The New Conquistadores

Not having my own telephone connection at home…STILL..and not having a television set has really restricted my awareness of the world. I used to read the news online daily. Now I might connect every second or third day and I don’t have the news daily. Oddly enough the world seems to continue to evolve even as I am unaware of it. That’s reassuring, I suppose, but it would be even more reassuring if the world could find a better path here and there while I am unaware. The American insistence that it can “fix” places like Iraq and Afghanistan is mind-bogglingly naïve. Having nice boys from Ohio and Louisiana maintain order in places like these is rather like taking your Japanese made vacuum cleaner (complete with instructions in Japanese) to a Mack Truck repair station for an overhaul. The truck station probably has lots of great tools, but the staff haven’t the slightest idea how the vacuum cleaner works, nor can they read the manual. So all these nice boys from Ohio and Louisana and New York and Idaho are walking around a country where they can’t read a sign, write a note, pass the time of day with a local, ask directions, buy groceries, basically function in any normally human way, but they do carry some rather astounding weaponry and have the power of life and death. Bizarre concept. Conquest is such an awkward thing.

Monastery restorations

My neighbour works for the American Research Center in Egypt and she called me the other day to join her for a dinner party that she was giving for a group of Italian conservators who had been here for some time doing restoration on some ancient Coptic frescoes at the Monasteries of St. Anthony and St. Paul on the Red Sea coast and the Red Monastery in Sohag. There were four young men probably in their late 20’s and early 30’s, their leader who is in his late forties, and a Coptic monk from St. Anthony’s Monastery who was their liaison. They’d been working for some months and were leaving for Italy in the morning.

We’ve been blessed with some very reasonable weather for the past few weeks, so Janie set her tables on her balcony upstairs where the sunset blended with the brilliant blooms of the bouganvilleia that creeps up from the garden. After grilled quail, salads, and fruit we all had time to sit around to listen to the stories of the young men about their work in the monasteries. They’ve been working there for a number of years coming each year for a few months and going back to Italy where they do restoration in churches in between. For young men used to life in Rome and Naples, the adjustment to life in a monastery that has existed in a rather remote location since the third century would be a challenge. Their comments were fascinating. Each of the men spoke of the change in the way that he saw his life after living with the monks for a month or so, of a sense of peace and a centered-ness that grew gradually with time in these remote communities. With the restoration projects, the monasteries are becoming more and more used to visitors who come to see the newly restored paintings. In some cases, the pressure of the visitors has demanded some changes in routines in the monastery. At St. Anthony’s the monastery was used to being supplied with water from a spring in the mountain. The spring was sufficient to serve the needs of the monks and their fruit orchard but now they need to bring water tankers to cope with their visitors’ needs.

There is something about the desert of Egypt that makes the ascetic life of the monks understandable. I don’t know what it is. The barren mountains broken by the odd oasis, perhaps. I just know that when I’ve traveled in Sinai, the thought of dropping my mobile phone by the road and crawling into a cave to contemplate the nature of God, man and the universe seems remarkably appealing. I don’t know that I’d last with the sort of work that one must do to survive there, but in some ways the move that I’ve done from the city to the countryside is much the same kind of move. The first few weeks and months, I did a lot of moving back and forth from Maadi to the peace of the new house, but now I avoid trips to Maadi and the city. I don’t want to deal with the noise and pollution. I don’t want to buy things that I don’t really need just because they appeal to me. I’d rather stay at home and work in the peace of my own garden.

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.