Abu Erdan, An Early Terrorist? Not Exactly

I'll bet you never knew that Audubon Society and some of the other conservation groups started with women's hats. Not the connection that most of us make, but that is true. At the turn of the century it was the fashion to decorate women's hats with feathers, parts of birds and even whole birds, the more exotic the better. The fashion reached a point that birdwatchers could rack up a better spot list sitting on a fashionable corner in New York or London than they could in the field. One of the birds that was most in demand was the egret for the graceful sweep of the snowy feathers and feather collectors went to work on the little egret and cattle egret population of Egypt as they did in North and South America, with the effect that there was general concern that the birds being hunted might become extinct.

The methods used by feather hunters were brutal to say the least. The plumes desired were most attractive during the breeding and nesting period, so this was when the hunters went to work. The result of their efforts was not only dead adults lying about under the trees, but starving young who were still nestlings dependent upon parents for their feeding. Concerned birdwatchers began a media blitz and formed such groups as the Audubon Society to try to turn the tide. Women members lobbied to have feathered hats outlawed and some of the British in Egypt began an unusual public service campaign to inform the people of Egypt of the dangers of killing egrets. Matchbooks, train cars, and posters on buildings proclaimed in Arabic "Abu Erdan saddiq el fellah", meaning "The Egret is the friend of the farmer". Abu Erdan means "father of beaks" in reference to the long beak sported by the egret, and they do assist the farmers of Egypt by eating the grubs, worms and even young mice that might be turned up in the tilling and cultivating of the soil.

The saviour of the egrets was not so much the written word as it was the hairdresser's scissors. Bobbed hair suddenly became fashionable and the extravagant feathered hats that had previously adorned the longer hair were no longer in demand. Gradually the egret populations regained strength. These days cattle egrets are no longer in the least bit endangered. Just before dusk they can be seen gathering in the trees along the road that borders the Cairo Zoo, tall shady eucalyptus and casuarinas where they will be nesting during mating season. In the countryside they can be seen in flocks following a tractor or examining freshly turned soil for bugs and other avian-oriented goodies. Sometimes they will be resting quietly in the sun along a trail as I'm out riding only to take off in a huge white cloud when the horse disturbs them. The cattle egrets still outnumber the little egrets, but sometimes I catch sight of some of the more unusual water birds such as night herons or grey herons. Sometimes life should be for the birds.

Heads Up Animal Lovers!

One of the more....or less....endearing aspects of Egypt is the random nature of life here. You learn to be comfortable living cheek to jowl with all sorts of interesting germs, bacteria, four-legged (and more and less) fauna anywhere in the country. One of the things that you learn on moving to Egypt is that (Omigod!) eggs can stand unrefrigerated for as long as two months and stay fresh, although once you refrigerate them, they MUST stay refrigerated. What a shock....and what a relief. Why waste refrigerator space on something that comes in its own wonderful packaging that can sit happily in a cupboard for a month or so. Terrific. My home is a great example of our coexistence plan. With 12 dogs, a cat, a tortoise, six parrots, three chickens, ten horses, two donkeys, and two water buffalo wandering the premises, the mind trembles to contemplate the number of diseases rampant on my two and half acres.

Imagine my wonder, shock and horror to read that my Dr. Dolittle-ite compatriots in the United States are now finding themselves under siege by none other than the brilliantly efficient US Department of Agriculture. Do click on the link above to read the rather bizarre and quite frightening plans to microchip all of the animals in the United States to be able to track their whereabouts 24/7. Granted at this time the plan seems to be aimed at consumables and livestock rather than dogs, cats, and goldfish, but nevertheless the hassles and bother involved are mind-boggling.

I'm sure that the USDA wants its public to realise how hard they are working to keep the American populace free from the threat of disease transmitted by foreign migratory waterfowl or suspect transient cattle. Mind you this is the same group of people that do not at this time have a firm and effective testing program to know that the cattle coming through the slaughterhouses are free from BSE because it's too much time and money. So instead they plan to locate every breeder of birds, horses, cows, pigs, sheep, goats, whatever by GPS and to require that every animal be microchipped so that its exact whereabouts can be determined at any time. This will add how much to the cost of meat for the average household? And what about the small farmer who wants to raise his/her own food for home consumption? As Ms. Zanoni notes, the small farmer is barely making ends meet as it is, and this could surely be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Ok, so why does this matter to me? The likelihood that such a set-up could be legislated into existence in Egypt is on a par with the likelihood that all the camels at the pyramids of Giza will take flight at 10 am on Tuesday morning, transporting those unlucky tourists who happen to be riding at the time to Timbuktu. We don't even have bills of sale for livestock in Egypt. If and when ducks from Greece or Turkey land in Egypt carrying avian influenza there will be absolutely nothing that the government can do to track down where suspect poultry might be lurking because the answer is everywhere. Is this a risk? Yes, of course. But so far it's still more of a risk to try to cross Kasr el Aini Street at 3 pm. I follow the WHO and CDC bulletins regarding avian influenza and a number of other emerging diseases so that I can keep abreast of what some fairly thoughtful people regard as real risks to me and my neighbours who keep chickens, ducks, and geese. Will a microchip really help me if my chickens get sick? I don't think so. I do think that they would find themselves on a bonfire without benefit of barbecue sauce pretty damn fast in that case.

I have a personality defect such that I really don't like people micro-orchestrating my life and I hate to see it happening to others. I can see this kind of effort on behalf of the USDA causing infinite problems for other people who enjoy horses or who breed parrots as I do. I can see a growth in bureaucracy in the US government to enforce more useless laws that restrict the activities of those unfortunate enough to live in the Land of The Free. I wonder what effect such a legislation would have on good people such as my sister-in-law who runs a raptor rehabilitation program in Ojai, California. Would she have to somehow find a way to find the funds to microchip the owls and eagles that come through her center to be healed and released?

This world isn't such a huge place, despite what people have long thought. Ancient humans travelled distances on foot or with the help of donkeys and horses that we modern softies find incredible. Migratory birds and insects have been capable of moving between continents for eons...a fact that most of us have only just clued into courtesy of the current paranoia regarding avian influenza. Viruses and such have been migrating around the world for ever....modern man has just figured this out and it scares the hell out of him.

How I Spent My Christmas Holiday

The holiday season in Egypt was really a HOLIDAY season. Christmas on December 25th was just the start of festivities. A week later we celebrated New Year's Eve with a barbecue and bonfire, and another week later on the 7th of January we had Coptic Christmas as well. AND to top it all off, Eid el Adha, the primary feast of the Muslim calendar started on the 9th of January. Many of the schools gave holidays from just before Christmas to after January 15th this year. Not bad if you want to take it easy, but pretty terrible if you are trying to do something like finish a house. The final present for us, though, was the premature birth of our baby gamoosa, named Hawanum bint Gameela....a name longer than she is.

For myself, the holiday season was a mix of work and fun. My daughter arrived Christmas day from New York to spend three weeks here getting her Egypt fix. I met her at the airport and we drove to my son's where an impromtu exchange of gifts took place. All of us being on short rations financially, things were kept very simple, but I did get a lovely small set of speakers to use with my laptop and iTunes. From there it was on to a friend's home nearby for an English Christmas dinner with her children and their Egyptian friends. Many of these young people have been spread all over the globe studying or working and hadn't been gathered together for a number of years. It was a wonderful evening of laughter and joy....followed by 24 miserable hours for my daughter as a combination of exhaustion and evil airline food caught up with her and laid her very, very low.

From the 27th of December, I went into high gear with a week of visitors from abroad coming to me to add riding to their holidays. Every day for a week I scrambled out of bed in the early morning to feed parrots, pack saddlebags and pick up riders who wanted to experience the farmlands and deserts of Egypt on horseback. I must say that I've been unbelievably lucky with my clients in that they were all very enjoyable people to spend my days with. Most horse nuts like myself count themselves very lucky with every hour that they spend in the saddle. When you spend a solid week in the saddle, four to six hours a day, there does come a time when even looking at a horse can border on pain. I was wonderfully proud of my herd who behaved brilliantly carrying everyone safely through village and sand dune all week, and when everyone left we all took a break to relax.

We start up again with work in a few days with a 20 km ride for some of my regular clients and plans for a day ride to Dahshur for others. The new year looks to be busy and hopefully more prosperous.

Growing Up Female

Growing up isn't an easy task in any case. I certainly wouldn't want to do it again, and I recently got a new perspective on the process for some of our multicultural kids in Cairo. They say that birds of a feather flock together, so it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that many of my friends are foreigners married to Egyptians. Likewise, many of my children's friends are the product of such marriages. While I've always been aware of the stresses that I knew could plague such mixed culture families, there are some that I'd never noticed.

Until very recently, it was the law in Egypt that although the children of an Egyptian man and a non-Egyptian woman could be Egyptian, the children of an Egyptian woman and a non-Egyptian man were not. A recent change in the law allowed the children of Egyptian women (especially those married to Sudanese) the Egyptian nationality, enabling them to attend public schools instead of private ones and to take part in Egyptian society. It cannot be said that the legal and social position of men and women in Egyptian society is equal. Boys are granted infinitely more leeway in terms of behaviour than girls are...after all, they are just boys and boys will be boys. As the product of a North American upbringing, I never had that particular prejudice, and my son was stuck with very much the same rules and regulations as my daughter was subjected to.

So it was a bit of a shock to me to be talking with some of the young women here and to discover that many of them felt, as the products of mixed marriages, that they really had no future in Egypt for the next few years. These are well-educated, bright young women. They are the sort that Egypt really needs to provide some of the yeast in the dough, but they are very, very aware of the fact that they don't fit in. The girls spoke of the constant questioning of their "Egyptian-ness", a process that they've gone through for years, many of them not being traditionally Egyptian in their looks. They speak Arabic, but are often answered in English to their extreme annoyance. They have learned to be fiercely independent and self-contained from their trials as children who were not accepted as proper Egyptians....trials that many of their mothers have been unaware of over the years. For myself, my status as a definite and official foreigner was never in any doubt, and it never occurred to me that my children might not be accepted as "real" Egyptians.

Now in university, these young women are questioning the wisdom of coming back to Egypt after graduation to work here. They've been living independent lives in Europe and North America, and are all too aware that in coming home they will be subjected to the questions of relatives, friends, and simply nosy strangers as to why they might want to have an apartment of their own rather than living with their parents, or why they aren't interested in getting married right away. Furthermore, having had the mixed blessing of being raised in two cultures, they are not traditional Egyptian women in any sense of the word, and they do not necessarily see the reason for the traditional assumption that they will marry Egyptian men. This brings us back to the issue addressed by the recent legal changes.

If these half Egyptian young Egyptian women were to marry non-Egyptian men, what would their children be? They would like to be able to live in Egypt and see the possibility of their children being Egyptian as a positive step, but at the same time, they express concern at putting their children through the difficulties that they encountered regarding their own cultural identities. As it is, for the Muslim girls, it would be expected by the entire community and the legal system that their prospective husbands would convert to Islam, since the marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim man would not be accepted at all, nor would it be a legal union in Egypt. For girls who have been raised to believe that they can be all that their brothers can be, these restrictions are painful.

Most of the girls see a possibility of coming back to Egypt when they are perhaps in their 30's, to come back as adults established in their working fields. They don't want to forget about Egypt as their home, but want only to be accepted as Egyptians who aren't quite the same as other Egyptians.

Christmas in Egypt

In Canada today would be Boxing Day, the day after the Christmas dinner and gifts, the day that the big sales start. In Abu Sir it's nothing special really, just another beautiful winter day under a clear blue sky after a couple of days of watching the heavy grey clouds of the Mediterranean storms rolling down the valley dropping the occasional load of rain on unsuspecting Cairenes. That's not to say that there is no Christmas celebration here. On the contrary, we celebrate Christmas twice in Egypt, once on the 25th and again January 7th with the Copts and Eastern Orthodox churches. So with two Christmases, the time leading up to the beginning of Christmas on the 25th can be fairly hectic. This year was more so for the people who work at many of the foreign schools that give a Christmas break, because the break usually includes the two holiday dates, bringing students back on January 8th or so. But this year the Greater Bairam, Eid el Adha, starts around the 9th of January, bringing with it an additional week of holiday. So teachers and students were preparing for an extra long Christmas break this year.

We don't have the massive Christmas shopping push from stores here, however, and you don't find the stores more crowded at this season than any other. Christmas shopping in Cairo has its own flavour. Part of the season has been a series of Christmas bazaars (or bizarres, as you choose) that are held in various places throughout the city. These support local charities from the income of the bazaar and many shoppers prefer to do Christmas shopping that also helps other people. I have been a patron of the Maadi Women's Guild Bazaar since we moved to Cairo. In fact, when we lived in Alexandria, I knew people who would travel to Cairo to attend it as well. The Maadi Bazaar is held at Cairo American College, the school my children attended, and the students and teachers take an active part in fundraising with games for the children attending the bazaar. The football field is usually covered with tables for vendors, part of them commercial vendors and part of them are charitable organisations who raise funds by selling handcrafts and other items. Here you will find bold printed cotton products with Sudanese drawings printed on them, delicate crocheted table cloths, detailed embroidered hangings depicting village life from Upper Egypt, wooden furniture crafted by mentally handicapped students, applique work and quilting from the recycling center for the Zebeleen in Mokattam, a wide array of items that make lovely presents, especially when taken on a visit back to North America and Europe.

The commercial vendors are worthwhile as well and part of their income goes to the Guild for the donations to charities. Some of the regulars are the old book salesman who carries wonderful old copies of books, some of them published in the past century, for those who are addicted to things readable, or the amber man who sells silver and amber jewelry...hard to resist. The commercial tables are often a chance for someone with a new product to give it a try with the public. In the past I've found a skilled maker of wooden toys selling ingeniously carved objects sturdy enough for children but smooth and beautiful enough for adult tastes. This year I bought some locally prepared chutney that may find its way into the supermarkets later if the response was good enough.

The European Bazaar is another Christmas bazaar held at the Nile Hilton every year, and the participants there are the embassies of the countries of Europe. They bring in shipments of handcrafts, foods, and beverages from the father/mother land and sell these to expatriates who are longing for German knackwurst, Italian panetone and Chianti, Russian nesting dolls, or English sausages. The proceeds from the bazaar again go to charitable organisations to improve or continue their services. The organisers of these bazaars look through the various organisations working in Egypt to find those who are in need of funding and also really performing a necessary service. Significant amounts of funding go to health services for the poor, orphanages, schools for children with special needs, shelters for women and so on.

The other place that I like to do some Christmas shopping is in the smaller shops that I know in Maadi that carry interesting pottery, art and jewelry from local artisans. One of my favourite shops is one called Norag run by a close friend of mine, Mai Greis. Mai has an eye for art that is truly gifted and one can often find wonderful gifts there for almost anyone. She's working on a website for her place and hopefully sometime in the future will be online. She carries pottery from the Fayoum school, wooden and stone carvings made by Bedouin sculptors from the oases, handpainted and sewn Egyptian cotton and linen clothing designed by another friend Marie Claire who divides her time among desert safaris and her artistic endeavours, as well as the odd piece of furniture designed by Mai. Every time I go into Mai's shop I find something new and fascinating.

I stopped by a week or so before Christmas because Mai called me to tell me that she was hosting an exhibition of jewelry made by two women we know. Suad Raja has been a friend of mine since the early days in Alexandria when she was a new mother of her daughter Najla and was teaching belly dancing in my living room to a group of other mothers who spent part of the morning working up a good healthy sweat learning to shimmy and twist to the beat of the tabla and the other part of the morning collapsing in hilarious laughter at our own efforts. We are now both much older and less flexible with grown and nearly grown children, but when I see her in my mind's eye I don't see the silver that highlights in her curly black hair (just as it does my own). Suad began designing jewelry based on the traditional Yemeni silver of her youth while Najla was still very young and is the owner of a successful company, Sheba Jewelry, www.shebajewelry.com, based in Cairo but establishing a branch in the US as well. She now commutes between the Washington DC area and Cairo. The other artist, Maie Yanni, worked as a doctor before her children were born, but found that being a mother and a doctor at the same time wasn't very easy, so she decided that it was better to do one thing well than two things not so well. Wanting an outlet for her ideas and creativity, she began making jewelry for herself out of common objects such as fine bone and shell buttons, ribbons, and bits of silver wire. It takes a moment to realise that the lovely necklaces are in fact made from such everyday things as buttons. As friends eagerly bought her pieces, Maie has developed a following which now includes the young friend of mine who received a lovely sea green pendant.

And what did I get for Christmas? My son decided that it was time his mother had a decent set of mini-speakers for her iPod and computer, so he picked up some on a recent business trip, and my daughter arrived yesterday afternoon with a copy of Temple Grandin's book Animals in Translation. But the best present of all was the time spent in the company of my two children in the home of my friend Jo with two of her children (along with a few other people's now grown offspring) enjoying a traditional English dinner of ham, turkey, Christmas pudding and a lot of laughter. For all of you, I wish the best in the holiday season and the new year. Here is a special image of a winter sunset over the desert to remind you of the joy of the intangibles that we are given, the gifts that mean so much more than anything that can be wrapped.

Definitely Book Of The Month

I stopped by Diwan, a lovely bookstore in Zamalek, the other day when I ventured into town for some reason that I've already forgotten. Stopping at Diwan is like stopping at a chocolate factory for me. I am a serious book addict with a fairly serious library of books by and about Egyptians and Egypt. My visitors love it because they can read to their hearts content about pyramids, Mamelukes, early exploration of the Nile, whatever. Anyway, I found myself poking through the shelves and I ran across a book by Dr. Leila Ahmed, the first professor of Women's Studies at Harvard Divinity School. The book, A Border Passage, is her autobiography and reminiscences of her childhood in Cairo during the change from British rule to Nasser's government. To be quite blunt, it is one of the best books I've read in years.

Dr. Ahmed has also written Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, a book that I haven't read yet, although it is now on my list. A Border Passage is lyrical, with the music of Egyptian life a theme that flows comfortably and seductively throughout her autobiography, which explores many of the issues of growing up female in Egypt. Some of the issues faced in growing up during the 50's and 60's have changed for women in Egypt, but many of them are the same. Watching my own daughter identify and deal with them as she grew up here was both interesting to me and daunting at the same time. With a Canadian mother and an Egyptian father, she had to invent her own culture as she grew up, since the two didn't always synch well. My husband was a product of the same culture as Dr. Ahmed, a culture that did value males over females, and that allowed males more freedom of action than females had. On the other hand, I was raised by a father who felt that it was important for both the boys and girls to know how to cook, sew, change tires on a car, fix a broken toilet, pitch a tent, and catch a fish. Although I made it clear from day one that there would be no difference between the rights of our son and our daughter, this was a point that had to be brought home more than once. Leila Ahmed's family was both ordinary and extraordinary and made it possible for her to study abroad at a time that such a course was not so common for young women.

I spend a lot of time with women of many backgrounds and social classes. My seventeen year old housekeeper from the village can't read or write, and her mother died about five years ago followed shortly by her father, leaving her an orphan. She's now engaged to be married to a young man from a neighbouring village, a skilled groom working for friends of mine. Before she became engaged to Gaber, she asked my advice as to his suitability. Gaber is a polite, hard-working young man with whom I could see no problems, so my advice was that he would probably make a good husband. Although my heart cringes at the thought of a seventeen year old getting married, she's already been supporting herself for the past three years and is well past the usual age of marriage in the villages. When she marries, she will stop working for me, but has promised to arrange for a friend of hers to come to help out in my house. Her friend is also married but also has children and I suppose has realised the necessity of extra income in her family.

Every woman has a story. We will recognise ourselves in parts of the story and find new truths in other parts. We will enrich our own lives by learning of the lives of others. A Border Crossing is a double blessing. Not only does it give us an experience of another culture, another country, and another time, but it does so with such beauty and grace that you will dread finishing the book as I do.

Just Another Pretty Face

A few weekends ago in November, from the 17th to the 20th, The Egyptian Agricultural Organization, the national Egyptian Arabian stud farm in Zahraa, held the National Egyptian and International horse shows, four days of some of the loveliest horses you could imagine.I went on the first and third days of the show, the days when the mares and fillies were showing because I'm very partial to the girls. The fact that I know many of the breeders who have spent their lives breeding and training some of these horses is a definite plus. It's always good to cheer for the horses of friends.

The history of the Arabian horse in Egypt is a long one. When the Arabs moved out of the Arabian peninsula early in their history of conquest that reached all of North Africa and parts of Europe, they moved with their armies on camels leading the horses that were used in the lightning raids on cities and towns along the way. The Arabian horse is one of the primary breeds in existence. They are small, fine boned, thin-skinned, and the originals were tough as nails. They had to survive on whatever fodder was available and, like their owners, on camel milk and dried dates when nothing else was available. One of the interesting characteristics of the Arabian horse is that it has fewer vertebrae than other horses, indication of how long the breed was isolated from the others. The Mameluke cavalry was famous for its horsemanship and the area where I am living now was once the horse farms for the Mamelukes. Like other famous cavalry regiments such as the Cadre Noir of France, or the riders of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, the riders developed stylised versions of the war moves of the horses into a form of equine ballet. Known as the dancing horses of Egypt, these horses move in time to oriental music with movements similar to those of the high school of dressage. One of the favourite accompaniments of the horse shows in Egypt is a performance of the dancing horses, which often culminates with the horse sitting like a dog and offering a leg in salute. In battle, a horse that could sit or lie down on command could help an injured rider to escape the from the danger of the fight.

These days most of the Arabian horses in the world are not called on to perform in battle. A very versatile breed, they are used by ranchers to handle cattle, by endurance riders who travel hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles in competitions, and by people who just want a hardy, intelligent riding horse. Breeders of pedigree horses compete with them in horse shows that rate their beauty, as categorised by head and neck, topline, legs, and movement among other things. Arabs are known for their smooth, almost floating, trot. My own horses are not pedigree Arabs, but baladi, or countrybred, Arab mixes. They share the Arab intelligence and versatility as well as the small size...all the easier to to get back on should one fall off, not that I do that much anymore.


Halter shows such as that at the EAO the other weekend involve some major financial considerations. The mares and stallions that produce prize winning foals in the international shows often have price tags equivalent to the value of an expensive home in a good neighbourhood. I've personally met foals valued at half a million dollars each. Pretty impressive and way, way, way out of my budget. They are works of living art, these extraordinary creatures. They float over the ground and seem never to touch the grass, looking out at the world with wide dark eyes that seem to say to everyone watching them, "Well yes, I am utterly beautiful. Of course you are enthralled."

Some people are silly enough to think of horsebreeding as a business. For the very rare breeder, it is a business, but for most people it is an extremely expensive hobby. The investment in the buildings, land, and livestock to start breeding is enormous if you want to compete at the upper levels right away. Many of the successful breeders have been at it for over forty or fifty years now. Meanwhile, if you happen to lose a good broodmare, something that is all too easy, the profits of a year or two can go down the drain in a matter of minutes. Nevertheless I do enjoy watching these people competing with their lovely creatures, though not quite as much as I enjoy riding my own mongrels.