When Football Isn't Just A Game

Global Voices Online is one of the most interesting sites for the analysis of blogs from all over the world on any topic imaginable. Recent excitement over the Algeria/Egypt football shootout for a place at the World Cup has been making the news and blogs throughout North Africa and Global Voices has picked up on it.

Egypt won the first match in Cairo after people in the streets attacked the bus of the arriving Algerian team causing some minor injuries. The second game saw a lot of street action in Khartoum after the Algerians won with Egyptians reportedly being targeted, as well as a couple of days of demonstrations with some violence outside the Algerian embassy in Zamalek. As one who was a student at the University of California at Berkeley in the "violent" days of the late 60's when there were "riots" everyday from noon to one in Sproul Plaza, I'm a bit skeptical about news reports of riots. I had a noon class and missed the entire season, much to my siblings' disappointment. I never saw a single "riot". Rats! A friend of mine in Zamalek, however, was able to tell me that things were a bit tense there for a while.

In all the ruckus after the match in Khartoum, Alaa Mubarak, the second son of the President of Egypt who is usually a low profile businessman, called in to some talk shows to express his displeasure at the Algerians who had, on their own turf, taken out their frustrations on Egyptian workers and companies with their own riots. Many Egyptians, apparently, are quite taken with this action and are looking at Alaa with a new light. Marwa Rakha wrote a longish article examining the responses to Alaa Mubarak's outburst as well as looking at the political possibilities presented. After all, in this part of the world (as in most of the world) EVERYTHING is political of course.

Okay, boys and girls. If you can't play nicely, we will have to take the ball and go home.




copyright 2009 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Why You Can't Go Home

I went to our family home in Maadi the other day to see the tenants. As I waited in the hallway for Jane, I looked carefully around the house. We lived there for about 8 years. I did some very significant renovations in the house before our tenants moved in, but the sense of the house that attracted us many years ago still live in the house. Our tenants are a lovely Scots family with three children who have been with us for some years now. This is right, as it is a children's home. The house itself feels friendly to kids.

As I stood in the hallway looking into my study, the living rooms, the dining room and the kitchen I had the most extraordinary sensation. I felt as though all my skin, inside and out, had been scraped raw. I wondered if I would want to live back here in "civilisation", if I might want to be more in the center of things. But I realised that even standing in the hallway, I was being dragged back into my former life. I was looking at the front door wondering when my late husband would be walking through apologising for being rather late. I believe that it took a relocation to let me realise the importance of a new beginning of sorts. I know that even now, if I were to be living in our old home, I would stop moving forward and simply go back to waiting the arrival of the lost.

copyright 2009 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Grassroots Movement for Gas Guzzlers

A young friend of my daughter's recently sent me a link to a webpage started by one of her friends to encourage carpooling in Egypt. Cairo reputedly has 20 million inhabitants and I'm willing to bet about 10 million cars. These days any errand at all can take hours. I think that this is a great idea and I really wish them all the best.

Take a look at Egyptcarpoolers

copyright 2009 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

A Dove Has Flown

One of the wonders of the internet is the ability to keep up with friends of ours from all over the world...and to make these friends in the first place. Many years ago when I first started blogging, Leila Abu-Saba posted some comments on my blog and we became net friends. We followed each other's blogs and when we discovered Facebook we connected there as well. For quite a few years, Leila was battling first breast cancer and then liver cancer as well and just recently she lost her fight to stay with us. I've been having phone line problems and have been just checking my email so I missed the news and this morning was shattered to realise that she was gone.

The title to this piece is a link to Leila's blog post which was a meditation on cancer, forgiveness, and politics. I don't know anyone who could have expressed this better. Friends of hers are making sure that her books get published, the task that she was trying hard to finish in her last days. Look for them and let her words, thoughts, and spirit live on.

Leila's manifesto for hope is a good place to start.

copyright 2009 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

She Teaches With Horses

The summer's grip has been broken although days are still t-shirt warm. I check the temperatures for my friends and family in North America and I think I'm happy to be here. We don't have the flaming leaves and crisp mornings of fall, but it is here nevertheless. The schools have finally been allowed to open again after a silly panic attack over the H1N1 flu...can't blame it on the pigs and any numbers of how many people have had it as opposed to the ordinary garden variety flu that has been known to kill many more people are unreliable. Sure kids and adults are getting the flu and being told to stay home in bed, but who knows what flavour flu it is?

With a return to normality, I've had my level of busyness go up enormously. We host the American school riding clubs on weekends; high school on Friday morning and middle school on Saturday morning. Some of the high school kids are into jumping so they go off to a stable nearby that specialises in jumping, while the others have a great time here playing games with horses, taking basic riding lessons, and generally getting to know some of the creatures that share the planet with them. I had an old friend come by for a two week stay and Tracy Karbus shared some of her skills with some of the students and friends of mine. She does workshops with horses known as equine-assisted learning, a skill she acquired studying with other practitioners in the US. In equine-assisted learning sessions, the participants work with horses in problem solving situations that test their skills and abilities to communicate their needs and intentions nonverbally. Horses are perfect for this kind of work because they are gentle, kind, and highly social animals who are very skilled at nonverbal communication.

The workshops give the participants tasks such as one leading another while blindfolded and leading a horse as well or trying to get a horse to move to a certain point in a paddock without touching, speaking to, or bribing the horse. Initial nervousness at partnering with something that outweighs them by a factor of five often gives way to an understanding that the horse might be helping them to solve their task. One woman doing a trust walk with a horse under her niece's direction confessed to a secret fear of blindness and the realisation that she could actually follow the horse to a certain extent.

A task that requires humans not to talk or touch brings home to us the enormous place that we give to our voices and hands in communication. I tried one of these tasks and almost died of frustration to the delight of the high school girls who were watching one of their teachers, myself, and a trainer from a neighbouring farm fail miserably in trying the task that they had just attempted. Nothing like seeing "experts" fail to make you appreciate your own efforts. And as one of my neighbours noted while watching, it was a highly unusual sight to see me speechless for five minutes.

We don't have access here to a lot of the kind of teaching clinics that people can pursue in North America or Europe. There you can sign up for a weekend of natural horsemanship, polocrosse, equine-assisted learning, endurance training or balanced riding. A few of us are working to bring opportunities for these things to Egypt to enhance the skills of horsemen and women here. Tracy's work teaches people skills that are useful in horse handling but also in people handling and a portion of her work in the US is corporate where her clinics teach leadership and team-building skills. But she finds that her clients' initial dip into the pool of horse-handling often brings up issues that they want to follow up in subsequent sessions.

In early November we are planning a riding clinic with Zsuzsu Illes, a niece and student of dressage rider Charles de Kunffy. She will be working with riders to help them to ride in a more balanced fashion, regardless of their discipline of riding. There are eight spots for participants in her two day clinic and plenty of room for auditors. In the new year we hope to have Ron Breines coming to do some horsetraining clinics and possibly a return trip for Tracy. Life is looking more interesting for horse people.
copyright 2009 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

A Watering Place Dries Up

For many, many years Christo, the fish restaurant across the road from the Mena House Oberoi at Giza, has been a favourite place to take visitors for a nice fish dinner and a beer or glass of wine while watching the lights of the Sound And Light play across the pyramids on the hill. Yesterday I met some friends of friends in the US who were visiting Cairo for dinner there and found to my disappointment that the restaurant has been bought by new owners who have decided that they will no longer serve alcohol. Christo was never exactly a riotous beer brawl sort of establishment in the first place, but nibbling on calamari and shrimp while sipping a cool Stella was a lovely way to spend a summer evening. My friends were still happy with the dinner, having no real reference point, but I found that not only did I miss the liquid refreshments, but the food isn't as good as it used to be either. Salads and fish were not as fresh. Another tradition falls by the wayside.

copyright 2009 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Up In Smoke

Ramadan has begun; we are on our second day now. Many people are fasting, refraining from food, water, and cigarettes during the daylight hours and then breaking their fast with tea and a cigarette to battle those headaches that are the result of the sudden withdrawal. After the breaking of the fast, many people go out to spend the evening in the Ramadan tents where they have soft drinks, tea, coffee...and shisha. A shisha is a water pipe, sometimes called a hubblebubble, that supposedly "filters" the smoke through water. An article today in the BBC goes into some detail on why smoking shisha is really not a great idea.

Years ago I spent a semester teaching health (aka: Sex, drugs, and alcohol) to some middle schoolers who were astonished to see the crud that was washed out of a shisha pipe hose after use...and this was what accumulated AFTER the "filtering"! The smell of the flavoured shisha tobacco is actually quite nice and I like to run across it on an evening breeze. Maybe the fact that I've never been a smoker keeps me from understanding the attraction of shisha, but the health hazards are serious.

So have a cup of mint tea instead. Ramadan Mubarak.

copyright 2009 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani