Signs of Spring

RemoteControl.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

I've been carrying my camera for months to catch this photo, but the weather has been too chilly until recently to encourage this quintessential countryside means of travel. Now that the afternoons are warmer, I see the farmers on their way home from the markets sleeping on their carts while their faithful donkeys take them home on remote control.

It seems a bit odd to speak of seasons in a country that has sunshine most of the year, especially as I correspond with friends in North America who have been truly socked with evil winter weather this year. But we do have seasons and spring is well and truly underway. Night are still chilly enough to warrant a sweater or jacket, but the days are warm enough to make you appreciate a very cold beer. The mulberry trees are covered with new leaves and the tiny flowers that herald May's mulberry crop. Already we are estimating when we will be able to go out for our incrementally slow but satisfying mulberry rides in the countryside, when we park our horses under each tree to pick the berries that are just out of our reach on foot. The horses like the leaves and have learned that if they are cooperative they are likely to get some of the berries as a reward.

Many visitors to Egypt get the idea that people here have no sense of urgency, punctuality or time. My donkey cart sleeper probably exemplifies this stereotype. His donkey plods him homeward as he sleeps oblivious to the passing traffic. Being on the upward swing after a nasty bout with an intestinal bug, I have a rather different view. Most of the poorer people in this country deal with the exhaustion caused by parasites and infections on a daily basis. They need to sleep whenever they can just to go on, and despite the weariness that aches in bones and muscles, they still get the fields hoed, weeded and harvested. My hat goes off to them. It isn't easy.

The other thing that influences this stereotype of the time-blind Egyptian is an interesting paradox that my yoga teacher (an American environmental lawyer who changed careers years ago) commented on during a class recently. She was working us through some stretches and noted that one of the most frustrating things about living in Egypt is the way that when you plan to do A,B, and C some morning, W, K, and Y occur spontaneously and demand immediate attention. This, of course, blows your carefully crafted North American schedule right out the window. You are behind in completion of A, B, and C even if you've managed to handle both W and Y. When I considered the fact that this being true for ex-pats signals the fact that it is even more true for locals, the domino effect of too many events in too small a time span is considerable. Chaos reigns supreme and adaptability is the order of the day.

Just last week a friend of mine in Portugal sent me an email with some of Einstein's best quotes. One of them was: "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." Think about how many times people mention the timelessness of the Egyptian countryside, the pyramids, Egypt itself. See? There's our problem. Egypt is timeless, so there is nothing at all to stop everything from happening at once and all too often it does.

Everything Old Will Be New Again

Trash Collection, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

Trash is a problem anywhere. In Egypt there have been various solutions to the problem, none of which have really worked that well. First, to understand, we have to talk about the parameters. There are over 70 million people living in a narrow strip of arable land along the Nile. The rest of the country is desert, other than the oases which harbour a small percentage of the population. So we could get rid of our trash in the desert, right?

That was the theory in the past, along with the habit of tossing it into the river to carry off to the sea. But 70 million inhabitants create a lot of garbage and the river can't handle it anymore, not if it is going to provide water for the Delta downstream from Cairo. The problem with taking it out into the desert is the fact that there are no roads out there, other than the roads that are leading to new settlements, and the people in the new settlements don't want garbage there either.

Cairo, with a population of about 20 million, has had a trash problem for millenia and even now we have a group of professional trash recyclers near the city who have made their lives around the collection of garbage and the resale or reuse of usable items. They are known as the Zebaleen, or the garbage people, and the life they lead is not a very pretty one, but the job that they do is essential and well done. They will be seen throughout Cairo and the surrounding areas with their donkey carts picking up the trash to be taken off to their settlements near old Cairo. Cloth will be recycled into rag kilims and paper into recycled paper. Glass finds its way back into the souq where hand-blown vases, glasses,and dishes of lovely shades of blue are sold to visitors.

There are NGO's working with the Zebaleen to help them to market their recycled products, to run schools and hospitals for them to improve the quality of their lives and so on. There are also foreign companies that are hired to collect trash in large trucks that carry the trash out into the desert where it is dumped in pits and left to rot...or to blow away in the first high wind. On the whole, I believe that the efforts of the Zebaleen are the more effective. We have the Giza dump just over a hill in front of my home. Years ago it was much further away, but over time it is creeping closer and there are days when the ripe odor of rotting garbage wafts over the desert where we love to ride. Not nice at all.

My neighbours have to pay to take trash to the dump and being farmers with very little disposable income, this is a problem. They try to burn most of their trash, but some of it ends up in the canals. The wealthier inhabitants of my neighbourhood pay for monthly trash collection in which our households subsidise collection for our less wealthy neighbours, but the Giza dump is not my idea of a solution to the problem. The farming areas where there are no shops to distribute plastic bags and packaging are noticeably cleaner than the areas closer to access to the "modern conveniences" like a styrofoam tray for your cheese. I drive the grocery store clerks nuts when I suggest that I don't really need one.

One of the newer trends that I've noticed is that some of the farm families have started their own recycling plants where they collect plastic materials for sale to other companies. Not very pretty or picturesque, but it's getting the job done as well. Sometimes the most effective solutions aren't so pleasing to the eye.

Time Out

Resting in a mosque, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

Sometimes the world is simply too much for all of us. I've been feeling rather rotten lately, achey bones, tired, slightly nauseous...could be the flu. But there's no fever and it has been going on for a long time. So I went in to the doctor who ordered up the usual battery of blood, stool, and urine tests. Living in the midst of bacterial reality and sharing my space with a variety of unsanitary beings ranging from chickens through donkeys to tortoises, my personal bet was some sort of intestinal parasite. Logic, right?

The results came back and my doctor, a bright young woman who studied medicine at Boston University Hospital ruled out parasites. She also ruled out sugar, red meat and cheese since my lipid profile wasn't all that it should be. But for the fatigue and generally fragile feeling, she wasn't sure and tomorrow morning I'll have another blood test to see if it is some kind of endocrine problem relating to the adrenal glands. That's really all that I need, since my thyroid died about 21 years ago from an auto-immune disorder, but that event is what she's holding out as evidence that I may be seeing a replay with a different gland. Terrific.

On the other hand, it could just be stress. My first reaction to that was "Impossible! I've reduced the stress in my life enormously over the past year." But on thinking out loud with her, I realised that although I'd reduced it, I still had way too much going on in my life for it to be truly peaceful.

The day before my appointment, for example, I got up early to feed the birds and prepare dog food. Then I picked up a neighbour whose car isn't working so that we could go grocery shopping 20 km away in Maadi. I stocked up on necessary items with special thought to the fact that I had to do my weekly bird bread batch, and I was lucky enough to collect about 10 kg of veal bones, the big heavy leg bones, for the the dogs. When we were through, we dropped by my son's apartment where we picked up three of his friends from New York who were visiting Egypt and leaving the next day.

My son had asked me to do the pyramid and shopping tour with them while he was at work,and seeing as they are all really nice kids, I'd agreed. We piled Don, Annie and Ian into the car and headed for Abu Sir, where groceries and neighbours were unloaded, horses were saddled, and they were taken out on a round of the countryside and desert to see the pyramids of Abu Sir up close and personal. The horses were wonderfully calm, despite the fresh cool breeze that just invited a gallop (these kids were non-riders), and everyone had a great time.

The visitors dismounted with varying degrees of wobbly legs and they were piled into the car again for a dash to Giza where the plateau would close at 4 pm. We had three of the rat terriers in the car with us, which made for an interesting conversation at the gate of the plateau. "Dogs are not allowed here, ma'am." "Yes, I know and they are going to stay in the car." "But why did you bring them then?" "They were just here. It wasn't a decision." So the RT's and I did the tourist guide thing, driving around the plateau as the kids hopped out to gaze, gawk, and take the obligatory pictures against the huge stones.

Once we'd finished the Giza pyramids, we headed back to the house where at 4:30 pm, it was way past time for lunch. Quick sandwiches, birds and dogs fed, and we headed south along the road to Dahshur so that they could see some more unspoiled countryside and then come back through the desert to see the pyramids in Dahshur and around Sakkara. Once it's past four, you can't get into the areas on the road because they close the gates, but if you know the desert and have a decent jeep, that is no obstacle.

The lake was gleaming in the late afternoon sun and was appropriately impressive with pastoral scenes of sheep grazing beside the pools while children played the ubiquitous football on any flat spot they could find. The sun setting behind the Bent and Red pyramids was totally photogenic and the empty sand just invited the jeep. We zipped around the desert stopping for photos, climbing this hill for a look and that butte for the view, making it to the exit from the Country Club just after sunset while we still had enough light to see by.

Now back to Maadi with a pass by a selection of stores for trinket buying (a good two hour procedure) and finally to my son's to drop everyone off. By the time I got home it was after midnight and the bird bread wouldn't get baked until the next day. I fell into bed gratefully.

She's right. I do need to slow down, but there are always so many things to do and some of them are so enticing. So right now the sofa is enticing me and I'm going to take a nap.

The mosque in the photo is the huge one at the Citadel in Cairo that was built by Mohamed Ali in the mid 1800's as a copy of the Grand Mosque in Istanbul (the former Byzantine church of Ayia Sophia). I've always loved the peace of the space inside this mosque.

And The Rains Came

Stranded in a Taxi, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

Early March is not supposed to be wet. Early March is when we have some sandstorms, some wind, some warm but not hot sun, and some cool nights. What we got last night was wet. REAL wet.

I was riding with some friends about noon and we were commenting on how warm it was for March. All of us were riding our rehabilitation cases, so it was the countryside for us with the firm footing that the horses who are coming off of tendon problems need. On our travels we ran into a neighbour who commented that we could relax because it was supposed to rain the next day. Rain? Looking into blue skies. Rain? No way. We finished our ride and went home where the electricity that had been nonexistent all day decided to come on just in time for me to prepare the bread for my parrots and take a shower before heading off to Mme. Wigdan Barbare's Shams el Asil stud just down the road for a celebration of her eighth generation of Egyptian Arabian horses. Dany is an old friend and one of the foremost breeders of Arab horses in the world, so this was an occasion that I wouldn't miss for anything. (http://haramlik.blogspot.com if you want to see)

I got back in time to feed the parrots their freshly baked bread, a concoction that I've worked out to ensure that they have the nutritional necessities. It's a mixture of soaked sorghum, black-eyed peas, whole wheat, pasta, vegetables (this time pumpkin, broccoli, hot peppers, and beets) pureed in a blender with whole eggs including shells, tahini, sunflower oil, peanuts, shredded coconut, and corn meal that I bake for about 3 hours in a low oven in 5 kilo batches weekly. I have the fattest sparrows in Egypt living here.

I got the creatures all fed and on a whim took another shower to wash my hair, figuring that it would be enough of a rush in the morning to get to yoga. A brilliant whim because about half an hour later the sky went black and the hounds went crazy when thunder and lightening crashed overhead. The heavens opened and....the power went out again.

Whenever it rains here, the main grid for us farmers dies. Whatever the weakness is, we know that no one is going to fix it until the rain stops for fear of electrocution. I can't blame them. So it was time to light up all the candles and work on a book outline until my laptop died, which it did about 9 pm. Nothing to do then but go to bed like the chickens. The dogs, needless to say, were a great deal less than thrilled that the garden was quickly turning into a swamp.

This morning I woke to a steady drizzle interspersed with more serious rain. Wonderful. Still no power and I was so happy that I'd washed my hair the night before. I fed the parrots and the chickens quickly before yoga, ignoring the indignant looks of the chickens who were wading in puddles left by the night's precipitation. As I left for yoga, I noticed that there were fresh skid marks leading from the road to the canal. I suspect that the rain exacted its toll on our country drivers. My usual 20 minute drive into Maadi turned into almost an hour as the traffic slowed to a crawl to slosh through pools of muddy water that reached to the middle of the tires or above. Thank heaven for a jeep. Not everyone was so lucky as the photo attests.

The power finally came back on about 4 pm today, not before I had time to bring my water to wash dishes from the hand pump and heat it. It was an interesting exercise, one that many of my neighbours do on a daily basis. I couldn't refrain from a cheer when the lights in the kitchen came back on. I don't think that I'm really cut out for a frontier life. At least I never got around to mopping the floors yesterday. Now that would have been a frustration.

Separations

Dave and Michael in Los Padres, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

I woke up early this morning knowing that I had to compose a business letter to be revised by my advisors for my airline. Not a nice way to start a day. Taking a bit of dry dog food out to the porch to distract the canine members of the household, I stepped out into a world of pearl mists clinging to the palms and a semi-warm stillness that took me back to schoolday mornings of my childhood in Ojai. Now a resort destination an hour or so north of Los Angeles, when I was growing up there, Ojai was still primarily an agricultural valley tucked into the mountains behind Ventura. With a massive population of perhaps five thousand in the entire valley, it was quintessentially rural. Massive oak trees grew in the middle of roads with impunity and the asphalt was lined with broad dirt shoulders for the equestrian traffic. My neighbours here have trouble imagining a place with so few people since the "villages" of Sakkara and Abu Sir contain a population of close to fifty thousand. There's rural and then there's another type of rural.

One thing that I've never talked about has been the fact that when you live on the other side of earth practically from family, you miss them. My brothers and half sister live in California, ten time zones away. One of my brothers still lives in the Ojai Valley and whenever I've been able to visit there, I'm struck by the beauty of the place that I grew up in. A rift valley surrounded by mountains covered with sage, cactus and the fragrance of the desert foliage, Ojai has preserved the wonderful oak trees, orange orchards, and parks of my childhood. There are times when I'm tempted to go home, but I don't think that it would work, and not just for financial reasons even though they are very strong. The home that my parents bought in Ojai in the early 60's for USD 18 thousand is still standing, a small California redwood bungalow, but it would sell for over half a million today.

One of the issues that I had to face when I chose to stay on in Egypt after Diaa's death was that of choosing to live so far away from my family (as opposed to his) and the friends that I'd accumulated over the years in Canada and the US. But the reality of the situation was such that even had I gone back to our home in Toronto, I would have been separated from my brothers and sisters. One of my sisters lives near Chicago, making her the closest geographically to Toronto, but the rest of my siblings live in California, which isn't close to Toronto however you measure it. In fact, I've been separated from my family a great deal since I moved from Vancouver on the west coast of Canada to Ontario in the middle of the country.

In Egypt it's almost impossible to separate from one's family in any serious way without leaving the country. While Egypt looks large enough on a map, the actuality of a narrow river valley in the Sahara desert means that there are 70 million people crammed into less space that there is in California, I would imagine. Irrigation and desert reclamation have expanded the inhabited area of the country in recent years, but most people still live within twenty kilometers of their siblings and parents. It isn't unusual for a countryside family to set aside a plot of land on which they build a house that ends up being the base of an apartment building with floors for the children and grandchildren. When you don't have the room to build out, you have to build up.

That doesn't get around the fact that I do miss my brothers and sisters. My parents have been dead for some years now as has my father's sister, my only relative on his side of the family. My mother's family in the UK is closer to me in Egypt than they were when I lived in North America, and they've found Egypt to be a lovely vacation destination, so I see them off and on. I have a fantasy that when I win the lottery or something I will invite my siblings over for a Nile cruise together. I've never been on one and I'm sort of saving the experience.

The younger generation, my nieces and nephews, have been to Egypt to visit. My brother Dave and his wife came with their children in the 90's for Christmas one year. We had a wonderful time together and Diaa took time off work to be in Luxor and Aswan with us. Dave's daughter Jennifer joined us for a summer when she was fifteen and needed a break from a destructive social scene in California, and then she came again on graduating from high school. Diaa and I paid for each of the kids to visit Egypt after graduation as our graduation present to them. Her brother Nick came one summer and my sister Sue's son JP was here the same summer as Jennifer and then again the following summer to work with Diaa briefly while on break from college. Both Jenn and JP are parents themselves now, so I guess I'd better start saving for the next batch of graduation presents.

I've been a wanderer for most of my life, moving from southern Calfornia to the San Francisco area and then on north to Vancouver. From there my path took me east to Toronto and further east to Egypt. There is always the bittersweet pang of leaving loved ones goodbye to be combined with the anticipation of new faces to be met. There will always be mornings in Sharm when the salt tang of the sea brings me back to the dawns that came every spring in Vancouver when you knew that winter was over because all of the streets smelled as though the sea had washed through them during the night. There will be nights when the velvet softness of a breeze off the desert brings back other desert nights from my childhood so far away. Like small jewels with sharp edges that can also cut, I tuck these moments away to treasure.

Got The World On A String

Tying horses in the desert, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

Interesting past couple of days. I thought that weekends were supposed to be when people unwind. But somehow for me that hasn't been the case for a while. Last weekend was a crazy trip to Sharm el Sheikh for business and an airshow, only to lose my old dog Stella while I was gone.

This weekend there was the National Egyptian Arabian Horsebreeder's Association halter show on both Friday and Saturday at the Club just down the road. We had gorgeous weather for sitting around looking at pretty horses, and I actually did it for about 3 hours Friday afternoon. They were pretty but I doubted that a lot of them could have done the work that mine had to on Saturday morning. Saturday morning is the time that my regular riding clients come to go play in the desert and today the trip was about 35 km to the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur.

Thursday was so dusty that I could barely see the desert from my front door. There was just a grey haze with a few greyer palms almost bent double from the wind. Naturally, I was mopping my floors. That is, after all, just the thing to do on a day when half of the Sahara is blowing past your windows. We were worried that the ride on Saturday wouldn't be possible. The horse show probably would happen even if it were the last day on earth.

But Friday and Saturday gave us the kind of weather that makes us say that we can't imagine living anywhere else in the world. After an hour and a half romp in the desert with my neighbour Janie, I headed off to admire high-priced horseflesh for a few hours. Just before the horseshow finished, a friend showed up with her daughter for a visit and some horse time at my paddocks. Patricia is in middle school and looking for fun things to do, so we did some riding lessons after dark in the paddock. I couldn't see much, but Bunduq cruised her through some exercises with flair. Horses see much better in the dark than we do.

The next arrival was another friend with a six year old son. A single mother, she works harder than almost anyone I know, but this evening an old friend was in town from Europe and I had offered to watch the son for her. Ali and I played a few games of Chowder, a fish-eating-fish game that is about at a clear six year old level, watched a bit of Winnie The Pooh and then it was The Bed Time. Six year olds think that they should stay up until the cows come home. Old ladies who could be six year olds' grandmother think that 10:30 is a wonderful bedtime, especially when they are getting up at 6:30 the next morning to feed the dogs and birds before going riding for about five hours. Old ladies are ultimately both more devious than six year olds and more stubborn, so they get to bed on time.

Riding to Dahshur was utterly freeing. I dropped all the stress and worries behind me for a few hours to search the sand on our route for interesting stone chips, fossil shells, flakes of mica and odd looking potsherds. We picked smooth spots for long canters, talked about archaeology, and discussed my clients' summer trekking plans. When we reached the Bent Pyramid, which is a kilometer or so south of the Red Pyramid, a driver was waiting with a cooler filled with apples, sandwiches and cold water, as well as a large bag of berseem and a bucket of carrots for the horses.

It was at this point that I decided to try to solve an interesting equestrian problem. In most normal environments in which people ride horses, there are objects that can be used to secure horses that are not currently being ridden. The best thing that we could find were some rocks that were too small or a pyramid that was too large. Therefore, being innovative, I clipped the three horses together figuring (correctly at least today) that the likelihood of three geldings all choosing to do the same thing at the same time was pretty slim. Well, it worked this time.

My Turn To Ask A Favour

At various times in the past, people reading my blog have suggested that I should try to publish in book form. One of those people was working in the industry and has given me some information on organising a book proposal. A prospective publisher would like to know who might be interested in buying my book, so to that end I would love it if some of you who read my blog would send me either a private email or write a comment to say a bit about who you are. (I have to admit to some curiosity myself actually.) Some of you have done that, but many post comments anonymously.You'll find my email address in my profile.

This project of writing about my life here is terrifying at one extreme and absolutely as exhilarating as a gallop in the desert at the other. I worked as a staff writer and editor for a few years on a monthly English-language magazine here in Cairo. It was really my first job as a writer and I was a bit amazed at how easy it was for me. I had a ball with The Egyptian Reporter, which is now unfortunately no longer publishing, as I had something new every month to explore and write about. I talked to scientists, rose breeders, horse breeders, biologists, businessmen and students about everything from bugs to gun control. When my husband died I was still working with them and in fact we'd started a children's magazine as well, but the demands of his life as taken up by me were too severe and I had to quit.

I stopped writing anything at all for about two years as I struggled through the morass that is Egyptian banking and business until one day I sat down and wrote a poem. It was quite naturally about grief and anger and dealing with a loss, but somehow it popped the cork on the bottle and the genie was out. For another year writing poetry kept me sane in endless board meetings where I was there only because I was the widow. Poetry let me open a window for a short look out and close it again when it got too scary or the psychic winds became too strong. Many of the things that I could write in that format, I don't know if I could ever write in prose. I discovered blogs in 2003, but it took a while for me to become comfortable with the form and habit of frequent posting. Now I'm something of an addict and my housework has been known to go to hell in a handbasket when I start writing.

Writing a book is going to be a new challenge. The blog helps me to remember what was going on in my life at various times, but I can't just publish the blog, so it is a total rewrite with a lot more organisation and information to sort out. Big job but I'm looking forward to it. And thank you for the emails in advance.