Coming Back Into Focus

Being short a camera has been a terrible strain. I'm used to a lovely little Panasonic Lumix that fits into a pocket and is so easy to shoot. Then last week an angel called Angela dropped into Egypt and dropped a camera into my life. She had a week off work and had always wanted to come to Egypt, so she and a photographer friend of hers came and spent a week at my guesthouse. She liked my photos and hearing about my dip in the canal, brought along an extra camera that she'd replaced with a newer model. It's larger and more complicated than the Lumix, but I figure that I can learn to use it. I'm back in business, and who knows? Maybe they will even be able to fix the Lumix.

Well, this last week has been busy with showing Scott and Angela around my part of Egypt. Naturally, they wanted to see the pyramids at Giza, so we rented some camels and went out just before sunset to catch the last light on them. We'd already spent most of the day in the desert chasing sun and shadows around Dahshur, Sakkara, and Abu Sir under a gradually darkening sky. We met our camel man in Nazlit Semman and headed out onto the Giza Plateau along with all the other visitors who have someone to pay off the tourist police who are supposed to be keeping us all out, but who are actually making a living wage on the bribes to let us all in. This is a fine old Egyptian tradition. As we reached the top of the hill, that evil winter Giza wind tore into us leaving Angela and I with our teeth chattering while Scott shot the photos that he wanted to get.

It's amazing what a passion will persuade people to do. I'd been asked to cover the endurance race being held at Sakkara Country Club under the auspices of the Pan Arab games. Teams from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Libya, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE were to race 120 km in the desert in a series of five loops with vet checks at the club. Unfortunately, the start of the race was scheduled for 5:45 am, necessitating a 5 am wake up. Happily, there was excellent catering at the race and once the teams of riders got underway, we were able to find a good breakfast while waiting for them to finish the first loop. Endurance racing really is not a spectator sport. There isn't much to see of the racing part because the riders are very quickly usually stretched out over miles of trail, each essentially riding alone. Once they get back to the vet check area, the horse is checked to see that its pulse and respiration have dropped to normal, and then there is a half hour hold for the horse and rider to eat and drink something before setting out again. Exciting, right? I overheard one nicely dressed woman remarking to a friend that this was the first endurance race she'd ever seen and probably the last too. She'd never spent so much time in her life "watching horses get bathed." A major part of the preparation for the vet check is to cool the horse from its exertions in the desert to the point where its heart rate is low enough to pass muster.

At the end of the day, the UAE took team gold and the individual gold, silver and bronze medals...as expected. Qatar took the team silver and Syria and Egypt shared the bronze. Bed felt great after chasing from one end of the race area back to the press tent about a dozen times to update the progress of the race to a website for endurance riding. I was really proud of our Egyptian team for their performance and careful riding of their horses. They were riding home-bred and home-trained horses rather than the best that money can buy.

Yesterday was American Thanksgiving as well as the last day of Angela and Scott's visit. We played with the horses and Scott got some lovely photos of Shams playing with her herd...the dogs. She is now downing over a litre and a half of milk at a feeding and is eating crushed horse pellets and fresh berseem. She wanders around after the grooms, plays on the lawn with my driver, and curls up in the shade with her buddies the dogs. She doesn't seem to realise that she's a horse at all. After taking them for a quiet ride in the neighbourhood during which Scott only took 670 photos, we wandered over to some friends of mine who live nearby for turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, pumpkin pie and all the rest of the traditional stuffing appropriate to Thanksgiving. Early this morning we got to the airport to get my visitors back to the US and Scott left me with about three thousand photos of the race and the parts of Cairo that they saw. It's going to take me ages to see them all!

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

A Small Miracle

Last Saturday we had a small miracle happen at the farm. I've had two mares standing around becoming more and more rotund by the day. Everyone visiting had their own idea regarding whether Shabboura (Fog in English) or Lily (My Night in English) would deliver first. Well around 3 pm in front of the entire farm staff and about 5 visitors, Shabboura lay down in her paddock and proceeded to have a baby. Horses just don't do that. They like to have their babies in private as a rule. They wait until 3 am or some such horrible hour to foal. But not Shibs. No, she had to have an audience and plenty of attendants.

Foaling usually isn't a long drawn out process. For wild horses, it couldn't be because the mare and foal are at extreme risk during birth. True to form, it was only about 30 minutes from the first sign that she was having labour pains (puzzled looks at her stomach and flanks along with some sweating) to seeing the nose and front feet of the foal start to emerge. A couple of the grooms came to hold the foal's legs and then shoulders so that it didn't slide back during contractions. Once the foal was on the ground they helped to remove the placenta from the face, announce that we had a filly, and then move her to near the mother's head so that she could clean her up.

Shabboura's human audience were utterly enthralled by the birth. At some point I will have some photos from various real cameras, but I had to make do with my Nokia. Lily watched the birth very calmly from a corner and after the filly, who I decided to name Shams (Sun) had dried off Lula the mule and her buddy Jack leaned over the paddock fence to welcome her. When Diva had her filly about six months ago, Shabboura was the other mare in the paddock and Lula and Jack were just as interested.

We got the Shams to do the all-important early nursing that gives the foal immunities acquired by the mother, gave her an enema to move the meconium out of the filly and left mother and daughter together to get to know each other overnight in a quiet box. But the next morning it was apparent that all was not well. Shabboura was edgy, didn't want the filly near her, and there wasn't much available in the way of milk. We called a vet who came by later in the day, checked out Shabboura and told us that somehow she had a nasty infection in her udder and that the filly couldn't nurse from her mother. We'd started supplementing Shams' milk supply with goat milk, but most of the goats in the area are about to give birth and there isn't a huge supply. Some people will supplement with baby formula so we bought a few cans of a recommended brand and until we could get that out to the farm, we gave her some local skim milk from a baby bottle.

Shabboura was moved back to her paddock with Lily which is close to the grooms' room so that she could be monitored in terms of temperature and administration of some pretty hefty antibiotics. We felt that we could hardly lock poor Shams up alone in a box...since none of the adult horses are forced to live in them..so we constructed a small paddock right next to the boys' room. After creating a frame of rope, we moved in hay bales to build walls and then spread an thick layer of hay on the ground for a warm and comfortable place for the filly to sleep. The dogs very quickly decided that the hay was indeed a comfortable depth and moved in to help the filly sleep.

One of the hardest things about having a bottle fed baby is the frequency of feedings required to keep a small mammal alive. Shams needs about half a litre of milk every two hours or so, and I thank heaven for my grooms who are taking turns at doing it each night. They make up their bed on the mastaba bench that is next to Shams' hay paddock so that it's easy for them to get up to feed her the two bottles that are required. Waking up to feed her isn't that difficult. Shams can be pretty persuasive. She's figured out that humans are great because they provide food and that dogs can be both entertainment and warmth. This one is really going to be fun to raise.

Today we had some of the school kids in for a riding lesson and the grooms made sure that they had a bottle of milk to feed to Shams. She's not at all fussy who holds the bottle as long as they hold it. In a few weeks she's going to have to have another home, but it's possible that if the infection that Shabboura has clears up properly she will be able to go in with her mother and perhaps with Lily and her foal. We have a couple more paddocks under construction for this.

Shams is the sixth foal to be born here. All the others have been "normal" situations where the mare did most of the work for us. This is a new experience, because even if she should be able to return to her mother, Shams identifies very strongly with humans and dogs now, much more than the others ever did. I wonder what this is going to mean. Wadi, Fagr and Negma have grown up in the herd, while Nazeer and Nayzak were born in a boarding stable and lived with their mothers in boxes. Herd foals are much more socially adept, but the first two colts had a lot of paddock time with their mothers and the advantage of sharing an extra large box with both mares. This year's crop of foals is going to be something else.

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Keeping In Touch

Rebellious Arab Girl had an interesting post today. She suggested that everyone post about their favourite blogger and why this is their favourite. I have to admit to very eclectic tastes and the site where I saw the reference to her suggestion is one of my favourite sites for blogging: Global Voices Online. Technically, I suppose Global Voices isn't a blog, but for someone like myself who is interested in things all over the world, a site that collects blogs and keeps track of who is saying what where is invaluable. I also have a Google News alert set up to give me a link to every news article and blog that mention "Egypt", "Giza", or "Cairo", which drops a little email into my box that gives me pages of reading every morning. This arrangement has brought me travel blogs by people just passing through the area, keeping-in-touch-with-home blogs by people who are living in the Middle East temporarily, and of course some of the more mainstream blogs from Egypt, as long as they are in English. I find, however, that Global Voices still has more depth in the blogging field than Google when in comes to aggregation. So they have my vote for a favourite blog/blogging tool.

I was chided this morning by an email correspondent who was worried that perhaps something was wrong because I hadn't posted for so long...almost two weeks. Well, there was a minor bug that was slowing me down, and I'm finding myself very busy these days on the work front. I've been mostly working my riding trips by word of mouth and such. My website is out there and I get quite a few inquiries from there, but I haven't done much advertising. A week or so ago, however, a newspaper from the UK was doing an article on unusual vacations and they listed my farm. Free advertising is always nice, and this prompted quite a few people to contact me about riding here. Between my usual daytime work with horses, lessons, rides and such, plus correspondence at night, I've been neglecting the blog. The fact that I am still cameraless doesn't help either. I really like having photos to illustrate my posts. But hopefully that will change for the better soon and I will be back to my chatty self.

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

New Life For Old Weeds

To the untrained eye, water hyacinth is very pretty. Its big round leaves give way to lovely pale violet flowers that look for all the world like the hyacinths that used to bloom early in spring in my garden in Canada. They don't have the lovely scent as far as I know, but then leaning over a canal to smell a flower isn't the best idea at the best of times. Most of the canals here have the plant growing in them and periodically they are dragged out and left at the sides of the canals for wandering goats and sheep to eat. Besides being pretty, I've been told that the plant also takes up heavy metals in the water, which probably doesn't make it the best animal feed in the world. To be honest, the goats seem to only nibble on the freshest leaves and then only if there isn't anything better to be had.

The downside of water hyacinth is that a lot of water is lost to evaporation from the leaves and it clogs the channels of the canals so that the water doesn't flow freely. Beautiful or not, it is a weed. This morning I found an odd little item from the Shanhai Daily, a newspaper in China (bless Google News) that talks about a Chinese company coming to Egypt to manufacture furniture from the water hyacinth that grows in our canals. Apparently the weed itself is of superior quality in Egypt and the labour costs are low enough to make the investment a good thing. I must confess to being a bit stunned at the idea that a Chinese company thought that Egypt would be a nice cheap place to manufacture something. My second thought was to hope that someone puts some environmental safeguards on such a factory, not that Egypt is notoriously strict in that department, but China appears to be much worse. According to the article the manufacture of water hyacinth board does not involve the formaldehyde and other toxic chemicals that fiber board and plywood do. I'd want to do a bit more research before I take anyone's word on that, but if true, this all sounds terrific. We get rid of our weeds and have a new supply of wood for building furniture. One of the problems for furniture makers here is the fact that we have to import all of the wood, since we have no forests. It all sounds, on the surface, like a nice fit. Now let's hope the reality lives up to the press...but that's always the problem, isn't it?

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

A Soggy Horse Tale

The Nile Valley is crisscrossed by irrigation canals distributing water to the farmlands of Egypt. These canals sometimes extend through urban areas where pipes have been laid to contain a canal under a roadbed as well. Near the farm where I live, the canals have trails alongside them, making them a favourite place to ride my horses. Yesterday was Friday and I took the morning to go riding with a group of friends through the desert to the northern end of Sakkara village and then home through the farmland to the farm. The ride down in the desert was lovely. A light breeze kept us all cool and my young gelding Fagr was behaving beautifully, keeping up with the older horses and not trying to run off in the vastness of the Sahara.

As we moved into the farmland on our way home, we kept up a brisk pace to be back at the farm in a good time for my friend Cris to be home on time. Our track took us past families in the fields, most of them harvesting forage for cows and donkeys so that they could relax at home on the first day of the feast after Ramadan, which is today. The horses were happy moving down the trail that wound along a deep canal about midway between the two main roads in this area. We were in the middle of nowhere and delighted to be there.

Suddenly, we came around a bend and found that one of the farmers had placed a diesel pump on one side of the trail with the intake hose extending across the trail to the canal on our left. There was room to pass and two of my older horses being ridden by friends hopped the hose and passed safely. When it was my turn with Fagr (aka, Figgy), however, his left hind foot slipped on the edge of the canal and he slid into the 2 metre deep canal. Although I launched myself out of the saddle towards the path as I felt him slipping, I didn't make it and ended up submerged in enough murky water that I couldn't feel the bottom, not that I'd want to anyway. I discovered that Fagr is a very strong swimmer, strong enough to pull me along the canal until I got smart and dropped the reins.
The farmer whose pump had been parked at the trailside reached down and helped to haul me out of the muck and then we had to call to Fagr who was swimming in some bewilderment along the canal. He turned and emerged from the water slightly downstream and on the other bank. Another farmer took the reins and led him along the path to a point just down the trail about 150 metres. We were reunited, dripping and filthy, and I realised that my digital camera and my mobile phone were both in the saddle pack attached to Fagr's saddle. As he'd spent rather longer in the water than I had, I was not optimistic about their survival.

As it turned out, my pessimism was well-founded. Both the Nokia and the Lumix were willing to turn on after about 18 hours sitting and drying out, but their behaviour is very erratic. The Nokia won't dial things and keeps beeping at me randomly, while the Lumix opens the lens and then shuts it over and over. Very sad. And I'd just gotten the Lumix back from being serviced on Wednesday night. Panasonic took over a month to replace two motors inside that had been damaged by dust. Well, at least dust isn't the problem now but I'm hoping that I can convince them to work a bit faster this time.

So for a while, my blogs will either be accompanied by photos I've already taken and stored or they will be photo-less. That is the point of the shaggy horse story, and Cris was late as well.

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Listening To The Silence

My camera has been having some dust issues lately. What a surprise considering that it gets tossed into my bag anywhere I go whether on foot, horseback or in the car. I take it everywhere and there's dust everywhere in Egypt. After two years any digital camera would get a little sticky, so I took it into Panasonic in Nasr City, where, of course, the camera opened and closed perfectly. The guy at the service desk handed it back, saying that it was fine and was rather bemused when I suggested that it might need...GASP!...service. I walked out with a receipt for my beloved Lumix and a promise that it would cost between 50 and 500 LE and would be finished in ten days. Unfortunately but as usual, that was a month ago, and today when I called and totally lost it with the service department they told me that I would, inshallah, have it tomorrow. All of this is to explain the scarcity of visual aids. The pictures here are either older or were taken with my Nokia.

We are over halfway through Ramadan, well past the first part of the month when the general population of Cairo is going around the bend from caffeine and nicotine withdrawal. After a week or so their bodies are used to the idea that they will get their fix after sunset, but the late nights and the sugar highs from Ramadan deserts ae beginning to take their toll.

Today I had to do something that I try not to do during Ramadan. I drove myself into Maadi to take care of some urgent errands. The traffic wasn't really as bad as I'd imagined it might be, but it was bad enough. Between the Monib Bridge and the Autostrad, the flow slowed to a trickle and as I crawled along I could see the cause. A large truck was blocking the left lane (not necessarily the fast lane in Egypt) and behind it I could see a small car was rather smooshed against the concrete guard rail. People were standing around discussing the situation and there seemed to be no causualties, which was a relief. Just ahead of the truck was another car that had somehow been involved in the mess as well.

I don't know if anyone collects the statistics, but based on reports by friends of mine who don't have the option of holing up on a farm and just going places on horseback on dirt tracks, I'd be willing to bet that the accident rate goes way up during Ramadan. The temperatures have been in the low to mid 30's C (low to mid 90's roughly by that other measure), so dehydration is a real issue. Blood sugar rates that are scraping along the asphalt during the day skyrocket after iftar...as do the speeds of many cars. It really is not much of a surprise when people tell me how just in our neighbourhood there have been two hit and runs and one major head on collision in just the last ten days. I don't like to drive during Ramadan. I'd rather stay home.

One of my informants about traffic conditions came out to ride with me this evening. She's military, an fighter jet mechanic, and does a lot of driving between the base and Maadi where she comes on her days off. She rides as much as possible while she's here. I guess it's a good antidote for all that mechanical stuff. I suggested that she come out and ride with me over the iftar period to hear the silence of the countryside, so she came out about half an hour before iftar. The guys got our horses ready while I finished a riding lesson with a couple of small girls and we set out for the trail while they set out for iftar.

Iftar, the breaking of the fast, takes place just after the call to prayer at dusk. Half an hour before the call, there were still a few farmers working in their fields and a few stragglers urging their livestock homeward, but most of the fields were empty. Wonderful smells of garlic, onions and tomato drifted from the houses we passed and children were rushing in from playing outdoors. You never realise how much ambient noise a place has until it goes away, and the quietest time in Egypt is during iftar. It's one of the few times when you can be out in the countryside and truly be alone as long as you are not near someone's home. We ambled along enjoying the birdsong and waiting for the moment when we would stop hearing the trucks on the Mariouteya Road nearby. This is one of the major routes south and the steady rumble of trucks, buses and cars on it becomes a kind of white noise that you don't really notice until it goes away. Eventually that time comes when even the slowpokes have either arrived home or given up and the white noise is gone.

The call to prayer echoed from the mosques of the area and gradually a deep silence fell over the fields and canals. We were the only people out on the trail and every family we passed invited them to join them for iftar. We thanked them and continued our ride. The sky darkened and the palms became black outlines against the horizon. Closer to the farm a few cars were beginning to move about as families left their homes to visit friends. We were passed by one large blue dump truck full of kids who shouted greetings. I guess if the family vehicle is a dump truck, that's what you use. We did, however, decide to prudently avoid the larger village on the main road by the country club and the smaller one just past the entrance to the farm because of another fine Ramadan tradition that really doesn't go that well with horses...cherry bombs and bottle rockets. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valour.

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Egyptian Humour is Special

Hannah Allam's blog Middle East Diary today listed some great jokes that Egyptians tell about themselves. The sense of humour here is a special gift.

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani