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

Looking For Perspective

When I moved to Egypt, in many ways it seemed to be country frozen in time. That changed irrevocably in January 2011, and since then I've seen friends complaining that they feel they've aged about 10 years in a few months. It is really hard to keep track of where Egypt seems to be going and how it's going to get there. I read the news from a million sources religiously and find that most of the mainstream media get a pretty limited view. News seems to come from statements from people and institutions which can tell you what they want you to know, but not necessarily what it means or feels like. So I troll through half a million tweets from activists and journalists looking for somewhat more obscure but well-written articles and blog posts that can fill in the gaps. Twitter is very useful in this respect as it's very interesting to listen in on discussions between journalists covering the same region (most of mine are, quite naturally, based in the Middle East) as they debate the relevance of news items.

We are sliding into our presidential elections at this point. The turnout for the People's Assembly vote was an amazing 70% and the interpretations of the results went on for weeks. Most of the new members of the Assembly were from either the Muslim Brotherhood or from the Salafis, with a reasonable number from the liberal coalition and some other smaller parties. Most people were concerned that this would signal more emphasis on sharia law and conservative tradition...was Egypt going the way of Saudi Arabia? When my staff, grooms and gardeners who all live in the villages near me, told me that they were going to be voting for these three parties, I was surprised to hear that the liberal coalition was in the list. None of them struck me as the Salafi type, although the Brotherhood was no surprise so I asked what the logic there was and the reply surprised me. They weren't voting for religion. They simply wanted to be sure not to vote for any remnants of the old regime and felt that these three parties were the safest. This was borne out by a discussion of the election results that noted that the percentage of candidates elected who could be traced back to the previous regime was tiny, perhaps 3%. So perhaps what Egyptians were voting for was change more than religion...but then again, perhaps it wasn't. I guess we will find out.

As I've found that most of the news coverage of Egypt has concentrated on only a few aspects of life here, I've been keeping my eye out for broader coverage and would like to recommend a few blogs that will help with this. Zeinobia at Egyptian Chronicles writes political posts for the most part with a very personal perspective. Her latest post looked at the football ultras protest that preceded the announcement of the charging of over 70 people in connection with the tragedy at the Port Said football match. The implication is that the protest pushed the army to lay the charges, but given the number of police and security personnel who have been acquitted by the courts and the willingness of the "government" to release people in prison who are willing to pay a portion of their ill-gotten gains, the likelihood of conviction is small. Zeinobia also is blogging about a trip she's taking to upper Egypt and posting videos.

Mahmoud Salem, aka Sandmonkey, has been blogging since 2006 and is one of my favourite bloggers on the Egyptian political scene. He started blogging anonymously due to family connections to the Mubarak regime's party, the NDP, but came out with his own name after January 2011. His posts are some of the best thought out commentary on Egyptian events available. He ran for the People's Assembly but unfortunately didn't make it...hopefully for us he might manage next time, though it might be unfortunate for him.

Maurice Chammah, who writes Adrift On The Nile, is from the US and studying journalism in Egypt on a Fullbright. His perspective on Egypt is different and his posts are as well. A recent one looked at the very local music scene in Port Said. With his slightly foreign perspective (yes, we do notice things that locals take for granted, just as they see nuance that we often miss), his blog fills out part of  a complete picture.

Baheyya, an anonymous blogger, has been at work almost as long as I have, since 2005, and I've enjoyed many of her posts enormously. The blog was very quiet for a while, but lately has become more active with a very interesting post on the youngest presidential candidate. The age factor of Egyptian politics and power cannot be underestimated, and I've heard people say that the changes we are going through are as much a matter of generations as ideologies.

The Arabist, which is largely written by Amrani Issandr, a journalist, is a different sort of blog. As a journalist, he works with news stories, presenting Arabic stories in translation to show what is going on in the Arabic press, and often posting the work of other journalists in this area. He doesn't simply look at Egypt but also at the rest of the Middle East.

Global Voices collects blog posts from all over the world and offers them in translation and also often in the native language. They have websites in over a dozen languages and the editors and aggregators are skilled at picking out important posts from the different countries. They should be a frequent stop when anyone is trying to make sense out of the news.

Ahmed Awadalla, who writes Rebel With A Cause, looks at a lot of different issues, most recently the needs of rural women. Even urban Egyptians have little knowledge about life in the villages and they tend to imagine all sorts of odd things.

Lest I totally overwhelm people with a reading list that no one could handle, I will add just one more view point today. Sarah Carr is a mudblood as the post-Potter people call our half Egyptian half Something-Else population. Being the mother of a couple of these and friend to many, many more, I have a special affinity to the interesting, often humorous and sometimes slightly skewed point of view of our less pure Egyptian population. Her posts at Inanities are often extremely funny and always worth a read. If you find her byline on a piece of journalism as well, and you will quite often, it is a cue that this definitely should be read.

When I began blogging about Egypt in 2003, nine years ago now, there really wasn't much out there on the internet to counteract some pretty shoddy reporting in the main stream media. Thankfully, that is no longer the case and Egypt is emerging in the minds of people abroad with a much more rounded personality. We aren't sure where the road we are on is leading us, but we know it won't be backwards to the past. One way or another we move forward to a new definition of one of the world's oldest countries.

copyright 2012 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Summer in The Cities

It's 9:30 am. I've been up for a couple of hours, even had a shower, but you wouldn't know that now. I'm sitting here utterly dripping wet with a towel on my table to keep my arms from soaking the table top, and all I've done is to feed birds and make myself a cup of tea. Still, I'm very happy to have done that since this summer has been devoted to recovering from a bilateral knee replacement done at the beginning of July. I'm now walking around the house (where the ground is level) without crutches and thinking seriously of when I'll be able to get back on a horse. That's probably not for a while yet. I'm happy to wait until the temperatures drop to at least about 34C/93F...that's about 5 degrees C lower than they are now.

It hasn't been a boring summer, despite the time spent recovering from surgery. For the first few weeks, I couldn't sit in a normal chair with any comfort and was checking my email on my laptop from a battered old lazyboy chair donated by a friend. That wasn't bad, but a laptop REALLY heats up your lap and virgin naugahyde doesn't exactly dissipate heat, so computer work was necessarily short and sweet. Once I was able to sit up for some lengths of time (and another wonderful friend found me a lapboard to help insulate my healing knee incisions from the fiery laptop) I started transcribing my father's journals for friends and family. My father was an interesting character who worked in many capacities but primarily as a computer modeling expert for the US Department of Defense...back in the days when being a modeling expert also meant inventing most of what you needed to do it with. When he retired, he moved up to British Columbia where my sister was attending university for a while and helped to set up the internet in the Pacific Northwest. He died in 1978 and his journals ended up with my sister who sent them to me in New York this spring when I was visiting my kids there. As children we always knew that our dad did something that the US Navy didn't want him talking about. (No fears there, Navy folk...he even took his secrecy stuff seriously in the journals.) We knew he worked on the Space Program some, but really other than as a guy who loved talking, camping, fishing, hiking and taking a nap on a Saturday afternoon, we didn't know a lot about our father. So this is a labour of love for me.

Before I did my surgery, I spent some time with my kids in New York. My daughter was taking a break after her comprehensives and we found ourselves wandering over the lower portions of Manhattan running errands and doing shopping. Our peregrinations took us near the site of the new Muslim community center that suddenly became the source of such vitriol lately. I must confess to being utterly bewildered by the willingness of certain portions of the media to whip Americans into a fearful frenzy over nothing at all. I think many of the hate-mongering reports, especially from Fox (can't call it "news" when most of what they say has no basis in fact) are horrifying. I must confess that the fact that Rupert Murdoch is comfortable with a Saudi partner who is helping to fund the community center SHOULD give some of the protesters pause. The manipulation is just a bit obvious but no one seems to want to see it. As someone old enough to remember changes in US laws about race and women, old enough to remember the aftermath of the imprisonment of US citizens because they happened to be Japanese (many second generation) during WWII, I wonder if American society is actually making any progress at all in becoming what it could be.

Of course life in Egypt continues to provide wonder, bewilderment, and the odd hearty laugh. Recently the art world was rocked with the news that thieves had made off with a $50 million Van Gogh painting of a vase of flowers from the Mahmoud Khalil museum in Giza. It wasn't a difficult theft since none of the alarms in the museum and only seven of the forty-three security cameras were working at the time. This morning's news item about the government's plans to build a nuclear reactor to take up the power needs not met by natural gas and oil just below the assessment of the security at the museum left me gasping. We can't keep the security at a museum up to par and we are supposed to be comfortable with a nuclear reactor? I don't think so. And why in heaven's name isn't Egypt a forerunner in solar energy...with about 360 days of sunshine what couldn't we run on solar energy?

The world is a puzzling place.




copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Working together?

I've recently found a very nice blog about Arabic literature in translation. This morning I read a post that exemplifies much of the discussion on the list regarding raising reading in Egypt to an acceptable activity. Reading is not high on the list of things to do to relax here. Most Egyptian students are so traumatised by the school system that they are happy never to read anything more complex than a road sign for the rest of their lives. And there is no culture of parents reading stories to their children in the evening to encourage kids to think that reading can be a pleasurable activity.

Now we have lawyers (do they read for fun?) wanting to sue to have the classic 1001 Arabian Nights and a prize winning novel Azazeel banned for being a bad influence on society and insulting Christians respectively. There is something seriously wrong with people's priorities here. A novel is, after all, just a story. No one ever has claimed one to be fact although many novelists like Salman Rushdie have fallen afoul of critics (many of whom have obviously never read the books) who don't want anything untoward to appear in print.

I would suggest seriously that since 99.9999% of the population here spend a vast amount of time watching television and much less reading that the lawyers start their crusade elsewhere. Can I nominate Sex In The City and/or Desperate Housewives or Weeds as being far more detrimental to public values and probably much more widely viewed than anything in print. Of course that would mean taking up the lances against Orbit Showtime Network which is based in the UAE I believe, that liberal country where giving your wife a peck on the cheek in public can result in police action.

Sometimes life simply is too weird.

copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Why I Watch the BBC

The last few weeks have not been kind to me either on a computer front or the internet. My hard drive in my laptop began making sounds more appropriate to an angry dog, not a comforting event. I could barely work with email, much less my usual news sources, most of which are on the net. I use Google News a lot when I want to get a variety of viewpoints on a particular issue, but my daily news usually comes from Reuters or the BBC. My opinion of the North American news is not the best and I find that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do a fairly good job on the political issues there.

When something happens like the recent Israeli demolition of Gaza, the North American news is not the place that I look to for information, since my experience is that it will not be reasonable coverage. I've been bombarded with invitations to join Facebook groups in support of the Palestinians who have been first imprisoned in Gaza and now are being slaughtered there. I've read notes on line talking about demonstrations in support of the Gazans in Egypt, although to be honest the demonstrations I've seen have been extremely orderly and low key. On one hand, one would imagine that the obvious thing to do would be to open the borders at Gaza to let people out of the conflict but with that tiresome ability to see shades of grey that comes with aging, I can also see the incredible problems that Egypt would face were it to do so. This isn't simply being caught between a rock and a hard place, but being surrounded by them. I'm not going to suggest that I have answers. I don't. It breaks my heart to hear of the suffering of the Palestinians and I have to admit to little sympathy for the Israeli's who feel that the death of a few of their people justifies the destruction of so many others.

A friend sent me this Youtube video and I feel that it makes some very good points that people need to be aware of. And that's why I watch the BBC.

copyright 2009 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Probably Elsewhere Too

Today's New York Times asks if Jon Stewart of The Daily Show is the most trusted men in America, and then looks at why this may be. With my subscription to Showtime Arabia I get to watch Mr. Stewart every day followed by Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report, a fact that my daughter in New York finds hilarious since she has to follow it online as she, being an impoverished grad student, doesn't have a cable subscription. I read my news online, following the BBC World, New York Times, Washington Post, and the International Herald Tribune among others through Google News. I haven't trusted television news for many years. The Daily Show is the only "news" show that I watch and I find that it keeps me remarkably up to date with American politics, certainly as up to date as I want to be.

Perhaps it would bear examining Jon Stewart's following in the world outside of North America as well. He is incredibly popular in the Middle East among English speaking viewers for his ability to get to the point of the matter, eliminating the political fluff. I am delighted that my cable subscription gives me access to his sanity on a daily basis. It's funny the things you find in Egypt....


copyright 2008 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani