Feluccas on the Nile

Feluccas on the Nile, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

At least once a summer I get out on a felucca in the evening. There's no real reason that I can't do it almost any night, other than the fact that life tends to get in the way. Summer evenings are also the main time for riding, so that presents a major conflict, but every time I get out on the river I wonder why I don't do this more often. Sliding silently up the river as we hear the noise of traffic fall away in the wind takes me back to many of the summer nights spent sailing from Alexandria to Cyprus many years ago.

Before we moved from Toronto to Egypt, my husband had a 32 foot Jeanneau Atalia built in the south of France, his only toy. He sailed it from France to Egypt during the spring before we moved and we did a lot of day sailing from Alexandria's Eastern Harbour. The sad thing about having a sailboat in Egypt is that the bureaucracy really takes the fun out of a lot of it. Night sailing in Egypt is pretty much restricted to the Nile and Lake Nasser because the Coast Guard forbids night dockings in Egyptian ports. Boats have to be in the harbour before sunset.

For about five years we would sail our boat to Limassol, Cyprus, where the kids and I would live on the boat in the marina doing maintenance all summer and then my husband would join us to sail back in the fall. It was a magical time for the kids, living on the boat and having a dinghy to zip around in along the shore. I loved the escape from the complexities of life and the ease of simply getting up to dress in a bathing suit, doing laundry in a bucket on the dock, and reading in the cockpit in the evening.

Now I get my sailing fix from the feluccas in the summer. The evening that this photo was taken I'd gotten a phone call in the afternoon from a young friend who wanted to come riding that night. I'd already promised to join friends for the felucca and gave her a rain check for the next day. As we sailed up the Nile, a mass of other feluccas wove their ways in and out of the islands and other boats. Lo and behold, one of them contained the girl who had wanted to go riding! She called out that it had sounded like such a good idea that they'd also headed for the river.

With the almost constant breeze blowing up river from the North, the feluccas are out sailing almost 24 hours a day. During the day they may ferry people across the river, they may be carrying refugees from the city heat. At night they are hired by the hour and may be out sailing all night long. The boats are constructed of heavy wood and the lateen rigging is simple and elegant for the river work. As Ratty in Wind In The Willows avowed, there's nothing like messing about in a boat.

Oh Rats!

Guarding The Kill, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

One of the things about feeding half a dozen parrots and four chickens properly is that there are plenty of leftovers for other animals. The sparrows around me have nominated me for sainthood, I'm sure. They are so fat it's a wonder that they can even fly. Last week I noticed an increase in the quantity of rat droppings under the parrot dishes and decided that enough was enough.

Rats are everywhere,especially out here in the country. We have three species of them to deal with and they are smart, tough, little monsters. During the day you can see the Nile Rats (Arvicanthus niloticus) running around the canals. Unlike the other rats (Rattus rattus and Rattus norwegicus)the Black Rat and the Norwegian Rat respectively, the Nile Rats are out and about in sunlight. The other two rats are imports to Egypt from India and Europe, but they've found the climate and abundance of food to be a blessing as well. About ten years ago I began breeding American Rat Terriers to hunt the rats that frequented the grain siloes in Alexandria at my husband's request. By last year we had about twenty of them split up between the hunting pack in Alexandria and my house, but my brother in law, who took over as manager of the siloes, is not a dog person to say the least and he shipped the Alex dogs to me. Hmmm. Just what I needed.

So recently there have been signs of rat activity in the bird cages and I've been puzzling over what to do. The dogs had also been digging holes around the concrete floor of the cages, in an attempt (to my weary brain) to get the chickens. But do I own Chicken Terriers? No, dummy, they are Rat Terriers and finally I slid my brain out of neutral and assembled the household garden hoses, sliding each into one of the holes around the birdcage and turning them all on full blast.

Why I hadn't thought of doing this before is beyond me, since hosing the rats for the dogs was one of the techniques used by the handlers in Alex. So Sabrine and I sat in the shade watching the water run into what must have been an enormous burrow complex for at least an hour!Litre after litre after litre poured in under the birdcages and nothing reappeared! I was really beginning to wonder when there was a flurry of excitement and the first rat poked its wet nose up into the air and was snatched by a waiting dog. A quick chomp broke its back and the rat was dropped with disinterest by the terriers who went back to watching the holes for more refugees. Koheila the Dalmation, on the other hand, found the trophy to be irrestistible and ran all over the garden with it, to Sabrine's disgust since she was collecting the bodies in a plastic bag for disposal. Morgana the Dane found the entire exercise utterly bewildering and went to sleep in the shade after sniffing around the holes for a bit.

Over the next 40 minutes we caught ten rats of varying sizes as the relentless onslaught of the water drove them into the sunlight. At the end of the hunt we had about 2 kilos of dead rats. Success! Rats were tossed, dogs were very disappointed not to have any more to hunt, and I figured that I had the problem solved. Not exactly. The next day the inroads on the left over parrot food were much less, but there were still signs that the rats were still with us. Rats! I waited about a week for the ground to dry out, not wanting to drown my garden in hunting the rodents down, and we repeated the process. There was still some residual dampness down there because the water rose much more quickly this time, and with it rose three more rats, two of which are shown in the photo with Al, who seemed to feel the need to guard the bodies.

Have I evicted my rodent squatters for good? Not a chance. Just a day after the second rat raid on the bird house, I saw a fat and sassy Nile rat run along the fence of my garden and go to ground under a short bushy palm tree in the corner. With the spiky branches reaching the ground, the bloody rat is almost untouchable and we haven't been able to find its hole yet. The dogs have been digging around the tree and one of these days we will try flooding the area to see what comes up.

In case anyone has fond memories of childhood rat pets and feels that I'm being callous and cruel, they should reflect on the fact that one breeding pair of Black Rats, if left undisturbed, can produce more than one million offspring of multiple generations in one year. Furthermore rats are carriers of wonderfully nasty diseases such as leptospirosis and plague. In fact, while checking the correct spelling for the Latin name of the Nile Rat I ran across a National Geographic article that suggests that plague may have come from ancient Egypt rather than from the far east. See http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/03/0310_040310_blackdeath.html

I guess that flooding the garden is going to be a regular job around here, and while the temperatures are in the 90's, it's not such a bad one. One of the interesting historical things about rats in Egypt is that the annual flood of the Nile used to do a lot to keep them under control, since they would have to leave their flooded burrows to find higher ground, leaving them prey to dogs, cats, jackals, hyenas, raptors, and snakes. Now that the Nile no longer floods, the rats have only to deal with us humans, and I guess that we aren't much of a challenge.

Laying Ghosts

Five years ago, June 9 was a Friday. The school year was just about over, my son was home from his first year of college, and the children were sleeping late in the house in Maadi. Five years ago I decided to slip out of the house early to go take my favourite mare for a ramble in the countryside since the desert was going to be much too hot, so I got up early, stopped by Greco for a latte, and drove out to Morad's place where my horses were stabled then. Some of my neighbours had gone out into the desert (yes, mad dogs and horsemen!), and were meeting for breakfast at Morad's aunt and uncle's house down the road, so I let myself be distracted by good company and laughter over a leisurely breakfast with friends. A country breakfast of fava beans, boiled eggs, salty white cheese, bread and coffee can last for hours and by the time we'd finished the sun was fairly high in the sky. Magdy and Janie had people drop by and the morning moved on into afternoon as we sat in the shade in their garden gossiping, chatting over the news of the day, planning equestrian events, and doing autopsies on events just past.

Around 3 pm I decided that if I was going to ride, I'd better get busy and I walked back to the stables at Morad's to get Dory ready to go. We started out alone and headed north along the canal in the shade of the huge eucalyptus trees that line the road. The dusty road was almost empty at that hour on a Friday. Friday is the main day off work for people in Egypt, and 3 pm is prime siesta time on a Friday afternoon. Dory and I had the world to ourselves. The kingfishers divebombed fish in the canal while the cattle egrets and the white egrets looked up at us on the trail occasionally as they gulped down minnows and frogs from the banks. The crows only grumbled quietly in the tops of the eucalyptus trees. Even the birds were taking time off. Sleepy village dogs couldn't be bothered to jump up from their shady spots to bark at us and just barely lifted their heads to growl.

In the heat I chose a path that kept us in as much shade as possible so we worked our way north along the canal to the asphalt road that goes from Shubramint to the desert dump for Giza. Even on a Friday the enormous trucks were moving in and out of the desert carrying the waste for the city out and bringing sand and gravel for construction in. The intersection (if it can really be called that) of this road and the Mansoureya Road is always crowded with vehicles and workers. Some enterprising individuals have set up tea shops along the road under the trees where drivers can stop for a cup of the black baladi tea and something to eat while they stretch their legs out on the woven mats that mark the area of the "shop". Some horses would find making their way through the trucks and cars intimidating, but Dory doesn't find anything intimidating anymore. She does her own looking at oncoming traffic and responds to the slightest touch from me to adjust her path around these enormous vehicles trailing streams of sand and dust.

Just before we arrived at the intersection, I placed a call to Germany. My husband had flown his Beechcraft C90 there the day before and was planning on returning that evening. I caught him as he was on the tarmac in Augsberg doing a final check on the plane before taking off. We chatted, the usual sorts of things said between people who have been partners for about 25 years, and then I asked when he expected to arrive in Cairo. I was to have the driver go to the airport at about 11 pm unless I got a phone call from Greece where he might stop to refuel if necessary. Yes sir. No problem and have a good flight. Be careful. He'd been working much too hard lately and I was happy to hear that he'd slept late that morning. Dory and I negotiated the traffic as I finished my call to Germany, and we headed on down another shady dirt road on our rather indirect way home.

That was the last time I spoke to the man that I loved more than my own life. The next morning I was a widow facing challenges that I could not even imagine at the time and my children had lost their guide, their protector, their tyrant, their father. The greyness that I remember of the morning of June 10 might not have been there in reality but it was so much there in my being that the shreds of it linger today. Five years ago I had no idea that I would be plunged into financial and corporate chaos so horrific that I wouldn't even have a moment to consider what his loss meant to me as a woman. Five years later the chaos is down to mere confusion at times, I'm out of the corporate quagmire for the most part, and I've had time to consider my loss in the peace of my home in the country. That isn't really such a blessing, I guess.

I woke this morning to the calling of the parrots and the crowing of the rooster who shares the flight cages with his little harem of hens. One of the dogs was barking at someone passing by on his way to the fields and the sparrows were arguing as usual outside my bedroom window. I shoved a dog off my foot and recognised the enormous crater where my heart used to be, and I realised that I have to come to terms with my life alone. I've had to make a trade for the quiet of the country that I love for the excitement of never knowing what fascinating plan that man would come up with next. My life now is much calmer, less stressful, but I miss the electricity, I miss the confusion, I miss the anticipation that was so much a part of it before. I miss waking up next to a large warm body that isn't a Great Dane pup who has sneaked onto the bed at night.

My life goes on. Friends have asked after me and pointed out that I've been alone for five years. Isn't it enough? Have I thought of moving on, of finding a new partner? I've realised over the past few weeks as I've reflected on this anniversary that I haven't been ready for anyone new in my life. I still haven't said good-bye. When I finished my phone call to Germany, I said "I'll see you soon." I think I've been expecting to all this time, but I know now that it isn't going to happen. Yes, I need to finally say good-bye. I need to let it go and perhaps the empty place inside will fill again. But it is so terribly hard to say.

Mad Dogs and California Women

Jog Dogs, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

Tracy is a runner. I'm not. I let my horses do the running for me, and while she loves riding as well, she also really loves getting down and gritty and running in the sand herself. As she's correctly pointed out, it gives her a great perspective on what the horses go through working in the desert. When we went out to take some photos of her running in the desert, the dogs thought that this was a great idea and piled into the car to be able to go out and join her.

Koheila the Dalmation naturally ran with Tracy. Koheila, despite the fact that she has only three functional legs and one of the others tends to lose track of those on the lefthand side of her body, is also a runner. Morgana, the Dane puppy chased along for a while and then sat down to watch with Terra and Geo, who are both old enough at seven and six years old to know better than wear themselves out in the sun. Misu, one of my smallest Rat Terriers, thinks that the sun sets on Koheila's head and had to chase after The Spotted One and Tracy. Frankly, they were all exhausted in fairly short order in the heat of the summer desert.

Cross country running is not one of the things that my neighbours really understand. Most of them don't own cars, so if they go anywhere it's either on foot, by donkey, or hitchhiking. Most of them walk miles daily just going to their fields and returning, not to mention the walking involved in the work in the fields. Why anyone would go out and run in the desert is an utter mystery to them. But they give Tracy the privacy that she loves for her running, and this is the important point.

Most days Tracy slips a pair of long jogging pants on over her shorts and heads for the mango grove that gives us access to the desert. When she is sufficiently out in the desert to be alone, she slips off the long pants to run the hills along the wadi that heads into the plateau. After she's sufficiently run out, she heads back to the mango grove and, after putting the long pants back on, she comes home. Sometimes the kids on the road by the canal race her back to our gate and she plays along with them good naturedly.

Her behaviour is most decidedly odd by my neighbours' standards, but she's never been bothered by anyone. I suspect that in part this is because she is very respectful of their ideas in never going out on the street in her running shorts. I also suspect that there is a real respect for the kind of lunatic who can run up and down hills of sand in the desert for an hours or so. I know that the fact that she is a foreigner gives her a certain amount of leeway that an Egyptian might not be given, but for whatever reason her insanity is tolerated, we appreciate it.

I remember a male runner who used to train in the desert in our area. We would see him working his way across the dunes and up and down the hills between Sakkara Country Club and Abu Sir. He was always regarded with a certain mixture of humour and awe. No one ever bothered him and his solitary task was always respected. Maybe that's a lesson to us that if we attempt something sufficiently difficult and bizarre, the rest of the world will be content to sit back and watch in wonder.

Moving On

Welcome to Cairo American College
I went to the Cairo American College graduation on Friday morning at the Sound And Light theatre at the Sphinx. Unfortunately, having staggered out of bed at 6 am to get organised for getting there on time, I forgot my camera, so you'll have to get by with the photo on the website for the school to give you a rough idea of the high point of the morning.

My high school graduation was a ceremony that took place on a football field on a June afternoon in 1967. My children both graduated from CAC in front of the Sphinx and the Pyramids of Giza on June mornings about four and six years ago. Do I even need to ask which event would be more memorable?

This was one of many graduations that I've attended at the Sphinx, as I've been attending them for my own children and their friends since 1996. The school has been holding its graduation ceremonies in the location for over fifty years. This year's graduating class at CAC was pretty representative with about 115 graduating seniors from twelve different countries. Although it's called Cairo American College, about half of the students are Egyptian, and over two thirds are usually non-American. But the curriculum is American, even when the culture is a fascinating pot pouri. In recent years with the American concern for safety abroad, the school has become more security conscioius, to the bewilderment of many of the students. Consider the oddity of protecting students from members of their own society. The fact is that most of the students find themselves happily at home in Cairo once the strangeness has worn off. The general safety in the streets (as long as you aren't crossing them!), the richness of the culture, the array of things to do, and the relative inexpensiveness of moving about that gives them freedom in the city are pretty seductive.

I sat there with my friends listening to the student speakers framed against the pyramids and I looked around me. The family I was sitting with were Lebanese/Finnish, while the other friends were British, Canadian, Indian, and American. A cheerful and enthusiastic crowd of Swedes waved a banner in blue and yellow. Massive extended families cheered for many of the Egyptian graduates. The scene was one of friendly solidarity. The podium was flanked by enormous American and Egyptian flags, a sheikh called for a blessing of the graduates at the beginning of the ceremony while the pastor of the Maadi Community Church blessed the group at the end. No matter where the children came from originally, they all acknowledged that their lives had been changed by living in Egypt.

Maybe that's the way it's supposed to be.

Moving Into The Sunlight

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Egypt anger over 'grope attacks'

The fact that men assaulted women protesters by tearing their clothes and groping them to shame them in public is not of interest to me. The behaviour is appalling, no doubt, but the remarkable thing about the news story for me is the reaction of women to the incident. There was a time when the women who had been assaulted would have gone home to hide in shame, but now women are protesting the behaviour and demanding the resignation of the head of security who should have kept the protesters safe. The men who attacked the women are operating under the old mentality, that people can be frightened and shamed into hiding and living quietly without protest. The women who are protesting are operating under a new and, to my mind, healthier mentality that bringing wrongful behaviour into the light of day can stop it.

When I was growing up in California, I recall a conversation among my mother and her friends, women who had grown up all over the US and Europe. Virtually every single one of them had been molested at the very least when they were young, most of them by male relatives (cousins and uncles were favourites). In my mother's case, as a fourteen year old she'd been raped on a train by an American soldier and was too afraid to even push the emergency button to call for help. All of them had been taught to be good, quiet girls and not to make a scene in public. They all instructed their daughters never to put up with any behaviour from anyone that was inappropriate and to make a VERY Loud Fuss In Public should they find themselves in a tough situation. To the best of my knowledge, none of the daughters ever faced the kind of abuse that their mothers had faced.

As a housecleaning veteran, it's my firm belief that if you want something to stay clean it must be exposed to fresh air and sunlight regularly. The same maxim goes for behaviour. Evil flourishes in the dark and the more the public eye is on something, the less likely of wrongdoing. So, good for you, ladies! Keep up the racket!

Enjoying the Amenities

The Culture Wheel


It's often difficult for people living in other countries to imagine the richness of life in Egypt. Not long ago I invited an email friend of mine to visit some time and got the all too common answer that she'd been told that "this was not a good time for Americans to travel in Egypt due to unrest and anti-American feeling." It's so frustrating to hear this refrain over and over again, and I'm compelled to wonder what the purpose of convincing Americans that they are disliked and in danger overseas could be. My background in social psychology suggests a number of reasons, none of which reflect terribly well on the powers that be who are putting out this nonsense about the danger of travel. What can you do?

A group of us received an invitation from some Norwegian friends to attend a musical program at El Sakia el Sawy, a unique venue also known as the Culture Wheel. The name in Arabic refers to the waterwheels of the countryside and to a series of novels by Abdel Moneim el Sawy. This set of libraries and halls is located under the May 15 Bridge that goes from Giza to Zamalek, an odd place for concerts and conferences, but utterly ingenious. It is named for Abdel Moneim el Sawy, an Egyptian writer and journalist who died in 1984 in Baghdad while working there. His son was doing renovations on the bridge when he discovered the unused space under the bridge at the edge of the Nile in Zamalek. He arranged to prepare the area for a group of libraries, a garden, and a hall for films and musical programs, as well as speaking engagements by authors or other individuals. A week before the Norwegian jazz concert, my American housemate had attended a talk by Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist, at El Sakia. For myself, it was the first time to go there, although friends have been singing its praises for some time now.

The crowd for the jazz concert was small but eclectic. Our Norwegian community (not so many people really) came out and brought Americans, Canadians and Egyptians with them for the evening. The tickets cost LE 20 per person, or about $3.50 US. You can't get into anything for that price in New York. The performers were two Norwegian jazz musicians, a Norwegian folk singer, an Algerian woman that I'd last seen performing with Fathy Salama at the Citadel last summer, and an American bass player, so the crowd on the stage was very much a mirror of the audience. After the performance, most of the audience moved on to a restaurant/bar at the southern tip of the island for mezze and beer under white canvas tents. The music there was just loud enough to interfere with converstation, to my way of thinking, but the mezze was good and the beer was cold, which is always a plus on a summer night. Before we knew it, it was about 1 am, and the Sakkara crowd had to make our way back to the farms for an early start to riding the next day.

My houseguest is heading back to Los Angeles tonight for a month. Her sister is getting married there and she has a long list of friends and business contacts that she has to see in that month. We found ourselves in Garden City yesterday when an appointment was cancelled so I took her to Nagada (http://www.nagada.net) to visit an Egyptian clothing design house. Nagada is the name of an ancient city in Upper Egypt that is now just a village. It has been famous for centuries for its woven cotton and in recent years a group of designers began using these cottons in clothing and furnishings. I've been in love with their clothing for years, especially the cottons which are striking in their unusual weave and delicious in the comfort for our Egyptian summers. I picked up a couple of pairs of cotton trousers and ordered some matching tops. One of the lovely things about Nagada is that if the item you want isn't available in the fabric that you want, they will make it up specially for you at no extra cost. My friend, who is one of these horrible tall slim California blondes with a ridiculously athletic figure that really can show off clothes, found some crinkled silk dresses, tops, and skirts to take back for occasions in California on her trip. She's been looking forward to the inevitable questions about why she's planning to come back to Egypt to work and live with some trepidation, but yesterday was delighted to find some clothing that will impress anyone with its style and beauty. And then when they compare the prices being paid for a similar quality in North America to the prices in Egypt....Ha!

Living in Egypt isn't all water buffalo and dust at all. Even living out where I do, it's only about 45 minutes into Cairo where I can swan into a sushi bar or a fine Italian restaurant in some posh clothes created by local weavers and designers. The Sakia has something scheduled every night if I want to listen to music there, and then there are the clubs and other venues for concerts and performances. There is so little that cannot be found here if you know where to look that I find very little impetus to travel. Take a look at the websites. They are eye-opening.