A Spot of Trouble

About two weeks ago I found a sort of white blister on the knuckle of the middle finger of my right hand. The blister soon had a red ring around it and I scrubbed it hard with a surgical scrub, fearing that it was a spider bite. The knuckle swelled, the right hand hurt like crazy, but after about three days the swelling went down and I stopped worrying. A couple of days later I found another blister on the palm of my left hand, near the heel of my thumb. That one really hurt and within 36 hours I had another blister on the tip of my ring finger on the left hand. By this time, the right hand was much better aside from the fact that the hole left by the blister on the knuckle was taking its own sweet time to heal. As a matter of fact, even today it still isn't healed.

I began getting alarmed when the wound on the left hand turned black, blue and a bit green with red streaks running up my arm and an egg-sized lump under my left arm. I wasn't getting much sleep with my dreams being entirely about pain in my hands, and I was feeling pretty terrible. I did some research on the net and made an appointment with our family doctor. The research confirmed what I feared, that I'd been bitten by a brown recluse spider, probably while cutting chicory in the garden for the birds' breakfast. Egypt has its fair share of venomous spiders, as well as spiders that are supposed to be venomous and aren't. We have poisonous snakes and scorpions as well. Despite my hanging about in the sorts of places that critters like, I really haven't seen much in the way of evil ones, other than the recluses.

One very rainy winter in Alexandria there was a rash of brown recluse bites among friends of ours. Most of us caught things in time and escaped with sore, swollen bites, but one of the men didn't pay attention and ended up in surgery having his elbow joint cleaned out when the bite became necrotic and invaded the elbow. These cute little brown arachnids pack a wallop. They are relatively small, just over a half inch in diameter, and nocturnal, with a preference for hiding under vegetation in the garden or in clothes that have been tossed on the floor...a good reason to be tidy. But they aren't aggressive and only bite when someone "attacks" them by putting a hand or foot on or too near them. In fairness to the spiders, while they are not uncommon in Egypt just as in the southern United States, my kids never seemed to get bitten and there could have been tigers hiding in the rubbish tips that they called bedrooms in high school.

Two weeks on, I'm still taking antibiotics. The tip of my ring finger and the base of my thumb on my left hand are still so sensitive that I jump if I accidentally bang them on something. The bite on my right hand has a nasty deep scab that is slowly healing, and I put a layer of A&D ointment (not just for babies, you know!) on my hands about three times a day to help the healing. The lymph node is no longer swollen and I'm feeling pretty good...especially since the temperatures are down to a balmy 33 C these days. Do I still cut chicory for my birds? Nope. On his suggestion, I let the gardener do it. He has calluses on his hands that no spider could bite through.



copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Time Enough To Eat

Egyptian food is wonderful. Much of the wonderfulness of it comes from the freshness of the ingredients. I was cruising the news on the internet and found an interesting piece on Time online (you can reach it by clicking the title here) about how much of the cultural aspects of eating are being lost in the globalisation of fast food. My closest fast food place is probably about 15 km, a fact which never fails to please me. In Egypt fast food places all deliver, making it even easier to destroy yourself with food. On the other hand, sometimes I get an invitation to Mabrouka's and that is much, much better. Mabrouka is a widow about my own age with four sons and two daughters. Two of the sons are married, two are not yet...all of them live in the family house. The daughters are married and live nearby. Mabrouka grows her own poultry and buys produce in the village that is grown by her neighbours. She is a wonderful cook, as you can see in the photo. Dinner included chicken cooked with sliced potatoes in a tomato sauce (fresh tomatoes of course...not a can in her house) that were baked in a wood burning oven. The roast chicken was also baked in the oven and the stuffed aubergine, peppers, zucchini, and cabbage leaves were cooked on a stone top to the oven. It's more work than I want to do, but boy, do I appreciate her work. Dessert is usually fruit.

I wish I could say that since moving to the farm I've lost a ton of weight and become sleek and svelte, but that would be fibbing. I haven't but I know that my diet is a lot healthier than it was in the city. The temptation to just call for a pizza was always really a tough one. Now most of my meals are prepared from the things that we are growing on the farm. This depends on the season, but being able to freeze or dry vegetables makes them last. Like most of our neighbours, we are growing the summer crop of bamia, or okra. Part of the reason for this is because I find the flowers lovely. Fresh okra is eaten while still small, but the parrots and poultry appreciate the larger pods. When dried and ground into a powder, the pods are the basis of a Sudanese stew, moolah, of which I am inordinately fond in the winter. The pods have small spines on them and I'm always struck by the dedication of the okra farmers who have to pick their crop in the summer heat while completely wrapped in fabric to keep the spines out of their fingers, arms, legs, and faces. Much of the crop is frozen to provide okra for winter meals, since when it is cooked with the rich tomato sauce and small chunks of meat, it makes for a very filling meal...much more filling than is needed in summer.

Another summer crop that is more appreciated in the winter is molokheya, which could be called the Egyptian national dish. Molokheya is essentially a weed called swamp mallow other places, a tall plant with shiny oval leaves and small yellow flowers. It grows almost anywhere wild and is also planted in fields. The leaves are chopped if fresh, or crumbled when dry, and cooked in a chicken, rabbit, or beef stock to which is added a fried garlic, coriander and a bit of cumin. Hot pepper can be added to taste as well. The molokheya makes a rather mucilaginous soup...another word for sort of slimy...but it is known to be good for digestion. Once you get past the texture, and some people never do, it is wonderfully delicious over rice. We have a small field of it growing next to the longeing ring and I find the plants all over the garden popping up next to roses or behind palm trees. Welcome.
My parrots like peppers, my grooms love peppers, and I like them too. This year we planted hot peppers and I learned that if you pick them young, they are usually sweet, but if you wait for them to ripen to red, they pick up a lot on the heat scale. Peppers have a ton of Vitamin C among other things and are very good for you. I never had any idea how many peppers can be produced by relatively few plants. It's quite astonishing and I haven't had to buy peppers all year. We also are still working our way through the braided onions and garlic in the verandah, while it is almost time to plant again.

Zucchini is a vegetable that is planted all year round and it only takes about two months to complete the growing cycle. One of my friends in Alexandria called Egypt "the land of the eternal zucchini" because of the omnipresence of this vegetable. Yesterday I made a salad from gargeer (aka: Arugula) cut fresh from the garden, tomatoes and red onions also just picked, the first zucchini from our garden sauteed with garlic and mushrooms (the only bought items), with chopped roast chicken. Zucchini just out of the garden tastes NOTHING like the stuff that you get from the supermarket. In another week I'll be sending zucchini home with my grooms because there really are limits to how much I can eat, even with the poultry, rabbits, parrots, and tortoises helping.

Finally, being on the cusp of the mango and date seasons, we have a number of sweet options. The mangoes this year had a hard time with the summer heat, but they are just as juicy as ever. The new dates are just coming on the market in time for Ramadan in a couple of weeks, and the sweet red Zaghlouls are already being sold on the roadsides. Left for a couple of days they turn brown and softer, resembling the dates that are more common in Europe and North America. The grapes, both seedless and with seeds are still in season as are the guavas. As the weather cools, apples, oranges, and bananas will take their places.

The farmers here for the most part eat a vegetarian diet. Vegetables grown in the fields, cheese and yogurt from the family cow or buffalo, and bread or rice are the staples. Breakfast is often cooked beans known as foul (pronounced "fool") cooked with onions, garlic, cumin and lemon, and eaten with cheese and bread. Lunch may be bread, cheese, onions, and then dinner might be a vegetable stew. It's a healthier diet than is followed in the city by a long shot. Sometimes it's easy not to miss junk food.
copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Shhh. We Want It To Stay...

However it happened, Mobinil finally got service restored in our area this afternoon. Thank you, Mobinil, we love you again.

Unfortunately, the only suitably jubilant photo on hand is set in New York...but you get the idea.




copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Please Contact Them

The story as I understand it is that some of the villagers in Menawet decided that the Mobinil relay tower there was causing cancer or some such thing. Or maybe they decided that the steel and concrete could be put to better use...who knows? At any rate, from what I understand, and this hasn't been published in any papers that I am aware of, they dismantled the relay tower last week and the area roughly from Shubramant to Abu Sir in Giza has been left with no Mobinil service at all.

To understand what a disaster this is it helps to realise that there are about forty thousand people living in the area, of whom probably less than 10 or 20% have land lines. The rest of us, including myself, make do with mobile phones. Some of us use Mobinil, some Vodafone, and a few adventurous ones the new carrier. To be honest, Mobinil, until recently, had the best reception out here and was the most reliable. Vodafone has improved a lot lately after calls to technical support brought engineering staff out here to check out and improve the situation. Because I do a lot of distance riding and the mobile reception in the desert is spotty...sometimes Vodafone working better than Mobinil, sometimes the opposite...I've had lines with both carriers. Right now I have my Mobinil line forwarded to Vodafone so that people can reach me at home.

Today one of my neighbours called me with the news that Mobinil has apparently decided not to replace the missing relay tower for at least a year, leaving the area completely without service for residents and visitors alike. Bloody brilliant. By the time they do replace the tower there will be no Mobinil customers to need it. As someone who depends on my mobile phone and who has been a Mobinil customer almost since the company opened, I am seriously ticked off. Probably someone in the higher echelons of the company decided that a bunch of ignorant farmers don't need a relay...so who is really the ignorant one?

The link in the title will reach the customer support page at Mobinil. If you are a Mobinil customer and find the idea of leaving 40 thousand residents and who knows how many visitors to the area with all of its antiquities, hotels, clubs, restaurants and so on without Mobinil service, do use the link to let Mobinil know.

We would appreciate it.

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Cairo's Bridge Of Dreams - LA Times

This is a really nice piece written for the Los Angeles Times by Jeffrey Fleishman about one of the main bridges of Cairo, the Kasr el Nil bridge, where it seems that half of the city congregates at night. In the summer, the bridges of Cairo become parks with every possible type of person relaxing over the water, breathing fresh air and enjoying the scenery. Worth a read, so click on the title for a link.


copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Got To Hit The Bookstore

I found these two reviews of a book that I really have to buy. The Man In The White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado looks like a marvelous read. It is the story of her father's forced expatriation during Nasser's regime and how it affected him and his family who found themselves in New York. Lucette Lagnado is now an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, so obviously she made the transition well, but for her father the transplant never really worked. The period of Nasser's socialisation of Egypt was horrific for many Egyptians of European and Jewish backgrounds and also for many Egyptians who simply had been too successful in their enterprises in Egypt. The young state of Israel had high hopes that some of the Egyptian Jews would head there from Egypt and were happy to stir the pot to encourage emigration. Unfortunately, Tel Aviv simply was no match for Cairo (and probably still isn't), so the emigrants were far more likely to go to Paris, London, Geneva, New York, or Montreal. Canada is full of Egyptians who left Egypt during the 50's and 60's and I often get emails from their offspring who are now intensely curious about the fascinating country their parents left behind.

There is no question that Egypt now is not the Egypt of the 50's. Even my husband mourned the passing of the city that died with Nasser's changes, and he was born in the late 40's. But what is the same as in the past? It is the nature of life to change and one simply hopes for the best. I'm happy to see books from the refugees from Egypt because it will remind both the world and Egypt of the multiplicity of resources that Egypt had on hand. This was not a uni-cultural society at all. Egypt had layers upon layers of immigration and conquest and Cairo was the pearl whose brilliance came from the accumulations of cultures from the earliest times. Early Egyptians merged with Nubians, Sudanese, Hittites and others from the Fertile Crescent, Jews, Greeks, Persians, Romans, Arabs, Berbers, the multitude of cultures brought in under the Ottoman Turks from the Balkans and southern Russia, the Europeans who came and fell under Egypt's spell....Egypt has been the true melting pot but rather than losing their shape and flavour in the process, it's as though people come, leave something of their lustre and take on some of the glow of the preceding inhabitants, leaving Egypt and themselves richer in the process. It really doesn't surprise me at all that Cairo is so hard to leave.

Links:
New York Times review: www.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/books/10book
International Herald Tribune review: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/09/arts/idside11.php


copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

A Time Out For Sunshine

For the past few days there have been sms' flashing around the mobile phone networks in Egypt warning people to avoid the sun from 11 am to 4 pm. Some of the warnings have been attributed to the UN (I didn't know that they had a weather department?) while others have had no attribution. Friends of mine have told me that there have been announcements on television as well. There's a certain Duh factor here. As long as I can remember, people have been warning that the most dangerous time of the day in the sun is during the hours between 11 and 4...and I can remember a fairly long time. I remember when they first invented sunscreen. Many of us, while we are miserably coping with our overheated summer weather, have been wondering what has changed to make these messages necessary. I guess it's awareness.

I did some net research to see if there have been any momentous happenings in the solar ray world, but no. I suspect that someone has finally noticed that ozonally speaking Egypt is not in the best of circumstances during the summer. As a matter of fact, according to some of the ozone maps that I was able to find while researching, we are in much the same situation as South Africa and Australia, two countries that push sun protection in a big, big way. So these messages seem to be A Good Thing. A look at the map above will show why. The grey and blue band along the equator indicates an area of lower ozone and higher risk. The turquoise band that overlaps Egypt and North Africa is a bit better, but it is the same colour as the band over South Africa and Australia. The green areas are better still, while the red spots are the best. It's sad, but definitely worth noting, that these are all over areas far away from the influence of human beings.

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani