Life is pretty good

Hey people. Some cool stuff has been happening in my life, so I thought I'd let u know about it. First of all I met this random old guy walking to school the other day and he had been in Cairo like a year ago so we got to talk about it. Other thing, I wrote a story about Cairo for my creative writing class. In fact, it was about a minibus driver and a Jinn. My class really loved it. I put some of the Quran and some songs in it. However, then my professor tried to explain to our class that a Jinn in Islam was the equivalent of a demon. I was like, "umm no its not," and then explained. Anyway, this prof is freaking annoying. However, today I was sitting in our on campus coffee shop during chapel break and he came up to me and was like, "I just want to tell you you're doing some good work, really good work." What the crap? Anyway, I guess that's good. I might publish my story in our campus magazine cause its kinda my way of informing people about what Egypt was like. If anyone wants to read it, let me know, you'd probably be better critics than my class too cause they've never been there and are kinda pansies in general.

Ok so then I went to Fridays with some people, and met this guy that's really interested in the Middle East, just bought a bunch of Qurans, knows this Middle Eastern shop owner here well, and is starting to get tutored in arabic. He did Salaam aleykum as a toast! I was pretty excited. I told him if its egyptian arabic I want to join.

Otherwise, I found what I want to do this summer. Its this organization in San Diego that works with torture refugees from the Middle East (and other places) and they have opportunities for data analysis (which is what I want to do). So ya, that's sweet. Oh and I applied for a job at Calvin's Center for Social Research too. And my current job is still the awesomest, easiest, most fun job in the universe. So ya.

Today I emailed the mosque down the main street from my house and Phil's house about setting up some sort of interfaith dialogue kind of thing with Calvin students and Phil and I are gonna go walk by it tomorrow. I also registered for the Faith and International Development Conference here and once again want to extend and invitation for you all to come. It sounds pretty awesome.

Otherwise, my life is going pretty darn well, in fact almost perfectly. My roommates are all freakin amazing. I'm seeing the guy I told u about last semester tonight and tomorrow night (not like "seeing," but he'll be at the same parties). It snowed last night but today the sky is bright blue so it makes that really pretty white and blue combination. I realized how much I missed the squirrels here. They make up for the lack of pigeons, but not quite for the lack of you all. Luv u, hope things are going well for u all too