Fouling The Nest

Most days when I go out into the desert with my horses, I feel blessed. I have equestrian friends all over the world who have to load horses into a trailer and drive for hours to get to someplace where they can ride for a morning. I can saddle horses, get on, ride for about ten minutes through a village full of friendly children calling out to me, and find myself in some of the most beautiful desert in the world. With the amazing pyramids of Abu Sir, Sakkara, Giza and Dahshur within riding distance, I have what most riders just dream of.

When I first began riding in the desert around Abu Sir and Sakkara, there weren't very many riders out there. During the early 90's we didn't have that many four-wheel drive vehicles in Egypt, so there weren't many vehicles out there either. The desert, once you were well away from the three-ring circus that is the Giza Plateau, was clean, unmarked and silent. The few riders who went out exploring on horseback left a few hoofprints, but that was about it.
A big revolution came with the introduction of the desert endurance races under the "guidance" of the UAE/FEI...races that saw as many, if not more, SUV's racing across the desert as there were horses, with passengers in the cars passing water bottles to riders who simply dropped them onto the sand. Many of these bottles were eventually collected by the villagers who recycled them, but many more remained to remind us of the racers. Not only did the racers leave their trash (water bottles, electrolyte syringes, and power bar wraps) but the cars' tires tore up the desert sand in a way that horses never could. The fact that the desert is a delicate environment seems to have evaded the notice of most of the organisers of these events.

There has always been an understanding of sorts between the riders in our area and the antiquities department that riders would maintain a good distance between ourselves and the antiquities. We don't bother the archaeologists who are excavating their sites, we don't interfere with the antiquities' activities, we don't dump our trash in the desert. After all, that would be self-defeating, wouldn't it? We have the world's best riding area...so why ruin it? Lately, however, the Antiquities Council have joined the ranks of polluters of the very place that they are supposed to be protecting. When archaeologists are excavating an area, a lot of sand, dirt, rock and debris is generated. A lot of time this excess is just piled near the dig after it's been sifted to remove any important objects, however small. Over the past few years, however, piles of debris that are obviously from digs have been appearing along a track that leads from the main Sakkara pyramid area to a hill that the Japanese have been excavating for quite a long time.

These piles include very old mud bricks, pottery fragments, pieces of old wood, and quite a lot of old human bones. Even with only the basic understanding of human anatomy, a skull is pretty identifiable. One might feel that it was inappropriate to simply dump human remains in the desert, that perhaps they could have been sifted out and then reburied, but on the other hand, all the old stuff kind of goes with the area, after all. What definitely does not go with the area, however, are old paint cans, plastic bags full of ordinary day-to-day garbage, and bricks, tiles and old steel reinforcement rods that have been removed from the remains of a building that the Antiquities Council decided to remove. These are definitely eyesores.

I suppose that the logic is that the piles of trash can't be seen by the tourists who are walking around the Step Pyramid compound. Well, if they don't know what to look for, probably this is true. They can be seen on Google Earth however, and they are certainly seen by the riders who pass by this area as we exercise our horses. Maybe because we live here, we don't really count. It isn't as though there is no place to put all of this rubbish, after all. The Giza Municipal Dump is also within eyesight (read: eyesore) of the Sakkara Antiquities Area, a fact that has been brought to the attention of Dr. Hawass. Sure, the dig crews might have to arrange a truck to carry it to the dump about 20 minutes away, but since they are using a truck to dump it all in the desert, this shouldn't be much of a problem. Maybe it's time for the Antiquities folks at Sakkara to start cleaning up after themselves. We don't see this sort of mess around Abu Sir or many of the other antiquities areas that are currently being excavated. Come on, guys, clean up your act.
copyright 2008 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

A Time Out For Sunshine

For the past few days there have been sms' flashing around the mobile phone networks in Egypt warning people to avoid the sun from 11 am to 4 pm. Some of the warnings have been attributed to the UN (I didn't know that they had a weather department?) while others have had no attribution. Friends of mine have told me that there have been announcements on television as well. There's a certain Duh factor here. As long as I can remember, people have been warning that the most dangerous time of the day in the sun is during the hours between 11 and 4...and I can remember a fairly long time. I remember when they first invented sunscreen. Many of us, while we are miserably coping with our overheated summer weather, have been wondering what has changed to make these messages necessary. I guess it's awareness.

I did some net research to see if there have been any momentous happenings in the solar ray world, but no. I suspect that someone has finally noticed that ozonally speaking Egypt is not in the best of circumstances during the summer. As a matter of fact, according to some of the ozone maps that I was able to find while researching, we are in much the same situation as South Africa and Australia, two countries that push sun protection in a big, big way. So these messages seem to be A Good Thing. A look at the map above will show why. The grey and blue band along the equator indicates an area of lower ozone and higher risk. The turquoise band that overlaps Egypt and North Africa is a bit better, but it is the same colour as the band over South Africa and Australia. The green areas are better still, while the red spots are the best. It's sad, but definitely worth noting, that these are all over areas far away from the influence of human beings.

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

So What Did You Have For Dinner Today?

If it was fish, it probably wasn't what you think.....

http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=07-P13-00026&segmentID=7


copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Time To Take Out The Trash

I love riding along the canals. I enjoy the water birds, the fishermen, the trees along the edge. When you mention "canals" to most people here they talk about how dirty they are, about the trash in them, and wonder why people dump dead animals in them. The fact is that the not all the canals in the countryside are dirty...just the ones with a lot of people around them. Odd, that. I was reading the news online the other day and found quite a lot of coverage of the west Pacific Gyre. What is that? The west Pacific Gyre is an area in the western Pacific where the ocean currents move in a circle and there is little wind. In the days of sailing vessels, they called them the "doldrums" and the captains avoided these areas for fear of being becalmed. Not long ago a sailor on his way back to California to Hawaii decided to cut through the Gyre and discovered that the area had been collecting floating trash and plastic in its pool. He's gone back to check again and found that the area of the trash is now twice the size of Texas. If you do a Google news search you can read all about the Gyre...and the five others in the world's oceans. Pretty scary reading.

Trash is a problem everywhere. We make jokes that the plastic bag is Egypt's national bird because there are so many of them blowing across the desert. The Giza dump is just over the hill and when the wind is blowing the right way there are literally hundreds and thousands of inflated plastic bags blowing in battalions across the desert. What good does it do to collect them, dump them and let them blow across the landscape again? They hang up in trees, against fences and then blow into canals. The ones on the fences can be collected yet again and carted back to the dump or sold to the recycling plant to make garden chairs.

But one of the questions that needs asking is whether these plastic things ever really go away. The research being done in the Gyre suggests that plastic never goes away. They've found microscopic shreds of plastic floating in the sea where sea birds fish for plankton and krill. The baby albatross on Midway Island are having a very tough time on a diet that sometimes is more than half plastic and many of them are dying from starvation. The fish that feed on the plastic/plankton mix end up in our food chain, maybe in our restaurants or tuna sandwiches. Many of the components of plastic might leach chemicals into the fish and birds, mimicking hormones and causing chaos. Ugly stuff, plastic.

I used to be bothered by seeing dead animals in canals until I learned how it actually made some sense. The ground water in the Nile Valley is so high that there isn't room underground to bury a large animal without it just soaking in water. If it soaks in the water a meter or so underground, it releases so many nutrients that it can poison the plants all around. It is next to impossible for most farmers to be able to move a dead water buffalo or donkey or cow up into the desert to bury and there are legal problems as well. The antiquities authorities don't like people digging holes whether it is to look for something or to bury something. That more or less leaves the canals which are full of fish, crayfish, water birds and wild dogs. These creatures can strip a carcass to bone within 2 weeks. When you think about decomposition, think about what is decomposing and what it is decomposing to. Animals are made up of the same elements as the soil. They go back to their components. Plastics are made up of polymers created from oil products. If and when they break down or decompose are they ever going to be natural? I don't think so.

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani