Early to bed and early to rise, makes a (wo)man healthy, wealthy and wise. (Benjamin Franklin)

A few participants of our group met at 5.30 am in the morning and went  on a spontaneous trip to the Al-Alzhar mosque, which was unfortunately closed. Instead they walked around the area and were invited to see the  making of a Misbaḥa – which is a string of prayer beads for Muslims to memorize the 99 names of Allah. Afterwards they by metro to the al-Qurba quarter of Cairo – a quarter with a lot of buildings with French architecture. After a refreshing and awakening breakfast the official program of the day started. A documentary about Jews in Egypt was shown and
passionately discussed afterwards. Since Judaism is not represented by a group member everyone showed genuine interest in the topic.

After lunch we started to discuss and develop our own ideas about how to share our exchange experience and how to promote interfaith dialogue in society. These ideas were further evolved and discussed through concrete project ideas and they also received helpful feedback from the teamers and the other participants. Since we were not able to see the Pyramids on Tuesday we postponed it to Friday. A light show at the pyramids told us about the sight’s history and its treasures. Some people split up and went to a concert of the Egyptian band Maktoub.

The ReliXchange project receives financial support by the German-Egyptian Transformation  Partnership through the German Foreign Office, by funds of the Ecclesiastical Development Services through Bread for the World – Protestant Church Development Service and by the “International Youth Work” Programme of the German Federal Child and Youth Plan through BKJ