Tag Archives: Egypt

September 16, 2012 · 11:48 pm

TechWomen Dinner at Home

The Huawei TechWomen mentors and mentees gathered in my home for a potluck dinner tonight. My husband made a halal chicken curry with rice as the entree. There were women from at least seven countries around our table: China, Egypt, India, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and the USA. The guests had fun visiting my office in WP668, our backyard caboose. The food was interesting, plentiful, and delicious. My mother and husband joined the party. What a delightful group of new friends!

4 Comments

Filed under Caboose Project and Other Trains, Home & Family, Mentoring & Other Business

Tagged as China, Egypt, Eleanor, Huawei, John, Mentoring, Middle East, technical women, TechWomen, WP668

August 7, 2012 · 10:23 pm

TechWomen Mentor Training

TechWomen mentor training was today, hosted by Walmart in San Bruno, California. About TechWomen:

Harnessing the power of business, technology and innovation, TechWomen brings emerging women leaders in technology sectors from the Middle East and North Africa together with their American counterparts for a professional mentorship and exchange program at leading companies in the United States.

Pairing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s vision of “smart power diplomacy” with “21^st Century Statecraft,” TechWomen works to empower women and girls through technology. It connects and supports the next generation of women in technology sectors by providing them the access and opportunity needed to pursue careers in technology.

TechWomen is an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). … partnering with the Institute of International Education (IIE) and the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) to implement this initiative.

This is the second year for TechWomen, with Silicon Valley companies hosting women from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Palestine, and Yemen. I was the Process Architect for TechWomen from 2010-2011. Today, I gave a short talk on the Best and Worst Practices in Mentoring. I am proud to be a Professional Mentor myself this year. Each mentee has both a Professional and a Cultural mentor assigned to her. Huawei hosted three mentees last year in Santa Clara (two from Lebanon and one from Egypt) and will host three more this year (one each from Egypt, Lebanon, and Morocco). We are very much looking forward to meeting them in September!

1 Comment

Filed under Hopper - Anita Borg Institute, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews

Tagged as Egypt, Geeks, Huawei, Middle East, teaching, technical women, TechWomen

July 23, 2010 · 11:06 pm

Comparing College Costs

Yesterday, I paid $193 for my son Paul’s first Freshman quarter at Foothill College (Los Altos, California). Foothill is a community college where Paul will be taking a light load for his first term and living at home. Today, my daughter Jessica in her organized way sent us a detailed breakdown of the costs for the first semester of her senior year at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). Tuition at CMU is $20,590 and other expenses (food, housing, books, travel) come to $4,525 for a half-year total of $25,115. I think that works out to CMU costing about 100 times what Foothill College does. CMU is a great school and Jessica has done very well there (she is on the Dean’s List again, with High Honors!). It is worth the cost.

Here are the kids having fun together during Spring Break in Egypt:

Pancakes & San Jose Metblog Entries

I just posted a San Jose Metblog entry about the Willow Glen Lions Club preparing to serve up Pancakes for Charity, at “Hot San Jose Nights” this coming weekend at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds.

The Lions practiced cooking eggs, bacon, sausage, and pancakes at last night’s meeting – it was good!

My other recent San Jose Metblog posts:

25 Technical Girls Win Awards, 6 Jun 2010
Sweet Mango Replaces Siam Square, 27 May 2010
Plants vs. Zombies, 26 May 2010
Lions in Egypt, 5 May 2010

You can see the index to all 13 of my San Jose Metblogs postings on: Authors – Katy Dickinson.

Weaving in Harrania, Egypt

Because our daughter Jessica is a weaver, John and Paul and Jessica and I made a point to visit the amazing Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Centre in Harrania, near Giza, during our recent trip to Egypt. We had to insist that our guide take us there (Wissa Wassef does not give the guides kickbacks) but it was well worth making a fuss to see. We went back a second time later! Here is a description of how Ramses Wissa Wassef started this impressive craft center:

Ramses’ interest in tapestry weaving began in 1941 when he was asked by a social welfare organisation to design a small centre in Cairo. While designing the building he asked permission to teach a small group of the children to weave, thus beginning his “experiment in creativity.” Weaving seemed the perfect medium to bring together his appreciation for traditional craftsmanship with the innate creativity of children, which he believed was damaged by routine and formalised education. After apprenticing himself to a weaver to master the basic techniques and exploring natural dyes Ramses began to pass on these skills to a small group of the schoolchildren. Using a high-warp loom, similar to those found millenia before in Ancient Egypt, the children began to weave in local wool dyed with natural dyes such as indigo, cochineal, madder, and reseda. Encouraged by the success of these experiments in 1951 Ramses and his wife Sophie began building a workshop near the small village of Harrania, ten miles from Cairo. At that time no weaving was done in the area, although since the success of the Centre imitations have become widespread. [From About the Art Centre]

We bought two books, some postcards, a ceramic sheep and a bowl, and a delightful small woven tapestry at Wissa Wassef. The larger statues in the gardens were remarkable but there was no way we could get one home. The weaving is so tight on our tapestry that I cannot put my fingernail between the threads. Most of the tapestries in the Wissa Wassef museum were very large; I am pleased to have a small but lovely sample of this work. The books are:

Egyptian Landscapes: 50 Years of Tapestry Weaving at the Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Centre, Cairo by Hilary Weir, Suzanne Wissa Wassef, Yoanna Wissa Wassef, Opus Publishing Ltd (2006)
Threads of Life: A Journey in Creativity by E. A. De Stefano, Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Center (1991)

We also toured two commercial rug factories while we were in Harrania. One place was producing some very good work – the El Harrania Factory. The owner generously gave my daughter some of his wool as a souvenir and said he trained at Wissa Wassef. The second factory we went to was unremarkable for either quality or creativity (but the prices were very high) – that was the one our guide wanted us to go to!

Wissa Wassef Art Centre

El Harrania Factory

1 Comment

Filed under Home & Family, News & Reviews

Tagged as Egypt, Jessica, John, Middle East, Paul

June 30, 2010 · 4:27 pm

Paul Graduates High School!

After much struggle, my son graduated from High School! Hooray! Paul graduated with his Palo Alto High School class of 2010 in a ceremony attended by his parents and grandparents. His sister Jessica listened by cell phone to Paul’s name being announced as he walked to receive his diploma. Jessica is in Washington DC, where she is working as a summer intern for the Polaris Project (“For a World Without Slavery”).

Paul made his way through High School despite his social-cognitive learning disability, dyslexia, dysgraphia, brain surgery, and debilitating headaches. He stubbornly continued to do six or more hours of homework every day (including weekends) up until the week of finals – catching up after we were Stranded in Egypt over Spring Break. He took a CPR Saturday class just before finals after a last-minute note from the school said he needed that training to graduate. Other kids in Paul’s class were honored for their academic, sports, and musical achievements. Paul won through to the end, and that was good enough. We are so proud! This week, Paul is going to visit Jessica in Washington DC (his first solo trip). He starts at Foothill College in August.

1 Comment

Filed under Home & Family

Tagged as Disabilities, Egypt, Foothill College, Jessica, Paul

June 3, 2010 · 11:03 pm

CMU-Q in Doha, Qatar

John and Paul and I visited my daughter Jessica in Doha while she was a student at CMU-Q (Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar) last semester. She had an excellent experience studing Arabic, history, and politics at CMU-Q and Georgetown. Qatar has a very conservative Islamic culture, similar to that of its neighbor Saudi Arabia. It was fascinating to watch guys in traditional white dress adjust their head scarves the way western women fiddle with their long hair. I have heard that between the expat business people and the guest workers, less than a third of the people in Qatar are citizens. So, we did not feel too out of place being westerners.

We were delighted to hear Jessica sing several roles in the Qatar Foundation’s annual musical, which this year was Oliver!. We went for a long walk on the Cornish and took a pearl boat ride across the bay to the very impressive Museum of Islamic Art in its I. M. Pei building. We toured the markets: Souq Wakif (including its depressing pets for sale), the falcon souq, and the gold souq. And we visited the huge Vegas-like Villagio mall, complete with its Venetian canal and gondolas. We played board games one night with some of Jessica’s faculty friends. She even made us dinner – we brought it from the kitchen in the women’s dorm to where John and Paul were in the park near by. We admired the many new and under-construction modern office buildings downtown but after a few days we ran out of things to do and were happy to move on to Egypt for some world-class sightseeing.