Shaken Not Stirred

 What's it like living in a country that is still in the middle of a revolution? It's actually a lot like living in a lot of countries these days, just a bit more dramatic. Almost everywhere I look I see change occurring at a phenomenal rate, partly brought along by the changes in communication that this blog exemplifies. When I began blogging in 2003, people were much more reliant on the main stream media for information about events whether at home or abroad. In the almost ten years since then, events have taken on an immediacy never anticipated through media such as Twitter, Facebook and Storify. Where once I felt I was happy to be able to go online to read commentary on events from a wide-ranging collection of news sources via the internet, now I go online and check the comment on Twitter from their correspondents in our ever-boiling part of the world to see what happened overnight before it even appears in the media.  One of the results of this increase in media availability has been an increased sense in the instability of our world. I'm not sure how more unstable it is, but I am sure that we are more aware of it. I also am very aware of the fact that I am one small cog in this huge global information machine.

When the Egyptian revolution started in January 2011, my children in the US contacted me to see if I wanted to go visit them for the duration...but they weren't terribly surprised to hear that it wasn't in my plans. I chose the location of my farm with care, knowing my neighbours and the social structure into which I wanted to fit. It is probably as safe for an older woman who lives alone with an unholy amount of dogs as anywhere can be. Once they'd assured themselves that I was still the stubborn old lady that they knew and loved, they did lay down some ground rules. With the outcome of the revolution very much in the air, I was NOT to post anything at all on my blogs. The few times I did, I was the recipient of immediate angry feedback from my offspring. But it's really hard for someone who naturally resorts to writing not to write, especially when the country around her is almost literally boiling. So we came to a compromise. I was allowed to post other people's articles about events in Egypt on my Facebook page which became a defacto news service. Writing by proxy saved my sanity. I've tried to keep a fairly balanced viewpoint about events, although clearly my feelings could not be denied. Over the past couple of years, my Facebook page has become less a personal account of my activities and more a forum for my friends all over the world to read news, blogs, and snippets from Twitter and to comment on or argue over them among themselves. I've likened it to the old fashioned literary salons of the 19th century at times. I love watching the discussions although often I don't take part in them if a couple of people are really into a topic. When life gets REALLY interesting in our neighbourhood, like it is now, I find that I really have to make the time to sit and write my own words because there is so much out there that others are saying.  So far worries about retribution for what ideas we are putting out on the internet are relatively small, since to worry about a little old lady on a farm in Giza who never shows up on TV or at a protest would appear to be a waste of time when half of Egypt is online complaining about one thing or another.

So, what is Egypt like in the middle of a revolution? Because that is where we are, in the middle, in a process that no one knows the ending of. I think everyone in Egypt has been anxious in the past few weeks with many people going down to Tahrir and gathering in other squares in other cities to protest the actions of our fairly recently elected president and with the knowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood and the supporters of said president were planning to have their own protest in support of the president. One of the main, not always unspoken, fears was that somehow the two groups would simply explode if put in contact, like a match to a stick of dynamite. A while back the Ikhwan bussed in supporters from outside of Cairo to come to Cairo University to support Morsi as he prepared to announce the acceptance of a draft constitution for a public referendum. The fact that the committee drafting the constitution did not contain any constitutional experts in any general sense was extremely worrying to many people. After all, a constitution of a nation isn't exactly a set of rules for a children's backyard club. It is supposed to protect the rights of all the members of the nation and with limited representation by minority groups and women, there has been an enormous amount of concern with what the output would be. On Thursday an Arabic version of the draft was released, which has been the topic of enormous amounts of discussion. I've printed up copies of it for my staff to read and think about. An English translation of it was published by Egypt Independent which I have been reading as well. Late in the evening yesterday, Morsi announced that this would be either approved or disapproved in a referendum on December 15, giving voters only two weeks to consider the issues.  I'm not sure that more time would necessarily lead to more clarity of thought on the subject, but it's fairly sure that only having two weeks to find, read, and discuss the draft does make it harder for people to object to it. Most referendums in Egypt have ended in a "yes" vote out of inertia. And in the end, this referendum was no different.

Does this signal the end of the process? By no means, and not the least of the reasons is Morsi himself. He's put people who even many Muslims and revolutionary types can't approve of on the Shura Council (the upper house of parliament) like generals and members of the Islamic Jihad. There is such a thing as appropriate, really Dr. Morsi. Virtually everything he has done, while he may have words to say that it has been expedient or for the good of the country, simply screams authoritarian Islam. And this is wildly offensive to Egyptians of all varieties who were thrilled to get rid of Mubarak. We are nowhere near the end of the tunnel and no one is sure what those dancing lights are. They could be Salafi cigarettes (soon to be taxed at much higher rates!), the steam engine of economic collapse, fireflies, fairies, or, heaven forbid, the end of the tunnel. My personal bet at this time is not the last, but the fairies or fireflies sound good to me.

So am I packing up for what might be the stability of the US or Canada? Not at all. First, I'm not all that sure of the stability of either state, to be honest. Both are awash in political and religious conservatism themselves, albeit both Canada and the US are so much larger than Egypt physically that the effect is diluted, and both are facing serious domestic political issues. Gun control in the US is vital, although many people are extremely vocal against it. My personal cynical view of the gun issue is that given the US is the world's largest manufacturer and seller of weapons and ammunition, the gun enthusiasm has been created in the same way that other consumer appetites have been and that no one is going to try to control the selling of guns for fear of damaging an important part of the economy, just like all the calls for cutting back on the "aid" for Egypt is going to lead to nothing because that "aid" is actually a government subsidy for the arms industry in the US and the money goes directly to the companies producing weapons and ammunition and to those servicing such weapons. What happens to them later is irrelevant to the US government or those industries, but the sooner they are used or blown up the better because that simply creates a new demand.

Canada, aside from the environmentally wasteful behaviour of the current government, is facing a deeper and perhaps more dangerous domestic issue that could easily splash over the border to the south. Both countries were created by wave after wave of immigrants primarily from Europe over the past three hundred years or so...a brief second compared to the history of Egypt. These immigrants, having now the positions of power in a land that they essentially invaded and confiscated (no wonder that both their governments are fairly staunch supporters of Israel, the most modern European colonial power) are crying now about how new waves of immigration are threatening their life style. Oddly enough, the indigenous peoples of North America, who for the most part live in poverty and on marginal properties to which they were pushed by the immigrants of their times, are getting rather fed up. A movement that started in Canada with a tribal chief Therese Spence, who is on a hunger strike for assistance for her people, Idle No More, is gaining support from other indigenous people's groups worldwide. At some point, the urge for justice that seems so keen in many semi-European countries in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Africa is going to have to thrust itself inwards to examine the morality of how those countries came to be in the first place. This is going to be intensely painful for many people. On the other hand, they could try to ignore it like they have in the past, but with the character of communication in our societies these days, that simply isn't so easy.

All things considered, I'll stick with my Egyptian revolution which for the most part is relatively straightforward even if we haven't the foggiest where the path is taking us tomorrow. I see shudders of change running through countries all over the globe and I don't think that anywhere is going to be immune. All the patterns I see forming are indicating that with information becoming so much more readily available and so much more easily placed in the public eye, many profound changes in human society will be seen in the relatively near future. My analysis is, of course, done very much by eyeballing events and getting a vague sense of movement. There is nothing scientific about it and I'm sure that some of the things I suspect will happen will not come to pass, but of this I am sure: Change is inevitable and will be faster than expected. It will likely make many people unhappy.

copyright 2012 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Recognising Catastrophe

These days the news from Egypt is pretty depressing for just about everyone. Voters are expected to choose soon between two candidates who are not the first choices of most of the voters, and who are fairly diametrically opposed. There is Dr. Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood who terrifies all the voters who worry about Egypt turning into another Iran, while opposing him is Hosny Mubarak's last prime minister, Ahmed Shafik, who claims that everything will be different if he is elected president, but most people sort of doubt that. Faced with two miserable choices, everyone is seeing disaster everywhere they look.

Some of us make a habit of seeing disaster in everything and I'm one of those people, oddly enough. "Catastrophizing" is a psychological term for the act of seeing the worst case scenario in every situation, and when I was a grad student it was something that I would be reprimanded for by my clinician friends as being maladaptive. I had no idea it had a name because it was just how I dealt with things.  I've catastrophized all my life. As a child I would lie awake at night and wonder how I would manage if I were to wake up in the morning and not find my parents there to care for me. Whenever I attempted something new, applying to university for example, I would spend hours imagining that I would not be accepted and think of what it would mean to my life, how would I manage to make a living, and so on. Of course, I did get accepted, but life was always coming up with new challenges to give me something to worry about.

It was when I was in grad school that one of my friends called me on my habit, gave it a name, and told me that it was a really bad thing to do. To be quite honest, I wasn't really convinced. I'd been looking at worst case scenarios all my life and a habit like that is hard to change. But when I looked up the pattern, I noticed that catastrophizing was something that was supposed to lead to a sense of inability, worthlessness and so on. But in my experience my assumption of catastrophe in every situation had led me to explore all the possibilities of what could go wrong and as many of the possible solutions as I might be able to imagine. Rather than paralyzing me, it pushed me to explore the possible futures that I might face and to try to figure out how I would deal with them.

When I was only about twelve I read about the epidemics that swept through Europe decimating the population in the Middle Ages. I became fascinated with the Black Death, probably to a certain level of concern from my parents. But I learned about the causes, the cures, the effects on the political systems and economies of Europe along the way. When we decided to move to Egypt, I took an entire series of first aid and CPR courses from St. John's Ambulance in Toronto and threw myself (quite literally) into a Bronze level lifesaving course at the neighbourhood pool. I had an idea from my travels here about the general level of first aid in Egypt in the late 80's (like nonexistent) and was going to be prepared for the worst case scenario, which in this case was needing this knowledge. And I did need it. A month after we moved here, with my training I was able to recognise and deal with my husband's  heart attack. We got him to a cardiologist and into ICU immediately, postponing my widowhood by a good twelve years. I don't want to think about all the times that the first aid training came in handy: broken arms, choking victims, a visiting child who had a crowbar fall on his head from a neighbouring construction site...you name it, it happened at our house. People used to joke that the catastrophes happened around me because I knew how to deal with them and how to get people the care that they needed to survive them.

As I've grown older, my catastrophizing has become a good and faithful friend. When the bird flu broke out and began spreading, I was worried for my African Grey parrots so I learned all I could about the vectors, the signs, the problems...and I learned that parrots don't get it. By examining the catastrophe I realised that it wasn't really a catastrophe, no matter what the press said. I did have to slaughter my chickens when bird flu broke out at a chicken farm near me, but no people got sick at all and we were well provided with chicken soup for some time. Some research on swine flu also reassured me that I was highly unlikely to perish from that as well. When life turned interesting in Egypt during January 2011, I assured my children that I would be fine where I was, and although events were at times very frightening, albeit more for the people in the center of the city than for us out in the villages, I had no intention of evacuating. Instead I threw myself into finding out as much as possible about what was going on, what possible risks might be, what possible outcomes might be...in other words, what were the worst possible scenarios.

I've continued my preoccupation with trying to prepare for catastrophe for the past year and a half. I have no input into what might happen in Egypt. Due to a wonderfully weird bureaucratic glitch, I don't have my Egyptian citizenship despite having been married to an Egyptian, being mother to two Egyptians, and having lived here for almost 25 years, and I can't even vote. It's pretty frustrating although the thought of having to choose between two totally unwanted alternatives is not terribly appetising.  I wish I could really say that I've gained some understanding of what is happening in Egypt right now, of what we can expect, but I can't. I'm watching bemused like everyone else, wondering how on earth we got here. I have my own ideas of what would be the greater catastrophe for Egypt: Morsi for president or Shafik...but even that has variables that I can't predict. I don't know how invested the military is in seeing that Shafik win the election, what they will do to ensure that, how they would respond if Morsi won, or what the reaction would be if Shafik wins and people feel that the elections are a total sham.

There are times when imagining the worst case scenarios just can't really do justice to reality.  Do I feel incapacitated, frozen, unable to make decisions or act? Not really. I am frustrated, worried, and do feel that way too much is hanging in the balance. Am I about to take off and leave? No. None of my worst case scenarios include my leaving Egypt. I love my farm, my neighbours, my animals and my life here. I'd say that my absolute worst case scenario involves me not being able to move around Egypt freely and being stuck out here...and as far as I'm concerned that isn't a bad scenario at all.

As I was thinking about all of this, quite serendipitously one of my children's friends posted a link to an excellent New Yorker article on the internet. Entitled Failure And Rescue, this article suggests that life is unpredictable, but that how we face our catastrophes determines how much we succeed.  He uses the story of surgery that almost went terribly wrong but ended up in success because people were aware of the possibilities of problems, recognised the signs and were able to deal with them. Sometimes catastrophizing is an adaptive trait.


copyright 2012 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200, But Do Watch This Video

There is a video that I think everyone who has an interest in the Egyptian political scene in either the short run or in the long run should spend an hour and a half to watch. Mahmoud Salem, a blogger also known as Sandmonkey (see his blog at http://www.sandmonkey.org), spoke at the Washington Institute for Middle Eastern Affairs a few days ago. Aside from being an extremely astute and acute observer of our political scene, Mahmoud is a highly entertaining speaker. His description of Am Moussa as "that sandwich that you find in your fridge at 3:30 AM when you are hungry but you can't remember where it came from or what it's made from; but you eat it anyway" is priceless. This is one young man who, in my opinion, is a national treasure and should be watched closely. Please click on the link to see the YouTube video. It's worth every minute. copyright 2012 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Both Spinning in Space and Standing Still

I have the serious sense of the world moving both too fast and too slowly these days, and to be frank, it makes me a bit dizzy. An unhappy motherboard on my laptop has left me with an iPad that can post but not photos, for the most part, and I won't really be able to intersperse my ideas with some lightening photos. So bear with me.

Where has our Egypt gone? In some ways it is still the same place and in others it has changed almost beyond recognition. Before the revolution the standard line of the government was that they were the only dike between stability and the chaos of Islamic tides. Governments believed this and so did many people. What we've found since the uprising in Jan/Feb has been that the Muslim Brothers, the Salafis, the Sufis, and many other Islamic groups have more than enough internal disputes that no one group is likely to be taking over from the previous government. What we've realized is that this entire propaganda campaign was a diversion from the reality that since the early 1950's Egypt has been a military dictatorship and that this, in fact, hasn't changed. There are many, myself among them, who have a strongly nagging suspicion that the protesters of winter did the military here a huge favour by insisting on the removal of Mubarak and, more importantly, his sons from the picture. There was a lot of debate about the question of whether the very powerful Egyptian army would accept Gamal Mubarak, who never even served in the armed forces, as a successor to his father, and I believe that we have a resounding "No!" as our answer. The military were delighted not to have to force a confrontation and to appear to do the will of the people. They didn't exactly come down that hard on the Mubaraks, allowing Gamal the freedom to come to Cairo from Sharm el Sheikh for months, and allowing Hosny's chief of staff access to the Presidential palace and all its shredding machines for months. After all, maybe the Mubaraks had the wherewithal to perform a resurgence. It's only been in the past few months when it's obvious that the Mubaraks are truly history that the Supreme Council, a ruling group of generals, have taken even half-hearted steps against the previous regime.

Instead, they have adopted the old ways of creating dissonance among Egyptians by ambushing Christian protesters and then claiming in the government controlled media that they were being attacked. This story has only worked among those who only read, listen to or watch only the government controlled media as everyone else has been broadcasting videos and eyewitness accounts of the reality of the situation. Unfortunately one of the aspects of the old Egypt that hasn't changed is the large number of people who do rely on the state media for information, an unsettling thought to say the least. The "government's" inability to handle the issues of seeing Egypt through this period have been publicly on show and privately indicated. The prime minister has attempted to resign many times and has been told, probably very forcefully, that his resignation will, on no account, be accepted. This is likely because the military know that it is the only facade that gives them the slightest shred of legitimacy and they can't afford to lose this. But it seems pretty clear to everyone that the main concern of the military council is the maintenance of their freedom of action without the inconvenience of civilian oversight. They get about $1 billion in military aid yearly from the US and one of their primary concerns is not threatening this lucrative source of income. There has been significantly less concern with reassuring the world that Egypt is still a safe tourism destination (which it is, by the way, unless you are unlucky enough to find yourself in front of a tank...which is an occurrence of very low probability), to look to the reorganization of our schools (which have basically been holding pens for the young and have utterly failed at education), to provide a reasonable standard of living for employees of the state like teachers and doctors (they could share out some of that military largesse?), or to provide any security for the citizens of Egypt who have been living since last January without any traffic or parking police for the most part. It's okay, we can live without the Central Security Forces, who unfortunately seem to have no problem working...usually NOT for us.

One of the things that has changed is the willingness to discuss our situation among people in general, and this is definitely a Good Thing. You hear discussions and arguments over current events in Egypt everywhere now, whereas before January they were generally carried out in low voices in closed rooms among close friends. As an Arabic speaking foreigner, I can hardly buy a coffee without discussing something. People are now willing to talk about, and go on strike for, things that they have long been vexed by. While the strikes are truly inconvenient for most of us (though we saw a nice decrease in traffic during the transit strike...no buses and fewer minibuses) it's totally understandable. Everyone was gagged for so many years with repression and the inability to speak out. The Maspero incident in which the army attacked the the Christian AND Muslim protesters left real scars and worried Christians here in Egypt. Rumours abounded immediately afterwards about army checkpoints that were stopping cars and rounding up Copts. I've found no confirmation of them, but the damage that they do to the national psyche is obvious. Out here in the villages, religion is still not an issue and we have Copts and Muslims living and working side by side. The idea of conflict over this is still considered ludicrous.

The list of things that haven't changed, however, is staggering. Whatever is passing for an Egyptian government is still almost utterly disengaged from the concerns and needs of the people. Election dates are postponed and changed at random, procedures for elections are totally unclear and are changed at random. This is enormously confusing and is leading to a real sense that nothing really has happened to change the essence of the Egyptian government. The schools have been a cause for serious concern for years, with crowded classrooms taught by untrained teachers who rely on rote learning turning out citizens with only rudimentary skills at the basics and virtually no ability to analyze a situation and make an informed decision. Essentially, they've been factories for an ignorant and compliant populace.

An additional serious problem that I have only really become aware of in the past 6 months is the issue of the education of families in maternal, prenatal, and postnatal nutrition. My housekeeper had a baby and returned to work after two weeks bringing the baby with her. While this may seem way too early, it's worth noting that she probably works much less in my home than in her own, she has a number of adults available to help with care for her son, and she has decent food here. I've had meals with farm families and noticed that the men generally eat first, with the children next and the women last. These means that women who are pregnant and nursing don't necessarily get the nutrition they need. Magda has had more children that she needs (let's not even open the topic of her husband who doesn't help to support the family and stands in the way of birth control in a really secure fashion.) Now she's on pills having tried a number of other unsuccessful forms of birth control but she has always been too tired and improperly fed to be able to nurse her babies properly. When this last son was born, I began buying the formula to supplement as one can is about 40 LE. To feed this child properly would take over half her monthly income...and she has more kids at home to feed. So basically we have taken on the job of feeding this baby, who is now beginning to eat and gets homemade baby food while he is here almost every day. I've begun noticing the other infants around me and most of them are small, thin, rather unresponsive, the victims of postnatal malnutrition. Their mothers are often exhausted working hard around the house...housework in the villages is no joke. Food is prepared absolutely from scratch, keeping a house clean next to the desert is a full time job, and there is little time to put one's feet up. Additionally there is almost no knowledge of proper nutrition or even the need of a nursing mother to drink sufficient fluids. We find ourselves raising children here who due to improper nutrition have a bad start in life and then compound it with the schools. While I'm definitely not an advocate of cradle to grave imposition of lifestyle, it is absolutely the role of government to provide education to its population whether children or adults. The government here really hasn't tried much.

One of the senses that many of us have these days is the sense of there being simply so much to do to put Egypt to rights. How is this going to be done? Will we get a government that responds to the needs of the people? Will we just get another one that milks the country for wealth? Every question is still in the air.




copyright 2011 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Thoughts on Recent Events

I began this blog about 18 months after 9/11 in an effort to help friends and acquaintances of mine, mostly from the US, understand why I insisted on living in this backward, terrorist-ridden woman-hating country...that was pretty much how Egypt was described in the media back then. I looked online for webpages or information about the joys of living in Egypt (and there are many) but I couldn't find anything. So with all good intentions, I decided to write about living here as a long term resident and lover of Egyptian society and life. In March, my blog will be about eight years old.

From the beginning, I chose to avoid discussions of local politics, partly because I'm not an Egyptian citizen, not for want of trying but because of some utterly inane bureaucratic hitch in the Mogamma that prevents me from being given citizenship even though my husband and children carry it. As someone without formal citizenship I was very aware of my precarious position under a regime that was notoriously touchy about criticism and I had no wish at all to be deported or barred from entering the country that I consider my only home. In addition, I don't read or write Arabic and I really felt that it was rather inappropriate for me to be sounding off about things here that I could only partly understand for lack of complete information...and I was quick to find a group of much younger Egyptian bloggers who were doing an infinitely better job, at great personal cost.

I chose instead to try to talk about aspects of daily life here that could give the country a more human face, things that anyone could relate to in terms of family life, philosophy, those smaller things that keep us going when the larger events threaten to trample our souls and that are universal to all people. Sometimes I feel that maybe I did too good a job as I get a lot of email from people who for various reasons want to come here to live and work. I always have to point out that Egypt has never been without its problems (no country is), that it is essential to learn to speak (at least) Arabic so that there is a possibility of communication, and that this isn't Indiana with pyramids. Egypt has its own culture and way of life and doesn't need to have anyone else's imposed upon it. With my children grown and studying in the US, I had a constant pressure to remember to be tactful as they were not keen on hopping a flight to try to dig their old mother out of one of the Egyptian prisons.

With the January 25 protests and in the days following, I found myself sitting by the television at the farm, following events on Twitter and the net, and biting my tongue almost off. My son and daughter are still in New York studying and working, and they pointed out the wisdom of not being in Tahrir given my citizenship and the knee surgery that I underwent last summer. (I'm not so nimble on the ground although I am still fine on horseback.) I was devastated like everyone when Mubarak unexpectedly did not step down on Thursday night and cheered with most Egyptians when he finally left on Friday. And again, I was constantly asking myself if it would have been right for me to be there or not. A large part of my spirit says "Hell, yes!", while the part that probably keeps me alive, fed and safe, says "Maybe no". In the end, the deciding vote was cast by my work and lifestyle which meant that if I disappeared a group of people who depended on me for their living and a bunch of animals to whom I am terribly attached, would be set adrift with no one to provide for them. In addition, I actually hold my farm in trust for my daughter and I need to protect that trust. So discretion won out, at least for the short term.

Watching the revolution from the safety of the countryside was rather surreal. Out here the main difference in life was that many of us had a very hard time getting hay and feed for our animals. In our area people helped each other out with supplies so that no one would suffer too much. Thankfully, I'd withdrawn a reasonably large amount of cash from the bank before they all closed during the protests, and this helped a lot. I still had staff responsibilities even if the banks were closed, and animals could care less about politics...they simply want to be fed. Out here the neighbourhood watch was quickly instated and extremely efficient. At the height of the problems you had to go through about 6 checkpoints to get near my farm. If the driver and/or passenger wasn't recognised, they had to show ID, declare who they were coming to visit, and they had to call that person to verify the fact. Even now the checkpoints are in place and cars are carefully vetted. We could hear the tanks rolling around in the desert for much of the revolution. I understand that some archaeological warehouses were raided the first night that the police vanished, but things were quiet here other than the odd time the villagers caught people who had been stealing from stores in the Pyramids Road area trying to smuggle their loot through this area.

My staff, like many rural Egyptians, are mostly at the lower end of the educational scale with many of them illiterate. Even those who could read were incredibly confused. They were accustomed to reading the usual newspapers and watching state TV, so when Al Jazeera began showing what was actually happening in the streets, they didn't know what to think as the government newspapers and TV shouted out that A) Nothing was happening at all; B)There were small protests instigated by foreign powers variously and sometimes simultaneously identified as Israeli, Iranian, Hamas or simply "foreign"and C) Al Jazeera was lying about everything just to make Egypt look bad. I guess that the unspoken word there was that Qatar was also trying to bring down the Egyptian state. When the government satellite cut Al Jazeera Arabic, we would let people come to the house to see it in English, as that hadn't been cut. I spent hours talking to them about what was happening, what was hoped and why it was so important to them...and how it might change their lives but that it would not be an easy road.

Family and friends were, naturally, concerned. My children offered me a flight to NYC, but I declined saying that I felt safe and I wouldn't miss this for the world. As long as it was possible we spoke to each other daily. I don't want to think about my long distance bill. When the net returned after being cut off for a bit, reception out here was still a bit dicey and it took days to respond to people who were writing worried about me. And at the end of it all, I felt drained, happy, bewildered, concerned and frustrated. It's taken a week at least to work out all those emotions.

I was drained as many of the young people who were involved in this revolution were those who I'd been following online for many years. After a while they feel like friends, although I'd never met them, and concern for their safety and relief when they were released from custody was enormous. I was delighted with the outcome inasmuch as our unesteemed head of state departed finally with his family. The cronyism, corruption, and violence were never far from anyone's sight, so I was cheering for the revolution from day one. I think everyone in Egypt is a bit bewildered at this point. This is the first time in probably over eight thousand years that Egyptians have had a say in their government. They have gone through any number of systems of monarchy to military dictatorship and now finally have a chance to have the people of the country speak for their needs. In a sense, they have the chance now to reinvent democracy on their terms. There certainly isn't much in the way of baggage to encumber them since everyone acknowledges that what existed here was certainly not any kind of real democracy. Everyone is looking about asking where to go from here, but they are not simply looking. This afternoon a neighbour took Catherine (a friend of my daughter who is staying here and helping me) into Zamalek for a meeting of a group of people who are wanting to help to rebuild Egypt. There are many groups of this sort on Facebook that I know of and quite likely many more being organised offline. People are collecting money and hospital supplies to help the victims of violence during the protests, they are establishing food banks, going out and sweeping and repairing the streets, directing traffic and taking care of neighbourhood security. Many of the police are either on strike (the lower ranks do get appallingly bad wages and working conditions) or in hiding.

While in many respects, the country seems to be quite normal in these post-revolutionary times, in many others it is not. The stock exchange has been closed indefinitely for some time now. I don't understand stock exchanges when everything is terrific, so I have nothing to say about that now. The strikes that are being held are totally understandable in that no one has had the freedom to complain about anything for longer than anyone can remember, but they are definitely inconvenient at times. Banks were closed all last week and we have had no assurance that they will open this week. This is primarily because the employees of the National Bank are on strike. But the strikes are not indefinite, they come and go causing temporary problems. These are growing pains and I remember being inconvenienced plenty of times by strikes in Canada. In Egypt, people simply have not become accustomed to any labour unrest. A group of my neighbours got together on Friday morning to check out the situation for horseback riding in the desert here, something that is important for both our sanity and some of our budgets. On Friday it was fine, but one neighbour reported seeing soldiers jogging in the desert on Thursday morning. No one is quite sure what that means.

My theory is that Egypt works on a special chaos filter and very close to the red line at the best of times, so when things aren't quite normal...they really aren't that far off normal. On February 12, Catherine and I drove down to Beni Suef (with the ever protective Mohamed of course) to buy some goats to improve our flock. We picked up two males (one Alpine/Syrian cross and the other Saanen/Syrian cross) and three females (all Saanen/Syrian cross) to breed with our flock of baladi goats. The males were named Google and Twitter while the females were dubbed Mona, Zeinobia, and Nadia, after three of my favourite Twitter posters during the protests. We saw nothing unusual other than a couple of burned cars on the side of the road, a couple of tanks and a four year old boy in the village where we bought the goats who picked up a stone and brandished it at us shouting "Horreya" (Freedom)...only to be firmly scolded by his mother who told him that was enough. The revolution is over.

But is it over? Not really. The military leaders are the same military leaders who were in power under Mubarak, while the cabinet is largely made up of the same old gang of suspects. There is still an awful lot of housecleaning to do. Much of the frustration I mentioned has to do with the influence of other countries in Egypt's affairs through the use of the aid given, primarily to the military. Most of the US aid was given in the form of credit that could be spent in the US arms industry to buy tanks, planes, guns and tear gas canisters...though oddly enough many of the latter were way beyond their expiration dates apparently. Wonder where the money for the new tear gas went...or are there huge warehouses of the stuff lying about? Basically the aid went to prop up a regime that was everything the US government claims to hate. They've gone into Iraq and Afghanistan to rid the poor citizens there of repressive regimes supposedly...while causing major collateral damage to both countries. When the protests in Egypt began, the leaders of the free world sided with Mubarak, although no one can believe that they were unaware of the real situation here. Maybe they only lead the "free" world and don't really have anything to do with the oppressed world except to sell the governments there arms. At any rate, the Egyptians "freed" themselves and with a much lower cost than we would have had with help from the US military.

During the protests there was much discussion of the "Tunisia" effect referring to the overthrow of the Ben Ali regime only a short while earlier. Of course, there are still issues there as the "interim" government of Tunisia has also kept on entirely too many of the old regime. Within days of February 11, protesters in Bahrain marched to demand reform and more voice in their government, perhaps a constitutional monarchy rather than what currently exists. Like the Egyptians, they marched without weapons, chanting in peace, and when the government soldiers, mercenaries for the most part unlike the Egyptian army, encountered the protesters, they were fired on with tear gas canisters at point blank range. The army's responses to peaceful protest has been so violent in Bahrain as to be termed a massacre at times. And the governmental tactic has been to ban the press, penning them in the airport so that there can be no international oversight...except that there is no such thing as no oversight anymore. Telephones shoot videos and can transmit them abroad. The protesters across North Africa (Libya is fighting a vicious battle with largely foreign troups as well against the citizens) are for the most part following the nonviolent doctrines of Gandhi and the governments opposing them fail to realise that they'd get further by allowing discussion and participation than by reacting with violence. Watching the idiocy of the regimes' responses is wildly frustrating. We all know that they have huge stakes to protect, but the violent approach in the long run simply does not work. Soldiers might be able to shoot 10, 20, 100 people...but can they hold out over 1000 or 1,000,000? What the Egyptians learned early in February is that you are as free as you can imagine, or you are as oppressed as you allow yourself to be, and that lesson seems to be one that is easy to learn.


Photos of Tahrir by Zena Sallam

copyright 2011 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