It Isn't Just Us!

Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com

And I thought that it was just us in Egypt! I love this article. I'm sure that the numbers would be higher than that here. We were awarded the highest number of fatalities per kilometer of road in the world, but then we don't have so many kilometers of real road here.

We Didn't Need This...No One Does

ABC News: Egypt Blast at Bazaar Kills 2, Injures 19

I'd been spending a non-riding day yesterday, as I did the day before, having come off of one of my geldings while riding on Tuesday afternoon. He stopped and spooked at something, I rolled over his shoulder and landed with an audible thunk on the hard-packed clay of the trail, and I managed to pull a couple of muscles in my back. They are getting better, but the hour and a half that I had to spend in the saddle (on another horse) right afterwards were no picnic. That's the price of running your own business when you are the main asset. Note to self: get another asset.

Anyway, not being able to ride despite the absolutely beautiful weather was annoying so I decided to chase down some rabies vaccines for my dogs and horses. Merri and I dove into the misery that is Pyramids Street to make our way through the buses, crowds and pollution that is Giza to the Pfizer store where I bought 50 doses of 3 year rabies vaccines for my horses and dogs and the dogs and horses of a couple of neighbours. On our way back I stopped at a pharmacy to buy one hundred 3 ml syringes (the pharmacist did ask what I needed so many for) to make sure that I had plenty for administration. Once back at the house, all the house dogs and the cat got shot, and then we all headed over for the paddocks to do the horses, dogs and donkeys. Gameela the Gamoosa was exempt. Rabies is a real problem in the countryside, and about 4 months ago we had something like 10 dogs die from it among the farm dogs, who are never vaccinated for anything. For this reason, I vaccinated my horses and donkeys, since they are out and about in an area where they could possibly be exposed.

All the animals shot, we headed back to the house to prepare some Chinese food for a potluck neighbourhood dinner with my Norwegian friend Pal, but the preparations were interrupted by another neighbour whose husband had just called to say that he'd heard there'd been a bombing in the Muski area of Cairo. We turned on BBC World, the main television news source in this household, to hear nothing. Big sigh of relief, maybe it was just one of those stupid rumours. But then I checked Google News online, which has to be one of the best sources of news on any subject anywhere in the world, and found to my sorrow that there had been a bombing. Damn.

This morning, the Google sources say that two people were killed and about 20 injured from a blast from a small bomb filled with nails. The area where the blast went off is a street that extends towards the Nile and downtown from the Mosque of Hussein in the area of the main bazaar. While Khan el Khalili is a tourism area, it is far more one of the main shopping areas of Cairo, a sprawling site that contains smaller sections for gold, brasswork, herbalists, clothing stores, fabrics, tools....whatever you might be hunting for in Cairo, you will find it in this part of town, and at a cheaper price than other places, so it is filled, packed, inundated with lower middle class and lower class Egyptians all the time. Tourists like to come because it is an extremely interesting place, and the bargains are real, but the main clientele is local. At least half of the people injured were Egyptians, and there are conflicting stories about the killed. One news story says that the daughter of an Egyptian shopkeeper was among the casualties, while other foreign reporters are only talking about a foreign man and woman. Friday is usually a very busy day in the Muski area, but I'm betting that the shopkeepers are not doing much today.

Naturally, most of the conjecture is around the topic of who would have done such a thing. Some people say that they saw a man on a motorcycle throw the bomb into a knot of people including tourists, while others say someone placed it on a motorcycle. An unidentified woman who was seriously mangled (and killed) in the bombing may have been a suicide bomber according to others. It's going to be a while before we have any idea. Does this herald a period of attacks against foreigners? I doubt it. Most of the problems that Egypt had in the past were part of a struggle between people who were in opposition to the government, specifically the security forces, and the police. Ironically, the government's response in the 90's was to insist on police escorts for tourists, which simply made the tourists targets even more than before. I just hope that we don't see an exodus of tourists from Egypt, as the hotels and resorts are currently packed with visitors. In the meantime, my two American visitors are feeling very safe here in the countryside, and I feel no danger to myself at all.

Now we will all wait to see how the foreign press covers the event, how the government investigates, how the tourism industry reacts. As far as I can see, this was one of those tragic random events that could happen anywhere. Even the "safe" United States has had pipe bombing episodes in the past. No one made it out to be part of a sinister plot against Westerners or Easterners when it happened there. On the contrary, it was quite realistically described as a random act of violence by a deranged individual, just as most of them are. Suicide bombing is most surely an act of a deranged individual, one for whom despair is the overriding current in his/her life. Frankly, throwing a pipe bomb from a motorcycle does not seem to me to be the most balanced way of dealing with a problem either.

Egypt is utterly dependent on tourism. 99.9999% of Egyptians do not want to see anything happen to foreign tourists because a drop in tourism affects every sector of Egyptian life. The farmers get less for their crops if there is less demand. The manufacturing sector depends on purchases made by tourists or the demand of the hotel industry. The poor horse and camel men at the pyramids, as well as the souvenir sellers everywhere, are most directly hit. I would imagine that if the shopkeepers of Muski could get hold of who ever created that bomb, there would only be tiny shreds of whatever left in a matter of moments. No, we didn't need this at all.

Meeting New Faces

Hedgehog 3.25.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

Molly, the little blonde dog in the photo, was a rescue from a mountain in Greece where she'd been abandoned by owners who were not happy with her for whatever reason. My daughter and I were on holiday there, driving rather randomly around the southern mountains when we spotted her sitting forlornly by the side of the road near the office of a cave that we wanted to visit the next day. We asked the people in the office about the dog and were told that she'd been sitting there for a couple of days. Not really needing another dog since we had two already in Cairo, we decided to open the car door and if she jumped in, she would go with us. No fool Molly, she hopped right in and has been a family member for the past 10 or so years. Her abused past left her with psychological scars that will never heal and she's blind in one eye with limited vision in the other, so she and my daughter's cat share a back garden where they live in peace and quiet. Molly comes in to join a selection of the terrier pack at night, however.

A week ago a friend of mine brought by a hedgehog that her daughter had rescued from a pet shop. Hedgehogs are native here and occasionally caught and sold to people as pets. Despite the fact that hedgehogs are terrific insect predators, it was felt that having one wandering the house wasn't a good idea so Phredd lived in a cage where he really wasn't so happy, so he ended up in Molly's garden for a brief stay. He was invited for a longer one, but made his getaway after only a day. He was adorable with a long pointed snout, soft facial fur, button eyes and nose and big soft ears, but I'm sure that he's much happier catching the grubs in my neighbour's fields.

The Nile Valley is a rich environment for animals with the crops year round and we have a lot of visitors among the migratory birds that pass from Europe and Asia to southern Africa in the spring and fall. Like all parts of our damaged world, the valley was home to many species that no longer survive here. Many have been hunted to extinction, others have been sold as pets like Phredd the Hedgehog and the many Egyptian tortoises who are on the brink of extinction and almost never found in the wild. There is very little education of the public, however, on the need to protect our fellow inhabitants.

One of the ideas that I've been playing with for my land is to have a center where children from schools in the city can come to visit and to be introduced to the farm animals of the countryside. A few ducks, geese, chickens, turkeys, a couple of goats and sheep, a water buffalo, a cow, and some donkeys (some of whom are already in residence) will be the visual aids and I'm sure that I will collect a variety of individuals like Phredd to help teach the children about the diversity of life in our environment. Many people don't realise that foxes and weasels are common inhabitants of Cairo along with less desirable creatures like rats and mice and the ubiquitous feral dogs and cats. They all have a place in the ecosystem, however, and this place should be understood. Geckos, small delicate lizards with sticky feet that can walk about on ceilings and walls, are common in Egypt but they are often hunted by people who mistakenly think that they poison food with their saliva. I treasure the two or three that live in my house feasting on flies and mosquitos.

My sister in law in California runs the Ojai Raptor Center where she helps to mend injured hawks, eagles, and owls to be returned to the wild. She also has some that for whatever reason cannot be returned to wild living who accompany her on visits to parks and schools for educational talks about the raptors of the area. A similar sort of center would be a useful addition here, I think. And with all the animals I have already, who would notice a few more?

The Healing Power of Women

TracyDonkey.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

Preface: Alright, guys. I'm sure that some of you will be either put out or feel neglected, so let me state at the outset that I do have some very good supportive male friends. I have a terrific relationship with my son. So I am not anti-male, except in the cases of a couple of my ex-kennel rat terriers who never seem to learn that the house is not territory to be marked.

I find myself surrounded by some amazing women these days. Tracy, the blonde trying out donkey equitation in the photo, will be arriving this afternoon from Crete, where she has been spending a month working out plans for a new project. She will be joining Merri, a photographer who came to stay with me when I first moved to Abu Sir a year ago. Merri had been trekking through Greece and Turkey when an invitation to do some riding in Egypt sort of sidetracked her. Originally, she was going to be here for 10 days and return to Turkey, but the call of the saddle was too strong so she's staying on to mid-April.

Susan and Mona, the other two women in the photo, wander by with or without their sons as do quite a few other women. Most of us are single, whether through divorce or widowhood, and most of us have children at various stages of development. I provide a petting zoo, horseback riding lessons and the odd babysitting stint for the others, while they come to me with love and comforts that may be intangible or sometimes edible like chocolate.

Last year my Norwegian neighbour Pal named my house the Haramlik, "the women's house" in Turkish. It's well-named. It isn't exactly serene when the dogs get up to mischief, but it is a nurturing place. Hortense came over yesterday to feed my parrots and dogs, since I had to leave my car at the mechanic for the evening for minor repairs. When Merri and I got home she was still here, so we all sat down with a welcome cup of tea and some fresh peaches. Janie came with her books on herbal, nutritional, and other alternative health cares when I was knocked out by the e coli infection that had me feeling so exhausted. Kati and her daughter replenished me with apples and laughter on the weekends while Patricia is learning to ride with the patient Bunduq.

There is something very special about a gathering of women. We all have that nurturing aspect and when it comes together with a group of friends, the healing of all of us begins. We listen to each other's worries, suggest solutions, offer that underrated comfort hugs. There are simply things that we can share with each other that need little or no explanation with other women.

I do love my male friends, but I don't know if I'd survive without the women.

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.