Time to Grow Up

When I first began writing this blog in 2003 I described myself as someone who was still trying to figure out what I was going to be when I grew up. I was 54 at the time. Sometime in the past six years, I guess that I've grown up without really realising it. I haven't thought about growing up in ages. I found myself sitting with some young friends last weekend...funny thing how most of my friends are younger than I am now, but then a lot of people are anymore. We were talking about growing up and the realisation hit me that for the first time in my life, it was no longer an issue. I've finally done it, I think. I think I'm finally a grown up and I believe that I'm pretty comfortable with what I am.

I've been someone else's child for a while, but now that both my parents are dead, that doesn't really define me. It certainly formed me, but it doesn't define me. My parents were highly individualistic, to say the least. In fact, I used to believe that my father was simply weird and for much of my life all I wanted was to be "normal" whatever that was. I'm not sure that I ever really knew what it was, and looking back on things, I'm fairly certain that normality has escaped me at every turn. Having my own children was the most "normal" thing that I ever accomplished, but I'm not sure that raising them astraddle two continents and cultures qualifies as "normal" in most estimates. My daughter echoed my wish for the elusive normality in a conversation this summer, so this must be a continuing issue, at least in my family. I asked her what was "normal" and she had just about as much trouble explaining it as I've always had.

So now if I'm all grown up, what am I? Well, I wanted to be a cowboy when I was little, and sometimes I do get to mess around with the horses pushing water buffalo down the trails around here, but I'm not a cowboy. I've spent time doing corporate things after my husband died, but I'm definitely not a business person...definitely! My children are fond of reminding me that no matter how old they may be, I'm still their mother. Sometimes I suspect that they might wish this were not the case, but it is and I can be their mom sometimes...usually when things aren't going so well. That's when you always need your mom, after all. But basically I think that I've come to be quite comfortable in my eccentric skin. I'm fairly certain that is what one would call someone who lives alone on a small farm with a small zoo and animals like horses who seem to feel that it's ok to wander around the living room. Sorry kids, so much for normality.
copyright 2008 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Bananas and Other Samples

One of the best things about having a farm is being able to plant fun things all around you. We planted fruit trees: apple, peach, guava, pomegranate, ishta, oranges, lemons, tangerines, and bananas, as well as very playful crops like sugar cane. The cane is tall now and visitors over the Feast that begins on Tuesday will get to cut stalks down and chew the sweet juice out. What's left over is more than appreciated by the horses, donkeys and goats.

Banana trees were some of the first things planted here and I have a couple of varieties. One type is the larger banana that is familiar in Europe or the US, but my favourite is the smaller type, what my kids used to call "banana samples". These tiny bananas are only a couple of bites but the flavour is wonderful and they don't go immediately to banana mush as they ripen. When I began visting Egypt in the late 70's, one of the first things to be imported here was a total mystery to me because they were importing Dole bananas...big tasteless yellow things in a country where the tiny bananas were so good. My husband's family learned very quickly that I was not at all impressed with imported bananas. These were simply not in the same class as the sweet little local bananas like the stalk being inspected in the photo by some of the dogs who were hoping for bones.

Now as we prepare for about four days of complete idleness (well, maybe not depending on how many people decide to take advantage of the holidays to stay and play in Cairo possibly at the farm rather than going to the beach...it's still hot here) I've taken more time on my collection of Egypt blogs and would suggest that they are a marvelous way to realise the richness of the experience here. I've found blogs from students here in Arabic courses, professors at the American University, housewives caring for young and not so young children while husbands pursue their careers, and locals of all flavours. They talk about so many aspects of life here, both good and bad, that a wander through the blogs will give you a wonderful tour. I know that elsewhere the Feast is not an occasion of idleness, but maybe during low points in news programs or evening TV you might pick one or two to try out. These samples of Egyptian life are just as tempting and tasty as our tiny bananas.


copyright 2008 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

A Geography Lesson

Last weekend a group of tourists were abducted by a group of armed men in southwestern Egypt. The initial reports in the papers online were enough to make me want to tear my hair out. Headlines of "Tourists Kidnapped in Aswan" gave the world a totally incorrect view of what had happened. Amid much confusion, the story is finally coming out, even if the the tourists have not.

Apparently a group of 11 tourists from Italy, Germany and Romania hired a desert safari company to take them to Gilf el Kabir, a remote area of the Libyan desert in the southwest corner of Egypt. This is not an expedition to be taken lightly at all. The area was only first explored thoroughly by Ahmed Hassenein Bey who wrote an article for National Geographic in 1924.


Modern explorers use SUV's in convoy in order to carry the enormous amount of supplies necessary for a trip to the area. Safari leaders recommend groups of at least four to six cars with experienced drivers and plenty of gas and the Egyptian government requires a police presence on such expeditions. In fact, at least one of the hostages is an Egyptian police officer. As usual, there have been more articles in the international press about this situation than there have been locally. But to get the geography correct, the incident took place at the far southwestern corner of Egypt, nowhere near any of the cities or ordinary tourist venues...roughly on the back of the moon. As far as anyone can tell the kidnappers are desert pirates from Sudan or Chad, since the hostages have indicated that they do not speak Arabic. Such desert pirates in armed vehicles have been seen in this area for about a year. As marvelous as the area is, I think that this will likely deter some visitors for a time.

copyright 2008 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Whazzup Egypt !!!: New Tourist Visa Extension Law

Whazzup Egypt !!!: New Tourist Visa Extension Law



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Thanks Kim at Whazzup Egypt for this note. I get five to ten emails a month from people all over the world who are wanting to come to live and work in Egypt. That may seem odd to some, but it is true. I do counsel that life here can be tough if you aren't prepared...having either some help here or a decent knowledge of Arabic is the absolute minimum unless you are a radical Outward Bound graduate. Until recently it's been fairly easy for someone to come here on a tourist visa and then find work, but it isn't so surprising at all that the government is making it tougher. So if you are thinking of coming to live, you might want to line up a job ahead of time or be sure that you can get a work visa through your employer. There are plenty of employers who will ignore that little step, putting their employees in the position of being illegal workers.

Making An Exception

I generally don't talk about politics much. Egyptian politics are confusing, frustrating, and usually pretty pointless. The government here does pretty much what it wants and it's up to us to cope, not that this course of events is so different anywhere else as well really. After almost 60 years of watching politics in a number of countries it all starts to get a bit blurry.

However, the recent nightmarish possibility that someone like Sarah Palin could actually become the Vice President of the United States has made me break my politics rule. I'm watching the US elections with a great deal of interest this year. She was picked so carefully to provide McCain with some kind of excitement (I've seen him speak...he does not generate much heat and tends to simply repeat himself...old age?) but what a horrific possibility. How are women in the US supposed to support a woman who as mayor of a town in Alaska was the one to insist that rape victims pay for the rape kit used by the police in their investigations...something like that is usually on the house, to say the least. The New York Times article that the title accesses offers innumberable reasons to doubt the suitability of this woman for a job that could put her in the Presidency should her well-aged partner kick off any time in the next four years.

Personally, I see this election as being much more important to the US internationally than it is to the country domestically. The President of the United States is the public face of the country. Bad enough the world has had to put up with the Howdy Doody brainlessness of George W. for the past too many seasons...but if the voters in the United States show that they feel this superannuated "war hero" and the brainless (albeit fiendishly clever and manipulative) set of boobs chosen to accompany him are to be the public face of the "leader of the free world" I honestly suspect that there is going to be a major reconsideration of just how important the US is anyway. And with the financial crises that are being set off by the banking crisis in the US, there will be even more cause to reconsider.

Of course, one of the major characteristics of American culture, especially as epitomized by Fox News and CNN and such, is the tendency to imagine that the rest of the world is "just like us" only poorer or that they are the enemy. In actual fact, neither of these assumptions is justified, and I sort of doubt that very many Americans are really going to worry too much about what the rest of the world thinks about the US Presidency. On what basis Americans are going to choose between the candidates remains to be seen but the possibilities are a bit daunting.

As a North American living in the Middle East, the low level of international knowledge shown by Palin, despite the fact that she can see Russia from an island off the coast of Alaska, is rather frightening. Ignorance is definitely not bliss...just ask anyone who's been involved in the Iraq war which has been a monument to ignorance and lies from day one. Now that it's finally public that Bush lied about the reasons for the war, maybe it's time to seriously re-evaluate the US activities in the region. Somehow I can't see McCain and Palin doing that.

It's going to be an interesting election....as in the Chinese curse that wishes one to live in "interesting" times.

Sorry, no photos here. I tried to use some from the web and none of the ones I uploaded of Sarah Palin would show in the blog...I wonder what that means.




copyright 2008 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Reading Material For Ramadan

It's hot. It's been hot all summer and I'm ready for a change. This has been a busy summer in a way, not always a good way. It started with the rush of getting away from the farm for two weeks...my first trip out of Egypt since moving here with all the creatures. But my son was graduating from Harvard with an MBA, and you just don't miss that. Impossible. So a whirlwind trip to New York and Boston was undertaken on Egyptair's nonstop flight from Cairo to JFK. The return was amazing as I found myself on a flight that had to be made up of most of the preschool Egyptian children in New York on their way home to spend summer vacation with grandparents in Egypt...Sleep? Not much. I arrived to find an old friend from New Zealand in residence at the farm already and two new friends from California arriving in two days, while my niece, her daughter and a group of high school kids also from California were staying with friends who run an alternative school here. Chaos!

No sooner had everyone departed for their respective home bases than Egypt was hit with equine influenza and we had a 3 week quarantine followed by ten days of sheer misery when the horses were inevitably infected and we spent days hosing down a herd of miserable feverish equids. One of the mules and all of the donkeys came down with the bug as well. The babies and the youngsters (5 year olds) were hardest hit but everyone came through at the end and we all breathed a sigh of relief. I was quite happy that this happened at a time of year when there wouldn't be much demand for riding horses anyway with most tourists avoiding the summer heat and most of my local regulars being away on summer holidays.

So here it is the beginning of September and the first day of Ramadan is tomorrow. This means what for work? Who knows really, but the way things work is that if people rely on drivers to go places, they are not going anywhere much after 3 pm. During Ramadan the traffic is appalling for about 3 hours before iftar, the breaking of the fast, and no one in their right mind goes anywhere then. Businesses and schools close early so that everyone can be home for iftar, hence the traffic. I suspect that weekends will be busier than weekdays and mornings busier than evenings, which is fine with me because I love to saddle up one of the horses and go wander around during iftar listening to the silence of people happily eating.

With the summer heat, I've been hiding indoors during the day doing things like scanning about 25 years of old photographs for the children to be able to have them on cd's. I was a bit apprehensive at first, but finding wonderful shots of my husband playing with the kids, memory shots like the photos taken on our one successful camping trip as grad students (Diaa's idea of camping was the Hilton actually), and millions of pictures of the kids' early trips to Egypt filled a lot of holes in my heart. Troubles tend to hide good memories and it's healing to bring them back to the foreground.

Another job I gave myself was to collect all the blogs that I read from time to time so that other people can enjoy them too. Blogger just brought out a new gadget that automatically updates the blogs so you know from my sidebar when there is a new post. Some of these blogs are written by Egyptian bloggers, some of them are expats writing about their lives here, a few are political, many non-political. There are many more blogs in Arabic but I'm only including the English ones...I can't pretend to be able to read a blog in Arabic. One of the things that I noticed when collecting was that I'm kind of a grandmother among the bloggers, having started in 2003. A blog-fogey if you will.

So if you find yourself not wanting to brave the pre-iftar traffic or just sitting in some non-Ramadan place with quiet time, do explore the blogs. They are ample evidence of the variety and richness of life in Egypt, which pleases me immensely since one of my earliest goals with my blog was to find a way to show the world that richness.

So, to everyone Ramadan Kareem. May the next month be filled with the joy that Egyptians find in this month of fasting and reconnecting with friends and family.


copyright 2008 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Probably Elsewhere Too

Today's New York Times asks if Jon Stewart of The Daily Show is the most trusted men in America, and then looks at why this may be. With my subscription to Showtime Arabia I get to watch Mr. Stewart every day followed by Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report, a fact that my daughter in New York finds hilarious since she has to follow it online as she, being an impoverished grad student, doesn't have a cable subscription. I read my news online, following the BBC World, New York Times, Washington Post, and the International Herald Tribune among others through Google News. I haven't trusted television news for many years. The Daily Show is the only "news" show that I watch and I find that it keeps me remarkably up to date with American politics, certainly as up to date as I want to be.

Perhaps it would bear examining Jon Stewart's following in the world outside of North America as well. He is incredibly popular in the Middle East among English speaking viewers for his ability to get to the point of the matter, eliminating the political fluff. I am delighted that my cable subscription gives me access to his sanity on a daily basis. It's funny the things you find in Egypt....


copyright 2008 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani