Making New Clothes

FabricMarket.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

Last year when I was in New York I bought some very comfortable t-shirt fabric jogging pants at the Columbia Bookstore. Naturally, they were on the expensive side, but they were wonderfully comfortable, especially in the Egyptian summer, so when they began wearing out I took them and another favourite pair of pants to a tailor in Maadi to have them copied. I explained that they were working pants and I wanted them copied in dark coloured t-shirt material, I paid a deposit for them to buy the material and was told that the pants would be ready the next week.

Well, that was about a month ago. Ah, the timelessness of Egypt. Today I went to Said the tailor for about the fifth time this month and two pairs of pants were ready. They weren't the jogging pants that I really wanted and they weren't made of t-shirt material. Said and Maher, his son, had copied the other pants in another fabric that is more suitable for more formal occasions than feeding the chickens and exercising the horses. They will be a welcome addition to my wardrobe nonetheless.

The jogging pants had been totally forgotten and had to be dug out of a closet. Once we got them out, I explained once again that I wanted the pants copied in the same sort of material that they were made from originally. "But, Madame, that is very inexpensive material!" Yes, boys, it is but how expensive do chicken-feeding pants have to be, after all? We went through the same old I-live-on-a-farm routine that I so often have to do explaining that I'm no longer a city dweller. This time, hopefully, it sank in.

Maher assured me that he will go personally to the Wekelah to buy the fabric himself, so hopefully sometime in the next month I will have some local copies of some rather ridiculously expensive jogging pants.

The market that they will visit to purchase the material is one of Cairo's best bargain centers. Fabric that is 85 LE per metre in more upscale locations such as Maadi or Mohendessin costs about 45 LE a metre in the Wekelah. The stores elsewhere are bigger and usually airconditioned, while in the Wekelah they are tiny, cramped and open to the air. Just finding one's way around the narrow alleyways is a serious challenge. The day that I took the photo a friend of mine was in the area and although we could describe landmarks to each other, we never did exactly figure out where the other was.

The market is fascinating in its extraordinary diversity. There are stalls selling some of the sleaziest underwear imaginable, red chiffon nightgowns trimmed with feathers, sequined thongs, you name it. The patrons of the stalls are often women whose heads are covered with black scarves and sometimes they wear full Islamic regalia with their faces covered to the eyes. The mind boggles with the thought of what they wear underneath all of that!

Other stalls sell children's clothes or uphostery fabric or towels and sheet material. You can buy the cotton for your sheets and have them hemmed there in the market in one of the stalls where a man sits behind an ancient sewing machine making things up for people. One fellow I know there sells used scarves and if you dig through the piles there are some wonderful bargains to be had. Lovely silk scarves or sarongs for as little as LE 20 (about $3.25) that look like new.

Naturally in a place like this parking is an utter nightmare. I've found a yard in the area of the market where they sell used iron for fences and pipes where I can park for LE 5 for a few hours. The real price of parking, of course, is in fear as you try to maneuver a Jeep Cherokee in a space that is more suitable for a Mini Cooper and the tragectory for getting out includes at least 4 right angles to be taken in reverse. THEN, you have to make your way through the alleys to the main street. All in all, going there is a major expedition, but one that is usually well worth it. I actually know people who are addicted to the fabric souq and go at every opportunity....but most of them have drivers so they don't have to deal with half of the insanity. They must change their curtains about once a month.

Working With What You Have

Omar.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

The workmen were my teachers from the very first. I learned my Arabic from the fruit and vegetable sellers, from the electricians and the plumbers, from the grooms and the veterinarians. My Arabic isn't the most elegant even today. I do better in the paddocks and souqs than I do in a board room or a cocktail party. People laugh kindly at my Alexandrian accent, sort of the way that someone might find amusing the way a newcomer to English speaks with a southern accent. I can live with that.

Omar is my blacksmith. His teacher was Yassin, who had been trained by the British before they left Egypt in the 50's. Yassin began training Omar as he was going blind, not an optimal training program. Far too many skilled workers and even professionals here guard their skills jealously, not wanting to give anything away lest the younger ones steal their clients. Omar never really got a good chance to learn from Yassin, but a number of years later we were able to help him out.

A visiting American blacksmith offered to help a number of us who boarded our horses out in Sakkara by taking Omar under her wing for a few weeks to train him. The look on Omar's face the first time he met Sara was priceless. Clearly he didn't believe that he had much to learn from a woman...at least he didn't until she had fashioned a complete set of specialised horse shoes from a bar of iron in about 20 minutes. After that, she had his total attention.

From Sara he learned a lot about shoeing, about changing the shoes to fit the horses rather than vice versa, a very important distinction as most horsemen know. He commissioned an ironworker to build him a portable forge and a foot rest for filing the horses' hooves. He was a good blacksmith at the beginning, but he's a much better one now.

One of the things that I've always wanted to do is to institute an exchange program for skilled workers in the field that is so important to my life, horses. I'd like to be able to offer free room and board for visits to Egypt by vets, farriers, and saddlemakers who are willing to come to Egypt on holiday and spend part of that time teaching our people here. That is probably the only way that we are going to be able to train anyone under the educational level of a doctor of veterinary medicine. There are no schools for farriers, no training for saddlemakers, and our veterinary schools aren't exactly hands-on training. Unfortunately as well, politics being what they are, a man like Omar isn't likely to get a visa to go to study with a master blacksmith in the US or Europe to improve his skills.

You have to do the best that you can.

Street Smarts

BasketCart.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

I decided about a month ago that I needed a wicker basket for some cotton kilims that I use to cover my furniture to protect chairs from the wear and tear of rat terriers.I keep spares so that I have clean ones to put on while I wash the sandy ones. While driving in Maadi, I saw a typical basket cart parked at a corner near the Irish school and stopped to ask the prices. I looked around and couldn't see anyone near the cart, so I asked the guard at the school where the basket seller was. He didn't know, and I went on my way but I stopped by at least three times a week for the next three weeks. I never did see the owner of the cart but the baskets never changed place or position.

Finally this morning as I was cruising past the corner, I spotted a man sitting in the shade under at tree across the street from the cart. Screeching to a halt, I asked if by any chance he was the proprietor of the cart. Yes, he was, came the reply. Just out of curiosity, I asked how long he'd been leaving his cart parked unattended at this corner. Oh, heavens, no. He was there every day according to the basket man...but there was a sheepish grin when I raised my eyebrows and told him that I'd been looking for him for weeks to buy some baskets. Sheepish grins turned to calculation as we decided which baskets we needed and when we went on our way the jeep had our fruits and vegetables packed into the larger rectangular wicker baskets for the ride home.

How many major cities can boast that a cart full of items like this can be left unattended for weeks on end and there not be any theft? Pretty amazing even for Egypt.

Five Year Plans

What is it about five years? Perhaps it's the coincidence of our having five fingers and toes, but have you ever noticed how many five year plans there are? Five is one of those numbers of importance for whatever reason and the significance of five years is central to me right now, whether I like it or not. I was 25 years old when I went off to graduate school, having said good bye to a floundering marriage on the west coast, and I told myself that I would give myself five years to do whatever it was that I was going to do there. I decided (and I don't know why) that at 30 it was time to be something other than a student. It didn't matter what that was at all. What was important was the fact that 30 marked the end of a period of my life as I saw it. It's only just now that I remembered this fact, so five-year plans are obviously a part of my internal clock.

June 10, 2005, will mark the fifth anniversary of my husband Diaa's death. Anniversaries of death, called sennawaya, are usually observed in Egypt for at least the first few years, but the past four have more or less slipped in under the radar as far as I've been concerned. I have not visited the grave site because I have no sense of him there. It is a place of pain without any comfort whatsoever. I've promised myself that I will not be buried in that barren patch between Heliopolis and Ismailia. I would much prefer to be buried out here in one of the cemeteries of the villages with my friends around me.

You see? I find myself thinking on death, which is something rather unusual for me, and I notice that this year his death is more real to me. Perhaps this is because I am finally seeing the ends of the business issues that have entangled me in his life so much. Perhaps it is because I am closer to making a material start on my own life without involvement in the projects that were his. I don't really know. I am aware of emotional turmoil that has been long suppressed and is now leaking to the surface.

I like to cook and although I hate to eat vegetable soup, I make excellent vegetable soup from fresh vegetables and herbs. I used to make it all the time for Diaa as he was always watching his weight and cholesterol levels for his pilot's license. The process of choosing the most interesting and freshest vegetables, of cutting them into appropriate shapes and sizes, the browning of onion and garlic in good olive oil, and the combining of colour, texture and flavour to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts was a joy, even if I was never going to eat it myself. I'm funny that way. I like my vegetables raw. There was a point in the process when I knew that the soup had simmered just enough, when the vegetables were all floating in a savoury broth at the same level rather than some floating on the surface and others resting on the bottom. I think that I am like that soup right now. Many things that had been floating on the surface have now sunk to the bottom, and when I turn a psychic spoon in my mix, I find a selection of all the ingredients.

But I don't think that I've tasted it yet. Am I afraid to taste it? A little. Who wouldn't be? Here I am, the mother of two adult children who are beginning to make their own ways in the world, I have no living parents so I am truly an adult. I have no male protector in a culture where this is important, so I am an eccentric. This year I face my loss and assess it. No one else in the world is ever going to be responsible for me, for my decisions, for my actions. The realisation is both freeing and terrifying, but I can live with it. My soul has had time to develop some tough skin on it, thanks to the battering it's taken over the past five years. Now I face a new five year plan, an open-ended plan of rebuilding me and my life on my terms entirely. Wow.

Ancient Connections

Watertruck.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

My friend Nathalie invited me to come along to visit the monastery of St. Anthony last Saturday. Usually, she and her daughter would have been riding with me, but her visiting mother wanted to see the monastery, so we changed activities somewhat. I drove the four of us down in my old jeep (thank heaven for functioning air conditioning) for the trip that took about 2.5 hours from Giza. Most of the way is now highway, taking the Moneeb and Ring Road to the exit for Ain Sokhna and then the new highway to the Red Sea at Ain Sokhna. The road was brilliant, empty, and devoid of radar, so Matilda (the jeep..as in the old song about the woman who took all his money and ran to Venezuela, or in my case the mechanic) had a chance to air out her engine. At Ain Sokhna we intercepted the old road from Suez to Hurghada along the sea coast and had to slow down significantly.

When I first moved to Cairo I heard about the road to Hurghada, but references were usually accompanied by shivers of trepidation. The road has been improved significantly but it is still narrow and winding, being wedged between the sea and the rocky hills along the coast. At one time it was a desolate route to travel but with the boom in development along the coast, now you drive past a string of hotels and holiday developments in a varying array of completion.

At Zafarana, a tiny refueling station for the trucks heading on for Hurghada, we stopped for tea and a pit stop at a small rest house, The Sahara Inn. Nathalie's daughter recalled the family's rating system of 'yuks' and 'yaks' for bathrooms during their treks in the Himalayas as we debated the wisdom of using the bathrooms there. Happily, the owners of the place had recently remodeled and the bathrooms were wonderful...definitely 3 or 4 yaks rather than the yuks that we were expecting. Bathrooms are really important when traveling in Egypt and you very quickly learn to make note of the good ones and use them whenever you are nearby, whether you need to or not.

From that point we turned into the desert along a tiny asphalt road that ran down the center of a broad wadi. We only traveled about 15 km down the road, thankfully, as the road bed had been seriously abused by heavy trucks and the asphalt had deep ruts from the tires. It was not a track that I'd like to take in the dark since if you had to swerve for anything on those ruts, you could easily lose control of your car. I could see miles in every direction and there wasn't a scrap of green to be seen in the wadi.

About 15 km along this route that heads back to the Nile through the desert, we encountered a clear sign marking the road to the monastery, a turn south towards rocky hills devoid of habitation or any other signs of life. Shortly after turning off, however, we came up behind the truck in the photo. Driving a jeep and taking a picture through the windshield simultaneously isn't really something you should try at home, kids, but we were the only cars on the road and the water tanker was crawling along at roughly 20 km per hour. Someone crazy enough to run in the desert sun could have jogged along side. The painting shows St. Anthony and the monastery, and the truck was driven by a monk with a full beard and the black embroidered hood of the Coptic orders.

St. Anthony lived in the 3rd century AD, having been born in a wealthy family in the Fayoum. After his parents died and he inherited the family wealth in his 20's, he decided to give away his wealth and become an ascetic. At that time, such people would go live in isolated ruins or caves and the local communities would support them with gifts of food and such. He was obviously a person of some intelligence and education as other ascetics would move to be near him, while he kept moving to more and more remote areas to get away from people. Eventually, he came to the area where the monastery was built and he lived in a cave in the hills where he had a difficult hour's hike (by my estimate, having tried out the nice recently constructed stairway) from his cave high in the hills to a spring that flowed from the mountain near the valley floor.

His reputation drew other religious figures once again, but this time rather than fleeing them, St. Anthony began to establish a community of like-minded individuals who began to build Christianity's first monastery. Over the years, they built churches, a fortress, a dining hall, a flour mill, and a garden to grow simple crops to keep themselves alive. For centuries, the spring which supplies 100 cubic metres of water daily was their only supply of water for crops and personal needs. Gradually, over time other monks came and went traveling throughout the Middle East and Europe taking the concept of an enclosed religious community with them.

As I recall from my studies in history, the monasteries of Europe in the Middle Ages were repositories for the learning of centuries. They were safe havens for travelers in troubled times, collecting information in the process. They were storehouses for information where books from all over the world were kept safe and copied for dissemination. The knowledge of the ancient world of the Greeks and Romans, along with translations of medical and scientific texts from the Arabs formed the basis of scholarship for the Renaissance burst of activity in Europe many centuries later. None of this would have been possible without this Egyptian ascetic who established the pattern for monastic life in the desert of Egypt.

The monastic life in Egypt has been fraught with difficulty, as has been every sort of life here actually. The early monasteries were fortresses as well as communities. St. Anthony's and St. Katherine's (which is run by Greek Orthodox monks) are two of the most ancient, and both of them for centuries were entered by a basket that was suspended by a rope from an opening in the wall. The basket would be lowered by a pulley manned by the monks to allow visitors to enter the monastery, but there was no other door to allow entry. During the early years this provided a defense from marauding Bedouin who would besiege the monasteries from time to time. During times of more peaceful coextistence, the monks would share food and water with the wandering herders. Now the door to the monastery is usually open, albeit if they had to close it one would be hard pressed to gain entry as it is made of wood at least ten centimetres thick and armored with beaten iron a centimetre thick. The modern monastery contains three sets of walls, those of the fourth century, those of the fourteenth, and a final set from the eighteenth century.

Visitors today are welcomed by the community and the monks offer to guide people around to share the wealth of history, art and architecture with those who make the journey. Our guide, Father Ilarion, was born and raised in the Cairo suburb of Shoubra and spoke excellent English. A good education is no barrier to the monastic life. The first monk that I met from St. Anthony's, Father Maximus, was the driving force for the restoration of the frescoes and he holds graduate degrees in museology and art history from such mundane institutions as Harvard. Having made friends with the Italian restoration team about a year ago, it was a special delight to me to see the work that they had done.

My life in Abu Sir is rather time consuming with the veterinary issues of keeping a ridiculous number of animals healthy and the day to day hassles of life here. I have to replace my jeep's windshield AGAIN after a chunk of gravel chipped it and a crack began crawling across it. Thankfully, windshields aren't that expensive here, but the time involved is a nuisance. To be able to get away to such an extraordinary place was a tremendous gift, and the realisation of the interweaving of the Coptic monastic history with the history that I learned as a child has filled me with a new sense of wonder.

Some Weeks Are Longer Than Others

Garden gathering, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

This is the time of year when we change from winter/spring to summer in Egypt. Sham el Nessim, which was celebrated last Monday, is the day when the police all over Egypt get to change from their black wool winter uniforms to the summer whites, and their relief is usually obvious to any observer. We've had a cooler than usual spring, so it wasn't so bad for the poor traffic cops standing in the sun.

The transition from spring to summer is greeted with mixed feelings here. On one hand the days are going to be hot for a while, like about 5 months, but the evenings with the silk soft air (at least out here in the country) make up for the heat. Relaxing on the verandah or riding in the countryside at night are wonderful in the summer. Winter nights are pretty chilly to enjoy much.

This year the transition was marred with tragedy. The deaths of three young Egyptians who for whatever bizarre reasons decided to try to harm some foreign tourists were upsetting to all of us. Tourism is so important to the economy here that most Egyptians want nothing more than to see it increase. None of the people I know are interested in seeing people stop coming here. Whatever logic was being followed by the young man who threw himself off the bridge and by his sister and fiancee is as foreign to us as the thoughts of any aliens. The picture that has come through here has been of a wildly disfunctional family.

On Monday my guest and I went out for a ride in the countryside in our celebration of Sham el Nessim. Music playing from various gardens announced the arrival of city folk who had come to spend the day outdoors in the traditional manner. Farmers were working in their fields to harvest the green fodder for their animals, but their wives and children were already on their ways out to bring the Sham el Nessim picnic of fish, cheese, onions, and bread.

Refreshed by an hour or two with the horses, I headed into Maadi on a much less pleasant task. An a'aza was being held in one of the gardens for a friend of mine who had died in a particularly tragic fashion. A teacher at a local school, when she didn't show up for work early in the week before, someone went around to her flat to see if she was all right. A widow for many years, she'd been having problems with her younger son, so there was some concern for her welfare. The concern was well-founded in this case, as she was found dead in her flat, a victim of domestic violence. The younger son, a boy in his early 20's, had apparently killed her in a fit of anger.

Just as with the young people who died earlier in the week in a senseless, supposedly political act, this was complicated by the problems and pressures of youth, many of the same problems and pressures that are found worldwide. Her death wasn't especially Egyptian, it was just a tragedy, and it was an immense tragedy for her older son. A kind, sensitive young man, he teaches music therapy in a school for children with special needs, autistic children and those with attentional and learning disabilities. The Egyptian legal system does not take matricide lightly, so he has lost both his mother and his brother in one incomprensible act of violence.

The friends who gathered to honour his mother came literally from all over the world. Many were long time Cairo residents, some of whom flew in from Europe and the US to pay their respects. The setting was one of Maadi's most beautiful gardens and every guest brought a dish to share with the others. Near the garden gate was a table filled with potted plants and a note asking each guest to take one, plant it in their garden and nourish it with the love that the woman we were honouring would have given it. She was an avid gardener and always had plants growing in her class room.

I find gatherings like those difficult. I barely remember the days that I went through after my husband's death almost five years ago,but I do recall that somehow the sympathy of others made everything worse in an odd way. In retrospect, I don't believe that it did make things worse, but when I was trying so hard to keep myself under control, the grief of others was an invitation to feel it myself. Seeing her son sitting in the shade with his wife brought it all back to me with hideous clarity. When someone was speaking to him, he could make contact, but when left to himself, he slipped into a deep grey fog. He is fortunate to have a loving wife who will be there to help him through this period.

The rest of the week slipped past in a haze of tasks and errands. One delightful task was a trail ride with my Belgian friends and Nathalie's 76 year old mother. She was a delight, curious, active, and fearless. Despite the fact that she hadn't ridden for at least 25 years, she handled an hour and a half on the trail like a trouper, trotting and cantering along with the rest. I think I've found my role model. What a woman! And she'd just gotten back to Cairo from a trip to Petra where she'd spent two days hiking in the desert visiting the ruins in Jordan.

Yesterday my son and I finished some work on a project together. In celebration we went to a restaurant in Zamalek where his girlfriend and another American friend who is studying at AUC joined us for a beer. We went on to a Japanese restaurant in Giza for dinner, from which point I headed back home to the farms and they continued on to meet other friends. I remember being that young and staying up half the night. Don't do it much any more.

On my way home a pickup truck with a smoke machine in the back brought traffic to a screeching halt by creating a cloud of anti-mosquito smoke so thick that drivers couldn't make out the road for a couple of minutes. Cairo traffic being pretty insane at the best of times, the situation could only be laughed at. Once the smoke cleared and I could continue on my way, I found myself behind a wedding party in about four cars, all of which were weaving all over the road. In the US or Canada, they would have been arrested for reckless driving. Here people just smiled and waved. I worried that they might not make it to the reception. Fortunately, they turned off and the rest of my colleagues on the road seemed to be at least moderately sane.

Near the Giza zoo, I stopped for a traffic cop and a young girl about 8 years old was walking down the median holding strings of white flowers for sale. I bought a few strands of ful for my rear view mirror, remembering my husband buying some the first time we came to Egypt as the scent filled the car. Some of the sweet things never change.

Ruining a Great Weekend

CountryRide.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

Weekends are my busiest working days. Friday morning I have a lesson ride with the daughter of a friend of mine. Christina boards her old gelding Fares with me and rides whenever she gets the chance. Her older daughter Sara decided recently that she wanted to take up riding again but she didn't want to take lessons in an arena, so her mother offered to let her take them with me in the countryside. I find the trails a good place for people to learn because there is always enough going on around them to distract them from their worries about being on a horse. Sara is doing very well.

Saturday mornings are my favourites. I have another mother and daughter pair that like to come out for 2 to 3 hour rides in the countryside and desert. Today we decided to go for a 'toot' ride, a trip in the farming area where we can have long canters interspersed with stops under the mulberry (known locally as 'toot') trees to harvest the ripe black and white berries. I prefer the black to the white myself, but there is definitely something wonderful about picking fresh fruit from a tree off the back of a horse.

Our ride was lovely, the weather was clear and warm with a cool breeze to moderate it. When we finished, arrangements were made for them to come back tomorrow with yet another generation for a quieter ride among the mulberry trees with Nathalie's 76 year old mother. I'm looking forward to this, since this woman just came back from hiking in Petra, Jordan, where she outmarched both her daughter and granddaughter.

The next item on the list of to-do's was to make a sandwich and take it to my temporary housemate, Tracy, who was painting her new apartment, an airy nest perched on top of a farmer's house with a view of the pyramid of Abu Sir and a grove of mango and orange trees. Her balcony is definitely going to be a gathering point in the coming months but right now the issue is how many coats of paint will it take to cover the tangerine walls in the living room and to tone down the lavender in the bedrooms.

Sandwich delivered, I went back to my paddocks to finish work on a special saddle pad to protect the withers of my new mare. We took an old saddle pad, a foam cushion, the back of a pair of jeans and some velcro tape to the village tailor the other night where he helped us to design a pad to protect her back. Saddle blankets to wash, yacht rope reins to wash, and lemons to deliver to help my poor head groom get over the flu.

By 4:30 we were tired of painting and washing respectively and dragged our weary bodies home only to find that some idiot had decided to drop a homemade bomb and himself off an overpass behind the Egyptian Museum downtown. Why do they have to do these things?

We are in the middle of a holiday weekend here. Tomorrow is the Eastern Easter, that is for the Eastern Orthodox and the Copts. Then Monday is Sham el Nessim, an ancient Egyptian festival of spring time when families head for the countryside or the median of the main roads to spend the day in the open eating onions, boiled eggs, and rotten fish. The fish recipe is ancient and dangerous in that fish is left to ripen for a day and then packed in salt. The ripening gives flavour, or so I'm told, but it also gives botulism a great chance to catch hold. The dish is called Feseekh in case someone offers it to you. If they do, run.

Meanwhile, we will hope that this blows over, although the news that two women attacked a tourist bus in another section of Cairo and at least one of them was killed is making this look like a pretty nasty holiday weekend. However, in case anyone wonders if I feel safe here...yes. I still do.