The countdown to Egypt is on. Next Sunday, I will be heading out to NYC, and after spending a day there I will be in Egypt on Tuesday, January 12. I will be spending the semester studying Arabic at Alexandria University (in Alexandria, Egypt) through Middlebury College's study abroad program. Here is a description of the program. I will be posting on this blog throughout the semester with stories about life and school, observations about the overall experience of being in Egypt, and anything else that seems worthy of being put down in writing on here. This is my second travel blog - you can find the blog that I kept in Kenya last summer here.
Don't be alarmed by all of the Arabic writing on the previous posts on this blog - for my Arabic class last semester we all kept blogs that we updated semi-regularly throughout the semester. I figured that it would just as easy to simply convert that blog into my Egypt blog instead of starting a whole new one. Despite the fact that the Middlebury program is focused on the language and all the participants signed the "Language Pledge" saying that they agreed to speak Arabic 24/7, I will be writing in English on this blog.
Feel free to share this with anyone you think might be interested. For now, إلى لقاء (until next time).
Consider some of the important findings in recent Arab Human Development Reports and related studies:
ReplyDeleteThe total number of books translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years is fewer than those translated in Spain in one year.
Greece – with a population of fewer than 11 million – translates five times as many books from abroad into Greek annually as the 22 Arab countries combined – with a total population of more than 300 million – translate into Arabic.
According to a Council on Foreign Relations report, "in the 1950s, per-capita income in Egypt was similar to South Korea, whereas Egypt's per-capita income today is less than 20 percent of South Korea's. Saudi Arabia had a higher gross domestic product than Taiwan in the 1950s; today it is about 50 percent of Taiwan's."
As Dr. A.B. Zahlan, a Palestinian physicist, has noted: "A regressive political culture is at the root of the Arab world's failure to fund scientific research or to sustain a vibrant, innovative community of scientists." He further asserted that "Egypt, in 1950, had more engineers than all of China." That is hardly the case today.
A recent UN Human Development Report revealed that only two Egyptians per million people were granted patents (for Syria the figure was zero), compared to 30 in Greece and 35 in Israel.
In the same UN report, the adult literacy rate for women aged 15 and older was 43.6 percent in Egypt and 74 percent in Syria, while for the world's top 20 countries it was nearly 100 percent.