EX-SUNDBERG OF ARABIA, NOW SUNDBERG OF LA

I have taken off my kafiya and bedou robes, dismounted my camel, shaken the sand from my boots and am back ... in LA for about a week.

I flew back from Cairo yesterday, June 3. "Only" 11 hours to JFK, then 5 hours to LAX. A breeze after Japan to Jordan back in February! That was over 24 hours, including lay-overs in Beijing and Dubai.

Egypt was nice, short -- and hot. I thought I could get by with a visit, maybe two out to AUC's new campus in New Cairo on the far, far east side of Cairo and still get to do a bit of local tourism in Cairo, but ended up spending most working days involved with the university. (An hour bus ride each way from downtown now.)

I had two main goals in Cairo:

1 -to determine if a Master's from AUC would get me where I wanted to be at the end - a qualification to teach or use Arabic professionally

2- to determine if I could find a job at AUC to help support a master's for 2-3 years

Even with GOAL 1 I needed to find out which of the two master's programs might fit me best: Arabic Studies or TAFL (Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language).

I had already been admitted by the Arabic Studies program but hadn't heard back from TAFL. Turns out they wanted me to take a placement test in Arabic to see if I qualified to enter the program. Luckily, I was in town and could do it. May 30 I took their 2-hour test and passed - not perfectly but quite acceptably. I met with Prof. El Sayid Bedawi the next day and he praised my Arabic abilities while strongly counseling me NOT to do the TAFL program. You already know 90% of what we teach our future teachers in our program, he said. (Things like theories of second language learning, teaching methodology, etc.) He strongly urged me to use my master's years to improve my literary Arabic via reading literature, exactly what the Arabic Studies program would give me. We also talked about conspiracy theories about JFK's death, the blockage of Gaza, and the short-sightedness of AUC's board of directors. He's a nice, cultured gentleman close to retirement and very respectful of my "Dr." status. (I keep forgetting I'm already a PhD.)

It wasn't until my very last day in Cairo, however, June 2, that I could firm up GOAL 2 - a job.

The director of AUC's huge adult outreach EFL program, Nadia Touba, was away in England at a conference, and with the British Airways strike and worries about Icelandic ash clouds, I feared she might not be back before I left Egypt, but we got together finally at the old downtown campus. She had been very encouraging in her earlier emails, and in the interview I got the impression I could pretty much "write my own ticket" as far as how involved I wanted to be with their program. She even invited me to think about a full-time opening as Assistant Director of the English Language Program, an administrative post I was way under-qualified for (all my experience has been on the teaching side). But there was always teaching, as much as I wanted - teacher training could even pull in $30 an hour (huge in Egypt).

Doing the math, however, I quickly saw that balancing the salary from a LOCAL-HIRE job with the very INTERNATIONAL tuition fees AUC would be charging ($7,700 per semester) would be a challenge. I might end up having to subsidize my Cairo expenses from my savings, but I could cover a lot locally if I were prepared to work hard on both the study and job ends.

MEANWHILE ... I have a standing offer from a university in the Persian Gulf for an assistant professor of English position that I need to reply to by their deadline: June 6.

Two good choices, which makes it hard to decide which direction from this major fork in my road to take. I'd hoped the many sedentary hours in the air here might give me my answer, but no definite direction yet.

Hmmm.