to accommodate a political conference -- its been a trial by fire for most of these students. For more information on those stories, you really should check out the student newspaper Caravan's online publication at http://www.auccaravan.org

That's not to say there haven't been some definite positives by moving to Kattameya. For one thing, I can actually breathe air that isn't laced with heavy doses of lead and carbon monoxide. The campus is beautiful and there are moments when I'm walking down the Avenue that I have to stop and take a look at the architecture.  And I do believe that as the kinks are worked out, AUC will really be a force to be reckoned with in terms of technology and programs. 

It's just for students right now, the growing pains are, well, a lot more excruciating than they expected.

So a Facebook group has sprung up calling on students to meet in front of the HUSS building during assembly hour on Wednesday. It's expected to be a daylong protest, complete with red striped bands around the wrist in a sign of solidarity as well as a large bed sheet for students to commemorate their bad experiences for everyone to see. Its a sight I think I'd like to see, if only for the fact that AUC students are truly doing what we see so often in colleges abroad -- uniting in protest over a common cause. 

While news of the planned strike has been circulating for a while, it seems that professors are taking it serious this time with many canceling classes -- whether in solidarity with the cause or simply because it saves the trouble of having to trek out into the desert to attend a class that may only have 2 students, I don't know. In any case, from my point of view, I think the strike is a good sign. Not because I'm an instigator who revels in chaos (although I have my moments). But rather because this type of protest is particularly important to see in an Arab country where freedom of expression is not easily come by. 

And if I don't have to make the arduous journey out to the desert to teach an empty classroom, well, that's an added bonus.