Fuul Medammes and Team Building

In the US fast food restaurant are nothing but what their name indicates: fast food. When you are in a hurry, you eat fast food. When you don't have the money to afford to dine out at an elegant restaurant, you get fast food, when you don't have the time to cook you also go for fast food.

In Egypt however, fast food has a different twist to it. First of all, fast food here in Egypt is anything but fast. Whether you're getting home delivery, dining in or even take away, in most cases you have to wait and sometimes for a bit too long. But that's not the greatest difference between such type of restaurants in Egypt and the US. While in the US fast food places are considered to be on the lower end of the food-price chain, in Egypt eating at fast food restaurants is considered the classy thing!

At work, we ordered food, not from a US-like fast food chain, but from the traditional full and falafel type of shops. We could have used Gad, but we went for Shabrawy, a popular chain in Egypt offering traditional fuul and falafel (tameya). We did not order sandwiches like is commonly done, but surprisingly, specially for people working at a US company, we ordered fuul in plastic containers and we sent the office boy to buy bread (balady bread). We then emptied the full into a large container and started eating all together crowding around it!

By some, this might seem unhygienic, all of us eating from the same plate, and boy we were many. To the Egyptian who still views eating from US-like fast food chains as classy, this action of ours would seem not appropriate and not 'classy'. This has to do with the class structure that is unfortunately still rooted in the Egyptian culture, and how different classes in Egypt eat in different ways. But the lovely thing I noticed was not only the better taste of the fuul eaten in this way, but that our crowding around the plate and all eating from the same large plate together sparkled a team spirit which although we could not see with our eyes yet we felt with our souls.

It might sound funny to hear that eating from one large plate can be a team building activity, yet I believe one should do what it takes to promote a team spirit. It's much better to use an activity that stems from our culture than to try to forcefully inject 'foreign' objects inside the body of an Egyptian team. We should learn from the West, then adapt what we learnt to our own culture. Never should we take things as is and just apply them blindly in a forced way to our culture, because they will get rejected, not work or in best cases cause annoying problems.