Categorising Ourselves And its Price

The recent controversy surrounding Caitlyn Jenner's coming out as a transsexual has brought up some extremely important issues in human interactions in general for me. A good friend posted an article by Nuridden Knight looking at a comparison of the issues body image and self love for black people and for transsexuals. I personally would not have made those comparisons, but then I am about as WASP as they come in terms of my externals and have always enjoyed the benefits of belonging, at least as far as surface characteristics apply, to the privileged class in this world. I think that she has made some excellent points in this article and the viewpoint interests me because I have never been able to view the world as black/white even with shades in between because I was raised to believe that the colour of a person's skin was one of the least important attributes of that person. It was an issue that was never brought up in our family, although we had very few friends who were persons of any sort of colour other than vaguely pink partly due to my father's job as a Navy scientist (this was in the 50's and 60's) and partly due to where we lived. But considerations of colour or ethnicity were also not applied to Hispanic families in our area either and to even parrot a word of discrimination was to bring the wrath of the parental units on us.

My first boyfriend when I was growing up was of mixed race and ethnicity and it was a massive shock to me to encounter people's animosity to us as a couple in the early 60's. I moved to Canada in my early 20's where "black" people were from the Caribbean for the most part and very different in culture from the "black" people that I'd known in the US, which to me validated my parents' teaching. After all, how could the attributes of "black" people be so different if they were determined by skin colour? My late husband was Egyptian/Sudanese and the reactions of people in Louisiana to him when we visited New Orleans in the 70's was at once hilarious and horrifying. He was sporting a fairly impressive afro and was pretty dark from a lot of time in the sun, but as the nephew of the first president of Sudan he had no preset option for being of a lesser status due to the colour of his skin or the curl of his hair, and people we encountered, who on seeing him initially as "black", generally were very taken aback at his complete ignoring of that category in his interactions with them. Happily, he was a charming individual and things never got difficult, although it was extremely unsettling to a lot of people there in Louisiana. So the binary of "black" versus "white", while as a couple we probably exemplified it, was simply not workable.

I've always felt that while we see sex as being a binary...you are either a man OR a woman...it isn't really. That word "or" is a dangerous one. While working in Vancouver as a cocktail waitress to put myself through university, I was lucky enough to meet a number of transsexual individuals who while they might look like a man or a woman externally definitely gave off the "opposing" vibes, but how opposing were they in reality? As I grew older I realised that just as one's personal mannerisms were not a binary, neither were one's sexual preferences. For women sliding across sexual preferences can be easier than for men. After all, as mothers we are as loving to our sons as to our daughters, or at least we should be. It is quite natural to us to hug other women to comfort them as it is to hug men, and the division between simple interpersonal caring and loving sexual behaviour isn't a fence but a pasture or sometimes a forest.

Perhaps because men have not been so much a part of the parenting/nurturing culture in western society, it is easier to see their sexuality as binary, but it is also a continuum...or there wouldn't be so many strong male bonds. Despite being married and having children, I know that I have characteristics that might be labeled as male, and here in the villages of Egypt, I have indeed been called a "man" as a compliment (which I find rather odd and sometimes uncomfortable) because I am happy to be living on my own, running my farm, and taking responsibility for my people...and because I don't scare easily or back away from a confrontation when I feel I'm right. But is that really the behaviour of a "man" or is it the behaviour of someone who is simply certain in my own role, responsibility and power within my community and family? As well, I've been blessed with many nurturing, gentle male friends...so are they womanly or even, gasp! gay? Not at all. They are, however, more complex and interesting individuals than those who block away that aspect of the personality.

Life is so much simpler and less taxing to us when we categorise our world into little boxes, but in reality we dribble outside those boxes all the time. Living without our category boxes is infinitely more work. We actually have to pay attention to the individuals with whom we are interacting and see them in their glorious complexity. This takes time that modern society and human laziness often would like to avoid, so we categorise them. But what happens when we don't avoid the reality? Our world is so much larger and full of possibility and promise. With my work with our veterinary/farming charity that operates out of my farm, I have gotten to know the villagers, both men and women, as well as their children, as individuals rather than as inhabitants of that large box of "fellahin". There are those with whom I really enjoy spending time, others that I could cheerfully toss into the nearest canal because they refuse to open their eyes and ears to new ways of caring for their animals and families...but this is to be expected. Not all humans, dogs, birds, horses, or cats are enjoyable companions for every individual, and there is usually someone who likes the individuals that I do not like.

Looking at the question of how we accept the variety of individuals in our world whether it be through the lens of colour, sexuality, sex, gender, or social class clarifies the same issues at stake here in Egypt with the tendency of many to divide Egypt into social classes. We have the wealthy, theoretically educated (since they have financial and social access to "good" schools) and we have the poor and uneducated who have been told that they cannot be judges because their father was a farmer or trash collector. "City" people ascribe attributes to "country" people that don't necessarily fit in the actuality of individuals in these categories. And the opposite is also true. "Secular" people ascribe attributes to "religious" people that are equally without a good fit. Recently I've had groups of women who wear niqab bring their children out to the farm because my staff (who are mostly men other than myself and my housekeeper) are considerate and will stay away from the garden so that the women can enjoy the air without the black veil that they choose to wear in public...and they are well-read, well-travelled, interesting, questioning women, fascinating to talk to and very enjoyable as companions. Once you lose the category of Darth Vader clones, they are marvelous people. I do not necessarily agree with all that they believe but I do find them to be people with whom I am happy to spend some of my time, and I feel that I have been enriched by this interaction. The important point here is to appreciate the differences and enjoy them rather than to block because of them.

In her article, Nurredin Knight talks about learning to love herself as a black woman and accepting her entire being as what she is and what she should be. She questions whether sexual reassignment surgery is such a good idea. Wouldn't it be better just to accept on a societal level that just as there are people of different heights, weights, colours, athletic abilities and so on, there are also people of different aspects of sexuality and gender? When my children were young, one of their favourite books was called Leo The Lop and it was about a rabbit who had floppy ears who felt that somehow he wasn't normal because his ears didn't stand up like other rabbits. This is, of course, an oversimplification of a massive issue that touches every aspect of human endeavour. What is "normal" anyway? Much of the sectarian strife in the Middle East is rooted in the idea that there is only one "normal", just as sectarian issues in North America, while not necessarily expressed in religious terms, are also. One group can not decide that it is "normal" but no one else is. In this world, we need to lose the categories, all of them, and look at people as individuals who are individually kind, productive, inclusive, and honest...or they are not. And individually as people they should be part of our lives...or not.






Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

June 5, 2015

Don't Mess With Egyptian Women!

 I have time for a quick Christmas present from the women of Abu Sir to the rest of us before I scamper to get my Christmas lunch organised. Yesterday I was out for a ride with a friend and stopped by one of my neighbour farms just to say hello and chat briefly. He had a story that almost had me falling off my horse in laughter. The women of my area have my deep and abiding respect. They care for farms, families and homes in pretty tough conditions but never fail to have a smile, a greeting and to lend a hand to others. They are the steel of their families. While this is a very traditional part of the country and one of strong religious conviction, these women are also very accepting and friendly and have always been a source of laughter and joy for me, a very nontraditional aging Canadian. I've been hearing from many of my neighbours that they are very unhappy with the mismanagement from the Muslim Brotherhood and the meddling ways of the Salafis for some time. One neighbour told me how when buses came to shuttle protesters into Heliopolis for the demonstration at the presidential palace that turned so bloody a couple of weeks ago, quite a few of the mothers around me informed their sons that if anyone wanted to take the bus into town, they were welcome to do so but not to bother to come back.

So apparently a group of Takfir wal Higra moved into our area to help our local population behave in a more "proper" manner. They were seen walking along the roads in their short galabeyas and had taken a mosque for preaching and an office in Abu Sir for organising.  A week or so ago, eight of the men went into the main souq of Abu Sir and as they were entering noticed one woman sitting by her produce with a little bit of leg showing from her galabeya. Very rudely kicking at her leg, they told her to cover up and be decent. This was a monumental mistake. As it happened, this woman was the head woman for the souq and a member of a very populous clan in the area that number in the thousands. She and the other women in the market attacked the eight men and beat them so severely that they had to go to the hospital. When the men tried to file a report with the police about the attack, the police refused to take the report, saying that they weren't going against these women as well...were the men crazy? So now the youth of Abu Sir are using the office as a tea room and the mosque is no longer being used for their fundamentalist sermons and no one has seen the Takfir group for some time.

If anyone is wondering who to support to get rid of Islamists in Egypt, here is your answer. The women of Egypt are some of the strongest women I've ever seen.

copyright 2012 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Love And Hope Spring Eternal

I've been writing this blog for about eight years now and right from Day One I've been getting emails, mostly from women, about moving to Egypt to pursue a relationship with someone. Many of these inquiries stem from holiday romances, some from people met at univerisity abroad, some from internet romances that someone wants to pursue. Our revolution hasn't changed the incoming traffic one bit, other than my correspondents report even more nervousness from their friends and relatives who worry that a move to Egypt will automatically end in disaster. I finally decided that it was time to put out a list of things to think about before marrying into Egypt.

I spent 25 very interesting years married to an Egyptian man whom I met in Canada while in grad school. We married and had our kids in Canada but we were visiting Egypt very regularly before we moved to Egypt. Some years while the kids were still very young, I spent a month or two staying with my in-laws while my husband would travel back and forth between Cairo, Khartoum and Toronto. When I finally moved to Egypt, I'd been visiting it since 1976 and had spent a fair bit of time exploring and learning my rudimentary Arabic. I had decided that I loved Egypt's chaos, its happy loopiness and randomness, and it was actually my idea to move here against all of my husband's objections. We had a good life, our children had a varied and rich childhood, and while there were some ups and downs, I wouldn't have missed a minute. I did NOT move here cold without having visited quite a bit, nor without knowing some Arabic (enough to do daily tasks fairly independent), and I knew (or at least thought that I did) my husband's family quite well. In other words, I probably made the transition from Canada to Egypt under the best of circumstances. I'm not sure that most other people will be so blessed. So here is my open letter:


Dear Whoever is thinking of moving to Egypt for a partner,

I really should have a sort of form letter for this because I don't know how many emails I've sent to people who are thinking of following a friend to Egypt. First, the reality of life here is not seen anywhere in the western media. Life here is nothing like what they show on the news or in magazines. It is not especially dangerous, but it is not a life for someone who is unaware of his/her surroundings. Tell all your friends and relatives that you are not moving to the moon or to the 2nd circle of hell. That said, there are some serious questions that you need to ask and answer for yourself before making any kind of permanent or even semi-permanent commitments to a life here.

1. Do you like living in Egypt? Is this a country that fits well with your lifestyle and personality?

This must be decided for you and you alone. Life is impermanent and people come and go in it. So if you think about living in Egypt, it's important to know that you would like living here with or without your partner. I suggest coming on a visit to see if you can cope with the life in Egypt, whether it is in the pollution, crowding, and excitement of Cairo or in the much slower life of the villages or smaller cities. Don't just visit the pyramids and museums. Go everywhere. Check out shopping centers and souqs. Talk to other people living here. Go grocery shopping. Try cooking. Look for a job ...if only to see if you would be happy working here.

2. Are you willing to learn Arabic?

It is possible in some places to live in Egypt without knowing Arabic, but to be honest, you will be missing out on most of the life here if you can't simply carry on a conversation with the people around you. Even a simple task like grocery shopping can be much more effective and interesting if you can ask what new foods are and how to prepare them. Getting lost is less of an issue and Surprise! many of the things that people say around you are not cause for concern. Written Arabic and spoken Arabic are almost different languages, but there are many language schools here in Egypt and abroad that will help you to learn the language.

3. Do you know what you are getting into? Relationships are complicated and more so across cultures.

If you are considering an alliance with an Egyptian partner, you need to meet his/her family. You never marry a person, no matter where you live, you always marry his/her family and their history. This is true of marriage within your culture and religion and even more true if you are moving outside of your culture or religion. Your partner's unconscious assumptions about the role of wife and mother or husband and father are determined largely by what existed within his/her family, just as yours have, and it's a very good idea to meet the role models, to say the least. As well, although it is totall unPC to say anything about social class or anything like that, if your family backgrounds are too different, the adjustment can be very difficult. With a new geography, new culture, and new language, why make things harder than necessary? The more you know, the better you are prepared.

4. Do you realise that every country has a different family law? What you are accustomed to is not necessarily what is going to be what you have to deal with here.

Learn about family law in Egypt and get a good lawyer to explain and protect your rights if you choose to marry and live within Egypt. Egyptian family law is currently closely tied to the family's religion and this must be understood and taken into account. As we are currently in the process of reworking the constitution and government (hopefully), much of this is still unclear, but most definitely the family law that you are used to wherever you live now is nothing like the family law in Egypt. Family law is the law that determines marriage, divorce and child custody. For example, a woman's rights to divorce and other things can be specified in her marriage contract...a legal document that is the basis of every Muslim marriage, while divorce is forbidden by the Coptic church. Inheritance is so complex under Islamic law, which will be applied to a Muslim family no matter what anyone might wish otherwise, that it almost is a course of study on its own.

These are the main points. You need to see for yourself. That's the main thing. Egypt is safe to visit, so you should. Think carefully and do what is best for you.

Wishing you all the best,
Maryanne



copyright 2011 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Women Writing; Women Reading

Arab women get a bum rap to my way of thinking. The stereotype is a silent acquiescing figure wrapped in black just waiting for her master's voice, but as I've been happy and eager to tell friends abroad, that is so not the reality. I'm not saying that life for women in the Middle East is all sunshine and lollipops, but I am saying that women are not the doormats that they are imagined to be either. Just recently, I followed a lead from one of my favourite bloggers about Arabic literature in translation, M. Lynx Qualey, who writes (appropriately enough) Arab Literature (in English) on Wordpress, to a site Arab Women Writers. This site contains biographical information and references to Arab women who live all over the world (including the United States) and who write in a variety of languages. I consider myself fairly well-versed in Arabic literature, at least in translation, and I was awe-struck by the extent of the list of writers catalogued on the site.

My enlightenment regarding the role of Arab women first came courtesy of my mother-in-law, God rest her soul, who was a force to be reckoned with. She never stood in the limelight, but she certainly directed the lighting crew and everything else. No one, but no one, crossed her. Once I moved here, my education continued. I met women who were working at the highest levels of business and banking, women like Iman Bibars the director of the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women,Noura el Daly who runs Animal Haven and many others who completely ignored the stereotype and were working hard to change it.
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For those of us who can't just hop a plane to travel to wonderful new places to see and learn, books offer us the chance to visit and learn from our living rooms, even more so, I feel, than films and news. Books about women are terrific- but when they are written BY women they are the unique voices of experience. I've written before about Dr. Leila Ahmed's book, A Border Passage, which remains one of my favourite books and one that gives a unique picture of Egypt in the days before Nasser. Lucette Lagnado, who left Egypt with her family for the US as a child, wrote the wonderful Man In The White Sharkskin Suit, which gives insight into the lives of the Jewish Egyptian families prior to the Nasserist diaspora. Through the eyes of these women we can move in time and space, gaining wisdom from our sisters all over the globe.

As an added bonus, I'd like to recommend Nahla Hanno's blog Born Again Egyptian, which she writes in both English and Arabic. Unfortunately, I can't read Arabic so I have to be satisfied by the English posts, but they are more than satisfying. She's living in Saudi Arabia and writes about her experiences at home and abroad and about her love of Arab women's writing. A marvelous post titled Both Right And Left Handed talks about a book by a Syrian woman who interviewed women throughout the Arab world about their lives. She found food for thought and hope among the Tuareg women of North Africa. And who knows who we will discover tomorrow...

copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Saudi Hypocrisy

Global Voices reported today the response from other countries in the Middle East and North Africa to their recent ban on young Moroccan women coming to the Kingdom to perform omrah, the pilgrimage that takes place during Ramadan rather than during the Great Feast a month or so later. These women, apparently, have been decided to be a threat to the sanctity of Saudi male morality as they might be prostitutes (and one must assume, of course, that the required male accompanying them would be their pimp). To say that the Moroccans are a bit miffed is a major understatement. This is a blanket indictment of Moroccan society by a group of people who are notorious for their travels throughout the region for the purpose of sexual enjoyment.

In Egypt, there are villages outside of Giza and Cairo where male Saudi tourists have made a tradition of offering young girls sizable (for the girls of course, peanuts to the Saudis) amounts of money for the "privilege" of an informal marriage to the tourist for the summer months. The girls are then left to fend for themselves, and the fortunate ones find someone who is practical enough to appreciate a girl with some money to start a life with. Not a pretty picture. Apparently, this is common enough practice in Morocco as well to cause Moroccan legislators to pass a law requiring Saudi wives to be informed of these marriages before the marriage can take place. Since the law was passed in 2007, this ban is probably not in retaliation.

The assumption that Moroccan women are looser in their morality and thus probably prostitutes is highly offensive to all Moroccans. Morocco is less strait-laced than Saudi, to be sure, but then the Saudi's are notoriously less strait-laced the second they set foot off Saudi soil as well. It seems to me to be a serious case of the pot calling the kettle black. An article in the Guardian looks at the stereotyping involved. By the same kind of logic of "loose morality", given the stereotypes of North American and European women, one would have to ask if Muslim women from these areas have special problems going on pilrimages as well...and why are Egyptian women not banned? Maybe that's the point. These pilgrimages are getting to be very crowded, so perhaps it's better to make them gender-specific and cut the crowds down?




copyright 2010 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

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

Some Women's Issues

I don't like to discuss politics in general, not the faceless issues that so often populate the news. I'm not sure that they need discussion and they often don't really touch individuals directly. Recently, however, I read an Associated Press article online about a grassroots movement to convince Egyptian women that female circumcision is a bad idea. "Grass-roots effort in Egypt fights 'cutting' girls" written by Anna Johnson is an excellent piece that looks at a reasonable local approach to a very emotional issue. Every women's organisation in the world seems to be against FGM (female genital mutilation) and I am totally in agreement with all the objections. It is a pointless practice that causes much pain to young girls and later to women when many of them have problems with childbirth and pregnancy due to the rather haphazard surgeries performed. What I have trouble with is the strident demands that "they HAVE to be made to stop it!" without any background in the social complexities involved.

I was talking to my housekeeper about the issue the other day. Like most women in the villages here, she was circumcised as a child. She has five children of her own, the oldest two being girls and a couple of daughters younger. When I asked if they had been cut, she told me that her mother had come by one day while she was at work, taken the two older girls and had it done. She wasn't entirely comfortable with the fact and was rather embarrassed to tell me. This is where a good part of the problem lies. The older women who have been raised with the tradition have a vested interest in continuing tradition that validates their experience, no matter how unpleasant the experience might have been. In fact, in some cases, the more unpleasant, the more they want to see it continue so that they don't have to feel that they suffered for nothing. It's a variety of the old argument that perpetuates the British habit of sending children off to boarding schools at early ages...no one liked it but "if I survived and thrived, you will too".

One of my neighbours here managed to convince her housekeeper not to cut her daughters using an extremely ingenious argument. Most of the families here are very religious and she pointed out quite correctly that circumcision is not a Muslim tradition at all. This information came as quite a surprise to her housekeeper as it did to mine when we were talking. FGM is an ancient African tradition and is not supported anywhere in Islam, and at least in Egypt using this religious argument could be quite successful. The trick with it, as is the case with so many things of a religious nature, regardless of religion, is the fact that religion and tradition can become so totally entangled that they are hard to separate. There are quite likely figures who might argue that the surgery supports female chastity...but you can make the same argument for medieval chastity belts. I'm going to follow this grassroots movement and be cheering on the sidelines.

A Google link took me to a new blog today The Hijablog. This is a fashion blog for young women who wear hijab and I find it a real breath of fresh air. Hijab, the wearing of a scarf to cover your hair and often the neck and shoulders, is something that most westerners have a problem with. I could never even bring myself to wear a hat in the depths of a Canadian winter, often coming back into the house after shoveling the driveway with frozen hair after my morning shower (I mean how extreme a hatophobe can you get?) and I only wear a riding helmet because I promised my kids that I would for safety and I don't like to break a promise. So the likelihood of my ever being hijab is minimal to say the least, but I have also long been a an admirer of the women who turn their use of scarves and veiling into interesting and attractive outfits. Some might say that this negates the purpose of hijab, because it's almost impossible not to notice these striking young women, but I have to admit that I see the veiling issue as a combination of a social and a fashion choice.

My daughter used to wear a scarf over her vibrant auburn curls while in Cairo, partly to escape the need to do anything with them (they have a total life of their own!) and partly to deal with the reactions of young men in Cairo, who quite frankly need to be taught to deal with women on a much more comfortable and polite basis. It was never a religious thing for her, although it is for many young women. The way I see things, women have a multitude of manners in which to present themselves, hijab being just one. And I get a kick out of young women who are interested in exploring the fashion aspect of it. Good for you, Basbousa.




copyright 2008 Maryanne Stroud Gabbanien

The Importance of Staying In Touch

I recently took a brief holiday to the US to see my kids. When I got back to Egypt, I arrived to find my niece from California, along with her five year old daughter, a fellow teacher, and ten high school students, happily installed at an alternative school not far from the farm where they would be staying for a two week visit to Egypt as a part of their school program. I also had an old friend from New Zealand who came to think out some major life decisions at the farm and within a couple of days, another friend and her daughter from California had arrived via Luxor. If I'd been rested after two weeks of bouncing between Boston and New York, a matter of conjecture only since I certainly wasn't after a flight home on a plane carrying every small child in the US with an Egyptian grandparent to visit over the summer, I wasn't rested once I got home. My animals apparently miss me a bit when I'm gone and the greeting from the dog pack was riotous to say the least, but it was later in the evening that I noticed a real difference. When I sat down...and later when I went to bed...I found that all the dogs, even the big ones, had to sit or lie close enough to me to touch me. With temperatures during the day of over 90 F/38 C, this could get to be a burden. Night time temperatures in the high 70's/high 20's, made things a bit better but I didn't get much sleep the first few nights. It was as if the dogs needed to reassure themselves that I wasn't going to vanish again while they were sleeping. Silly dogs...but are they?

When I spent some time talking to my niece and catching up on family happenings, I was astonished to find that I'd missed some pretty important events abroad. Living on the opposite side of the globe, more or less, from part of my family and a minimum of 11 hours flying time from the kids, I rely on internet communications a lot. Emails, chat, Skype, even Facebook are all helpful in keeping up with family and friends who are wandering the globe, but in the end, we only know what others tell us about their lives, and they only know what we are willing to disclose. That can be a problem. "Oh, I didn't want to worry you." "Well, I figured that it would blow over." How many times have we all used this excuse as a reason to keep our problems to ourselves? We all do it. We share the good times and hide the bad ones, but at what cost?

When my husband died, I soldiered on. I sat through years of horribly confusing negotiations, miserable meetings, and generally disabling work in fields that I really had no experience with. It was not fun. Without a group of women friends who gathered around me, held me as I cried, and encouraged me when I wanted to just give up and run away, I would never have made it. Ladies, I salute you and I would never have survived without you. A core group were also going through some pretty gut-wrenching life changes...divorces, separations, career issues...and we would meet about weekly for a meal and an exchange of woes. How depressing...but not really...and how therapeutic. An Irish grad student friend of mine used to tell me, while we were suffering from being the first major influx of women grad students in our department in Canada with all the weirdness that entailed, that a problem shared is a problem halved. It isn't really that other people are going to solve the problem for you as it is that simply carrying the burden of our problem alone adds to its weight.

So the dumb animals aren't so dumb at all. They understand the need to be with the ones that they care about even if they can't speak in words. Years and years ago, AT&T, the American telephone company ran an ad campaign to boost long distance calling (I'm not so naive as to think that they approached it as a public service!) that featured someone saying "Reach out and touch someone." It's good advice. And don't only share the good news. It really is okay to say, "I know you can't do anything about this, but just knowing that someone is thinking about it with me helps...." And if you are on the receiving end, know that hearing about a problem doesn't necessarily mean that you have to rush out to slay a dragon. Sometimes just swatting a fly will do.
Oh, and the dogs? It only took a few days of sitting on me for them to decide that I'd returned for the duration and to go back to giving me space to breathe...thank heaven.

copyright 2008 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Definitely Book Of The Month

I stopped by Diwan, a lovely bookstore in Zamalek, the other day when I ventured into town for some reason that I've already forgotten. Stopping at Diwan is like stopping at a chocolate factory for me. I am a serious book addict with a fairly serious library of books by and about Egyptians and Egypt. My visitors love it because they can read to their hearts content about pyramids, Mamelukes, early exploration of the Nile, whatever. Anyway, I found myself poking through the shelves and I ran across a book by Dr. Leila Ahmed, the first professor of Women's Studies at Harvard Divinity School. The book, A Border Passage, is her autobiography and reminiscences of her childhood in Cairo during the change from British rule to Nasser's government. To be quite blunt, it is one of the best books I've read in years.

Dr. Ahmed has also written Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, a book that I haven't read yet, although it is now on my list. A Border Passage is lyrical, with the music of Egyptian life a theme that flows comfortably and seductively throughout her autobiography, which explores many of the issues of growing up female in Egypt. Some of the issues faced in growing up during the 50's and 60's have changed for women in Egypt, but many of them are the same. Watching my own daughter identify and deal with them as she grew up here was both interesting to me and daunting at the same time. With a Canadian mother and an Egyptian father, she had to invent her own culture as she grew up, since the two didn't always synch well. My husband was a product of the same culture as Dr. Ahmed, a culture that did value males over females, and that allowed males more freedom of action than females had. On the other hand, I was raised by a father who felt that it was important for both the boys and girls to know how to cook, sew, change tires on a car, fix a broken toilet, pitch a tent, and catch a fish. Although I made it clear from day one that there would be no difference between the rights of our son and our daughter, this was a point that had to be brought home more than once. Leila Ahmed's family was both ordinary and extraordinary and made it possible for her to study abroad at a time that such a course was not so common for young women.

I spend a lot of time with women of many backgrounds and social classes. My seventeen year old housekeeper from the village can't read or write, and her mother died about five years ago followed shortly by her father, leaving her an orphan. She's now engaged to be married to a young man from a neighbouring village, a skilled groom working for friends of mine. Before she became engaged to Gaber, she asked my advice as to his suitability. Gaber is a polite, hard-working young man with whom I could see no problems, so my advice was that he would probably make a good husband. Although my heart cringes at the thought of a seventeen year old getting married, she's already been supporting herself for the past three years and is well past the usual age of marriage in the villages. When she marries, she will stop working for me, but has promised to arrange for a friend of hers to come to help out in my house. Her friend is also married but also has children and I suppose has realised the necessity of extra income in her family.

Every woman has a story. We will recognise ourselves in parts of the story and find new truths in other parts. We will enrich our own lives by learning of the lives of others. A Border Crossing is a double blessing. Not only does it give us an experience of another culture, another country, and another time, but it does so with such beauty and grace that you will dread finishing the book as I do.