Categorising Ourselves And its Price

The recent controversy surrounding Caitlyn Jenner's coming out as a transsexual has brought up some extremely important issues in human interactions in general for me. A good friend posted an article by Nuridden Knight looking at a comparison of the issues body image and self love for black people and for transsexuals. I personally would not have made those comparisons, but then I am about as WASP as they come in terms of my externals and have always enjoyed the benefits of belonging, at least as far as surface characteristics apply, to the privileged class in this world. I think that she has made some excellent points in this article and the viewpoint interests me because I have never been able to view the world as black/white even with shades in between because I was raised to believe that the colour of a person's skin was one of the least important attributes of that person. It was an issue that was never brought up in our family, although we had very few friends who were persons of any sort of colour other than vaguely pink partly due to my father's job as a Navy scientist (this was in the 50's and 60's) and partly due to where we lived. But considerations of colour or ethnicity were also not applied to Hispanic families in our area either and to even parrot a word of discrimination was to bring the wrath of the parental units on us.

My first boyfriend when I was growing up was of mixed race and ethnicity and it was a massive shock to me to encounter people's animosity to us as a couple in the early 60's. I moved to Canada in my early 20's where "black" people were from the Caribbean for the most part and very different in culture from the "black" people that I'd known in the US, which to me validated my parents' teaching. After all, how could the attributes of "black" people be so different if they were determined by skin colour? My late husband was Egyptian/Sudanese and the reactions of people in Louisiana to him when we visited New Orleans in the 70's was at once hilarious and horrifying. He was sporting a fairly impressive afro and was pretty dark from a lot of time in the sun, but as the nephew of the first president of Sudan he had no preset option for being of a lesser status due to the colour of his skin or the curl of his hair, and people we encountered, who on seeing him initially as "black", generally were very taken aback at his complete ignoring of that category in his interactions with them. Happily, he was a charming individual and things never got difficult, although it was extremely unsettling to a lot of people there in Louisiana. So the binary of "black" versus "white", while as a couple we probably exemplified it, was simply not workable.

I've always felt that while we see sex as being a binary...you are either a man OR a woman...it isn't really. That word "or" is a dangerous one. While working in Vancouver as a cocktail waitress to put myself through university, I was lucky enough to meet a number of transsexual individuals who while they might look like a man or a woman externally definitely gave off the "opposing" vibes, but how opposing were they in reality? As I grew older I realised that just as one's personal mannerisms were not a binary, neither were one's sexual preferences. For women sliding across sexual preferences can be easier than for men. After all, as mothers we are as loving to our sons as to our daughters, or at least we should be. It is quite natural to us to hug other women to comfort them as it is to hug men, and the division between simple interpersonal caring and loving sexual behaviour isn't a fence but a pasture or sometimes a forest.

Perhaps because men have not been so much a part of the parenting/nurturing culture in western society, it is easier to see their sexuality as binary, but it is also a continuum...or there wouldn't be so many strong male bonds. Despite being married and having children, I know that I have characteristics that might be labeled as male, and here in the villages of Egypt, I have indeed been called a "man" as a compliment (which I find rather odd and sometimes uncomfortable) because I am happy to be living on my own, running my farm, and taking responsibility for my people...and because I don't scare easily or back away from a confrontation when I feel I'm right. But is that really the behaviour of a "man" or is it the behaviour of someone who is simply certain in my own role, responsibility and power within my community and family? As well, I've been blessed with many nurturing, gentle male friends...so are they womanly or even, gasp! gay? Not at all. They are, however, more complex and interesting individuals than those who block away that aspect of the personality.

Life is so much simpler and less taxing to us when we categorise our world into little boxes, but in reality we dribble outside those boxes all the time. Living without our category boxes is infinitely more work. We actually have to pay attention to the individuals with whom we are interacting and see them in their glorious complexity. This takes time that modern society and human laziness often would like to avoid, so we categorise them. But what happens when we don't avoid the reality? Our world is so much larger and full of possibility and promise. With my work with our veterinary/farming charity that operates out of my farm, I have gotten to know the villagers, both men and women, as well as their children, as individuals rather than as inhabitants of that large box of "fellahin". There are those with whom I really enjoy spending time, others that I could cheerfully toss into the nearest canal because they refuse to open their eyes and ears to new ways of caring for their animals and families...but this is to be expected. Not all humans, dogs, birds, horses, or cats are enjoyable companions for every individual, and there is usually someone who likes the individuals that I do not like.

Looking at the question of how we accept the variety of individuals in our world whether it be through the lens of colour, sexuality, sex, gender, or social class clarifies the same issues at stake here in Egypt with the tendency of many to divide Egypt into social classes. We have the wealthy, theoretically educated (since they have financial and social access to "good" schools) and we have the poor and uneducated who have been told that they cannot be judges because their father was a farmer or trash collector. "City" people ascribe attributes to "country" people that don't necessarily fit in the actuality of individuals in these categories. And the opposite is also true. "Secular" people ascribe attributes to "religious" people that are equally without a good fit. Recently I've had groups of women who wear niqab bring their children out to the farm because my staff (who are mostly men other than myself and my housekeeper) are considerate and will stay away from the garden so that the women can enjoy the air without the black veil that they choose to wear in public...and they are well-read, well-travelled, interesting, questioning women, fascinating to talk to and very enjoyable as companions. Once you lose the category of Darth Vader clones, they are marvelous people. I do not necessarily agree with all that they believe but I do find them to be people with whom I am happy to spend some of my time, and I feel that I have been enriched by this interaction. The important point here is to appreciate the differences and enjoy them rather than to block because of them.

In her article, Nurredin Knight talks about learning to love herself as a black woman and accepting her entire being as what she is and what she should be. She questions whether sexual reassignment surgery is such a good idea. Wouldn't it be better just to accept on a societal level that just as there are people of different heights, weights, colours, athletic abilities and so on, there are also people of different aspects of sexuality and gender? When my children were young, one of their favourite books was called Leo The Lop and it was about a rabbit who had floppy ears who felt that somehow he wasn't normal because his ears didn't stand up like other rabbits. This is, of course, an oversimplification of a massive issue that touches every aspect of human endeavour. What is "normal" anyway? Much of the sectarian strife in the Middle East is rooted in the idea that there is only one "normal", just as sectarian issues in North America, while not necessarily expressed in religious terms, are also. One group can not decide that it is "normal" but no one else is. In this world, we need to lose the categories, all of them, and look at people as individuals who are individually kind, productive, inclusive, and honest...or they are not. And individually as people they should be part of our lives...or not.






Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

June 5, 2015

On Bombs

Yesterday I was greeted on opening Facebook, one of the best sources of information in Egypt, by a post by the daughter of a close friend saying that the police had shown up in a very timely manner to take care of what appeared to be a bomb near their apartment building in Maadi. She had been contacted by a neighbour who informed her of the arrival of the police and her boab (the doorman to the apartment building) told her that someone had seen something near the large electrical box on the corner that had wires and looked very suspicious, so the police had been called. There subsequently was  a small boom, then a larger boom, and the problem seemed to be sorted.

Today her mother called me before bringing a friend visiting from Finland to see me here at the farm and we were talking about the incident. Naturally, everyone is very happy that the object had not blown up the electrical connection or caused any injuries, and she was very happy that she and her friend had been at the beach at Ain Sokhna, thus missing the excitement. I asked if there was any further information about what exactly was involved and what had  happened. She told me that while the object had looked suspicious, as far as she knew there was no official statement that it had been a bomb. Apparently the police brought along a big metal box into which they placed the offending object and then performed a controlled detonation. It might well have been a bomb, but now it is in a thousand bits, so it would be hard to tell. On the other hand, she pointed out that the piles of garbage that were usually surrounding the electricity box on the corner were now gone, so perhaps it was a plot by the neighbourhood to get the spot cleaned up. As usual, no one really knows.

There are odd homemade bombs going off in various parts of Egypt, this we do know. Today one went off at Carrefour in Alexandria killing one and injuring six. Most of these are aimed at the police, much like in the 90's when the police and Islamists were in an informal war. Most of us who live in Egypt do our best to avoid the police or government buildings if it is at all possible (also like during the 90's), but then we try to avoid them most of the time since contact with the government and police is almost never very pleasant. I have to go into the dreaded Mogamma (the abyss of state bureaucracy in Tahrir Square) sometime soon to renew my residence visa, but I keep putting it off simply because I don't want to go there, not out of fear.

Yesterday, while this excitement was going on in Maadi, we had a couple of families at the farm with their children to play in a wading pool and romp with dogs and baby goats. Neither family was particularly concerned, though one had been redirected when driving near the site of the bomb that cleaned up the corner electrical box. I'm sure that somewhere in Egypt people are very worried about all this, but to be quite honest, I don't know them. Most of us accept the fact that much of this falls into the "Shit Happens" category that we really can't do much about in our daily life. You take reasonable precautions, pay attention to the news, and get on with your life. Many people say that they'd rather deal with the odds of these random bombs than the possibility that some unbalanced individual might decide to shoot them over some imagined slight or something.  Death really is one of the unavoidable things in life, so losing time worrying about it doesn't seem terribly logical.




copyright 2015 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Learning To Live And Living to Learn

 I was talking to a friend today about this blog post and he told me that there is an Egyptian saying "If you do something, you might make a mistake and be punished, but if you do nothing you can't make a mistake."

Once a social psychologist, I suspect always a social psychologist. I went off to graduate school at the University of Waterloo in the mid 70's with a lot of illusions, but mostly I went there because they had a very short application form and one of my peculiar oddities is a horror of filling out forms. I can always think of other ways to answer the questions on them, ways that won't fit into little boxes, so I'm always left with a feeling of failure and confusion. Probably Waterloo wasn't the place for me academically, but it was where I met many beloved friends and where I met my late husband who was, in traditional Egyptian fashion, an engineering student. The social psychologists were experimental social psychologists, people who basically played experimental tricks on people to find out things about social behaviour. My advisor, Dr. Melvin Lerner, was an archetypal Jewish psychology professor and specialised in a field that studied victim blaming. He would undoubtedly be turning in his grave these days seeing my stand in social media for a just peace for Palestinians, but that is neither here nor there, because the parting of our ways came as I decided that I wasn't cut out for academia. I was interested in studying the development of verbal concepts of fairness in children, a topic that he didn't find very exciting, and his lack of support made me realise that this was not to be my life. When the graduate officer in our department asked what I was going to do next, I told him that I was considering opening a Mexican restaurant in Toronto...which, by the way, I never got around to. But much of what I learned to question and the concepts that helped me to formulate questions have continued to be useful to me in my very checkered career as a corporate wife, mother of multinational children, unwilling prisoner of corporate life and now living on the farm.

Dr. Sergio Forapani demonstrating dentistry to my staff

Before January 2011 many people in Egypt and beyond the borders never thought that the Egyptian people would rise up against the military rulers of the country. The reasons for this assumption were usually framed in terms of the "eternal patience" of the Egyptian people, citing millennia of authoritarian rule. But having watched methods of childrearing in Egypt, I had my doubts.  My in-laws, who were more or less upper middle class educated Egyptians, found it odd that I spoke to my children from the time that they were infants, explaining the reasons for my decrees as to what was acceptable or unacceptable behaviour.  I was living in Canada most of the year but would spend a month or so every winter with them in Cairo, during which time I drove my mother in law in particular rather mad by insisting that children under the age of three had no need of additional sugar in their diet, so her boxes of candies went untouched, or by refusing to allow a child who passed up a sandwich at lunch a couple of cookies later.  "But he's hungry!" she would cry. "If he were that hungry, he would have eaten lunch, but in the meantime he can have a carrot or a piece of fruit." was my cold-hearted response. I was terrible, I know, by refusing the request for a random toy when we went to a store. "But you have plenty of money!" "But they have to learn that you don't get everything you want it when you want it. Sometimes you have to work for rewards; it's called delay of gratification." She was utterly unappreciative of the value of a master's degree in psychology and thought that everything I did was completely mad, until one day she complimented me on my 16 year old son's skill at being a host at a family iftar and told me that she'd always thought that I was crazy but had decided that perhaps I knew something. I took the compliment with good humour, knowing that was as good as it ever was going to get.

Even one of my husband's uncles, a celebrated gastro-enterologist, told me flat out that it was pointless to talk to children under the age of four because they couldn't understand anything. I asked him how children were taught behaviour in Egypt and he just shrugged. Obviously, he'd never troubled himself with this problem, but his wife certainly had since his children of his first marriage, who were good friends of ours, were lovely people. When I moved out into the villages, my children were independent adults living and studying in the US, but I enjoyed the chance to watch parent/child interactions in the villages. One of the patterns I noticed was a sort of benign neglect. Children ran about under the more or less watchful eyes of parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents and older siblings, but they were not engaged in conversations by individuals older than them. They might talk to each other, but in general they would answer a simple question from an adult with a wide-eyed stare and no comment. This was true of my questions and I noticed that it also happened with most other adults. In my book of upbringing, not to answer a direct question in some fashion would be a major fault, but it seemed fairly normal to most of the adults. The children could speak when they wanted to, that was abundantly clear watching them together, but they rarely spoke to or were spoken to by adults. When I asked how the rules of life were learned, one father told me that people figured that by the age of ten or so a child was assumed to have learned them and would be punished for breaking them.

This fascinated me. Rules were almost never delineated or explained but breaking them brought punishment. It reminded me of the old learned helplessness experiments I'd learned about many years before. Basically, these experiments involved shocking or imposing other unpleasant experiences randomly to individuals in a learning task with the end result that the individual seemed to decide that it was irrelevant what he/she might choose to do because something bad was going to happen no matter what. The individual would no longer seek to do "the right thing" or try to avoid "the wrong thing" because it didn't matter. Essentially outcomes were random and uncontrollable, so why try. That essentially was the life for many children. They weren't told what sort of behaviour would bring a particular response....they had to find out for themselves and the outcome might not actually have anything at all to do with what they'd done. If Dad came home in a bad mood, you'd get hurt, no matter what the behaviour. Since the parents had also been raised in the same fashion, it all made a sort of perverted sense to them.

When I began looking around at day to day life in Egypt, the same random response pattern showed up. Even things like taxes for companies have no cut and dried rules, but are negotiated with someone, with the outcome completely unpredictable unless you figure out the right amount of lubrication to be applied. Students at universities and people competing in sports often find that who you are related to has much more to do with your success than what you do. One of my friends who visits me in Egypt from New Zealand on a regular basis always posts a blog of her trip and one year it was entitled "Egypt: We Do Random Well", so it isn't me who notices the tendency to random outcomes, punishments and rewards. The Egyptian school system is a prime candidate for the imposition of learned helplessness. In the first place, most teachers are just people who couldn't get another job. They aren't trained in any way at all. They are certainly not qualified to impart knowledge since their main qualification is a lack of qualifications for any other work. The curriculum could honestly be said to have been created by that famous room full of monkeys with typewriters. I've tutored village children with their English homework, and it is utterly insane. One little boy was given a text to read that went something like this:
"Fatima and Hamza are brother and sister. Their father is a doctor who works in a hospital and their mother is a teacher who works in a school. Every day they go to school, study their lessons and come home to do their homework after school. On Friday their father washes his car and then the family goes out to the park or perhaps to the swimming pool."

My first job was just to see if any of this made any sense to this boy. No women in his household worked outside the home. It is considered shameful if they do. Of course the fact that there is little in the way of transportation that could take women to jobs and even less in terms of jobs out here might also be a factor. None of the children in our village have a doctor for a father. Most of them rarely see doctors. Their fathers are labourers or farmers. In Egypt, NO ONE but possibly a cab driver washes his own car! If you can afford to buy a car,  you can afford to have someone else wash it for you..so this part of the story is fantasy. And finally, the little boy had to ask what a park was. He'd never seen one. He's seen pictures of swimming pools and maybe even seen one once but he's never been in one.  How could a primary school child make any sense of this, especially considering the fact that probably the teach was mispronouncing the words so much that the language hardly resembled English at all? And then,  even now corporal punishment is still common in schools and most of the people I've spoken to from our area experienced it and, in fact, quit school because of it. When I asked them why they quit, often the answer was something along the lines of "I could get hit at home, so why go somewhere else and have a stranger do it. I was too stupid to learn."

Dr. Sergio (left) and Dr. Mohsen (right) at a clinic

I have a staff of ten at my farm, five young men in their mid-twenties, three younger boys whose parents asked me to take them on to teach them, a housekeeper and my late husband's driver who is now my right hand after twenty years. Only Mohamed has any education. The rest never finished school and were convinced that they were too stupid to learn. I had often talked to them about going back to school but the answer was always the same....they thought there was no point.  After the revolution, when there was no work in tourism for us, I noticed that the guys were getting really, really bored with just the daily chores, so I sent them  out in ones and twos to work with the Donkey Sanctuary to learn to trim donkey feet. At first they were very reluctant, sensing another evil experience with the dreaded learning situation, but they came home energised and enthusiastic. The vet they were working under Dr. Mohsen Mohsen, is a skilled teacher who encouraged their learning instead of punishing their every mistake. They were happy to realise that the training I'd given them in horse and donkey care actually made them quite experienced in the field, which gave them more confidence.

Egyptian and Italian farriers demonstrating for my staff at a clinic

A biomechanics class with Dr. Sergio and vets, farriers, and grooms

After some months, after talking to some large animal vets who were saying how the gas price increases and increases in veterinary medicine prices were making it almost impossible to work with farmers who didn't have the cash to pay increased fees, a vet friend and I decided to try setting up a veterinary charity in our neighbourhood to help the farmers with their animals. We got a number of vets to work with us, both experienced and fresh from school. My guys were amazed to find that while they didn't have the technical knowledge of the new graduates, they did have much more experience and much more comfort in handling the animals, who ranged from pigeons to even the odd camel, with the majority being donkeys, goats, sheep, cows, water buffalo and poultry. This again was an enormous morale boost. We've been doing our work now for two years and every day farmers and cart drivers bring animals to the farm for treatment. We've had master farriers and a professor of veterinary science from Italy come to stay and give classes and practical lessons, often extremely technical work, and the guys are there for every class and every lesson, even coming in on their days off.  One of my gardeners has set up a chicken raising project for his wife and other women in his family to supplement their income, and they are raising some wonderful chicken. Friends from town make the trip to come to buy them, and there is an ego factor in knowing that professors and such are making a special effort just for your produce. Their veterinary knowledge is being used to raise better, cleaner, healthier animals and to teach others how to do it too.

I've watch typical learned helplessness victims turn their lives around and change their attitudes completely with giving them the chance to learn and use their knowledge to help others. One of the most impressive things, and something that I think has been extremely important, is the fact that they are not being paid for their veterinary work. It is all voluntary, even the work that occurs almost every day after working hours at the farm. This is a point of pride. Not only do they know things, but they can help people and do so without benefit to themselves. It isn't enough to give them knowledge...much of it they had before we started the veterinary work...they need to use it too.



copyright 2014 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Losing A Voice of Reason in Egypt

 A young man died yesterday who by any reasoning should still be here with us. Bassem Sabry was a writer, analyst, activist of the highest ethical standards whom I first encountered online during the winter of 2011. At times, reading the discussions on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, I was struck by his strong wisdom and innate kindness. When he published this on his blog I was stunned to realise how young he was, only 31 at this death, and how wise he was beyond his years. I posted many things that he wrote because he did it so much better than I did. I would urge everyone to take a moment to read this post from last May and think on it. If we all learned as much as he did in his thirty years, surely this world would be much better.


copyright 2014 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

The Power of One

Tomorrow we will be driving downtown to Sednaoui hospital with my housekeeper's son Ali and a friend of mine here who works as a groom and has a son with cerebral palsy so bad that he has fallen over many times and broken his chin. We are going to consult with my friend Dr. Mostafa Shokry, who is one of the best orthopedic surgeons I know (he's reconstructed one of my shoulders and replaced both my knees) and also the administrator of Sednaoui hospital, one of the  dreaded governmental hospitals...but one that he is transforming into a real hospital.  For some odd reason, an orthopedic surgeon has always been one of the first doctors that our family would have to find when we moved somewhere.

Ali was kicked by one of my horses over a year ago, an accident that broke his upper arm in about 5 places. It was in the evening and I had clients about to go out, so I splinted it carefully and sent him off to a local doctor who xrayed it and put it in a cast. The next day we xrayed it again and it was clear that the initial cast was NOT going to suffice so I sent a photo of the xray to Dr. Mostafa. He had us bring Ali to Rabaa Adaweya hospital for the initial surgery to put a titanium plate in his arm to keep all the pieces in place while they healed. We did the surgery to remove the plate at Sednaoui about ten days ago and now we will remove the stitches and that will be that.  Khamis is bringing Omar for an assessment of what they can do to help the repeated injuries to his chin. Caring for a disabled child in the villages is a really tough job but Khamis and his wife have done their best.

Government hospitals in Egypt have a well deserved horrific reputation. They are underfunded, understaffed, have had almost no security since the revolution 2011when the Ministry of the Interior decided essentially to go on strike.  One of my first experiences in Egypt when we moved here in 1988 was with the government hospital in Alexandria whose ICU was the only place we could get the correct medication for my husband who had suffered a heart attack. It was all I could do not to run out of the place screaming because it was like my worst nightmares of Dickens. He was there for two weeks and survived, but it certainly wasn't because of the hospital. So when we were going to Sednaoui I was apprehensive to say the least. What I found was a real surprise.

Once we got Ali settled in his room to wait for his day surgery, Dr. Mostafa took me to see what he's been doing at Sednaoui. Since he's very important to the maintenance of my arthritic old body, I hadn't been all that thrilled when they'd named him hospital administrator, and I'd sympathised with his stories of frustration and exhaustion as he first undertook the task, taking courses in hospital administration at the American University in Cairo as well as working all day at the hospital and evenings in his clinic with his private practice. We had chats about how to  encourage more active participation by staff members in the process of improvement as I was working on changing my staff from labourers to real partners at my farm. It has been a very tough year for him.

The first place that we noticed a difference was in the room that Ali was assigned. It wasn't large or fancy, but it was very clean and bright. I've had much worse rooms at some private hospitals in Cairo. In fact the first time Dr. Mostafa had to do surgery to reconstruct one of my shoulders after a fall, we were in a private hospital that was so horrible that we all agreed to get me out of there absolutely as quickly as possible. The nursing in my home would certainly be better than at St. Peter's in Heliopolis, and the premises were a thousand times cleaner. As we walked around the hospital I could see that our conversations about staff motivation had paid off at Sednaoui. All of the staff from the doctors to the men doing the renovations were welcome to speak to Dr. Mostafa and clearly respected and liked him.  Well, from my point of view, of course they would since he is a terrific person.

One of the initial things that the hospital had to do when Dr. Mostafa was trying to upgrade it was to improve security. Since 2011 there had been many incidents of people attacking doctors and nurses either in frustration at a lack of service or, sadly, to acquire the drugs available at hospitals. There is a security company working at Sednaoui now that is responsible for maintaining security at the gate. One of the more difficult day to day problems is the fact that if a poor Egyptian (Most of the users of government hospitals fall into this category.) is in hospital, vast numbers of his family and friends will come to see and want to stay with him. Unfortunately dealing with more than one companion in a hospital is not conducive to effective work, so the numbers have to be restricted. As well, since we all know that hospital food is boring at best, most people bring home cooking, which can wreak havoc on a prescriptive diet. A major part of the security staff's job is trying to thin out the visitors. Unfortunately, last summer Sednaoui was the receiving point for many people killed and injured in protests at Fath mosque near Ramses and the courtyard became a triage stage to try to facilitate treatment. Dr. Mostafa's usually cheerful face went a bit grey at the memory. Orthopedic surgeons, pretty much by definition, don't generally have to deal with people who are dying of wounds.

One of the things that I was very impressed with was the way that the hospital working areas were being redesigned. The doctors' offices have examination areas and computers, along with a small room with a cot for the residents whoh have to stay at the hospital at nights.

A long sunny room that is currently being used as a cafeteria for the staff will be a waiting area for families of cancer patients who are visiting to receive chemotherapy or radiation treatment.

The bathrooms were in serious need of renovation. New tiles, fixtures and doors have been installed. This isn't luxurious, but it is clean and functional, which is what one needs in a hospital after all. On the public wings where treatment is free, if not extremely in expensive, there are these joint bathrooms. On the private wing, where two patients may share a room, they also share a bathroom.










The old design for the ward bathrooms had very little or no privacy. These are being torn out for renovations.

The nurses' station prior to renovation, kept the nurses away from the patients and their families, tucked away behind glass windows, but for nurses to be effective they need to be aware of what is going on around them and accessible to the patients.

The newly renovated nurses' station is  open and the nurses are accessible to the patients and their families. Not that the nurses' dress is  very neat and clean. Government hospital nurses are not generally known for this.

This is a shot of one of the wards after renovation. It could be any private hospital.

We look around Egypt and we see problems and difficulties in every direction. It is incredibly easy to feel that bringing things around to the way they need to be is a hopeless task. To do everything at once is a hopeless task really, but seeing what one intelligent, caring, hospital administrator/doctor can accomplish gives us all hope. We just have to keep working one step at a time.

copyright 2014 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Another Year Another Anniversary

 It's 6 am and I find myself awake on this Jan 25 without any apparent reason. The older I get, the more anniversaries of different events I have crowding my life. I remember well the Police Day three years ago. I had one of my daughter's friends staying with me at the farm and neither of us had any real intimation that the day was going to be so momentous. We'd heard rumours of marches and such being planned but no one really had any idea what would be started that day and we still don't know how it will end. Today I will be staying out here in the countryside with my animals and staff. It looks like a lovely winter day in Egypt, but I'm hoping that I won't be following timelines of pain and damage online as I check Twitter and Facebook feeds. The one thing that changed for me forever that January 25 three years ago was my connection to current events through social media. It was the only way to keep track of what was going on here during those 18 days, and I developed an addiction to knowing what was happening in Egypt without having to wait for events to pass through the innumerable filters that are the ordinary media in the world.

Yesterday I, like everyone else in Egypt and probably in the world, was shocked by the news of the explosion in front of the Islamic Museum early in the morning. A friend who had been planning to bring her daughter out to the farm texted me at about 8 am saying that they'd felt/heard the explosion all the way out in New Cairo. The shockwaves must not have traveled so well through the Nile, because I had to admit that I'd slept well and soundly without disturbance.  The bomb that went off in a car parked in front of the police headquarters in downtown Cairo was aimed at the police, not the newly renovated Islamic Museum...the museum was simply collateral damage, but that is the problem with car bombs. They really don't aim well. The fact that it went off at 6:30 am on a Friday morning was a real blessing, since no self-respecting Egyptian would be out and about at that hour on a Friday (This is the only day off for many, so a lie in is essential!) and the street by the police building was essentially empty. I wonder why this is a detail that most news reports fail to mention. Had it gone off even three or four hours later, the death toll would have been much, much greater.

Following Twitter, the subsequent bomb at a Metro station (again near a police station) in Dokki, an apparently ineffective bomb at the police station across from the Mena House at Giza (somehow that seems fitting since my experience with that particular place of social "justice" has shown it to be dubious at best) and then another bomb attack on a police official in Giza filled the day with ever increasing amounts of concern. Maybe I've lived too long in the Middle East, or maybe I've just lived too long period, but from my angle we were blessed with either some incredibly inept bombers yesterday or they were people who really didn't want to hurt that many people. Who, at this point in time, is to say what the truth of the situation is.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, I had some women come out for a ride in the countryside, I did my grocery shopping in the village of Abu Sir, and I spent some time in the afternoon with some very lovely Italian Egyptologists who had been visiting the pyramids of Abu Sir and the Sun Temple just across the road from us. Overall, the contrast between my Twitter feed that was full of anger, fear and lots of finger-pointing and the relatively idyllic afternoon in the garden couldn't have been more stark. The government press has done a brilliant job of cranking up anti-Muslim Brotherhood anger since the end of June, a job that honestly didn't need much amplification since by the end of June most people in Egypt were well and truly fed up with them, their incompetence, their unwillingness to negotiate anything or to cooperate with anyone and the general sense of depression at the thought of having to spend more precious time in this particular funk. We have had enough free-floating anxiety, fear, and worry, thank you.

Reports of groups chanting against the MB floated across the news feeds along with some reports of clashes where anti-MB types were actually prevented by police from taking out their anger on some hapless bearded person. This was not the sort of scenes that I like hearing about. A mob is dangerous, no matter what it's orientation. By evening, I'd had it with what was being called reality beyond my bubble and I turned off my computer to watch a Coen Brothers film, but not before I got a concerned message from my son in New York.  He was only seeing the filtered, amplified "Cairo Is Burning" news reports on the mainsteam media, so of course he wanted to know how I was.  I reassured him that nothing at all was blowing up out among the water buffalo, that all the targets for the bombs seemed to be the security/police forces, and that he had to remember I've been through all that before here in the 90's when the world was screaming about terrorists in Egypt, while what was actually happening was that there was a pretty focused battle going on between various groups and, again, the police/security forces. Back then, we kept an eye out on where the security/police people were and simply made sure that we were somewhere else. While life in Egypt is not all that it could be, it was certainly also not at all what it was being portrayed as being.  And at the end of the day, the security people could certainly be trusted to follow through on these bombs....after all the prosecutor general was investigating Pepsi ads that were supposed to be inciting demonstrations. Some things in Egypt don't change.


copyright 2014 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Safe Havens

"How are you?" 'Are you safe?" The questions come in emails, in phone messages, on Facebook....heavens, even verbally. On these long hot summer days when there seems to be so much going on in the media, but when reality seems to be stuck in a  puddle of tar on a melting road, it's hard to know what to answer. We are in the midst of strong currents that push us in directions we don't want to go. The hope and vision that we saw in the winter of 2011 is darkness and worry in the heat of the summer of 2013.

My staff came to me today to talk to me about their annual raises. This is a topic that usually comes up in June but when it did this year, I told them that I couldn't do any raise at the present time, but we could talk at the end of the summer...and we are now at the end of the summer. But my funds are limited and while they are sufficient to pay salaries and the feed bills at the farm,  they are not going to be sufficient to pay increases without income from clients. I explained this to them and told them that we simply had to be able to get by on what we have for the time being. This is hard. We have good land on the farm where we are growing vegetables that the staff can use to help feed their families, but they are used to the idea that things get better, and right now they are NOT getting better.  They have good salaries and I help them with their medical bills and other things, but no one has ever taught economics or even accounting in Egyptian schools. It isn't very easy to explain that we just can't do raises.

Developments in Egypt are disturbing. The Ministry of the Interior has posted a notice showing two symbols that are being used as avatars on Twitter and Facebook in support of the Muslim Brotherhood, and is asking that people turn in friends as terrorists. This is a very bad sign, and in connection with the fact that the Ministry of the Interior has raided Human Rights Watch and is asking for a number of 2011 activists to appear for questioning.

We are under curfew, which is less than any kind of problem for me since I never go out anyway, but this is meaning terrible losses in an economy that is already crashing for most businesses. During the summer heat, most Egyptians are nocturnal and do most of their socialising and shopping in the cooler evenings. For the past week everyone in most places in Egypt has had to be home by 7 pm, although today they announced that the hour has been extended to 9 pm every day except Fridays. With all the businesses not making any money, how can everyone survive?

I've loved my life in this country and I still  have no wish to be living anywhere else. I look to the US where I lived during my childhood, but I see huge problems there. Most of the Middle East is  a crashing disaster. Europe is having major climate problems and its own share of political unrest. There simply seems to be no safe haven these days.


copyright 2013 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Laugh In The Dark

A couple of little old ladies (ok, one of them was me so maybe the "ladies" part is an exaggeration) were having lunch yesterday at the new Lebanese place on Road 9 in Maadi. (Al Balad is nice food, a little pricey, but good.) Anyway, we were talking and my companion told me that at every single shop where she'd stopped that morning the workers within were bursting to talk to her about all the advice Egypt seems to be getting from governments abroad. The gist of each outburst was "But none of those people have been here! None of them has seen their businesses go under because there's no power/gas/clients/money! None of them have had to listen to the crazy religious jabber of people who think that the age at which a girl marries is more important than the security of our hospitals!" There were variations on the theme, but essentially that was what she was hearing, and being a nice woman originally from Pennsylvania but also a 25 yr resident in Egypt, they really wanted to understand where all this was coming from.

The problem was that my companion felt the same way. As she put it, how could Pakistan, for heaven sake, where people get killed in horrible sectarian violence all the time, stand with a straight face and criticise the "coup/revolution/junta"? Neither of us are happy with the situation as it stands, especially since if people start running down streets away from mobs or CSF forces, us little old ladies aren't very fast. We make terrible revolutionaries.  Over olives and bread, I had a thought and it was that as much as what Egypt is doing in terms of our social/political growth (hopefully) and change (certainly) scares us Egyptians, it is TERRIFYING most of the rest of the world.

In my search for thought-provoking articles for my Facebook page, I follow people who comment on events worldwide, and one of the remarkable things I've noticed is that the general discontent level worldwide is rising. This is accompanied by a rise in conservative-unto-fascist thinking as many people retreat in the face of their worry and confusion (which is a whole other topic but it is feeding into the general divisiveness in Egyptian society), but many governments around the world must be really worried that if crazy, chaotic Egypt can get a ton of people (and I will not get into the question of just how many but it was a hell of a lot) into the streets, what would happen if THEIR people did it! This is a very sobering thought because no matter what form of government is concerned, the fact is that no army or police can really deal with a situation if literally millions of people simply walk into the streets and refuse to leave. So far, most places have not been driven to the point of distraction that Egypt was, so it hasn't happened, but the fact that we've done it means that it can be done. I'm quite sure that this is a lesson every government is hoping that their people don't notice or learn.

I think that, while being aware of others' opinions is not a Bad Thing, being overly concerned with them is debilitating, especially when the ship of state is sailing uncharted waters. Please forgive the nautical metaphors but having spent some years helping to skipper a sailboat around the Mediterranean, the image is the best I know.  The reality is that we don't know what is going to happen here. The MB seem to be digging in their heels and refusing to accept the political world that the majority of Egyptians are currently willing to be living in, which means that the military goal of clearing Raba'a and Nahda is going to be very difficult to achieve. And the recent allowing of "emergency" powers to the military AGAIN! is troubling to many of us who remember all too well that the military have kept a subtle but firm hand on our government throughout all since 2011, much to the detriment of the people. Will Tamerod be able to pull off another coup/revolution/whatever against the military should everyone realise that we are being steered back to 1990...or will the threat be enough to keep the military somewhat in line until we have some sort of real  opposition party? We simply don't know but we can't stand still. We must move on.

Friends in the US and Canada who read alarmist headlines contact me constantly about possibly returning to the lands of sanity (in their minds, but not mine), but I'm here for the long haul. Life these days reminds me of a carnival ride I went on when I was about seven in San Diego. It was called Laugh In The Dark and you sat in a small car that went through dark tunnels where skeletons and the like would pop out at you around corners or fall almost into your lap. It was terrifying and I believe I went on it three times that day. This is all utterly mad, but I wouldn't miss it for the world.


copyright 2013 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Redefining Political Realities

I haven't written anything in my blog for a very long time. To be honest, life in Egypt has had a fluidity lately that most people only encounter while white water rafting.  It's pretty hard to comment on something that is changed the very next day. But the past few days have been amazing. The demonstrations called by Tamarod surpassed everyone's expectations and the political response has been no less astonishing than the events of 2011. To be quite honest, I did not expect the popular outpouring that brought millions of Egyptians out into the streets. In my old, jaded mind set, a petition is something someone does to make him/herself feel better about something that they aren't really going to do anything about. Egyptians have redefined the concept of petition, very  largely because they don't generally use them and felt free to define it in a new way.

I've been doing a lot of thinking over the past couple of days. I get notices, often a half dozen a day, on FB and in email, to sign this petition or that one to save the spotted orangutan that is being hunted to extinction in Afghanistan or to tell politicians that Americans really don't want ground plastic in their corn flakes and some of them I take the trouble to sign and pass on and others I don't. Have I ever really had the sense that a petition would change my world? Not really. Maybe someone would read it but most likely not.

But in Egypt, we just removed a president who was delusional, irresponsible, unresponsive, and incompetent (pretty good reasons to get rid of him) by petition. Yes, it wasn't an army coup that did it, it was a petition. Over 20 million Egyptians signed a petition saying that they could not tolerate Mohamed Morsi any more. The army came in only to say to Morsi's followers, many of whom are just as delusional as he is, that the people REALLY have spoken and we will NOT have a blood bath here. The issues of whether or not this was a military coup are, in my mind, secondary and complicated and they don't really speak to what has happened. They may, in fact probably will, be very important in the days to come as the military and the people try to build a constitution and a means of ensuring both political change and stability that doesn't necessarily mean bringing millions of Egyptians out into the streets. But right now I want to talk about what happened here because I think too many people are seeing it through the lenses of predetermined labels and thought.

When I was a little girl, I clearly remember dreaming that if I were walking along a sidewalk in San Diego I could fly simply by picking one foot off the ground, and then picking the other foot up at the same time. I would then float along the sidewalk at roughly the same speed as if I were walking and at the same altitude. I must have been afraid of heights even then because I don't remember any soaring above clouds or anything. Then one night in my dream I was doing this and someone walked up to me, I can't recall who, looked at me flying along the sidewalk and said, "Don't you know that you can't do that?" and BOOM, I was on the sidewalk and never flew in my dreams the same way. I could only do it until someone told me it was impossible. I never forgot that dream because I always had a sneaky feeling that if I could convince myself that I could fly it would work again. So far, in sixty years, it hasn't so perhaps some real innocence is what is needed and this innocence speaks volumes in understanding Egyptians' approach to politics.

Egyptians don't really use petitions. Tamarod was the first real grassroots petition I've seen here. Upper class Egyptians are prone to the same petition signing online, but "normal" working class Egyptians haven't really been exposed to petitions. When I first heard of Tamarod, I was intrigued but not impressed. I thought, terrific for the minority who understand petitions, but what about all the poor, the farmers, the workers? As the Tamarod movement grew, these kids who were running it did the smart thing. They moved the petitions into cigarette kiosks, small grocery stores, and Egyptians by the millions who had been allowed no other voice suddenly found an outlet for their frustrations and they signed it in droves....and they passed the petition on. And, even more important, having taken this massive step of actually signing a piece of paper saying that they wanted a voice in their government, they came out at the end of June to back that statement up with the presence of their bodies in the streets. I'm willing to bet that at least 80% of the people who signed Tamarod came out into the streets at one point...and remember that there were 22 million of them.

Do you think it would work in France, the US or China? I don't know but I think that my dream speaks to that. In 2011, thousands of Egyptians went out to protest police brutality on Police Day. They encountered police brutality, which didn't surprise them, in a really brutal form, which did surprise and anger them, and they basically decided that it was ENOUGH!  No one went out in January to bring down the Mubarak regime and everyone was quite astonished when they did. It was probably the first time in Egyptian history (hieroglyphics don't have much to say about popular uprisings) that the Egyptian people brought down a government by simple force of will (combined to be sure with some Machiavellian maneuvering on the part of the Egyptian military). We and the rest of the world were stunned and like a dog that has finally caught a car after chasing it for so long, frankly we didn't know what to do with the country.  Reality in the form of referendums, elections and the incompetence of the people elected who had no experience at all with the nuts and bolts of governance, set in. Expectations that the Muslim Brothers who had always been the first on hand with help for the poor or disaster-struck would be able to handle governing were pretty much shot down by the time the presidential elections came around and Morsi squeaked in more by virtue of people NOT voting for his opponent than by anything else. Many Egyptians boycotted the elections hoping that large numbers of people NOT voting would be noticed....but they weren't really. People don't notice something that should happen but doesn't. What they notice is something that shouldn't happen but does.

So when Tamarod was organised and the more worldly of us sort of looked at it and thought "Cute. Nice try, kids. A petition never changed anything." the rest of Egypt was learning to fly because no one had ever told them that it wouldn't work. This was one of those things that had never been done, so why wouldn't it work? And it did work. It worked because the signers put their heart, souls and bodies into their action. And this morning, whether we see peace or fighting, whether the army deals with us honestly or not, whether Mubarak's weasels try taking over the government or not, this morning is the result.

At this point, I suspect that there are a lot of governmental types all over the world viewing Egypt very suspiciously. A country that has a terrible literacy rate, has one of the worst school systems in the world, has carefully taught its population to follow orders, that has a huge population of poor people who barely manage to survive, and that has no experience in that exalted form of political activity, democracy, has toppled two leaders in two years. Doing it once can be dismissed as a fluke, but doing it twice could mean that these people have actually figured something important out. I think that Egypt's complete inexperience in political matters has actually worked to its advantage because there are young people out there who come up with a simple idea like Tamarod and try it, not knowing that it isn't supposed to work. And as long as no one believes that it isn't supposed to work...it will work. Ignorance can be bliss.

copyright 2013 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

An Arab Citizen Speaks On Gaining Wisdom

Ten years ago I began writing this blog in response to all the questions friends abroad (meaning outside Egypt, for me) kept writing to me wondering how I could live in this terrible country that they were seeing portrayed in the media, a country of hate-filled terrorists and violent people. Obviously, to me at least, there was something seriously wrong with the information available to the world  if this was what my friends were seeing. I searched the internet for information that wasn't just dry facts and figures, something to show that Egyptians were, in essence, just like everyone else in the world, people with hopes, dreams, fears, problems, and solutions. I didn't really find much so in an act of utter hubris I began writing this myself.

In 2003, I was a recent widow, the lost wife of one of Egypt's more important (albeit by family plan lesser known) business figures, who was coping with a monstrous job of sorting out my late husband's estate and businesses that were in a pretty godawful state partly through the monumental incompetence of Egyptian banking and partly through his amazing ability to surround himself with people he considered friends who were, in fact, anything but. Mubarak was in power still and we were quite used to the fact that our phones were, and always had been, tapped. As a non-citizen, I was very careful not to discuss politics. In the first place, I felt that this was not my place and that the young bloggers who were appearing rapidly could do a much better job than I could. And more importantly, talking about Egypt's political problems, which were many, was not my goal. Letting the outside world see that Egyptians were "just folks like us" was my goal. So my blog was very much a special niche.

As time has gone on and changes have happened in Egypt, I have become more political just as virtually every other person in Egypt has. I'm less likely to hide my political feelings these days, but I must admit to a lethargy when it comes to posting to my blog. So much is happening here now, that many times I simply feel overwhelmed and I'm trying to find a way to deal with this as far as my blog goes. One of the things that I want to do with my blog is to take the opportunity to let my readers meet some of the wonderful young people who are doing much to try to create a new Egypt, and to this end I will occasionally present links to their blogs. I heartily recommend that you take the time to read these posts.

Bassem Sabry is one of my favourite bloggers/journalists in Egypt. His writing on the political scene here is excellent, but the post that I want to share is more personal. Last fall he turned 30 and wrote a meditative post on what it felt like to pass this milestone and what he'd felt he'd learned in his life so far.

A few of the thoughts from his post:

"I have learned that every human being must think well before taking a decision, but that too much thinking could paralyse a human being as well, and that it is at times wiser to leap into the waters and attempt - in a magnitude of panic - to learn how to swim."

"I realised that it is not the right of any human being to exercise control over a fellow human being except in what prevents the harm of others, and that we are much stronger than the conditions we find ourselves in - more than I had imagined. I realised that no one has the right to silence someone, or control what he reads and knows, for he is nothing but another human being like he is, and he is no way better than another to control him had the roles been reversed."

  

copyright 2013 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Not A Lynch Mob

 A recent report of rural justice has seized the imaginations of news organisations all over the world, most of whom are carrying on about "vigilantes in Egypt" and lynch mobs. This is rubbish to be quite short about it, and I really wish that people who write articles about us would bother to find out something about the situation as it really is.

The hard fact of the matter is that the "rural" areas of Egypt are full of so-called "villages" of anywhere from 5 to 100 thousand or more inhabitants and these "villages" have no legal municipal governments, no local authorities, no services from the central government...basically little or no support from the central government, who generally knows about as much about them as do the idiotic writers of these ill-informed articles. Most urban Egyptians harbour a secret fear of the rural Egyptians and are hesitant to venture out into the wilds of the countryside. As I have found living in this amazingly misunderstood environment, the facts of life out here are simply different from city life but no less civilised...in fact, I believe they are in many respects more so.

The incident in Samanod, a "village" in the Delta about 90 km north of Cairo that has so captured the imagination of the world press and led (naturally) to a vivid portrayal of Egypt as collapsing into gang warfare and vigilantes was that a couple of men were preying on tuktuk (motorised rickshaws) drivers, stealing the tuktuks, abducting school girls and so on. These men from a neighbouring village (as is generally the case since one doesn't foul one's own nest) were captured by the villagers where the actions were taking place, were beaten severely and then hung by their feet. They subsequently died from the beatings.

To speak from my own experience, when a thief is caught in one of the villages here it is in fact customary to hang him by his feet at his front door to allow his neighbours to witness his shame and identification as a thief. If a beating accompanies this punishment, it is rarely sufficient even to cause a doctor's attention. The punishment is the public shaming and it tends to be quite efficient, especially as it alerts everyone to who the thieves among them is. I haven't heard of women being punished in this fashion. In the city, if a theft occurs the victim is lucky to get a response of any kind from the police (who aren't even present in the first place in rural areas) and if the thief is caught and can't buy his way out of trouble, he will likely be beaten, spend some time in jail awaiting trial, and if found guilty spend more time in jail afterwards. Egyptian jails being what they are, I would think that an hour or so spent hanging upside down being embarrassed in front of one's neighbours is the far more attractive option.

My area is between the edge of Giza at Nazlit Semman, that unsavoury neighbourhood next to the Sphinx, and the next so-called "village" of Abu Sir that houses roughly 40 thousand souls. Our local authority is a highly respected older man who is one of my neighbours, a gentleman in his 60's with white hair and bright blue eyes, who in a Harris tweed could pass for an Irish farmer. Haj Abdou is quite a character. When I had an issue with a housekeeper who decided to liberate some money from me, I consulted with him and he called a meeting with me, the housekeeper and her mother which resulted in the prompt return of my funds.  1000% better service than any of the urban police and no one was beaten or hung upside down.  Shortly after the revolution a gang from Abu Sir was stealing electronics from shops on Pyramids Road in Giza, sending in one member to case the place, another to steal a jeep from somewhere and they would hit the store at night loading the jeep with their goodies and heading back to Abu Sir through the desert from the area at the end of the Moneeb. One night the army was moving tanks through the desert so they dodged out onto the asphalt road just north of us only to be stopped by one of the security patrols watching traffic by a campfire at night, as was the custom during those confusing days.  As they were unknown and unwilling to identify themselves or their reason for being in the area, the car was searched, the loot discovered and they spent the day tied up next to the wall of the omda's home next to their stolen jeep waiting for someone from the army to come to pick them up. Compared to the treatment of my saddlemaker who found himself in a military prison for asking for a death certificate for his brother than included the gunshot wound (courtesy of the military/CSF) that he actually died of rather than the accidental death listed, this was a pretty good deal.

Last night a visitor and I were driving home from a neighbour's place after dinner about 9 pm and I noticed that the areas of the roads that were not immediately lit and inhabited were completely empty. This was not the case a few years ago. Rural settlements are in small clumps in many parts and the people are used to visiting after dark, since they are working in fields during the day, but not any more. They will walk to the homes of friends or family or use a tuktuk if the distance is very far.  My staff tell me of gangs who are abducting women from tuktuks (the usual mode of transport in the countryside being cheap and plentiful), of tuktuk drivers being beaten or murdered for possession of their vehicle (current value new about LE 20 thou), and other problems in the darkened isolated areas away from the main villages.  Many don't venture out after dark at all and they all resent this enormously. When I announced that I was going out  to my neighbours for a 6  pm dinner to arrive home about 9 pm, they wanted me to bring my Great Dane to protect me on the road. Since the neighbours are cat people and Mindy isn't the best with cats, I pointed out that it wasn't a great idea and that it wasn't so far, but they were not pleased.

While in an optimal world incidents such as that in Samanod wouldn't happen at all, the fact that the villagers took their justice themselves isn't that remarkable. The fact that they would have to is sad...but that has been the way in rural Egypt for millenia. Most issues are decided by the elders and omdas, and the solutions are generally just registered with the police for public record. Perhaps when the rural areas of Egypt are really considered part of the country and not a foreign environment things will change a bit.





copyright 2013 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Shaken Not Stirred

 What's it like living in a country that is still in the middle of a revolution? It's actually a lot like living in a lot of countries these days, just a bit more dramatic. Almost everywhere I look I see change occurring at a phenomenal rate, partly brought along by the changes in communication that this blog exemplifies. When I began blogging in 2003, people were much more reliant on the main stream media for information about events whether at home or abroad. In the almost ten years since then, events have taken on an immediacy never anticipated through media such as Twitter, Facebook and Storify. Where once I felt I was happy to be able to go online to read commentary on events from a wide-ranging collection of news sources via the internet, now I go online and check the comment on Twitter from their correspondents in our ever-boiling part of the world to see what happened overnight before it even appears in the media.  One of the results of this increase in media availability has been an increased sense in the instability of our world. I'm not sure how more unstable it is, but I am sure that we are more aware of it. I also am very aware of the fact that I am one small cog in this huge global information machine.

When the Egyptian revolution started in January 2011, my children in the US contacted me to see if I wanted to go visit them for the duration...but they weren't terribly surprised to hear that it wasn't in my plans. I chose the location of my farm with care, knowing my neighbours and the social structure into which I wanted to fit. It is probably as safe for an older woman who lives alone with an unholy amount of dogs as anywhere can be. Once they'd assured themselves that I was still the stubborn old lady that they knew and loved, they did lay down some ground rules. With the outcome of the revolution very much in the air, I was NOT to post anything at all on my blogs. The few times I did, I was the recipient of immediate angry feedback from my offspring. But it's really hard for someone who naturally resorts to writing not to write, especially when the country around her is almost literally boiling. So we came to a compromise. I was allowed to post other people's articles about events in Egypt on my Facebook page which became a defacto news service. Writing by proxy saved my sanity. I've tried to keep a fairly balanced viewpoint about events, although clearly my feelings could not be denied. Over the past couple of years, my Facebook page has become less a personal account of my activities and more a forum for my friends all over the world to read news, blogs, and snippets from Twitter and to comment on or argue over them among themselves. I've likened it to the old fashioned literary salons of the 19th century at times. I love watching the discussions although often I don't take part in them if a couple of people are really into a topic. When life gets REALLY interesting in our neighbourhood, like it is now, I find that I really have to make the time to sit and write my own words because there is so much out there that others are saying.  So far worries about retribution for what ideas we are putting out on the internet are relatively small, since to worry about a little old lady on a farm in Giza who never shows up on TV or at a protest would appear to be a waste of time when half of Egypt is online complaining about one thing or another.

So, what is Egypt like in the middle of a revolution? Because that is where we are, in the middle, in a process that no one knows the ending of. I think everyone in Egypt has been anxious in the past few weeks with many people going down to Tahrir and gathering in other squares in other cities to protest the actions of our fairly recently elected president and with the knowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood and the supporters of said president were planning to have their own protest in support of the president. One of the main, not always unspoken, fears was that somehow the two groups would simply explode if put in contact, like a match to a stick of dynamite. A while back the Ikhwan bussed in supporters from outside of Cairo to come to Cairo University to support Morsi as he prepared to announce the acceptance of a draft constitution for a public referendum. The fact that the committee drafting the constitution did not contain any constitutional experts in any general sense was extremely worrying to many people. After all, a constitution of a nation isn't exactly a set of rules for a children's backyard club. It is supposed to protect the rights of all the members of the nation and with limited representation by minority groups and women, there has been an enormous amount of concern with what the output would be. On Thursday an Arabic version of the draft was released, which has been the topic of enormous amounts of discussion. I've printed up copies of it for my staff to read and think about. An English translation of it was published by Egypt Independent which I have been reading as well. Late in the evening yesterday, Morsi announced that this would be either approved or disapproved in a referendum on December 15, giving voters only two weeks to consider the issues.  I'm not sure that more time would necessarily lead to more clarity of thought on the subject, but it's fairly sure that only having two weeks to find, read, and discuss the draft does make it harder for people to object to it. Most referendums in Egypt have ended in a "yes" vote out of inertia. And in the end, this referendum was no different.

Does this signal the end of the process? By no means, and not the least of the reasons is Morsi himself. He's put people who even many Muslims and revolutionary types can't approve of on the Shura Council (the upper house of parliament) like generals and members of the Islamic Jihad. There is such a thing as appropriate, really Dr. Morsi. Virtually everything he has done, while he may have words to say that it has been expedient or for the good of the country, simply screams authoritarian Islam. And this is wildly offensive to Egyptians of all varieties who were thrilled to get rid of Mubarak. We are nowhere near the end of the tunnel and no one is sure what those dancing lights are. They could be Salafi cigarettes (soon to be taxed at much higher rates!), the steam engine of economic collapse, fireflies, fairies, or, heaven forbid, the end of the tunnel. My personal bet at this time is not the last, but the fairies or fireflies sound good to me.

So am I packing up for what might be the stability of the US or Canada? Not at all. First, I'm not all that sure of the stability of either state, to be honest. Both are awash in political and religious conservatism themselves, albeit both Canada and the US are so much larger than Egypt physically that the effect is diluted, and both are facing serious domestic political issues. Gun control in the US is vital, although many people are extremely vocal against it. My personal cynical view of the gun issue is that given the US is the world's largest manufacturer and seller of weapons and ammunition, the gun enthusiasm has been created in the same way that other consumer appetites have been and that no one is going to try to control the selling of guns for fear of damaging an important part of the economy, just like all the calls for cutting back on the "aid" for Egypt is going to lead to nothing because that "aid" is actually a government subsidy for the arms industry in the US and the money goes directly to the companies producing weapons and ammunition and to those servicing such weapons. What happens to them later is irrelevant to the US government or those industries, but the sooner they are used or blown up the better because that simply creates a new demand.

Canada, aside from the environmentally wasteful behaviour of the current government, is facing a deeper and perhaps more dangerous domestic issue that could easily splash over the border to the south. Both countries were created by wave after wave of immigrants primarily from Europe over the past three hundred years or so...a brief second compared to the history of Egypt. These immigrants, having now the positions of power in a land that they essentially invaded and confiscated (no wonder that both their governments are fairly staunch supporters of Israel, the most modern European colonial power) are crying now about how new waves of immigration are threatening their life style. Oddly enough, the indigenous peoples of North America, who for the most part live in poverty and on marginal properties to which they were pushed by the immigrants of their times, are getting rather fed up. A movement that started in Canada with a tribal chief Therese Spence, who is on a hunger strike for assistance for her people, Idle No More, is gaining support from other indigenous people's groups worldwide. At some point, the urge for justice that seems so keen in many semi-European countries in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Africa is going to have to thrust itself inwards to examine the morality of how those countries came to be in the first place. This is going to be intensely painful for many people. On the other hand, they could try to ignore it like they have in the past, but with the character of communication in our societies these days, that simply isn't so easy.

All things considered, I'll stick with my Egyptian revolution which for the most part is relatively straightforward even if we haven't the foggiest where the path is taking us tomorrow. I see shudders of change running through countries all over the globe and I don't think that anywhere is going to be immune. All the patterns I see forming are indicating that with information becoming so much more readily available and so much more easily placed in the public eye, many profound changes in human society will be seen in the relatively near future. My analysis is, of course, done very much by eyeballing events and getting a vague sense of movement. There is nothing scientific about it and I'm sure that some of the things I suspect will happen will not come to pass, but of this I am sure: Change is inevitable and will be faster than expected. It will likely make many people unhappy.

copyright 2012 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Recognising Catastrophe

These days the news from Egypt is pretty depressing for just about everyone. Voters are expected to choose soon between two candidates who are not the first choices of most of the voters, and who are fairly diametrically opposed. There is Dr. Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood who terrifies all the voters who worry about Egypt turning into another Iran, while opposing him is Hosny Mubarak's last prime minister, Ahmed Shafik, who claims that everything will be different if he is elected president, but most people sort of doubt that. Faced with two miserable choices, everyone is seeing disaster everywhere they look.

Some of us make a habit of seeing disaster in everything and I'm one of those people, oddly enough. "Catastrophizing" is a psychological term for the act of seeing the worst case scenario in every situation, and when I was a grad student it was something that I would be reprimanded for by my clinician friends as being maladaptive. I had no idea it had a name because it was just how I dealt with things.  I've catastrophized all my life. As a child I would lie awake at night and wonder how I would manage if I were to wake up in the morning and not find my parents there to care for me. Whenever I attempted something new, applying to university for example, I would spend hours imagining that I would not be accepted and think of what it would mean to my life, how would I manage to make a living, and so on. Of course, I did get accepted, but life was always coming up with new challenges to give me something to worry about.

It was when I was in grad school that one of my friends called me on my habit, gave it a name, and told me that it was a really bad thing to do. To be quite honest, I wasn't really convinced. I'd been looking at worst case scenarios all my life and a habit like that is hard to change. But when I looked up the pattern, I noticed that catastrophizing was something that was supposed to lead to a sense of inability, worthlessness and so on. But in my experience my assumption of catastrophe in every situation had led me to explore all the possibilities of what could go wrong and as many of the possible solutions as I might be able to imagine. Rather than paralyzing me, it pushed me to explore the possible futures that I might face and to try to figure out how I would deal with them.

When I was only about twelve I read about the epidemics that swept through Europe decimating the population in the Middle Ages. I became fascinated with the Black Death, probably to a certain level of concern from my parents. But I learned about the causes, the cures, the effects on the political systems and economies of Europe along the way. When we decided to move to Egypt, I took an entire series of first aid and CPR courses from St. John's Ambulance in Toronto and threw myself (quite literally) into a Bronze level lifesaving course at the neighbourhood pool. I had an idea from my travels here about the general level of first aid in Egypt in the late 80's (like nonexistent) and was going to be prepared for the worst case scenario, which in this case was needing this knowledge. And I did need it. A month after we moved here, with my training I was able to recognise and deal with my husband's  heart attack. We got him to a cardiologist and into ICU immediately, postponing my widowhood by a good twelve years. I don't want to think about all the times that the first aid training came in handy: broken arms, choking victims, a visiting child who had a crowbar fall on his head from a neighbouring construction site...you name it, it happened at our house. People used to joke that the catastrophes happened around me because I knew how to deal with them and how to get people the care that they needed to survive them.

As I've grown older, my catastrophizing has become a good and faithful friend. When the bird flu broke out and began spreading, I was worried for my African Grey parrots so I learned all I could about the vectors, the signs, the problems...and I learned that parrots don't get it. By examining the catastrophe I realised that it wasn't really a catastrophe, no matter what the press said. I did have to slaughter my chickens when bird flu broke out at a chicken farm near me, but no people got sick at all and we were well provided with chicken soup for some time. Some research on swine flu also reassured me that I was highly unlikely to perish from that as well. When life turned interesting in Egypt during January 2011, I assured my children that I would be fine where I was, and although events were at times very frightening, albeit more for the people in the center of the city than for us out in the villages, I had no intention of evacuating. Instead I threw myself into finding out as much as possible about what was going on, what possible risks might be, what possible outcomes might be...in other words, what were the worst possible scenarios.

I've continued my preoccupation with trying to prepare for catastrophe for the past year and a half. I have no input into what might happen in Egypt. Due to a wonderfully weird bureaucratic glitch, I don't have my Egyptian citizenship despite having been married to an Egyptian, being mother to two Egyptians, and having lived here for almost 25 years, and I can't even vote. It's pretty frustrating although the thought of having to choose between two totally unwanted alternatives is not terribly appetising.  I wish I could really say that I've gained some understanding of what is happening in Egypt right now, of what we can expect, but I can't. I'm watching bemused like everyone else, wondering how on earth we got here. I have my own ideas of what would be the greater catastrophe for Egypt: Morsi for president or Shafik...but even that has variables that I can't predict. I don't know how invested the military is in seeing that Shafik win the election, what they will do to ensure that, how they would respond if Morsi won, or what the reaction would be if Shafik wins and people feel that the elections are a total sham.

There are times when imagining the worst case scenarios just can't really do justice to reality.  Do I feel incapacitated, frozen, unable to make decisions or act? Not really. I am frustrated, worried, and do feel that way too much is hanging in the balance. Am I about to take off and leave? No. None of my worst case scenarios include my leaving Egypt. I love my farm, my neighbours, my animals and my life here. I'd say that my absolute worst case scenario involves me not being able to move around Egypt freely and being stuck out here...and as far as I'm concerned that isn't a bad scenario at all.

As I was thinking about all of this, quite serendipitously one of my children's friends posted a link to an excellent New Yorker article on the internet. Entitled Failure And Rescue, this article suggests that life is unpredictable, but that how we face our catastrophes determines how much we succeed.  He uses the story of surgery that almost went terribly wrong but ended up in success because people were aware of the possibilities of problems, recognised the signs and were able to deal with them. Sometimes catastrophizing is an adaptive trait.


copyright 2012 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani