Are We Upstream or Down?

The New York Times today ran an article on cities like Seoul, South Korea, that were digging out, or "daylighting", streams and rivers that had been covered over for the sake of automobile traffic. This is an interesting idea here in Egypt where lately a lot of work has been done in areas of Giza in which large irrigation canals have been buried in pipes to make way for roadways. We do have the Nile in Cairo, although building and businesses line the river and don't really give human access to the water and view. The bridges here are crowded all night long during the summer as city residents seek the cooling breeze that persists along the river. Businesses have sprung up among those who rent out chairs, prepare food, and offer tea or soft drinks to the bridge lingerers.

Many suburbs of Cairo have lost their canals to roadways as housing has overtaken farming in the area. Maadi has a wide green space of sorts along Canal Street, named for the canal that once flowed there. I don't know if the canal was filled in or redirected through pipes. While some people say that covering the canals helps to keep the mosquito population down, I would argue that we manage plenty of mosquitoes in areas with gardens but we are lacking the frogs, toads and dragonflies that abound around open water and who are major consumers of mosquitoes. But Egypt has millions of miles of irrigation canal in the countryside that could be enjoyed by walkers and others if they came out to do so.


Living out here in the farmland I have gained a special fondness for the canals that I have to admit is not shared by many. Most people think that the canals are dirty, which in some areas they are, and especially when the water is low, they can have a rather ripe aroma of mud and rotting vegetation. The water in the canals is slow-moving so they tend to be a dark green with abundant algae, but many people don't realise that they are also full of life. They are teaming with small perch, frogs, toads, crayfish, and support a wide variety of birds and animals. One can find egrets, herons, three different varieties of kingfishers as well as bee eaters, rollers, swallows and other birds nesting near, eating from or flying over the canals.


There are problems with the canals, without doubt. They do harbour schistosomiasis parasites and the water is best viewed from a distance, but this is certainly no reason to do away with them. Schistosomiasis, or Bilharzia, is a problem for the farmers who work in the fields and are often wading in irrigation canal water. I don't know that there are any sure solutions to our need for irrigation and the problem of Bilharzia other than the easy access to inexpensive medication for it. I see that my staff (who irrigate with well water on the farm, but who might help in fields on their days off) get dosed with praziquantel twice a year at least. There is also the problem that there is no better place to dispose of a dead donkey or water buffalo than a canal if the farmer lives in the valley. The water table is so high that nothing can be buried in the Nile Valley and most farmers don't have any means of hauling a carcass out to the desert to let the wild dogs and kites dispose of it, even if they wouldn't be subject to prosecution from the Antiquities Service should they do so. The fish, crayfish, dogs, and birds do a pretty good job of disposal in the canals, however unpleasing it may be aesthetically, and the body is generally gone in about 2 weeks providing water soluble fertiliser.


Our canals are the circulatory system of the Nile Valley. In the old days we had four months during which the Nile flooded the entire valley, drowning a large proportion of the rodent population, laying down a fresh layer of silt to fertilise the fields, and in essence, giving the valley land a yearly transfusion. We no longer have the floods to clear the valley and I don't believe that the mentality has ever adjusted to the change. The canals are seen as a necessary evil for the farmers and little or no work has been done to educate people in the best ways to keep their canals healthy. We have an astonishing wealth in our waterways and they should be nourished, protected, and cherished.


copyright 2009 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

New Life For Old Weeds

To the untrained eye, water hyacinth is very pretty. Its big round leaves give way to lovely pale violet flowers that look for all the world like the hyacinths that used to bloom early in spring in my garden in Canada. They don't have the lovely scent as far as I know, but then leaning over a canal to smell a flower isn't the best idea at the best of times. Most of the canals here have the plant growing in them and periodically they are dragged out and left at the sides of the canals for wandering goats and sheep to eat. Besides being pretty, I've been told that the plant also takes up heavy metals in the water, which probably doesn't make it the best animal feed in the world. To be honest, the goats seem to only nibble on the freshest leaves and then only if there isn't anything better to be had.

The downside of water hyacinth is that a lot of water is lost to evaporation from the leaves and it clogs the channels of the canals so that the water doesn't flow freely. Beautiful or not, it is a weed. This morning I found an odd little item from the Shanhai Daily, a newspaper in China (bless Google News) that talks about a Chinese company coming to Egypt to manufacture furniture from the water hyacinth that grows in our canals. Apparently the weed itself is of superior quality in Egypt and the labour costs are low enough to make the investment a good thing. I must confess to being a bit stunned at the idea that a Chinese company thought that Egypt would be a nice cheap place to manufacture something. My second thought was to hope that someone puts some environmental safeguards on such a factory, not that Egypt is notoriously strict in that department, but China appears to be much worse. According to the article the manufacture of water hyacinth board does not involve the formaldehyde and other toxic chemicals that fiber board and plywood do. I'd want to do a bit more research before I take anyone's word on that, but if true, this all sounds terrific. We get rid of our weeds and have a new supply of wood for building furniture. One of the problems for furniture makers here is the fact that we have to import all of the wood, since we have no forests. It all sounds, on the surface, like a nice fit. Now let's hope the reality lives up to the press...but that's always the problem, isn't it?

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

A Soggy Horse Tale

The Nile Valley is crisscrossed by irrigation canals distributing water to the farmlands of Egypt. These canals sometimes extend through urban areas where pipes have been laid to contain a canal under a roadbed as well. Near the farm where I live, the canals have trails alongside them, making them a favourite place to ride my horses. Yesterday was Friday and I took the morning to go riding with a group of friends through the desert to the northern end of Sakkara village and then home through the farmland to the farm. The ride down in the desert was lovely. A light breeze kept us all cool and my young gelding Fagr was behaving beautifully, keeping up with the older horses and not trying to run off in the vastness of the Sahara.

As we moved into the farmland on our way home, we kept up a brisk pace to be back at the farm in a good time for my friend Cris to be home on time. Our track took us past families in the fields, most of them harvesting forage for cows and donkeys so that they could relax at home on the first day of the feast after Ramadan, which is today. The horses were happy moving down the trail that wound along a deep canal about midway between the two main roads in this area. We were in the middle of nowhere and delighted to be there.

Suddenly, we came around a bend and found that one of the farmers had placed a diesel pump on one side of the trail with the intake hose extending across the trail to the canal on our left. There was room to pass and two of my older horses being ridden by friends hopped the hose and passed safely. When it was my turn with Fagr (aka, Figgy), however, his left hind foot slipped on the edge of the canal and he slid into the 2 metre deep canal. Although I launched myself out of the saddle towards the path as I felt him slipping, I didn't make it and ended up submerged in enough murky water that I couldn't feel the bottom, not that I'd want to anyway. I discovered that Fagr is a very strong swimmer, strong enough to pull me along the canal until I got smart and dropped the reins.
The farmer whose pump had been parked at the trailside reached down and helped to haul me out of the muck and then we had to call to Fagr who was swimming in some bewilderment along the canal. He turned and emerged from the water slightly downstream and on the other bank. Another farmer took the reins and led him along the path to a point just down the trail about 150 metres. We were reunited, dripping and filthy, and I realised that my digital camera and my mobile phone were both in the saddle pack attached to Fagr's saddle. As he'd spent rather longer in the water than I had, I was not optimistic about their survival.

As it turned out, my pessimism was well-founded. Both the Nokia and the Lumix were willing to turn on after about 18 hours sitting and drying out, but their behaviour is very erratic. The Nokia won't dial things and keeps beeping at me randomly, while the Lumix opens the lens and then shuts it over and over. Very sad. And I'd just gotten the Lumix back from being serviced on Wednesday night. Panasonic took over a month to replace two motors inside that had been damaged by dust. Well, at least dust isn't the problem now but I'm hoping that I can convince them to work a bit faster this time.

So for a while, my blogs will either be accompanied by photos I've already taken and stored or they will be photo-less. That is the point of the shaggy horse story, and Cris was late as well.

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani