I Never Thought Of Myself As Subversive

Asthmatic bronchitis and travel to see kids abroad have a way of keeping a person too busy to follow up on friends and the usual internet contacts. My eye was caught today by a USA Today blog post to the effect that it was dangerous to blog in Egypt today. Whoa Nelly! I had to follow that link.

The story that followed is one that is familiar to us here without the mention of the blogging so much. Alaa Seif al-Islam and a number of other young activists, many of whom happen to blog, were arrested (kidnapped is a more descriptive word of the process) in conjunction to demonstrations in Cairo for the independent judiciary and press. These young people have been very badly treated and with the resilience of the young are willing to keep at their activities. Americans of my generation will recall similar stories with regards to demonstrations against the US government during the war in Viet Nam. Many of the young people then were also subject to some pretty rough treatment by police who were more sympathetic to the military than the demonstrators. I point this out lest people are too quick to say, "But that would never happen here!" It did and it does. Government machines work to protect themselves everywhere.

There are links in the story that am posting from to Alaa and Manal's blog from Cairo and many other blogs, including templates for protests of the treatment of the demonstrators. Do follow and read. Do not imagine for a moment that you are free of the possibility of this happening to you, no matter where you live. This can happen to anyone.

Food For Thought With My Breakfast

I'm sitting in New Jersey having breakfast with a friend (tea with milk as in Egypt and leftover spinach quiche...not uncommon in Egypt as well) and checking my email. I have an arrangement with Google News to send me an alert for any news stories with the word "Egypt" or "Ojai" or "avian influenza" in them. The "avian influenza" alert is obviously to keep up on the situation, although my concern for my parrots is down to nothing. The birds that died at the Cairo zoo were ducks, geese, and chickens. Egrets, parrots and other birds were untouched, and it's highly likely that it was transmitted via the common habit at the zoo of buying cheap and dubious meat for feeding animals. Likewise, it likely came to Egypt via illegal poultry smuggling as they are finding in many other parts of the world. The "Ojai" alert is to check that my brother and his family haven't been either washed away in a winter flood or burned out in a late summer wild fire in the Southern California town where I grew up.

The "Egypt" alert gets me the most news reports, most of which I don't bother to read since they number in the high hundreds daily. I especially skip the annals of the football team in New Egypt, Illinois, (sorry, guys), but sometimes there are things worth a seriious read. This morning, this article by a freelance Canadian writer for Al Jazeera Online caught my eye. Al Jazeera is definitely worth a read, even if it isn't your cup of tea, just for its thought-provoking quality. I don't like to blog politics because I think that is highly available online. But this quote really stopped me:

"The idea that all Islamic fundamentalists are bent on the destruction of the West and its decadent lifestyle, reveals more about our view of ourselves as the centre of the world than it does about the terrorists and their motivations."

He properly notes that the primary victims of terrorism are usually the local population rather than visitors, but his comment that the real target might be those in the Middle East who try to bridge gaps between cultures is interesting. I suppose that maybe I should worry, but I don't. First I feel very comfortable in my social setting in the country...hey, most terrorists would get lost trying to find my place and as soon as they started asking directions, red flags would be flying all over the neighbourhood. And second, I somehow doubt that these guys read English-language blogs.

So I promise not to go all political while on holiday here. I'm thoroughly enjoying the lack of dust here and haven't had to take ANY of my asthma medications at all. I think that by the end of ten days, my lungs will have relaxed and gone back to a normal state. Time away from dust has always been the best cure for the asthma, since the inflammation has a chance to reside. I'm off to look at a possible apartment for my daughter this afternoon, a broom closet with a bathroom and corner kitchen for $820 a month...a cheap apartment in New York. The price one must pay for urban living...I couldn't do it but she is young and really wants to attend NYU for her graduate school. I unloaded the half suitcase of Egyptian cotton tshirts at her dorm room yesterday on my arrival. The world turns and now she asks for Egyptian products since they are cheaper and of better quality material than the local American.

I'm assured by email and mobile phone messaging that my creatures are all well, though the dogs are rather miffed. Poor Tracy is bearing the brunt, but only for ten days. Hope all of you are well.

Out of Desert Poverty, a Caldron of Rage in the Sinai - New York Times

It's pretty easy to sit and wonder what on earth could turn someone into a suicide bomber if you are sitting in relative comfort. Suicide, in itself, is difficult to comprehend for most of us. Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison has written an excellent and extremely readable book on the subject called Night Falls Fast that helps a great deal. According to her, suicide is essentially an act that is an expression of utter despair and hopelessness of a nature that most of us will be most happy never to experience. This despair and hopelessness may have its roots in a biochemical imbalance, as it would with someone suffering from severe depression. These are the suicides that most people are more familiar with. On the other hand, I recall talking to a psychiatrist friend of mine not long after my husband died, when I had banks and companies chasing me with open jaws, and expressing a concern that my longterm nemesis, chronic depression had resurfaced. My friend looked at me for a while and then told me not to worry. "It isn't that you are just feeling bad right now, Maryanne. The truth is that your life is perfectly horrible. There is a difference between depression and a totally unlivable life." He offered to prescribe something that would help me to make it through the rough times and made a point of telling me that when life got better I wouldn't be needing the help.

But what do you do when life simply isn't going to get better? When every door and window is locked and you have no hope of moving to a livable situation? I hate to say it, but I think I can understand and I believe that governments all over the world need to examine their policies to see that people are not cornered in the way that those who have committed suicide bombings are cornered. It's one thing when hopeless people kill themselves, a tragedy that harms everyone who loves them, but when they are so hopeless that they go out and try to kill others, who often have little or nothing to do with the original hopelessness, it is doubly tragic.

Imho-Who?

I had a chance to see one of Egypt's new jewels today. My friend Nathalie came to ride, and we decided to go to the new Imhotep Museum just inside the main gate of the Sakkara complex. I have a wonderful trail that wanders through the fields and ends at the entrance to the Sakkara antiquities area. In the past, I'd ridden up to the main gate with friends, been asked to pay the entrance fee and we'd gone in. If someone wanted to visit one of the sites, the others would hold the horses while the visitor looked around. Often we would leave through the desert to return. Lately I'd gone to the main gate and been refused entrance even when we offered to pay the fee with the guard saying that horses were a security risk. Considering that they don't have the trunk space of a Peugeot, I could never really figure that one out. Nathalie, however, has a diplomatic pass and no one said a word.

I'd seen the museum as they were building it below the hill that the cars climb into the Sakkara complex and had ridden past the construction site a number of times. This time we rode down the driveway into a carpark that was not very crowded. We were asked for Nathalie's pass a number of times, each time the official looking in disbelief at the horses. We found a kind soul who was willing to hold the horses while we checked out the new museum.

Double glass doors parted and we walked into a welcome wall of airconditioning. The museum is in honour of the pharaonic patron saint of the Sakkara pyramid and all the other pyramids, the architect Imhotep who designed the step pyramid for King Djoser so many thousands of years ago. Unlike the cluttered Egyptian Museum, the exhibits are sparse and for the most part well-labeled. The labeling process is still underway and we had to ask one of the employees to confirm our suspicions that the stone rods in the second picture here were in fact measuring rods. Now you know how they measured the pyramids.
Throughout the darkened rooms, glass cases of artifacts were lit to show the stoneware, the tools, the decorative objects and parts of some of the walls of the Sakkara complex. Some of the tools shown are essentially identical to those that I see workmen carrying today. The continuities in Egypt are both frustrating and charming.

One of the exhibits was particularly welcome to me. A couple of years ago the History Channel contacted me to supply them with horses for an episode of "Digging For The Truth". My horses appear (most beautifully I must say) in perhaps all of two minutes of the show, but at one point the narrator was interviewing Salima Ikram who was showing him the faience tile wall in the interior of the Step Pyramid. The interior is too unstable to allow visitors for the most part, so they've taken a part of the faience wall and reassembled it in the museum for visitors to enjoy. The blue pottery tiles were created to replicate the mats that used to hang on the walls of the houses of the time. The turquoise tiles are lovely in the limestone walls.

One of the most stunning pieces in the museum is a frieze of starving Nubians that were carved to commemorate the pharoah's visit to Nubia. The people are carved in exquisite detail in the most difficult style of frieze carving, excised from the background layer. This means that the important figures are standing out from the background and the artist had to do much more work to carve everything else away. It also allows for much more detail, in this case the pinched faces and prominent ribs of starving people. This is the only depiction like this that I've ever seen and Nathalie as well found it extraordinary.

The other room that was very impressive, but of which I have no photos because my battery died, was the Lauer Library. This is a reconstruction of the library that existed in Lauer's house at Sakkara where he worked from the time he was about twenty years old until he was almost one hundred, excavating and reconstructing the Sakkara complex. You can see his desk with some of his writings and the book cases with his reference books and those that he published about the site. His career was one of the most impressive in the history of Egyptology.

When we left the cool of the museum, a wall of heat from the desert, the counterpart of the climate control of the museum, hit us like a truck. More visitors had arrived and we looked around for the horses, finding them parked along with various cars and buses in the parking lot. Nathalie was going to be late for lunch with her husband and the weather was turning windy and hot, so we made our way back through the fields to the farm, and none too soon. I brought the dogs home with the intention of going into Maadi to see a friend, but phone calls and small chores interfered with my departure until with a roar a sandstorm descended on the house from the desert. Palms bent almost double and I could barely make out the garden fence from my front door. The power went out and the sky was so dark that I went about lighting candles. The dogs and I sat indoors hiding out and feeling sorry for the parrots who actually didn't seem terribly bothered by all the racket. Now we are simply hoping that it will all blow over tonight and leave us in peace.

Sham el Nessim? In Dahab It Was Smoke

Dahab blasts pinned on suicide bombers : Mail & Guardian Online

I had planned a post on one of my favourite holidays in Egypt, Sham el Nessim. Sham el Nessim (it means 'smell the breeze') is an ancient festival from pharaonic times when all the families in Egypt head for the closest spot of green to spend the day in celebration of nature and spring eating fish, onions and eggs. I spent the morning in the desert with my neighbour Morad who was riding a wonderful mare I bought last year. Stella has spent a year with us hopefully regaining her sanity after time at the racetrack and pyramids stables....Yesterday she showed me just how much progress she'd made and I was walking on air all day.

Until evening. A group of us were sitting around the remnants of our own Sham el Nessim feast when a phone message told us to turn on the news. Damn. Another tragedy in Sinai. Following the news on the BBC this morning we listened to the usual speculations regarding Al Qaeda, but the feeling for many of us is that this is part of a serious disaffection between the Egyptian government and the Bedouin who for centuries were the only inhabitants of Sinai. The peninsula was one of the most beautiful and desolate places in the world, bare rocky crags that support the barest of desert life looked down on bare sandy beaches where the clear blue sea bloomed with multicoloured fish and corals in a glorious counterpoint to the reds, browns and blacks of the desert rocks. Until recently, this was Sinai. Most of the roads had been built during the Israeli occupation and there was little interest from the Egyptian government in the area at all.

Entrepreneurs realised the potential for touristic development of the Sinai and began building hotels, camps, time-share apartments and so on on the coastal areas. Unfortunately much of the development was undertaken without any of the necessary environmental impact studies, but that is another story. What is important for the issue here is that the lands where the coastal Bedouin families had been fishing are no longer available to them because the peninsula is almost wall to wall development on the coast. Families that sold land to developers often can't afford to live in the new towns that are growing around the tourist areas. Land that was sold for peanuts to Egyptian developers years ago has earned millions of dollars, euros, yen, what have you, for the businessmen, but the Bedouin have simply been pushed into the barren interior of the land where the most promising work is in the growing of marijuana and opium poppies. Naturally these enterprises are not looked upon with favour by the government and the farms are the targets of drug raids on a regular basis.

But has anyone considered sharing the benefits of development with the local families? Very few. With all of the money flowing through Sinai, very little has stayed there to benefit the Bedouin who barely manage to exist in their beautiful hell. No schools, no training, no hospitals. What are the children here expected to do in the future in this situation? How are children who have no material assets, no chance to learn the skills needed in the increasingly urban society that we have here, going to manage as adults who have no possibility of employment?

Why do we need to look abroad for the perpetrators? As the government has said, this is a local problem but it is a very serious one that needs attention.

She's Pretty Foxy

It's 5:30 pm and there is a hot wind off the desert. The temperature is 100 F and the only happy things that I can see are the flies who are landing on my arms in hopes of some moisture and the dogs racing around the parrot cages hoping to catch a rat that will be flushed out by the hoses running down under the cages into the burrows. So far the rats are sitting tight and I would be inside typing this except the dogs work better when I'm around...sounds a lot like kids and employees, right? Thanks to wireless networks I can sit in the garden gradually stewing while I type a blow by blow account of a rat hunt. What a thrill, huh!

While the canines are patroling the parrot cage, Mona our one-legged Grey is inside entertaining the world with whistles and calls as she watches activities from the living room window. Her stump is healing very well and hopefully some time in the relatively near future we will outfit one of the new flight cages that are in the process of being assembled on the new land with some special landing perches since she needs platforms now more than branches. The flights are being fitted with a tree in the center of them to give the parrots some nice branches to play on and chew. The "trees" will be actually large orange, mango and mulberry branches.

The household has a new member as well. A week ago one of my grooms showed up with a young fox cub whom he had found along the road. She's very tame and may have been captured very young or even raised in captivity, but she has a break high in her right hind leg that can't be put into a cast. We took her home, gave her a good bath (so that now she had nice clean fleas), and popped her into a carton for a trip to the vet. Our vets informed us of the break, but other than that really couldn't do much except pet and cuddle her, which she seems to appreciate. We fixed up the wire on the back garden where Schmendrick the three-legged black cat and Molly the blind Greek Corgi live. This is our "special treatment" area since those two are very welcoming to the odd creatures that we foist upon them. As both Molly and Schmen are named after characters in The Last Unicorn, it seemed only appropriate to tag the poor fox with Lady Amalthea (10 points to anyone who knows who she is), but we mostly call her Thea.

She's made herself at home in the laundry room and seems to be quite comfortable with dry dog and cat food. We give her scrambled eggs mixed with yogurt and bits of meat or fish as well and she's thriving. Once her leg heals, she may be able to scale the fence of the garden and if she wants to live free she's welcome to. But I suspect that she may just stay with us as she is totally tame. We'll see. Meanwhile when I sent my daughter in New York a photo, she sent me a message that made me laugh out loud. "Well, Mom, you have the social outcast(Molly), the cripple(Schmendrick) and the orphan fox cub, so I guess now the back garden is The Secret Garden". Having the cast of The Last Unicorn living in my own Secret Garden isn't such a bad idea.

Score so far: Dogs 1 Rats O

Still Here, But It's Been A Tough Spring

The sandstorm that I wrote about last in March took a toll on me. We had three days of serious dust with the one storm, followed by a week or so with the odd very dusty day. Guess who lives in the middle of the Sahara despite the fact that she's allergic to dust...naturally. I probably shouldn't have been out taking pictures, but they were pretty cool, so it was worth it, or was it? I spent the second half of March and the beginning of April seeing more of doctors than friends or even my horses. My old buddy, allergic bronchitis, came to visit again and laid me low for almost a month. After thorough check-ups including CT scans and chest xrays, I'm on my asthma medication for a while but I feel like a human being again. For a while there, I would take some clients riding for a couple of hours and then come home to sleep for three hours totally exhausted. Running your own enterprise in which you must take a physically active role does have its drawbacks.

I didn't turn into a total turnip during my downtime, however. There were some memorable events during March and early April. One of these was a chance to be a tourist again one Saturday morning when the International Women's Association hosted a tour of the Abu Sir pyramid complex. These pyramids which are essentially in my back yard have been closed to the public for some time during a period when archaeologists have been actively excavating and studying parts of the complex. There were about 20 visitors that day listening to a Czech archaeologist explain not only what they had learned about the people who had built these structures, but also the relevance of some of the information. I had never really thought much about the fact that these enormous religious structures were populated by civil servants and had to be supported by the population of Egypt until it was noted in the lecture that this entire process had a life of its own that impacted the stability of the state over time. While initially the projects that were mainly carried out during the months of the inundation, the flooding of the Nile, when the farmers could do nothing on their land because it was all under water, had the function of strengthening the central government by bringing workers together to build temples and pyramids, later supporting the many priests needed to maintain the temples became such a burden at times that the state itself collapsed. As the archaeologist pointed out, their studies shed light on the life cycles of entire civilisations that faced many of the pressures and problems that our modern societies are now facing, and they can provide clues that might help those trying to solve modern problems.

At one point in the lectures, a very thought provoking question was raised. One of the women present asked in what language the inscriptions in the temples were written. The archaeologist answered that the language was ancient Egyptian, which is probably most closely related to the Coptic language used in the Coptic church. Virtually all Egyptians now speak Arabic, and because of their strong film industry, Egyptian Arabic is a dialect that is understood by almost any other country, much as Los Angeles English is easy for most people to understand. When the lecturer mentioned the relationship between Coptic and ancient Egyptian, the woman said, "So the Copts would be the 'real' Egyptians, then"... a statement that absolutely stunned me. While on the surface it might make some sense, Egypt has existed for almost 10 thousand years, a period of time that has seen invaders of many, many different ethnic and language groups come, rule, and either leave or be absorbed. By the time the Coptic church was established early in the Christian era, Egypt had seen the Hittites, the Hyksos, the Sea Peoples, the Persians, the Nubians, the Bedouins, the Greeks, and the Romans, to name just a few. Ruling families of neighbouring lands had sent children to marry into the Egyptian royalty, slaves to serve them, and conquered armies had been absorbed into the general population. What, then, would be a "real" Egyptian? The entire idea of humans as anything but a wonderful conglomeration of backgrounds really doesn't make any sense at all. The Coptic church may have preserved some of the old language, but the people of Egypt themselves are a most remarkable mix of every possible background from Europe, Asia and Africa. This is part of the charm of the country.

The melting of populations continues today with intermarriage and what may surprise some people, an active interest among many people from North America and Europe in coming to live and work here. While many of the foreigners living in Egypt are employed by companies from abroad, I'm often surprised to find there are quite a lot of people, especially young people who are looking for a different sort of working experience, who come here and find jobs in all sectors of society. The mother of a friend of mine arrived mid-March to spend some time with her daughter, a native Manhattanite who is working in publishing here. Friends of the mother also arrived from Europe, North America and Jordan to have a small reunion. While some of the older generation went off to visit pyramids by car, we kidnapped a teenage daughter who is completing her high school education with her friends in Jordan. A horse nut, Jess was more interested in galloping past pyramids than in trudging around them.

I have also been involved in some work that I feel is rather important. I've been riding my horses in the desert in this area for about 13 years now. When I first moved from Alexandria, I brought my two mares to Sakkara Country Club at the edge of the desert and I was delighted to have the desert to explore. The sand rises to a plateau just behind the Club and on very hot days the plateau was a lovely place to ride since you could be sure of the prevailing winds from the sea. Over the past 13 years, however, the Governorate of Giza has taken part of the plateau for the municipal dump. Gradually the dump has grown in size until recently I found to my surprise and horror that it was beginning to encroach on the wadi that stretches west from the Sakkara Step Pyramid. Talking to a friend of mine about it, she passed word to Dr. Zahi Hawass of the Antiquities Authority, who has expressed a strong interest in the situation. We spent a day on horseback and another morning with the jeep taking photos of the dump's expansion and taking GPS readings so that the exact locations are verified. We will be taking a cd with the photos to his office sometime soon because the situation is really out of control. The desert is a resource for people in Cairo, and it needs to be protected not abused.