Helping to Make History

One of the things about living in Egypt is that I have the chance to live right next door to pyramids. Every morning I wake up, look out my front door and there they are. It's easy to forget that for other people these are large objects of unbelievable mystery. But when I'm out riding my horses and we are ambling around the base of one of these massive things, they project an aura of enormous patience and majesty that is all the more profound for my having arrived by this ancient mode of travel. A couple of weeks ago I was contacted out of the blue by an associate producer for a television crew that would be shooting an episode of a History Channel program entitled "Digging For The Truth" to see if I could help them film with horses. I replied that I had horses for the work and also had a young friend who could play an Egyptian guide for the filming. Last weekend we set to work.

My usual Friday and Saturday mornings are neighbourhood riding times. There are a number of riders based in the area who enjoy getting out in the desert together in the mornings on weekends, but this weekend I had no time for those rides. So what did we do that was so special anyway? Not the usual Friday and Saturday morning rides, or even a decent moonlight ride although we have a full moon and clear skies. Instead, I washed and conditioned horse manes, assembled flashy riding equipment, and I rode horses to their appointed spots near Giza on Friday afternoon and Abu Sir/Sakkara on Saturday morning.

We tricked out two of my Arab geldings, Nazeer and Bunduq, with Arab breastcollars and dangly bits and fuzzy dooda's on their headstalls in raucous colours. Bunduq was dubbed "Rasta Man" for his Jamaican outfit in red, yellow and green. Nazeer was more tasteful in black, red and navy. We used my usual endurance saddles with rag kilim rugs over them for an added flare. The boys were amazingly cool about all the funny clothes and remarkably understanding and cooperative with the endless gallops up a short hill with a pause at the top and a canter to the bottom...I'm sure that they figured that these humans had lost their minds. We had water and a bucket and a huge pile of fresh-cut forage in the back of my jeep and it didn't take them long to figure out where the best place to stand during rests was! I think that the boys being very laid back was a real advantage with all of the "hurry up and wait" stuff that filming always entails. They'd munch away happily from the back of the jeep and then go off and gallop around the desert for 20 minutes at a time. The producers had especially requested a reliable horse for the program's star, since he didn't ride regularly and the schedule didn't include time to recover from a broken leg or worse. Bunduq, a 15 yr old schoolmaster, was my choice for Josh, while Morad, my neighbour who was playing the guide in a traditional galabeya/riding pants outfit, rode 7 yr old Nazeer.

We started out at 1:30 pm on Friday to get the horses to Giza for a 2:30 appointment. Luckily, the film crew wasn't any more punctual than anyone else here. Morad and my daughter drove over with gear and horse food in the jeep, while one of my grooms, Ahmed, rode Bunduq over with me. I don't often ride to Giza and today gave me a really good reason why not. The place is a dump. Disgusting. Not nice at all and full of tourists, thank heaven....at least it is generating a good income. The ride over to Giza took about an hour and a half through the countryside dirt roads which gave us some shelter from the sun. Happily there was a good breeze blowing so even standing around in the sun in the desert wasn't uncomfortable, although everyone had to drink a lot of water. On the way back Morad and Yasmine met us part way back at the beginning of the farming area with some sandwiches and cold drinks that Ahmed and I really appreciated. By the time I got back home I had just enough energy to set my alarm for 6 am.

Saturday's shooting was at the pyramids of Abu Sir and Sakkara, which are basically our backyard, so the lead time wasn't so much. I only needed 30 minutes to have the horses at the meeting place. I dashed around feeding parrots and preparing dog food (we have to cook a stew for them here) and got to the horses at 7 am. We tacked them up and headed for Abu Sir where the crew was to meet us...with an hour and a half wait while they were stuck waiting at their hotel for the Antiquities Department stooge who had been assigned to them for the day. The wait wasn't bad since the guys had figured out the back-of-jeep dining routine the day before, and half the neighbourhood showed up to ask what the devil we were doing in the middle of the desert. It was the time of the usual neighbourhood ride, so the neighbourhood was riding by. Yasmine amused herself by chipping flint tools which she then tried out on everything she could....I kept her away from the saddles. Anthropology children can be a burden. Today was more galloping around the desert interspersed with stuffing faces on fodder from the jeep...or green grapes if they could be snatched.

We didn't get paid for the work but it was fun and in January 2005 you will see my horses and Morad in the episode on pyramids. They are going to send me a DVD since we don't get History Channel. I was terribly proud of my boys who galloped about happily, didn't fuss at standing around for ages, and didn't spook or buck once. The story line is that there is this adventurer character (done up like Indiana Jones) who is traveling over the world investigating mysteries in adventurous manners. The star, Josh Bernstein, runs an outward-bound type center in Boulder, Colorado, in usual real life and has been diving in ritual pools in Guatemala, climbing mountains, doing all sorts of weird things for the show. Not a bad sort for an Indy wanna-be. The premise was that he's investigating pyramids along with interviews with Egyptologists but that he decides to ride from Giza to Sakkara on horseback. It wasn't entirely fake, since the horses DID go from Giza to Sakkara (though on two consecutive days) as well as from my place to Giza and back and my place to Sakkara and back.

The actor and the crew were delighted with the horses, the desert, the pyramids and everyone had a good time. We are all looking forward to seeing the finished product and happy with the thought that others will be able to see the pyramids that live next door.

Talking to Parrots

Since this is a means of communication that depends on phone lines, I suppose it's only natural that my lack of a telephone for the past four months has been a major focus. But that has ended for the time being. My phone line was installed a couple of days ago and I'm finally coming up to speed as a person who has a connection to the outside world. For four months I could only check my email at friends' places or internet cafes, which was really a pain for someone who got rid of her television set because she'd rather write to friends at night than watch the tube. I was deleting all but the most important emails because I knew that I wouldn't have time to answer the others. My websites went un-updated, cobwebs grew on many of my favourite activities, like the blog.

Well, dancing for joy here. I can wake up at 3 am and check my email again. And now I can get more disciplined about posting as well. On an everyday level here, we are enjoying a strangely moderate summer. It's hot, of course, but there is a good breeze and the nights are cool enough not to need air conditioning in the country. The city is much hotter because there isn't the air flow. My parrots have settled in seriously and yesterday I discovered a pair of eggs in the nestbox of my African Grey pair. Mona and Fritz have been watching me collect the eggs from the baladi hens in Ali's cage, so they are being extremely fierce in their defense of their nest box. "Right, Lady. We've seen what you do with eggs!"

I will have to have the CITES officials out sometime in the near future so that these youngsters can have passports that will enable them to travel with their future families. Most of the parrots in Egypt are smuggled and will never have the documentation that would enable them to leave the country. All of mine would never be able to leave, but any that I breed are eligible for passports. I can't count the number of times that people have contacted me when their work posting is up trying to arrange transport for parrots that they've adopted into their family. It can be heartbreaking and I usually try to talk people out of buying parrots locally if I can. But they are entrancing companions and can have very happy lives with people if the living arrangements are good.

My first parrot was Ali, an African Grey male that my children bought for me in Alexandria. He's been with me now for about 15 years. At first he was wild and frightened of people, but we put his cage in the kitchen, where there was the most traffic. We had a bowl of treats next to the cage, grapes, nuts and so on, and whenever anyone passed the cage they would take a treat, pop it into the cage and say "Here, Ali". He calmed down gradually, realising that this particular group of humans were an unending source of goodies and went from whistling to muttering under his breath and finally talking. When he was in the muttering stage, it was so close to speech that we'd hear him and automatically say "What?" as though he would repeat it more clearly....which he didn't. When he did speak clearly, the first word he spoke was, of course, "What?" !! The next one was "Here", which he still uses as a shorthand for "Give me a goody".

Now he talks a blue streak and occasionally expresses himself extremely clearly. Lately I had to be away for a few days and a friend was feeding the birds and dogs. The birds have huge water dishes for drinking and/or bathing, and the friend had been topping them up but not changing the water. When I got back, the dishes were a bit green from algae and sunlight...not the standard of service that my pampered parrots were used to...and the friend reported that the last morning as he was feeding Ali, Ali told him "You are a bad bird." I was surprised because this isn't one of Ali's usual phrases and in fact he rarely talks to strangers. When I saw the water dishes, I understood. Another favourite Ali story occurred when my daughter was about 13 and askd what I was cooking as she walked into the kitchen after school. It was spaghetti sauce with lots of garlic, one of Ali's favorite people foods, and before I could answer this little voice spoke up with "What does it look like, stupid?" We all fell about laughing over that. Most of the time he isn't nearly so direct.

We had two babies about 7 years ago when we got Mona, another African Grey, and she moved in with Ali. They each found very loving families and were a delight to raise. But Fritz, a Grey that needed a home, moved in next door to Ali and Mona in my old house and Mona found a way from her cage into Fritz' cage. Poor Ali. Now Fritz and Mona are starting a family and I'm looking again for a mate for Ali. More animals in my zoo...oh well.

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.