Word: cairo
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...began smoking the sheesha, and met his fiancee, during a year and a half of study at the American University of Cairo. Originally Class of '89, Mark went to Cairo halfway through his sophomore year, and spent the following year there as well. He returned to three semesters at Winthrop, and spent his last living off campus on Irving St. His fiancee and he met in Cairo in the fall of '87, and he describes her in contrast to the majority of women he met there...
During his time in Cairo the sheesha, which is a fixture in the city's cafes, became for Mark a way of meeting people outside the university. "People are always surprised to see a foreigner sit down and be familiar with a sheesha," says Mark," and they get very curious and friendly. It's a very communal custom...
...Mark's most focused forays into the city was during the summer of '89, which he spent getting to know some of the people who live in Cairo's City of the Dead. He was interested in the social networks that exist among the people living in poverty in the city's old tombs. The work he did eventually became a photo essay and an article(for Harvard's Development Forum) in which he was able to show, in this neglected part of Cairo, the existence of a healthy fabric of human community. All were photos taken in the City...
This spring, after three months abstinence, the sheesha brought back strong memories of his explorations of Cairo. It was easy to sit with him in the back-yard, stirring tea, handing back and forth the lay, basking in a stream of Arabic names and stories. Every night until the tobacco ran out, Mark would be in the backyard, arranging glowing embers with the masha' (a pair of small brass tongs), cupping his hands and blowing softly on the coals...
Mark began working in Cairo with a community service society, work he continued in a homelesss shelter once back in Cambridge. The work was "a start," through he was drawn more and more to what he could do with a camera. At the time he was taking pictures for Caravan, a student paper at A.U.C., covering a lot of demonstrations. One experience in particular stuck with him, giving him his first sense of the power of film...