The Mogamma Game in 2012

 

I went downtown today. I went to the Ministry of Justice on Lazoughly Square to get a paper stamped for a friend. There I was told that I had to take the paper to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When I pointed out that I'd been sent to the Ministry of Justice by the people at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they told me that I had to go to the BIG Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the one on the Corniche next to Maspero. Terrific.

Mohamed drove me over there as we passed through the area of downtown Cairo that has been "in flames", "melting down" and "filled with rioters". Other than the usual Cairo traffic, the trip took no time at all as there were no road blocks, no protesters, no fire bombs, not even very many police. It only took half an hour to find the door. Egypt's foggy bottom tends to be really foggy even in broad daylight and just happens to be across the road from what has to be the world's largest used clothing market. 

I found my way in and told them that the people at the Ahmed Orabi Department of Foreign Affairs had sent me to the Department of Justice who had sent me to this Department of Foreign Affairs. "Why?" they asked. "I haven't the slightest idea, but I need this paper stamped." I replied. They looked at the paper and told me that it was dated 1988 and was a marriage contract. I agreed and pointed out that it was stamped by the Consulate in New York. They told me that it should have been stamped by Foreign Affairs and/or the Justice Department over twenty years ago. I pointed out that as the groom on the paper had been dead for about a year and the bride was living in the US, there wasn't much they could do about that, but I was trying to get the inheritance papers sorted out for my friend and that if they woulf be so kind as to  help me, I would really appreciate it. A small whispered consultation took place and I was suddenly given a numbered tag and marched over to a tent where apparently the one man in all of Egypt who could sign this paper and stamp it for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in lieu of the Department of Justice was working. This very kind and polite elderly gentleman did so and then directed me to a third Department of Foreign Affairs.

According to the guys at the big Department of Foreign Affairs, this third office was “just behind the Semiramis Hotel near the US embassy”. Wonderful. This was exactly where I had promised my two currently long-distance kids not to go after the excitement of the past few days. Back into the car, a trip through the madness that is Cairo’s roadways near the Ramses Hilton (a place that I absolutely refuse to drive myself) and we found our way to the back of the Semiramis Hotel. Mohamed had to drop me and leave because there were no parking places and no way the police around there were going to allow him to wait around. Once I asked for the building with this office, I was pointed to a spot about two or three blocks south. “Behind” is a very relative term in Egypt. If you are in our foggy bottom looking south, then the other Foreign Affairs IS behind the Semiramis, but it is also behind the Shepheard’s Hotel and behind a couple of other buildings as well. To my untutored mind, I naturally assumed that “behind” required “in front of” being facing the Nile, but obviously to them it meant “in front of” being facing them. Interesting world view.

As I made my way to the hopefully last office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the shortest route was blocked by a four meter wall of enormous concrete blocks recently placed across the road to block protesters from the US embassy, so I had to walk around the Shepheard’s to the Corniche along the Nile, turn left away from the Nile and then zigzag around roads blocked with razor wire and very bored Central Security Forces. A couple of friendly secret police not so secretly gave me directions to the entrance of the ministry, which was guarded by even more bored CSF personnel. The brass plate told me that the office was on the fifth floor but someone obligingly pointed out that it was actually on the first. Naturally. This is an odd office that seems to work only with embassies, which would explain why it was practically next door to the US and British embassies, among others. Again I had to go through the entire sequence of events, was told quite brusquely by a very nasty little man to go sit down outside and dismissed. This wasn’t looking good, especially when the same nasty little man came out and shouted at a couple of the people who were waiting outside for whatever they were waiting for….but, miracle of miracles, after twenty minutes I finally received my properly stamped paper so that the lawyer can work on the statement of heirs for my friends.

Years ago, people used to joke about the Mogamma Game, a sort of sadistic snakes and ladders that would be experienced by people trying to do paperwork in the Mogamma, things like visa renewals. At the time, I had a very conscientious husband who made sure that the most I ever had to do was to show up at the appropriate time and sign something. Since his death I’ve learned how to do things the hard way, like everyone else in Egypt, and luckily most of the time I can keep a sense of humour about it. So I wandered all over melted down Cairo today and except for the fact that a lot of pavement was being held down by snoozy CSF personnel and I had to walk over four blocks out of my way because of yet another unnecessary wall (wish I had the commission on that franchise with all the walls built over the past year). But the good news is that Cairo is alive and the system of bureaucratic torture is very well indeed.

copyright 2012 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Goodnight, Ali

I lost an old friend today. Ali, also known as Ali Capone, Alibird, and AliDon'tBiteMyFeet, was found dead in the aviary today. There was no indication of attack, illness or anything to suggest why he would have died. I have to assume a coronary or something. He was about 22 years old, a fairly respectable age for an African Grey parrot. We don't know exactly how old he was but he was a fairly young bird when he came to live with us.

My kids bought Ali for me for Mother's Day when we were living in Alexandria. He was young, frightened, and not at all happy with human beings. I put his cage in the kitchen so that he would see people all the time. We put a bowl of treats (nuts, grapes, and so on) next to the cage. Every time someone came through the kitchen they would take a treat from the bowl and offer it to Ali, usually saying as people do "Here, Ali". Gradually he calmed down among us and got to look forward to the attention. It took months before I was able to touch him without significant blood loss, but in a year or so he would come out of his cage and wander around the house on the floor quite comfortably. African Greys are well known for their speaking ability and Ali was very vocal. With people talking to him all the time and giving him goodies, he began with whistling. When we copied his whistles, it became a game where he would copy any whistle he heard. Soon he began muttering. It was extraordinary to hear long conversations from this little grey bird, but the meaning was just out of reach. Without really thinking, you found yourself hearing this voice coming from the cage and saying "What?". We felt silly responding to a parrot like that but he sounded so real. Then one day in the midst of the mutter a word came out clearly: "What?". Well, of course. The next word he said was "Here", another natural since that was what people said to him when they gave him treats.

When we moved to Cairo from Alexandria, Ali came with us and he really came into his own in the new house. By now he was used to being loose in the house much of the day and sleeping in his cage at night. He had a nice perch on the top of his sleeping cage and when I came down to the kitchen I would hear a quiet "Hello Ali" from under the covers. If I didn't take them off and open the door, the greeting would come with greater volume and urgency until I finally did. During the day if I was cooking in the kitchen he would wander around the kitchen floor, pulling on cupboard doors trying to get them open and murmuring "What here Ali?" to himself. His vocabulary was increasing and his use of it was more skilled. He would encourage himself in his activities by saying "Come on Ali", and would be totally delighted if he got the cupboard doors open. He loved to pull all the pots and pans out of the cupboard. The sound of them banging on the floor seemed to give him enormous pleasure. He would follow me out to the living room and climb up my leg to sit on my lap while I read, or cuddle up under my chin when I took a nap on the sofa. Every now and then he would say something so direct, real, and off the wall that it would astonish me. One day when my daughter came home from school to find me making spaghetti sauce in the kitchen. She wandered in asking me what smelled so good. A little voice came from the cage saying "What's it look like, stupid?" We were both dumbstruck and looked over to Ali who merely scratched his head and looked innocent.

Ali didn't like the kitchen cupboards in our next house. They were too heavy for him to pull open, so he turned his talents to other occupations like removing the rubber seal of the refrigerator....like about three times. Expensive hobby. He also proved himself to be incredibly efficient at stripping the toaster cord of its covering while it was still plugged in, and we decided that maybe Ali needed a safer place to live. We built an aviary in the garden and found him a nice African Grey girlfriend Mona to share it with him. He liked the arrangement and after a couple of years he and Mona surprised us with two baby African Greys. They were great parents and took good care of the babies, but when they were fledged we moved the kids into the house to work with them so that they would be comfortable with humans. We didn't think that keeping four Greys was such a good idea. The babies, Pobble and Atilla the Hungry, were female and male respectively, and were so much fun to train. They were being hand fed so we took them with us to our house in Sharm el Sheikh that summer and had to clip their wings when they learned to fly in the living room. We found homes for them with good families. Pobble took after her father and was a real talker but Atilla was like his mother Mona and specialised in whistles.

While the years were passing, we collected other birds in the aviary. At various times we had African Ringnecks (the infamous Killer Kelly and her motorcycle gang) and some Cuban Amazons that I found sick and miserable at a bird seller. A friend brought me a really unhappy Grey who had pulled out all his feathers, but Fritzi recovered well in the company of Ali and Mona. When I finally moved from Maadi to Sakkara, I built a big aviary for the birds so that they would have plenty of room to fly in. Brilliantly, I thought that I might be able to use chicken wire to screen in the rooms inside (three 3 metre x 3 metre rooms joined by a small service room) but Ali, Fritzi and Mona had other ideas. They chewed through the chicken wire to make holes so that they could fly from one room to the other. Life was getting interesting. I bought some chickens to clean up the food that the parrots loved to toss on to the floor, then someone brought us a couple of ducks, a pair of turkeys, a couple of geese, some doves and pigeons and we had a major avian habitat going on.

You might think that a duck, goose or turkey could bully a half pound parrot but that is definitely not the case. Ali and Fritz took over monitoring the terracotta jar where the chickens liked to lay their eggs and we had to coax them away from it to collect them. There was no question....ever....who ran the aviary. Every morning when I'd go out to feed him, I'd hear a cheery "Hello Bird". As far as Ali was concerned we were all birds. If I was late with breakfast the calls of "Here Ali" "Here Bird" would increase with time. And everyone loved playing the whistling game with him. He would copy your whistle and embellish it a little with a sort of competitive streak. He drove the gardeners crazy when they cleaned the aviary because he would waddle along behind them and nip at their feet. They never would wear closed shoes for that work. I knew better.

There is great disturbance in the birdosphere today. A wonderful little grey creature is sleeping under the papaya tree and I will miss him forever. Goodnight, Ali Bird.

copyright 2011 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

With A Little Help From My Friends

I'm sitting at home this July and really, really at home for a change. I built my home to provide shelter for me from the sun and wind, to be a place to sleep in, and to be small and easy to care for. I have two small steps that go from the house to the garden, installed with the thinking that as I get older, the last thing I want is to have to deal with a bunch of stairs. There are no steps inside the house and everything inside is within easy hobbling distance. All of this is really useful right now because I had a bilateral knee replacement last week and I am not allowed to even tackle the little stairs to the garden until my staples come out.
The decision to do a knee replacement was a difficult one. On one hand, I began suffering serious pain in my knees last fall and walking was becoming torture. If walking on the smooth sidewalks of New York in June was bad, one can just imagine what it was like on the uneven ground of my farm. And if I couldn't walk comfortably to see my horses and to move around....what was the point of having legs anyway? Oddly enough, riding was the one thing that I could do for hours without any pain at all...but you can't live on a horse, no matter how much it might seem like a good idea.

I started doing research on knee replacement, talking to friends and family who have had it done. My younger brother had his done, which made me suspect that part of the problem was genetic, a malformation of the knees that my doctor had noticed when he looked at my xrays last fall. He said that I needed to do them both but we could either do them one at a time or at the same time. The real issue for doing two at once was aftercare. Friends here asked in astonishment "You are going to do a surgery like this in Egypt?" But the surgery itself wasn't nearly the concern that managing for the first two weeks after surgery was. We have some very good hospitals here and excellent doctors, though our nursing leaves me homesick for Canada. But on the other hand, the hospitals are set up here with the understanding that you will have a friend or family member staying with you to assist you. I decided that a lot of pain once was better than a lot of pain twice and opted for the bilateral surgery.

The surgery itself was in a relatively new hospital in Medinat Nasr with a very nicely equipped operating theatre. I was having an epidural with some interesting goofy juice to keep me out of the doctors' way. It was a long surgery, about 6 hours or so, and I recall coming to some incomplete consciousness (no pain...and I wouldn't swear about the consciousness) to be aware of the sounds of hammers, drills, and other power tools. I exited the semi-consciousness as quickly as possible as power tools should never be associated with someone's body....EVER. The first few days after surgery are best not remembered much....catheters, drains, yuck. But they were fine with the pain meds and we coped ok. The day after the surgery, I was given a walker to practice standing up and walking a bit, but it was the much anticipated removal of the tubes that provided the stimulus to get up and walk to the bathroom. Little triumphs, like washing my hair over the sink in the bathroom so that at least part of my body felt fresh, made huge differences to me. I was in the hospital for 5 days including the day of surgery and friends stayed with me in shifts for the time.

Finally I was sprung to go home to my vast relief...and the relief of my staff and friend Kelly who came here for a holiday and found herself dogsitting. The staff shut the dogs into the back garden while I arrived so that I could maneuver myself into a chair in peace, then we barricaded my knees with the walker and loosed the hounds. A walker is a terrific fence. After about 5 minutes of insanity on the part of the dog pack, they settled down to the reality that I was really back and not going anywhere soon. They'd never seen a walker before but very quickly learned to get out of the way as I was hobbling around the house. We'd made some helpful adjustments to the house, like adding a twin mattress on top of my king-sized mattress so that my bed was at an easier height for me to get in and out by myself, and getting a toilet seat extender to put on top of the toilet for the same reason. When your legs are functioning in a pretty funky manner, you really appreciate having a tall toilet and bed. Another friend had donated an old lazyboy chair to the living room and that has really been a lifesaver as I can adjust my body to stay comfortable.

The first "setback" was actually a very useful lesson for me. After I'd been home about 24 hours and the residual pain meds from the hospital had worn off, I had a really tough early morning with muscle cramps running up and down my right leg. I was in tears and called Kelly in the guesthouse. A friend of mine who is a massage therapist was staying there for my first week home, and she came over and massaged the muscles in my leg until I could relax enough to sleep again. The lesson learned was that while the orthopods can give you pretty shiny new knees to work with, it's your old muscles who are going to be doing the work, and probably not without complaint at first. While I expected pain from the surgery site, I was unprepared for the muscle cramps. Magnesium supplements, massage, and a mild anti-inflammtory took care of that issue and I was humbled before my 60 yr old muscles.

Now I have about 3 days before the staples come out of my knees and I will be given the go ahead to hobble around my garden where I should be hobbling and to begin my serious physiotherapy. The movement in the new knees is a wonder to me. After what I realise has been very long time of pain and discomfort, these new bionic knees slide so smoothly with my leg movement that I am in awe and remember the joy of free movement again. I've been resting a lot between wanders around my tiny house...my body is quite happy to tell me to remember my age and not push things too hard. Pushing things too hard is part of what got me here in the first place.

Would I do the surgery here again? In a heartbeat. My doctor did a beautiful job on the surgery and my friends have been so amazingly supportive of me, popping by with gazpacho soup, fruit cake and fresh cherries and helping with the few summer clients that come by, my staff have been there to handle all my responsibilities, and the core group of nurses (the two Mona's, Kelly and Sabine) who have been so very helpful in my post-operative care. I am amazed at the love and care that have surrounded me. I went in to fix my knees, but came out with a new appreciation for my life.

copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Busyness

It's the day after Shem el Nessimand we are all sitting around feeling entirely too well fed. This year the Coptic and Western Easters fell on the same day with Shem el Nessim the day after..three Easters in two days is definitely a record. Shem el Nessim is the official start to summer here and the mannequins at the malls are showing signs of summer readiness. All of this catches me a bit by surprise since we really didn't have a winter this year.

It's been a winter full of riding, mostly in tshirts with just the odd light jacket. No winter winds whistling down the dunes from the North Coast this year, although we did get a spectacular sound and light show one night when a thunderstorm brought the first hail in about 20 years to Cairo. We had a lot of internet issues after the storm, I suspect brought on by lightning strikes to the monster palm trees that are used to disguise relay towers here.

We've had our share of interesting visitors this spring. Steve Edwards who trains mules in Arizona came to visit my friend Bill the mule man here. Bill attended clinics at Steve's place and brought a saddle for our mule Amira. This saddle is so much more complicated than a horse saddle that we were all delighted to have Steve come out to show us how to use and adjust it properly. He also gave us mule-training tips and taught the staff how to make three and four strand rope out of old baling twine.

Steve and his wife Susan were filming the action here to be shown on RFD-TV in the US and to use on a cd about mule training. I rode out to the pyramids of Abu Sir on Figgy while Steve rode Amira, so now Figgy gets to join his big brother in being a film star. Next week I have some endurance friends from Michigan joining us, Maggie and Nelson Mieske, who are currently in Qatar where Maggie is teaching English at the university in Doha while Nelson works with horses there. Maggie is planning to do some riding with me as I have a mother and daughter visiting Egypt on a riding holiday here, while Nelson will be set up with some of the local farriers to help them hone their skills. Life is fun.
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

Having To Say Good-bye

I've known Omar Abdel Salam for over fifteen years. He's still a young man, about 45 years old, father of a number of children, the youngest of whom is about eleven. Happily, all the older ones are married, many of them with young children of their own. When I first met him, he was a groom at Sakkara Country Club, one of the best. But he wanted more from his life and as our ancient farrier at the Club was losing his sight, Omar convinced Am Yaseen to take him on as an apprentice blacksmith. It wasn't the optimal arrangement since Yaseen was in his late 80's and almost blind, but Omar learned all that he could from the old man.

A while later, an American farrier came to do some work at the breeding farms and a group of us arranged for Omar to work with her to learn more about his craft. He was less than thrilled at the idea but watching Sara turn an iron bar into a perfect eggbar shoe in about 15 minutes convinced him that she had something to teach him. In the following years, Omar took on two apprentices, one of his sons and another young man, and he taught them much of what he knew, having realised from his own experience that waiting until he was too old wasn't a good plan for anyone.

Omar and his boys have been taking care of my horses' feet for about 10 years now and he's more than just my farrier. Omar is a friend, someone whose company I always looked forward to when it came time to shoe and trim my horses. Sara still comes occasionally and she always makes it a point to bring something interesting in terms of tools for Omar. Farriers' tools are not in plentiful supply here and for the past few years he's been working against a tool account with me. I keep track of his tab and order rasps, cutters, nippers and so on for him and his boys.

The last time Omar came to me in February he was complaining of dizziness that was driving him nuts. He'd been to doctors who had been treating him for an inner ear infection, but he was still dizzy. He had Shaban do most of the trimming and nailing of shoes, but when we needed to shape a new horseshoe, he got out his anvil, seated himself in front of it and set to work. He was going to see a neurologist the next day, having felt that he'd exhausted the ear possibilities. The next thing I heard was that Omar was in the hospital. When his son and Shaban came to do my horses just recently, they told me that he was diagnosed with brain cancer. The doctors had done a biopsy removing part of one tumor that was pressing on the nerves that were making him dizzy, but there were five more that they couldn't really touch as they were mixed up with his optical nerves and other rather important items. Damn.

I went to visit Omar today. He's been released from hospital and is back at home in the midst of his family, but has been going into the hospital for radiation therapy, I believe. My Arabic vocabulary gets a little shaky in these technical things. His wife told me that there are two more sessions and then they will do an MRI to compare it with the earlier one. My father died of brain cancer and I remember all too well the progression of his illness. My bet is that Omar will not be with us much longer. He seems at least twenty years older than he was last month and he tires easily, has trouble speaking and his eyes don't track very well. This is a very aggressive cancer, something that his son confirms to me. His family asked what they could do, would there be medications abroad that might help him. I had to say that I thought that it was most important to keep him happy, comfortable, and as pain-free as possible. The doctors have told them the same. My friends and neighbours who are all his clients have all sent word that if the family needs any help they are just to say so and we will be there in force. If only we could just bring Omar back.
copyright 2009 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

The End Of An Era

The Bob expired today quietly in his home in the aviary. He died of old age, actually quite extreme old age. In the wild hedgehogs only live to be about four years old and The Bob was closer to about eight or so. He was never a cuddly individual but he would come out to see what I had for him to eat whenever he heard my voice in the aviary. Hedgehogs are....well, prickly. But he was a much loved member of the community and was a gift from Uma and Jim when they moved from Cairo to Singapore.

He will be buried in the garden under a laurel tree that needs to be transplanted into the earth.

Farewell, Bob. You gave many people much pleasure during your life with us.

copyright 2008 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

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

Seasonal Renewals

You would think that after over fifty Januaries, they would get to be a bit routine...but one of the things that keeps us alive is the fact that life changes all the time and you never know what you will find. This winter has been a good example. On the plus side of the register, I've had many more visitors this year than in years before. Over New Years I had two interesting Sue's visiting, one from Spain and the other from Kenya. I love listening to my guests' impressions of Egypt and the ways that life here differs from life in other places. Unfortunately for one of the Sue's, Kenya's elections did not lead to a peaceful New Year and she flew home early to check on her home and pets.

Riding with another visitor in the desert, we happened to go up a trail from a village to the sands that I'd never taken before and we found ourselves amidst pharaonic ruins on top of a hill. I'm used to seeing a stone wall or a pyramid, but these ruins were hallways and courtyards of a complexity that I haven't see before outside of some of the huge temples in Luxor. It's always so delightful to find something new in an area that you think is so familiar to you that you know it all. You never do know everything even about a patch of sand, and now I have the fun of sharing it with some of my local riding partners.

The winter weather that has us all shivering has been fairly unique in my experience here. I woke early one morning to find frost on my grass, a clean white carpet of real cold frost. The dogs were seriously unimpressed with it and in fact did everything they could to avoid walking on it. As far as they've ever known, the ground in the garden simply isn't white and cold. The lawn as well hasn't been too impressed with the frost and has turned a rather sad beige as a result, but I suspect that it will recover, since the frost only burned the green stems and not the roots. Canadian grass has to be much hardier to withstand the snow that they get in Alberta.

For my current batch of Canadian guests the contrast is pretty strong and they snicker a bit at our shivering in our rather feeble cold, but the wind whipping off the desert has had them zipping fleece jackets as well. Still, taking a good look at the desert and countryside through their eyes lets me see my surroundings anew. The children are on midyear holiday right now and not in school, which means that where ever we ride in the farming area we ride, we are surrounded by crowds of kids.

The children are ever hopeful that one of these days I will strike it rich and start distributing cash to them all, but there being far more of the children than there is money in my pocket, restricting my gifts to the odd photo printed in the study or a laugh and a chat seems to be the plan. They are good kids for the most part, with lovely dark brown or hazel eyes and big smiles.
Happily, Paddi and Linda enjoy the interactions and they've gotten some great photos. Guess it's time to warm up the printer.
copyright 2008 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

ER in Cairo

I was out riding with a few friends yesterday, just an hour jog in the countryside, training for two of them who want to improve their riding skills and training for my 5 year old gelding Figgy who is just now joining the working horse string. My mobile phone rang in my fanny pack attached to the front of my saddle and I slowed everyone to answer. Two of my neighbours and a friend had ridden down to Dahshur early that morning and it was one of them on the line to tell me that another had fallen from her horse and needed a pick up with a jeep. The four of us hastened back to the farm to go rescue Janie. Two of the friends went on home while one came with me after we collected cold water, a frozen jug of water, some arnica and some Rescue Remedy.

I ride in the Dahshur area quite frequently. The desert there is beautiful and the pyramids are easily as interesting and beautiful as Giza, although not as big. They are older though. The directions given would probably have stumped an ambulance driver, and even most of the local people around here wouldn't have had a good idea of the best way in to pick up our invalid. So horseback riding does have its rewards. We zipped off down the Mariouteya to the Dahshur turn, and then turned onto a dirt road before the entrance to the pyramid area. About a couple of kilometres down the road a turn over the canal into the tomb area of Dahshur gave us an entry into the desert close to the point where Janie's horse had fallen through a fox den with the result of her rolling over his shoulder and landing on her own on the sand breaking her collarbone.

The other riders collected horses, a groom that I'd brought would ride her horse home, and we packed Janie up into the jeep for the ride to the hospital. We'd only gone a few kilometres on the main road when a nasty floppy sound was the signal that I had a flat tire. Wonderful. And what a flat. The entire side of the tire was cut open, by what I have no idea. A quick call to Janie's daughter arranged a ride for my driver out to our parking place and a new car to continue to the hospital. While we were waiting, three different vehicles stopped by to offer assistance with the problem, but we told them we had someone coming. That's one of the things I really love about Egypt. When you have a problem, someone is going to help.

After a nice traffic jam on the Moneeb bridge we finally made it to Al Salam hospital on the Corniche in Maadi, our emergency room of choice...although that may change. About a year ago I'd taken another neighbour in there after a fall from a horse that broke her arm just below the shoulder, and a month or so ago Janie had taken a friend in late at night after a fall from a horse broke her tailbone. Yes, horseback riding can be dangerous, no question. In both of those cases, the doctors examined the women, made an x-ray, and sent them home with appropriate treatment, so we were expecting to be in the hospital for only an hour and a half or so, as long as the break in the collarbone wasn't too complicated. Something had changed, however, in the ER. A doctor first came and insisted that Janie had to lie on a back board, an object that looks like a surfboard with handles and is supposed to protect the spine in case of injury. Well, that's fine but where was it when we were collecting her in the desert, driving the jeep down the country roads, changing to the daughter's car and walking into the hospital? Seemed a bit like overkill to us but we humoured them. They very nicely gave Janie some pain killer IV and then hit us with a list of x-rays and diagnostic tests that were apparently "procedure". Must have new procedures, I guess. Despite our protests that a) she hadn't hit her head, lost consciousness, been confused or drowsy they wanted a CT scan on the brain. Ok, a bit much but reasonable. They wanted a bunch of x-rays on her back and pelvis as well as sonography on the pelvis and abdomen. Whoa Nelly! Janie had rolled off a horse that was also on the ground, hit the corner of her shoulder on the sand breaking her collarbone, but there had been no impact on her lower back, pelvis, head or even the other shoulder. The problem was very localised.

I was elected the official arguer because I'm very well-known to be stubborn and inflexible when necessary and I have a good understanding of medical procedures for basic first aid. We finally whittled the list down to something we felt was reasonable and would yield some actual information rather than a bunch of "You're fine"'s and a huge hospital bill. Six x-rays and a CT scan later we were told that she'd broken her collarbone (Well, duh. What did we tell you had happened?) but that it was a nice clean break that would have to heal in a sling. We'd walked into the ER at about 12 noon and it was 4:30 pm by the time we could leave. Janie hadn't even had coffee before going riding, her daughter hadn't had any breakfast before picking us up, and none of us had any lunch, so it was a pretty crabby group of women who left the hospital. That probably explains the vehemence of the final argument with the internal medicine guy who still wanted to have a sonography on the pelvic area. Fortunately for us, we already knew that the sonography man had gone home for dinner, so we told the doctor that if anything at all looked bad we would get back to them.

Both Janie and I are old hands here and remember when you had to walk into a hospital and tell the nurses and residents what kind of tests and treatments you needed rather than having some administrator tell us that "procedure" dictates what tests are performed. It's nice that they have all the new equipment and I'm sure that the procedures are useful, but it was so hard to get away from the idea that the driving force for the "procedures" was the balance sheet. I'm quite sure that the income for Al Salam will be rising in the near future because most people are neither as sure of what is wrong as we were, nor as determined in insisting on signing off on things that are unnecessary. I guess that progress has its price.

Oh, and by the way, the photos are just there for the viewing. They are pictures of the Dahshur area where they were riding. Pretty.

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Random Thoughts on Supporting The Soul

I haven't posted for a while. Life has been busy and stressful. That's right, life on the farm isn't all fresh eggs and sunshine...though they are some of the more reliable parts of it. My friend Tracy went back to California to study some workshop techniques employing horses, got together with some friends and formed a company there to do the workshops in various places including Egypt and decided that she needed to be sort of based in California to work with them and to be closer to her aging parents. She put her house on the market and it sold, happily to a lovely British couple who are also long-term residents of Egypt, so she hopped on a plane back to Cairo, cleaned out her house and closed the deal. She also lined up some work here, and I suspect will be back for at least a week or so in March. Now I'm helping Philippa and Rob get started with their life at the house next door.

A lot of my friends and family are going through some pretty major changes right now. My daughter is applying to graduate schools and while we are hoping for good news, it's pretty tough waiting it out. The son survived a week of tough interviews for internships next summer and has a choice of places to work like a corporate coolie when his classes finish. Deep breath of relief.

I'm still trying to extricate myself from the remaining links to my late husband's companies, and that is not going all that well. Pretty high reading on the stress meter. The brothers-in-law have decided that they want to sell their parents' apartment, which is primarily owned by my children although they have no interest in it. They offered to sign off on their share in the family house in Sharm el Sheik in return for our share in the apartment and a rather hefty cash payment. In theory, all very nice but where is that cash supposed to come from? After seven years, they insist on believing that somehow we were left with little pots of gold all over the world. What universe do these people inhabit? Whoops! the lid just shot off the stress meter.
So last night was Valentine's Day and Tracy's last night in Cairo on this trip. She's left me with bags of vitamins, nail polish and all those funny things that you forget you have stuffed into the bottom drawer in the bathroom. Cool, but I have my own bottom drawer and it's pretty full. We went into town to meet some women friends for dinner, then she would go on with them to catch a cab from town for her early morning flight. Tracy and I had totally forgotten Valentine's Day while I was dealing with various small problems at home like an injured donkey and a sick dog. The restaurant was full of couples chatting intimately over candlelit plates of pasta and the four of us who all happen to be single, some of us single parents, found ourselves talking about the things that sustain us in hard times.

Naturally friends are important. That one is a no brainer. Then there is family, which is great when it's good, but a disaster if it's bad. Don't I know that one. Wish my side of the family lived closer. But those are things that we find outside of ourselves. Most of us had found that there were things that we carry within us that are even more important when the chips are down and so is our luck and buoyancy. Each of us could recall a blow to our lives that caused us to reevaluate our surroundings, our thoughts and practices, something that unbalanced us enough to make us see the world anew and we could remember how we first saw something new that we stashed away in our hearts. For myself, the death of my husband was the unbalancing point and the rides that I would take in the countryside at night alone with my mare the first summer were my secret treasure that could bring me back to the now. I'd been knocked so badly off my balance that every bird, every star, every wedding song meandering through the mango orchards was something new to be studied, turned over and carefully stored away to treasure forever. It took a horror to teach me about beauty, and it was hard to accept that the beauty could be there and be stronger than the horror. But it was and it has sustained me. Others had the same experience after a particularly nasty divorce, the loss of a parent, and so on. We all felt very fortunate that we'd been able to learn from and bounce back from our disasters with something stronger to show for it.

The photos are pretty random, but each one of them is one of those images that warms my soul.


copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani