A Horseman Passes

There was a sandstorm yesterday. The sky was a dirty grey and a bitter wind blew in off the desert. It wasn’t a movie sandstorm, but a nasty Cairo winter sandstorm to make your hair gritty, your lungs ache, and to make you wish you’d never gone out of doors. I was out of doors for work and regretting it, but I listened to the weather forecast and was told that it would be like this for three days. Thinking of a ride and brunch that was scheduled for this morning, I called my friend Magdy to see what the news of the ride would be. He’d been in bed all week with what he called a most “pernicious” bug that was causing him great abdominal discomfort, but we chatted about the weather and I joked with him about his being smart and not riding the next day. I congratulated him on having good sense and told him that the most I was likely to do was to pop by the brunch as I had houseguests over night.
This morning dawned exquisitely beautiful, the only sign of yesterday’s storm being a skin of mud over every car left by rain last night. I headed out to my horses about 10 am and while I was on the bridge over the Nile my mobile phone rang. It was one of my grooms calling to tell me that Magdy Bey had died this morning. The beauty of the morning was lost to me.
Magdy and his wife Janie had been good friends of mine for 10 years and a major part of my sanity since my husband died about three years ago. When I needed wise, honest advice I knew that I only had to dial Magdy’s number at work or at home and I had the best. When I was low or needed help healing myself, my family or my animals, Janie was there. They were there for so many of us, without fuss, pretense or ceremony. The front door was never locked and there was a cup of tea for everyone at any hour.
I took myself in haste to Magdy and Janie’s house in Sakkara, the haven, and Magdy’s dream come true. He’d always wanted to be able to open his bedroom window in the morning and look out at his horses. Until this morning he could do that, open his window and look out to see a wonderful selection. There was La Reine, his half blind Selle Francaise, Bukreya, a pure Egyptian Arabian mare who actually finished Egypt’s first 120 km race with Janie, Bukreya’s daughters, Janie’s stallion Emir el Wadi, offspring of other mares who had grown old with Magdy and passed on, and also Texas, the gelding that had belonged to our friend Jenny who died in a car accident this last year and who had been promised a home for the rest of his life by Magdy and Janie.
Friends were beginning to gather in the garden waiting for Janie and their daughter Zeinab to bring Magdy’s body from the hospital where he’d been rushed the night before. As per Muslim custom, Magdy was washed, wrapped in a white cotton cloth and buried on the day of his death after noon prayers. I didn’t go to the graveyard with them. Someone had to stay and the house to receive visitors and the supplies that had originally been intended for the ride brunch this morning. Despite the change in weather, no one rode today. Magdy was buried in the tombs overlooking the village of Abu Sir, just below the tombs of the pharaohs in Sakkara. As they carried him up the slope the sun gleamed off the sand and sparkled on the palms and mango trees of the countryside. It was perfect riding weather.
After the burial, friends gathered in Magdy’s garden to remember the man who encouraged all of us to follow our dreams, a man who ironically died because his heart was too big. And it was indeed big, big enough to hold all of us from the wealthy and successful horse breeders to the simplest of the fellaheen who walked behind him to the tomb and came in their dark galabeyas to give his widow and daughter their respects.
The old royal flag of a crescent moon and three stars decorates Magdy’s car, his fireplace in the Sakkara house, and various cups and plates. Yesterday I was Christmas shopping and had found a lovely blue bowl with the design on it and I had bought it for him. Magdy came from an old Minya family and learned his love of horses from a grandfather who had been in the royal cavalry. He passed his traditions to all of us. Farewell, Magdy Bey, we’ve lost a horseman.

"your a kettle of fish arent you?" There are subject lines to emails that absolutely beg to be read, and this was one. I had no idea what this could refer to and I get enough bizarre spam that I thought it could conceivably fall into that category. What I found was a very pleasant email from Trevor in Australia, who has decided that it's time to visit someplace different. I've never met anyone whose life was unchanged by Egypt, for better or worse, and coming here to visit is something that I can encourage everyone to do. Okay, so I don't like it when prices rise because the locals are making so much money off the tourists, but I don't actually hang out in too many tourist locations anyway. "Welcome in Egypt", Trevor....whenever you make it here.

"Welcome in Egypt" is the literal translation from the Arabic welcome to this country. In a very real way, it expresses part of the charm and draw of Egypt. You are not welcomed at the door and then left to drift aimlessly here. No, you will be welcomed again and again and again as you travel through the country meeting people. Every day that I go riding in the countryside, I am welcomed, invited for tea (well, okay, not during Ramadan, although it's often offered despite my hosts fasting...I decline politely.) and welcomed again. It may be a formality of speech, but even formalities express the basic attitudes.

Some of my local friends find my decision to move to a totally rural area puzzling. Who do I know there? How will I manage? It isn't as though I'm moving to the North Pole or something, actually. In 45 minutes I can be in Maadi with all the restaurants, shops and supermarkets that I could possibly need...and a visit with friends over dinner or a coffee is going to be a welcome diversion. I imagine that about once a week or so I will make a provisioning trip to civilisation. There are only the Dahshur village markets nearby for me to buy the basics (vegetables and fruit in season). For anything luxurious, I will head to the fleshpots of Maadi.....luxury being muesli, expresso coffee grounds, dog chow (given as snacks for vitamins), and so on. As for who I know...I guess that soon I will know a lot of different people and that is always an adventure. I'm looking forward to it all.

Sending Things To Egypt

I got a notice from Fedex today that Tim Weber from Accu-Logistics LLC in San Leandro California sent me a blogger sweatshirt. Thank you, Tim. I don't think that this is anything that I ordered, so it must be some kind of gift, and the commercial invoice is labeled promotional item. But the downside of this is that I won't be able to collect it. Unfortunately, to get my sweatshirt will cost me roughly 6 times its value, payable primarily to the Egyptian customs department for importing clothing and some to Fedex. I had a long chat with a nice young man in the main office for Fedex in Cairo about the necessary steps to claim my sweatshirt and I decided that overall, it was probably best left with the customs people. It's not that I don't want a Blogger sweatshirt, but some things are better left unpaid. I'm sure that it will eventually find a good home, and if I see someone in a Blogger sweatshirt, I'll have a good idea where it came from. Items like that are supposed to be destroyed, but I've lived here for a long time and sometimes things slip. That's ok with me in a case like this.

The whole situation is one of the classic Egyptian scenarios. You have to be careful what you ship to Egypt because certain things are, fairly reasonably, protected by tariffs. We produce a great deal of the cotton sports clothes that people buy in Europe and North America. Our cotton goods are fantastic...and luckily some of the best aren't even exported but saved for us. I remember volunteering at an event in the US a few years back and being given a complimentary t-shirt with a "Made in Egypt" label in the neck. Cracked me right up. Sometime later one of my kids swiped it from me.

Book usually come through ok, although there is usually some duty to be paid. But Amazon, Borders, and Barnes and Noble will be happy to know that they do good business among at least a certain segment of the population. Posters and such somehow often get lost, as my son found to his dismay when moving his treasures back from New York to Cairo this summer. Live and learn.

By the way, apologies to those who might check this site occasionally. I haven't written in a long time, but I have a good reason. I'm changing the direction of my life here and moving from a Cairo suburb to a very rural setting over the next few months. I have before me the daunting tasks of renovating the villa where I currently live to rent to others and also building a small house in the country to which I plan on relocating myself and my menagerie....by January. Living in Egypt is going to get interesting. I'll post more on this later because it is a very unusual experience for someone like myself...but right now I have a contractor coming by to tell me how much its going to cost to make this old house presentable.

Life and Death

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage So the doctors save someone's life by inflicting even more pain on them? You have to wonder just what is going on in everyone's mind. I live in a country that is remote from the concept that everything has a cure, that life should be safe and risk free, that disease has no place in life. In Egypt, disease is a fact of life. Death is a fact of life, and once someone has died, in most cases, there are no autopsies or post mortems. The body is collected by the family, washed with respect and love, and placed in a resting place within 24 hours. I don't need to know exactly what killed someone, because sooner or later death will inevitably come for me and all those that I love. It is inescapable. All of the interventions in the universe will not change that fact. And now it looks as though some interventions might indeed not be worth the outcome. If I had a choice between dying from pneumonia fairly rapidly or being made a cripple to live in great pain, I'm not sure that I would vote for the cripple.

Then there is the issue of risk of injury. Each time I visit North America I am more horrified by the things that people there believe that they should be protected against. To judge by many of the more ridiculous law suits that receive outcomes favourable to the plaintiff, people now believe that the world should be made idiot-proof. I wonder if this is what killed off the dinosaurs, honestly. The world is not, never was, and never shall be, idiot-proof. Any fool with the tiniest bit of ingenuity can manage to get himself maimed or killed....I mean, what mother in her right mind would tell her daughter that it's a good idea to drive with hot coffee between her legs? I see here the other extreme, I would grant you. Pedestrians routinely step off the sidewalk without a glance, young men ride in microbuses hanging out the door, boys catch rides on streetcars by jumping on to the connecting pin at the back, the list goes on forever. One of my friends when I was growing up in California lost his leg catching a ride on a freight train. His parents lectured him for being a fool and he learned to live without his leg. No one sued the train company for having trains there to tempt idiotic young men into trying to jump aboard.

There are times when my heart leaps to my throat when I see some death-defying act of idiocy. There are times I want to stop parents and shout at them for allowing their roughly 8 year old to stand on the divider between the front seats of a Mercedes with his head out the sun roof. But do I want to have someone telling me who can ride my horses or play with my dogs? No, thank you. I like the fact that Egypt is, in some senses such as in the freedom to be an utter idiot, not a safe country. No one is going to knowingly harm you here, but you had best keep your wits about you even walking down the street or it is entirely possible that you could do something quite stupid and get killed as a result. I think that on the whole Darwin might have approved.

Israel Announces Official Decision to Remove Arafat

I've been up to my ears in visitors, work and trying to keep my life on an even keel lately, so I've been really remiss on blogging. Got to move it up on my priorities. But this article in the New York Times has really ticked me off. I would truly like to ask the American people to re-examine their values that they would support this kind of action. What would they say if the Palestinians asked to have Sharon "removed"....the fact that he'd been very legitimately accused of war crimes in the massacres of Shabra and Shatila in Lebanon by the World Court didn't go over very well. The world is probably not much worse than it ever was in terms of good guys and bad guys, but I really hate watching this kind of thing. I wonder if the minions of the Roman empire felt the same as the non-US/Israeli world feel about the way things are happening. I'm sure that it's not that far off. I'm having many thoughts about those who have lived under the "benevolent" guidance of colonial powers and why they haven't been too happy. Right now, there are a lot of us in the position of having to be under the "guidance" of the American empire, but the guidance seems to be pretty half-assed when it gets a bunch of poor, culturally ignorant American kids stuck in a country like Iraq where they have no idea of the culture, historical issues, or language. This isn't good for anyone.

A Little Night Music Maybe there is a curse to things that work too well. I sat here last night with my niece from Sudan musing about the horrors of the power blackout in the US. A young traveller was supposed to arrive last night from New York via Frankfurt, but she never took off. She's trying to get out of New York again to catch up. I know that our airports have been shut down for sand storms and parts of Cairo may have no power on any given night, but we have nothing of the scale the US experienced.

We have blackouts all the time, or are they grey outs or whatever....but the electricity in Egypt is so erratic that we are all used to having it fail at random inopportune moments. It's a good reminder that life isn't actually under our control, I believe. Yes, it's annoying. There are plenty of times that I've retired to get a good night's sleep at 8:30 because there's been no electricity for the computer, TV (a singularly lonely object), or for reading. I've even had to walk down 8 flights of stairs in the dark....or had to decide not to walk up them! What a terrible price to pay! The upside to a patched-together power grid is the fact that while bits and pieces of it fail regularly, they are easy to fix and it's unusual to be away from power for more than a few hours. All in all, I think I prefer to have frequent inconveniences to massive failures.

I remember one time in Alexandria years ago when the power was actually out for a couple of days, a strange occurrence. When we found out why it turned out that the main cable was copper and someone had dug it up, melted it down and sold it! This hasn't happened quite so much, but I'd say that we would be good customers for fiber optics for our phones and such. The cables don't melt down and sell.

On the whole, I think that I really prefer semi-reliable with frequent minor problems to perfect with the chance of utter failure. After all, as humans what are we but semi-reliable with frequent minor problems? Perfection is too hard to deal with.

Radio Paradise - eclectic online rock radio I've just discovered a new reason to love my computer, Radio Paradise. It's an interesting online radio that broadcasts from Paradise, California, ostensibly, but they are working out how to broadcast from anywhere in the world with a laptop. Mellow music, and no ads. Not at all bad.