Day 3

The day started with a visit to Dendara, which is the Temple of Hathor. The goddess Hathor was the goddess of love and sensual pleasures, patron of music and dancing. She is usually represented as a woman, a cow or a woman with a headdress of cow’s horns and sun disc, as she was the daughter of the sun-god Ra. She was also a maternal figure and as wife of Horus was often portrayed as the divine mother of the reigning pharaoh.
Dendara is one of the most iconic Egyptian buildings, mainly because it remains virtually intact, with a great stone roof and columns, dark chambers, underground crypts and twisting stairways all carved with hieroglyphs.
We learned today that training this week was only going to consist of 5 sessions and not the 6 we were expecting. There appears to have been some confusion between the university and the guide association.
The session was communication interspersed with the trading game from the leadership session. This week the girls were able to play the shouty shouty game with only a few comments and raised eyebrows! The girls engaged with pictionary well, which gave us a chance to increase our repertoire of Arabic words. The letter about WAGGGS issues was adapted to fill a shorter time to accommodate the trading game. This week the game worked better. More space meant the girls could actually move between tables and they were more inclined to buy and sell materials between themselves. Taking away paper or pencils from some teams also encouraged this. One group even used the initiative to try and sell back their materials to the bank at the end!
We tried some singing; Alive Alert Awake Enthusiastic, which prompted one girl who we understand is a known singer at the university, to stand in the middle and sing a song to us. It was something of a surreal moment!
Some of the feedback we are getting this week is that there are too many games, which takes away from the serious stuff. We think this is coming from the students as the girls who are scouts seem to be having a really good time. It leads us to question what the girls understand to be the purpose of our visit but even if all we achieve with the non-guides is to show them a new way of learning and give them an opportunity to practice their English, it will have been worthwhile. Even better of course if some of them are inspired to start units at some point!
We are hoping to attend English club tomorrow. They have asked us to talk to them about education in England.
In the evening we had a chance to go to the supermarket to buy some comfort food. The trip also presented Mr Usama with an opportunity to parade us round the town by taking us to his sister’s wedding dress shop and to a studio for a formal photograph. We managed to get out of visiting his club!

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