Dinner with Biance & Nicole, Cake with Matt

I loveeeeeeeeeeee Biance & Nicole!!! Bianca and I have kind of had dinners together every other week and its become a tradition for us, now its gym on tuesday eveninings and then dinner and a movie. This week we have had it on wednesday and I invited Nicole too. We might start an African girls night- we can start writing or reading poetry and maybe we might make a difference somehow! We have had such a great evening, I made dinner and they came over. We laughed so hard, talked about homosexuals and black people. I always end up talking about Efe in my conversations, its as though am trying to remind myself that no one should take her place in my Cairo memoirs. We talked about Cairo and the craziness of the place, the people and the sexual atmosphere in the city and the Middle East. What strikes me about Cairo is the contradictions of the place. It's depicted as a place of holiness yet there is so much ha-ram going around. Went to the gym, Mohamed was better today, he has ulcers- I feel for him. I hope he gets better. We talked for ages and I kind of understand him better every time I talk with him. God heal him, he is in so much pain and fatigue everyday from the medication. Aiman just sent me a message, its so sweet. I have such lovely friends- am so thankful for them...meanwhile I am way too tired to concentrate on my analysis and conclusion. I did some cases today on the UK asylum process problems, eye opening and I think am going to do a comparative analysis of Kenya, UK and Egypt and Egypt seems to come out as the most favorable despite its huge faults and human rights violations. Kenya seems to have their violations embedded in the refugee consitition and the UK is one that treats the indvidual as a thing rather than as a human being. So even if has made reservations to the refugee convention, its not the only one that has, but at least it has allowed UNHCR to assess RSD and has hosted several refugees and for that, I applaud it. Miss Mother and father so much. Precious people! tomorrow New campus, yay! bus trip... excited sort of cause I get to practice going there. Nicole and Biance were saying how there are yoga fitness and pilates classes at the New campus gym, how cool is that? am actually starting to want to be there. Oh I almost forgot, this afternoon I was desperate for something to eat on my way to the gym and I had been craving cake, so I pass by Costa to get some cake and could not find a place to sit, Matthew offered me a seat at his table seeing as he was alone and we actually did chat a bit. He seems quite reserved and shy. He has also lived in Kenya for a year and a half. Talking about it made me miss East Africa and being with Nicole today brought back all those memories, she is from Burundi and seems wonderful! Anyway, thing is Matt and I keep bumping into each other and today we ended up talking, we have bumped into each other in my apartment elevator, on campus way too many times, were supposed to have dinner twice with Wawa and Kristen and somehow he could not make it, and then today finally we get to talk and am kind of hoping we don't bump into each other again, cause I feel like we know each other but we never really have much to say to each other. Its such a small huge place this Cairo. A city of more than 20million people and yet foreigners just seem to know each other a bit too much.

Are gay rights, rights? Just a question

The fight for human rights has taken some dodgy discourse. Today people are fighting for gay rights, abortion rights, maybe soon we might need fornicator and adultery rights. Speaking with Ray, one of the African fellow-colleague today at the library, he was narrating his recent and on going discussion with Carl(a good friend of mine) on gay rights and the bible. I don't believe in gay rights,because I do not believe in homosexuality. I love Carl and he knows that am sure but homosexuality has its place in a dysfunctional lifestyle, yet what I believe we should be working at is a lifestyle that pleases God if we believe in him or that one believes in, and if he does believe in homosexuality that can not make me hate him. Am sure not all my friends believe in what I believe in and for that am thankful; yet when it comes to the basics and foundational belief in God I think that homosexuality is beyond intellectual rhetoric and that there is just no way I can justify the act. We all struggle with things in life, yet it we were to give into everything we wanted, what a world we would be living in. I can only imagine the number of people who would have been murdered by others. Anyway, bottom line Human rights and gay rights are distinguishable, if the human rights we have are by virtue of being human and they are inalienable then freedom is one of them, so why need an extra gay rights. And to argue homosexuality based in the Bible becomes in itself a discourse of contradiction,because there are plain and clear illustrations of what life should be and was meant to be, and again we tend to use certain scriptures without the coherence of scripture on the topic. Another issue comes in when thesizing(for lack of a better word, I like to create my own, after all language is dynamic) one's personal desires into rights becomes problematic, because then we may have vegetarians demanding that meat is not to be sold in the markets together with vegetables. Everything will become a potential right. So what are rights?