Riding with my grooms

Moving into May and Egypt decided to bless us with one of those breezy, clear, cool mornings that are so lovely as summer approaches. One of the older grooms at the country club near me has been helping to excercise my horses and has also been teaching the boys who work for me to ride, so I took Wednesday to ride with the three of them to check out their progress. I've been telling them about the trails that I've found and how they go all the way to the ring road from the back door of my land. I suspect that they didn't really believe me but we went to the highway and they saw for themselves.

We ambled along trails and dirt roads while I watched how they handled the horses and then we picked up the pace to trots and long canters. Lovely time and the boys had a ball playing with the horses that they usually are caring for. The looks on some of the farmers' faces were priceless to see these three young men riding along trails in the countryside with a foreign woman, especially as we were whooping it up along the dirt roads.

On the way back we took a short cut on a trail through some fields behind my paddocks and passed a farmer standing out in the middle of a berseem field under a lovely sky blue umbrella. With his white scarf wrapped around his head and a dark grey galabeya, he looked like a bit of thunder cloud that had somehow gotten lost and come to rest in the field. I wish I'd had a camera on me.

Birdwatching when the sandstorms don't blow

It’s typical Egypt that one really annoying season should occur with a really great one. May is the month of the main bird migrations from Africa to Europe with a major flight path down the Nile Valley. The European storks can be seen circling on thermals at the edge of the valley, probably having landed briefly for some rest and food along one of the quieter canals in the area. These immense birds barely move their wings, spiraling upwards towards their flight altitude of somewhere near 20 thousand feet, up there with the passenger planes. I saw an entire flock of European Rollers, feathered jewels that perform exquisite acrobatics in their chase after insects, flitting through the palm trees in the garden next door. Every so often some of them would rest on the power line, showing off the green, blue and gold of their plumage. And as I was riding along the main canal the other morning, there was a flock of about 30 white herons moving along the canal in pursuit of fish and frogs, adults and juveniles crowding the banks of the canal where the minnows were resting.

The Delta is a wonder during bird migrations, still, although modern agriculture and old attitudes about conservation are taking their tolls on the bird population. It’s really strange that we humans who have so much more possibility in our existence are so ungenerous in sharing our planet with other animals. Whenever I am riding or even just sitting in my garden watching the birds who gather there, encouraged by my parrots calls in the aviary, I think of a good friend of mine, Richard Hoath. Richard is a professor at the American University in Cairo, teaching English, and writing about his passion, wildlife and conservation. He just recently wrote a new book on Egypt’s admittedly vanishing wildlife, published by the AUC press. It’s worth getting a copy.

At the same time that there is so much to be seen in the air, we have the Khamaseen season, the yearly sandstorms that make life here miserable. For the last two days I’ve woken to find a strange stillness in the air, unlike the usual brisk breeze blowing down the Nile from the Mediterranean. By about 11 am, the wind is from the desert or from the South rather than the Northeast and it’s blowing like a manic convection oven. We might have a good Force 3 whipping through the palms and breaking branches off the casuarinas and eucalyptus growing along the canals, while we all cower in our houses with the windows shut and fans working overtime. You vacuum and dust your house every other day at least and any food left outside a container or the refrigerator has an oddly gritty texture. Hair….well, the less said the better. But on the clear days, the birds are wonderful.

Digging a Well

I had a well-digging crew arrive this morning about 8 am. It was actually about 9 am because the clocks were supposed to be set an hour ahead this weekend but I didn’t know that. Since I don’t have a television, don’t listen to radio, and still don’t have a phone at home so that I can connect to the net whenever I want, I’m at the mercy of people who let me know things, but somehow this doesn’t bother me much. So when my friend Kati called me to apologise for being an hour late coming over, I was pretty much clueless but I did find out about the time change.

Anyway, long before the phone call I heard a pickup truck pull up outside the fence near the back of my garden and an immense clattering and clanging commenced. Sounded a bit like someone bowling with trash cans…but louder…and naturally all the dogs went nuts barking at the racket. I’d been told that people would come to dig me a new well after the long weekend but I guess that they decided to come early. A group of us decided to test our wells a month or so ago, and mine came up wonderfully contaminated with nitrates, nitrites, and phosphates. These are runoff from fertilizers and while they are fine for plants, they aren’t so great for humans. What all this indicated was the fact that the well hadn’t been dug deep enough to get the water under the rock layer that would be protecting from the seepage from the fields. My landlords, surprise! were not terribly concerned about the water situation, and my son was, so drilling a new well was the answer. Meanwhile I’ve been cooking with and drinking bottled water.

So, once I dragged myself out of bed to see what the commotion was about, I found that there was a fairly enormous pile of metal pipes by the corner of the garden and a crew of rather disreputable men sitting around smoking cigarettes in the morning sun. Okay. Whatever. An hour later Haj Shaban, the local contractor who has been working on my house, showed up and there was a long discussion about where to place the well (outside the garden fence so that the dogs wouldn’t drive the diggers crazy) and how it would be connected when it was finished. Then the crew set to work. A tripod of long poles was set up with a pulley from which pipes were suspended. The pipes are raised and lowered by one man cranking a large wheel that either collects or lets go of steel cable. Periodically, a different pipe is used that collects the sand and dirt that has been dissolved in the water in the well. The water table here is only about a few meters under the surface, but you wouldn’t want to drink it. This process will continue for the next few days until they get through the rock layer to the clean water. This is the standard way of digging wells in the countryside in Egypt and probably in many other parts of the world.

I watched the men work all day at this job as I worked in my garden, tidying plants, tying up vines, cleaning up after dogs, feeding parrots and chickens, and watering. The well diggers were mystified by the sight of someone who in their opinion should have a gardener or housekeeper or someone doing these chores. I was amazed at the sheer amount of effort that they had to put into their work. Children would wander by from time to time and sit around watching the work, but the crew pounded away at the earth from about 9 am to dusk. Once the sun went down, the crew went home and will probably appear tomorrow or the next day. Once they finish the well, it will have to work for about 10 days before it can be tested. The test results of wells that the same man has dug in the area lead me to believe that I should have good, if hard, water soon. The water will be all the more precious for my understanding of the effort that it took to reach it.

Birdbrains

One of the not-so-wonderful aspects of country life here is the wait for a telephone line, especially when you are relying on a village landlord to apply for it. I've become an internet beggar, going to various friends' houses to use existing phone lines, a tedious business, especially since I can't do it daily and inevitably end up having to download about three days of email in one go. Then, of course, I have to read it or at least decide to discard the irrelevant (for now) items. Most of the time, I write my blog online, but the nice folks at Blogger added an email feature that no longer gives me an excuse for not posting.

So here I am in the quiet of the Abu Sir countryside, munching on a bowl of muesli and local bananas and sipping a cup of tea, while the horde of house sparrows outside make the most appalling racket as they are madly nest building all over my house. The eaves of the house are tiled with the terracotta tiles that are sort of tubular in shape, and the sparrows love them. Unfortunately, they also are still convinced that my residence in the interior of the house is just a passing phase, since they had the run of the place for about 2 years before I did such anti-social things as putting in windows and doors and floors and furniture. Every so often a pair will fly in the door and perch on the top to survey possible nest sites in the living room. If tiny grey and brown birds can express outrage at the temerity of humans, these do when I shoo them back out the door. These incursions are decreasing in frequency, so I imagine that in some weird avian logic, I'm being accepted as a neighbour.

One factor in my rise in status among the house sparrows is probably my installation of the flight cages for the parrots. I chose material that had holes small enough to keep out weasels but the holes are big enough for the sparrows to be able to fly in and help themselves to the parrots' goodies. I have a pair of African Greys, a single male African Grey (no computer dating services for birds, too bad), and a trio of Cuban Amazon females. My male Grey, Ali, has been with me for about 14 years and right now he's sitting behind the bouganvilleia vine in his flight calling and whistling in his most enticing manner to get me to bring out his ration of bird bread and chopped fruit and vegetables. He shares his cage with a pair of balady hens who tidy up after him and produce about an egg a day each. Fantastic eggs, too. Nice little recycling venture. Mona and Fritzi, the other Greys, also have a pair of hens sharing their cage and doing the clean up on the leftovers from my messy parrot diners. The Amazons are a bit dubious as avian neighbours and I really can't eat any more eggs, so I haven't put any hens with them.

After a number of years of yanking myself into consciousness to haul my sorry body out of bed into an office, it's a joy to wake up here and know that the first thing I have to do is talk to a bunch of real birdbrains.

Multicultural Marriages

Nazli asked about the cross-cultural aspects of marriage to an Egyptian and the changes that are involved in moving to another country. In one sense, every marriage is a cross-cultural experience in that every family in the world has its own culture. No two American, Canadian, Egyptian, or Iranian families are exactly alike. Every family has its own traditions and beliefs, and every marriage involves the melding of these beliefs into yet another tradition. When you marry outside of your religious or ethnic group, this process is just amplified. Being the child of a mixed marriage myself (my mother was British while my father was American), I was somewhat aware of the process already. My educational background in the social sciences increased my awareness as well. My late husband was also the child of a similarly mixed marriage between an Egyptian mother and a Sudanese father. The differences between Sudanese and Egyptian cultures are very similar to the differences between US and British, but being closer in proximity, the marriages are more common possibly.

Starting from a perspective of already mixed cultures, my family didn't find it terribly surprising that I chose to enrich the mixture. From one point of view (one that is of importance in traditional spouse-choosing in Egypt), my husband and I were very similar. We were both the oldest of four children, we both had graduate degrees from the same university in Canada, we both had Canadian citizenship, we both spoke more than one language, our fathers were both senior civil employees who had to struggle somewhat to provide for their large families, and our mothers had lived in the culture of their husbands.

But there were differences, obviously. I was from an Anglo-Irish tradition with some ties to the Anglican church, however weak, and my husband was a Muslim Arab, however liberal. After spending a number of years in anthropology and philosophy courses, I'd become interested in Islamic culture even before I'd met my husband. A course in mystic traditions in the history of Christianity and Islam had introduced me to Sufi tradition, and the very personal mystic approach to spirituality appealed to me. Thus, although it would be a very serious faux pas for a Muslim to ask someone to change their religion and my husband never did, I found that the change from a mystic Christian aspect to a mystic Islamic aspect was very little change in fact. I made the choice myself, feeling comfortable that the relationship I already had with the Almighty (however this entity might be named in another language) was one that fit as easily within the framework of Islam as it did within whatever framework had existed previously.

When we moved to Egypt, I made the Islamic label a legal one as well, since once religion mixes with law, it becomes something rather different. Had I not done this, the custody of my children might not have been with me at my husband's death. Although it is my personal belief that one's religious beliefs are the business of the person and God, it would be foolish to ignore the possible impact of the law on a family. Because there are both Christian and Muslim traditions in Egypt, there are legal differences in inheritance and such that reflect these traditions. A family that straddles the divide is likely to fall into a hole if disaster strikes, so we chose where we wanted to stand.

I raised my children in the Islamic tradition, but, like every mother anywhere, I put my own spin on things. We followed the traditions of fasting during Ramadan and so on, but for me the important aspect of any spiritual life is not the following of certain rules of when and where one prays or what one eats or drinks, but it is the deep knowledge that one is behaving in a moral and ethical manner with the other inhabitants of this planet, whether they are human or not. I honestly believe that the basis of every religion is the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you can live by this rule on a daily basis, you are living a correct religious life whatever the label may be. Thus, the particular decisions as to how closely one wants to adhere to a tradition are personal ones that do not really touch the essence of religious life. In fact, I have met more rule-following Christians and Muslims that have no more connection with the deep demands of spirituality than house sparrows. They have on occasion lectured me on my dereliction of duty in certain regards. For example, my husband never made it to Mecca, preferring to spend his time on his businesses that were employing people and making it possible for them to raise their children and educate them properly. He took great pride in the fact that he provided people with the means to live and took that responsibility seriously. We both felt that this act was more important than a trip to Mecca.

The main challenge that I see in a cross-cultural marriage is in the raising of children to embrace the best aspects of both cultures. In our case, this involved placing them in French schools when they were young so that they would have the English/French bilingual tradition should they want to live in Canada, and then giving them daily Arabic lessons here to ensure their ability to get along in Egypt. At times they were a bit lost, as might be expected and they had to find their own identities within the mish-mash that their father and I provided. They are more Canadian than American or British and sometimes more Sudanese than Egyptian. Having attended French and American schools and an Ivy League university, they have a pretty good handle on North American culture but they each have a definite culture of their own. Most of their friends are similar cross-cultural offspring, not surprisingly. To imagine that a cross-cultural marriage will produce uni-cultural kids is rather silly, and it also denies that richness of life that I believe such mixtures engender. Cross-cultural marriages are not the easiest sort to cope with, but I believe that if you go into it with your eyes open to the difficulties and with a determination to create something new within your marriage, you will have a more interesting life than otherwise.

The Haramlik

I’ve finally done it and moved out of the city into a rented house in the country. The goal, of course, is to have my own house, of my own design, on my own land, but for now a rented house is fine. The garden is still sand, so the floors are forever gritty, but that will change. The house is just big enough for myself, the dogs, and a guest or two, but naturally I had no less than four houseguests within 48 hours of the main move. (Other deliveries of items from the old Maadi house have been arriving daily to be absorbed into the general chaos in Abu Sir.) Luckily, my guests were four riders from the United States, all well versed in camping, which is what it was, though with a roof and a tiny bathroom, while workmen finished electricity, windows, and installed a kitchen.

Yesterday my guests traveled to Sinai to see Sharm el Sheikh and Saint Katherine for two days, leaving the menagerie and myself alone in the house for the first time. It’s a good fit for us. The parrots haven’t entirely adjusted to the freedom of their new aviaries, but they seem to be happy with them. The cats enjoy having mastery of the laundry room and the back garden. We are making the house ours. The Cretan birds are flying over the front door to welcome visitors, paintings are being hung in all the right places and the house is gathering its soul around us. One of my neighbours rode by a couple of mornings ago and announced that he’d named my house The Haramlik, which I believe is actually Turkish, meaning The Women’s House. The Haramlik it is.

For me this is a period of regeneration, the time that I needed after losing my last life in the plane crash four years ago. I’ve withdrawn from the companies for the most part, I’m going to be concentrating on where I am, what I need to do here, and where I want to be over the next few years. I have my writing, my animals and a lot of thinking to do. So many things, many of them material such as my Cretan birds, paintings, pottery, and statues, seem to have been selected over many years just to fit into my house, that I want to go back to examine the ways that they have all come together.

This is also the Women’s House in another sense, that so many of my friends are women alone whose children have grown and moved on and who need the support and help of each other to maintain our spirits and directions. None of us are feeble, we all have our particular works, but we need that sense of community. I hope that in some respect this becomes a sanctuary where we can find a cup of tea and some peace when it is needed.

Alexandria

Nazli asked me about Alexandria. Alexandria is Alexandria and there is no place in the world quite like it. I don't know what it is about that city but it is very special. When I first moved to Egypt it was to Alexandria and it will always have a place in my heart. The history of the city itself is unique. During pharaonic times there were settlements on the coast, especially during the incursions of the sea peoples, but the ancient Egyptians were far more attuned to their river than they were to the sea. The Nile was always the overpowering force.

When Alexander the Great's army came through Egypt in pursuit of Persians, the Egyptians were apparently welcoming to the Greeks, and it was Alexander who chose the site for the city. It lies on a rocky shelf that stretches along the shoreline and even today the city is long and narrow. The Greek city was more or less confined to what is now the downtown area and the area around the old port. During their day there was an island offshore where the famous lighthouse was built, but the Ptolemies built a causeway out to the island and gradually the shoreline filled in to make a narrow land bridge out there. During the rule of the Greeks and even during Roman times, Alexandria was one of the few great cities in the world. The French archaeologists are finding the remnants of Greco-Roman Alexandria out in the old port these days and there is talk of creating an underwater park.

When the Arabs conquered Alexandria about 800 years or so later, it was a city of libraries, baths, markets, theatres...extraordinarily cosmopolitan. The Arabs were, again, not tuned to the sea and Alexandria faded and wasted away. When the British and French came to Egypt in the 1800's to continue their European war there, the only inhabited area was the land bridge to the island that had a fishing village. The rest of Alexandria lay in ruins in the sands along the sea. It was Mohamed Ali in the late 1800's who built the modern city, knowing that Egypt needed a good port on the Mediterranean. He brought in French, Italian, and Greek architects to build his new city and the modern city core is their legacy.

The current governor of Alexandria has been working hard to restore the old lady's lustre. But I have to admit that I loved the seedy old city that slept by the Mediterranean all winter, huddled against the storms, to wake to the raucous deluge of summer-sore Cairenes in June. We used to try to get out of Alex in the summer to avoid the horrendous traffic jams that could make a winter trip of 15 minutes in the city into a summer hour.

My daughter took ballet lessons from a dancer from the Kirov Ballet at the Russian Cultural Center, an exquisite old mansion with enormous Art Decco stained glass windows in the staircase and a ball room for the ballet class. When the Soviet Union fell, the ballet classes went on, but no flag flew over the cultural centre. No one knew who would claim it and the staff were a pot pourri of the nationalities of the old Soviet Union.

We had a 10 metre cruising sailboat that we kept at the Yacht Club across the island from Qait Bey, the restored Arab fort that was built on the foundations of the ruined lighthouse in the Middle Ages. We would sail along the coastline from the old port to Montaza Palace, now a public park but once one of King Farouk's summer palaces.

When I first got my horses, I kept them at Smouha Club, an equestrian-oriented sporting club that had been established around the turn of the century by a local Jewish businessman. He was granted a large chunk of the city in a rather swampy area to create an equestrian community in Alexandria. They drained the swamp and parceled the land up with specifications that the houses could only occupy a certain percentage of each parcel in order to leave enough room for the horses. He also planned out Smouha Club with a regulation racing oval around the perimeter and a golf course in the center. I was told that at one time it had the best golf course in the eastern Mediterranean. By the time I came there, not all of the racing oval was properly maintained and the golf course had long ago fallen into ruin. The wealthy horse owners who had been members and neighbours of the club had gone into exile during the socialist times of Nasser. For me it was heaven to take my horses out there to wander in the far end of the oval far enough away from the rest of the club that it was almost like being out of the city. We used to see all sorts of wildlife and migratory birds out there.

I could go on about the beauty of this old sea lady forever. There are some good modern Egyptian novels in English translation about life in Alex, there is always Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea) about society in Alex between the wars, and Cafavy's poetry is exquisite. The best thing is just to come and see her.