First Day of The Feast

Everyone figured that yesterday would be the first day of the feast, Eid el Fitr, that marks the end of Ramadan, but traditionally the feast is determined by a human viewing of the phase of the moon, and the particular human this year determined that the first day of the feast would be on Tuesday rather than Monday. An energetic burst of the work ethic on Sunday ensured that the work to be done on Monday would be minimal, so there everyone sat wondering what to do with themselves since they were fasting yet another day. They all looked so lost that I suggested it was a good day for a group ride to learn some of my trails and we saddled up five of the horses to go out for an hour. My grooms can ride, naturally, and as it turns out my gardener is also quite capable. Mohamed Said, my driver/accountant/right hand man, on the other hand, might have been on a horse a couple of times in his entire life, so we put him on Blue Boy a lovely big cushiony Anglo-Arab who used to belong to the Czech ambassador to Egypt, and popped him into the lineup. The guys had a great time pretending to be tourists and asking the names of crops, then cracking up at each other's silly answers. The grooms and gardener, Farag, Madah, and Hussein, encircled Mohamed protectively, but Blue Boy proved himself once more to be a most reliable babysitter. Having killed a couple of hours playing, the entire crew finished up work in the confidence that this morning they would be having their customary tea and cigarette in the morning.

I was wakened this morning at about 5 am by chanting. "Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. La illaha il Allah." God is Great. God is Great. There is no god but God. The first time I ever heard the chanting on the first day of the feast we were living in Alexandria and there was a large and popular mosque about three blocks from our house. The first prayer in the morning on the first day of Eid el Fitr is traditionally held out of doors under the sky and I heard men and boys chanting this as they walked to the area near the mosque where the streets had been blocked off for the prayer. Out here in the villages, I heard first the muezzin for the closest mosque chanting, then a young voice in addition, and gradually the volume grew as men and boys gathered at the mosques chanting all the while. There is no way to sleep through the sound, and to be honest, I'm not sure that I would want to. Having identified the sound as praise rather than a local political uprising, it still brings chills but they are no longer of apprehension.

I had arranged with one of my grooms, Farag, to ride to the Shubramant/Zawia graveyards at 6:30 this morning as he wanted to pay his respects to his grandfather's grave and I wanted to see what was going on. One of the grooms sleeps over every night to help me if anything happens with one of the horses (injury or colic or such nightmares that happily seem to pass us by for the most part..knocking on wood) so Farag had the horses ready for us and we rode through our local village to the desert in the mist that almost obscured the rising sun. Despite the early hour, women and children were up and preparing for a day of festivity, sweeping areas before houses, laying out trays of oranges, guavas, grapes, bread and setting up small shops selling inexpensive toys for children. Most of the children were wearing new clothes as Eid el Fitr is the traditional day for the buying of new clothing.


The tombs for Shubramant and Zawia are a few kilometres away through the desert so we let the horses have a good gallop on the way. It was so early that even the desert dogs were just lifting sleepy heads to watch us zip past...much to early to chase horses. As we approached the grave area, we spotted groups of young boys playing on the hills just within the desert, and the groups grew more numerous as we came into the tombs. These tombs are built just between a narrow strip of cultivated land and the walls of the Beni Yusuf army base, a crowded band of low rectangles, many of which bear low domes on top. Strictly speaking, under Islam when someone dies they are to be washed, wrapped in a long cotton cloth and buried in an unmarked grave in the desert. There is no way in heaven that any religion or force in the universe could get Egyptians to forego their tombs and the rituals associated with them. So much of the activity here on this morning is particularly Egyptian in nature rather than Islamic.

After the prayer families go to the family tomb where they sit and have a light breakfast of oranges, guavas, grapes and sweet bread. The children go off to find vendors of such village delights as plastic sunglasses, cheap plastic cap pistols, and the ubiquitous bomba's or cherry bombs, strange paper wads with some horrible exploding powder that makes a noise guaranteed to delight any young creature. Parents pray, visit with family and friends, and generally take it easy. We arrived at the tombs just after the end of the prayer and made our way on horseback through an area that is usually quite empty if there is no burial in progress. Today crowds of children floated across the path and had to be warned to avoid walking behind horses, while various adults were greeted by us both. At one point we passed a group of young men sitting smoking with obvious pleasure in the sunlight that was burning off the mist.

It was only about 7:15 as we left the tombs, but minibuses of families were arriving from the villages to pay their respects to ancestors as we were leaving. Farag noted that if we'd stayed another hour the horses wouldn't be able to move through the crowd. As it was the activity and the trucks and cars trying to make their way into the area were making life quite interesting for me in terms of photography and despite the lovely anti-jiggle feature of my little camera, many of the photos came out quite blurry.As we left the tombs to return to the farm through the back roads, we were still encountering families on their way to the tombs or children bedecked in holiday finery and happily waving toys. One little boy had some brilliant flourescent green plastic sunglasses obscuring half of his face as he waved a cap pistol at us, and a couple of girls carrying large balloons almost gave the horses a heart attack as they shook them causing the rice grains inside to rattle loudly. The geldings skittered around a corner, leaving us quite relieved that we were not planning any more outings today. The thought of a million kids on a combination of the sugar high from the Eid el Fitr cookies, a lack of sleep from getting up at 6 am, and armed with plastic weapons and rattling balloons just didn't bear consideration.

Kullu sena wa entu tayebeen

Dusk

I'm boiling lemons for tea tonight, or maybe they should be called limes. Here they are limon, similar to the small greenish yellow limes in Mexico and they are the Egyptian cure for virtually everything. For cold or flu, you are supposed to squeeze some into a pot with water and then drop in the lemons themselves to boil with the juice. The oil from the skins adds to the potency of cure and with a drop of Jamesons it is a cold cure that will appeal to any Irish/Arab.

My guest left this morning for Jaipur, India, where she will spend a few months working with orphans. It was hard for her to go and I could see the tears in her eyes as she wheeled her cart into the airport. Sonia pointed out that she'd rarely traveled to some place where virtually everyone she met was welcoming to her. We talked on the way to the airport about the misconceptions that people have about Egypt...I have so many people emailing me to ask if it is "safe" to come to Egypt given "the way that Egyptians feel about Americans" for example. My response however is always the same. Egyptians have probably been welcoming tourists for about 5 thousand years and most of the reviews have been very good. I do know people who have had problems, but most of them would have had problems anywhere.

Before iftar I sat in my garden with my animals listening to the mosques leading up to the call to prayer for the iftar. The horses had been fed before the grooms went hoe for iftar so they were all busy eating in the paddocks. Hanuma our developmentally challenged baby gamoosa decided that it would be fun to chase the goats around their paddock. They can run so much faster than Hanuma that they are in absolutely no danger, but she jumped and bucked around them herding them into the shed with the sheep where they would no longer be threatening her dinner.

The terriers pattered around the land visiting the horses, while Morgana the Dane took up a position on top of a heap of sun-warmed sand by the grooms' quarters. Koheila ran up the hill for a quick tussle to establish the ownership of the hill...kids and dogs play King of the Hill all the time...while Sabah the Sloughi puppy crawled up into my lap for a nap. Egrets and crows flew into the distance to roost in the trees along the canals and a small brown owl called from the electrical wire above the bird cage. As the call to prayer sounded, the entire world fell silent but for the calls of the birds.

I think that I can be happy living here.

Random Ramadan Moments

I'm sitting here feeling very hard done by. It started with a sore throat yesterday afternoon, moving into a fever. Time to spend some time being nice to my body, even if it means that I'm missing what will naturally be a brilliant iftar at the home of my friends Amr and Cristina in Zamalek. Cristina is Italian and makes her own pasta. Need I say more? But I come to this recharging period honestly. There have been a lot of things happening around here. Tracy has gone back to the US for a time to study in programs that use horses to help teach children and executives leadership and other social skills. She's not sure when she'll be back, but I'm betting on no more than about three months. Just before she left we were working night and day to finish my guesthouse in time for Sonia, a lovely British woman who wanted to stop by and experience Egypt with a bunch of "normal" people on her way to a job working with orphans in India. Not sure how "normal" we are, but we've done our best. She arrived at the beginning of Ramadan and has had probably more Ramadan experiences than most tourists. One evening, the grooms had milked the gamoosa and heated the milk with sugar. Tracy and Sonia made the mistake of drinking it next to the donkey paddock where Hanuma our young gamoosa lives and they got mugged.

We couldn't send Tracy back to civilisation without a good ride to hold her over until she gets her next Egypt fix. She and I headed south towards Sakkara to see the date harvest, which has been winding to a close earlier this year due to the heat. Every year I think that I have enough pictures of the date groves and every year their beauty pulls me back in. The heavy bunches of gold and red dates hanging like chandeliers in the tall palms and the children playing around the ripening dates on mats under the trees are simply too lovely to ignore. Having Ramadan fall during the date harvest is a blessing to those fasting. Fresh crisp dates are rich in minerals that replenish the electrolytes lost during the heat of the day.

We are still waiting for the heat of summer to truly end. We are feeling happy that the temperatures are simply in the low to mid 30's C, and an afternoon nap is still a good idea, especially for those who observe the fast. With the onset of dusk, the call to prayer, and the replenishment of the body through iftar, spirits rise and then soar with the help of a sugar high. The dogs, of course, don't fast, but they observe the cooling of the evening with a wild romp on the grass. We've seen some changes in the dog pack lately too, one welcome and one not. Our welcome change was a Moroccan Sloughi puppy that I finally was talked into by an old friend who has been breeding them for years. I've been stalling Hafez for years as well, saying truthfully that I need another dog like a hole in the head. But this time I got suckered into it and the new arrival is a delight. While she's about the size of the Rat Terriers right now, she will grow to be almost as tall as Morgana the Great Dane, although quite a bit lighter in weight. Sloughi's are a rare breed, a North African sight hound that was hunted almost to extinction in a rather misguided attempt to protect gazelles. They are graceful catlike dogs and Sabah has moved right into the dog pack without a ripple. I usually wouldn't name a dog with an Arabic name, to avoid offending anyone who might share the name, but when I tried to change her name everyone ignored the change and simply continued to call her Sabah (morning) with various additions. Sabah el Kheir in the morning as the traditional greeting goes. When she's being a pest, she's Sabah el Daousha, or morning of noise.

Our sad change was the loss of the man of the house, the inestimable Fred, son of Bluto who was the best Rat Terrier in the entire world, his son being a worthy successor. Fred, as the only unneutered dog of the pack, took his job as main man seriously and had a feud going with a neighbour's mastiff. One night somehow the mastiff (who ordinarily is a very nice dog) got in and the boys decided things. No matter how great the terrier, against a mastiff it really isn't a contest. I can't blame the other dog and his getting in the garden was one of those horrible random mistakes. He's now buried in the front garden under a white frangipani tree next to the red frangipani that marks the grave of my daughter's old cat. So one comes and another goes. Not easy, but then none of us will get out of this alive.

The other evening Sonia and I enjoyed one of the countryside's special treats, a sunset ride during Ramadan. We started out in the afternoon sun along the trails watching the farmers on their way home for iftar. Everyone heads home a bit earlier than usual so as to be at home before dusk and the call to prayer. Even the birds were settling in the trees along the canals as we rode along. We watched the sun set, heard the call to prayer, and then heard all the human noises in the countryside fade to silence. No cars were moving, no children calling out, not a human sound disturbed the air for at least 45 minutes as everyone sat to enjoy the breaking of the fast. The moon was almost full and gave enough light to cast clear shadows of the horses as we wandered the trails on our way home.

Sonia is on her way to India in another couple of days so we decided to go see Khan el Khalili at iftar. She wanted to buy some gifts for nieces and a nephew back in the UK and I've never been to the Hussein area during Ramadan, so it seemed like a good idea despite the sneaky sore throat that was scratching in the background. It was a good idea too, an amazing experience. We arrived about 4:45 pm, with the call to prayer expected roughly an hour later. My long-suffering, not to be lived without driver/farm manager Mohamed took us into town and searched diligently for a parking place while we wandered rather aimlessly watching the crowds swirling around us. Once we rejoined Mohamed we looked for a reasonable place to have iftar because Mohamed was fasting even if we weren't. We found a table on a balcony overlooking the square in front of the mosque of Hussein and relaxed there watching the families wait for the end of the fast below. Bus after bus filled with tourists pulled in and discharged their loads, while Cairenes of every variety milled about the area in front of the mosque. When the call to prayer came everyone fell to their meal with a will...although in some cases a welcome cigarette came first. The difference between the city and the countryside was extraordinary. It was indeed much quieter in the square for a bit, but certainly not silent. We finished our meal with tea at Fishawy's, the famous coffee shop of Khan el Khalili, as it was filling with tourists, families and students ready for an evening of Ramadan entertainment. No one serves alcohol during Ramadan but Egyptians are out visiting, shopping and enjoying the night more or less all night during Ramadan. We wandered around the bazaar finding fun trinkets for kids and even managing to get ourselves lost for a while. Khan el Khalili is huge and sprawling, tiny shops stashed in among ancient palaces, warehouses, and mosques. I even found some lovely old brass bells for our donkey harness. Finally, we made our footsore way out of the city and hiked for another half hour to find the car that Mohamed had parked behind a hospital of Al Azhar university.

Beginnings

I guess I don't really like September 11 anymore. There are days in the year that give you a bit of a lift..I go for the soltices and the equinoxes myself being sensitive to light changes. December 25 gets a primitive childlike cheer and I'm partial to October 12 (Canadian Thanksgiving) which is earlier than the American version because it gets cold up there sooner, but it's still a great excuse to overeat with family and friends. But September 11 got ruined for me five years ago when I was worrying about my two kids who were in New York at university at the time and then worrying about all of their Egyptian friends who were in university in the US at the time...many of them came home after concerns about their safety there. Yes, the world did change and it was one of those "I remember where I was when I heard" moments but now I just notice the date on the computer and think "that's why I feel so cruddy today." Anniversaries are powerful things but sometimes we need to move on. I really felt that need today.

One of the major stressors in life is building a house, I'm sure. Okay, my house is built, more or less, and I'm even living in it although the cabinetmaker who was building my bathroom cabinet upon which my sink will rest has had some sort of meltdown due to his recently accomplished marriage and I'm still brushing my teeth in the guest bathroom next to my office. We are finishing the guesthouse on the farm with a visitor expected shortly and the work is frantic. Not fun at all.

I'd gone out with Mohamed, the angel of mercy who was my husband's driver, my driver, then my son's driver, and now is my right hand man on the farm. He gets out there helping the gardener plant lettuce, holding horses while the grooms tend to a cut here or wash something there, supervising workmen building walls or plastering or painting, keeps my accounts...this man is worth a million dollars. He and I ventured into the city to buy some items for the bathroom in the guesthouse and on the way back encountered a string of cars, trucks and buses carrying a group of villagers from a village to the north of us along our route to another village to the south where there was to be a wedding. The tipoff to the purpose of the caravan was the pickup truck filled with a group of young men playing a tambourine, singing and dancing, and generally endangering life and limb in Cairo traffic while bringing a smile to everyone's faces. Cairo traffic is tough at the best of times but when you are being treated to a serenade, however off-key, with this kind of youthful enthusiasm, it's really hard not to break into a smile.
We found ourselves wedged in between the pickup with the boys, a dump truck filled with furniture, and a mini-bus filled with the village elders who seemed to prefer a more sedate means of transportation but who were just as joyful if not as loud as the younger set. Gradually we made our way past the cars fighting to attain the highway on-ramp and gained the relative peace of the country road along the Mariouteya Canal heading south towards the farm. Eventually we stopped to pick up some grapes and guavas and we lost the group...or they lost us as the case may be.

Lord knows at my age I have no illusions that marriages are happily ever after situations. On the contrary, marriage is when you discover just how much of life is routine, boring, and necessary. But it is a beginning and beginnings must be celebrated just as ends must be remembered. Everything in the world begins, ends, and changes in between. Thank heaven.

Thank Heaven THAT'S Over

This has been a summer to remember...if only to remind myself that they aren't all that bad. One of the dubious blessings of the internet is the little doodad in the right hand corner of my browser that gives me the weather report daily. I check it because horses are sometimes less tolerant of heat than humans, and this summer it has given little comfort when the average temperatures here have been over 95 F or about 37 C since about June. I don't have air conditioning but I do have a well-designed house that allows maximum air flow, thank heaven for small mercies. With a garden that is still under construction, the dogs learned to find shade where they could, including the inside of the jeep whenever the door was opened. Once the sun went down, the young ones would go out into the paddock to wrestle and play while the rest of us just looked on in bemusement.

One of the things that we did to relieve the heat was a mass purchase of watermelons from the Obbour market, Cairo's main food terminal. This is a huge market on the Cairo-Ismailia road to which farmers bring their produce, both meat and vegetables and fruit. The difference in price is astounding. Watermelons that would sell for LE 12 in our local fruitseller were LE 6 each. We bought ten of them and then I had to find a place to store them at home. Very interesting experience to shower with few watermelons every morning; no wonder I had them make the shower big. This was the first time I'd been to the Obbour market and I was utterly taken with the enormous savings to be had by doing a lot of the neighbourhood's shopping as a cooperative...but then on the other hand, the neighbourhood grows a lot of the things found in the market, so why descend on the chain? Not only that, but people have been madly planting vegetables such as tomatoes, cabbages, lettuce, and onions all over the farm. Pretty soon we won't have to buy much at all.

Part of summer that isn't so great is the fact that due to the school year, summer is the time when ex-pats depart. I lost two sets of friends this way over the summer, but each family left me something to remember them by, even if only temporarily. My friend Nathalie and her daughter Pauline ran into EU bureaucracy when they made plans to move their cat Kettou back to Brussels. Cats and dogs now have to be microchipped, vaccinated, and blood-tested with the blood being checked in Europe before they can travel. Poor Kettou had to board with me for a couple of months when her results didn't get back in time to fly with the family, and she was moved into the back garden with our cat Schmendrick only to find a week later that she wasn't the only boarder. My friends Uma and Jim from Singapore were winding up a four year stay in Cairo and needed a new home for their Ethiopian hedgehog, Bob. Bob is about the size of a grapefruit when he rolls himself up, and he could care less about cats. He's been living with humans for four years now (that's pretty old for a hedgehog I've heard) so whenever he hears me come to the back garden to do the laundry, he comes poking his little nose out to say hi. I was especially glad of his friendliness when our old magician Schmendrick died last week of heart failure. The heat had probably taken its toll although the cats have the best wind and a very cool laundry room to hang out in. But he wasn't a young cat anymore and the vet said that his heart simply gave out as we were driving him into town. We buried him under a red Yasmine Hindi (frangipani) tree in the front garden. That's an old family tradition and I had to warn our tenants about digging under trees in the backyard in Maadi. But I guess that we figured that the pets we were missing somehow became part of the trees.

Mango! Eat Naked In The Shower

Want me to leave Egypt in August? I don't think so. Okay, so it's hot as hell, but it's mango season too. Yesterday a neighbour stopped by in the evening with a bag of fresh mangoes just picked from the trees in his garden. I was on my way out the door to another neighbour's place for dinner so I popped them into my refrigerator. This morning the heat hit me in the face like a barber's towel when I went out to feed the birds and I remembered the mangoes chilling deliciously inside. Four major mangoes for breakfast..can it get any better? Can it get any messier?

The one drawback of mango-feasting is that they are very juicy, slippery morsels. Mango juice is bright orange/yellow and shows up readily on clothing. I really do believe that mangoes are best eaten while naked and in the shower. Then you don't have to fiddle around with a knife and a spoon to dig out the firm, sweet flesh from the half mango, but instead you can dive right in there in full force, just peeling the skin off and taking mouthfuls of the golden fruit, letting the juice fall where it may in the knowledge that modern plumbing will cleanse you from all your sins.

What a way to start a morning, right?

It's For The Birds

Moving into a new house is So Much Fun, especially when everything has to be installed. Like lawns. Any idea what it's like to live in a house where you have 76 feet tracking sand into the living room? I've been taking care of Tracy's dog Buffy while Tracy's been in California and my friend Cristina's dog Evie while her family is in Italy, but frankly two more dogs don't really make that much difference. The extra feet are some belonging to Magda (my housekeeper), her daughter Amal, various neighbour kids and myself. We probably were sweeping an average of 2 kg of sand out of the house every day.

But then the sod came. With temperatures running from 37 to 40 degrees C, we are doing a lot of watering, but the sand level is now down to about half a kg peday. Progress, right? And as you can see, we even have a couple of trees installed around the house. And it is amazing how much cooler the garden feels with the grass in it. As they say here, slowly slowly, bit by bit.

Another addition to the household has been more chickens. The last pair took up residence in the freezer when there was an outbreak of bird flu nearby, but we haven't had any flu around here for some time now. While no one imagines that bird flu is going to just disappear, neither is the need for eggs. The other day a man came around on a bicycle with three palm branch baskets filled with half grown hens and roosters. I picked a dozen of the prettiest...naturally, since they are planned to be decorations that produce eggs rather than to end up in a roasting pan. Half a dozen are living with the Cuban Amazons and half a dozen with Ali the African Grey and Bamba the Bahamian Amazon. In a couple of months we should have plenty of eggs for my grooms and myself. The vets have made rounds here explaining how to spot chickens who have gotten sick..apparently they have blue combs which are pretty hard to miss. So now we are learning to live with bird flu. It was driving me crazy to just throw away the leftovers from the parrots, but there are some corn plants, various melons and probably cucumbers coming up along the fenceline.
The avian population has gone through some ups and downs lately. I bought two pair of budgies to keep Fritz company, even though I was warned that he would eat them. After spending two years with a zillion sparrows, I figured that he was probably used to smaller birds and I was right. They've settled right in and provide a lovely soprano twitter harmony to the whistles and hoots of the Greys. It took them a day to decide that it was safe to eat in the new cage; they were probably traumatised by being able to fly instead of being crammed into a tiny space. Now Fritz has four little buddies diving into his fruit and vegetable dish at meal times and he seems pretty happy with the situation. Budgies were my first experience with birds and I have to admit to having a weak spot for them. They are the aviary clowns and so full of life they have me laughing every morning.

In an effort to reduce the depradations of the house sparrows and rats I decided to build this cage with chicken wire instead of the very heavy wide gauge wire I used in the old house. As I discovered the other day this was Not A Good Idea. One of the Cubans spent some time chewing a hole in the roof of her cage and appeared on the roof of it just at dusk. She stood around looking at all of us and appearing quite pleased with herself before flying off to a tree in the neighbour's garden. The neighbourhood children were almost beside themselves wanting to catch her for me, but I pointed out that a) she could fly and they couldn't, b) if they grabbed her she might just bite one of their fingers off, and c) all the other birds would call her back to the place where there was plenty of easy food and water. Sure enough, 48 hours later she'd come back to the aviary and my grooms tossed a light hammock over her (just string, no wood or metal) and recaptured her. We had closed down the escape hatch, so we released her into the cage and she shows no current interest in further breakouts, but I am changing the wire.

Ali and Bamba have plenty of experience as chicken partners. They seem to be quite happy with the chickens cleaning up after them, and with Mona in the house still recuperating, he's sometimes quite friendly on a random basis. Having a dish of watermelon seeds increases the likelihood of friendliness quite a bit. He does love his seeds...and his macaroni, and his apple, and his cookies. Rather a good eater, Mr. Ali is. Mona, on the other hand, is still skinny, even though she gets less exercise than anyone else in the flock. We had another bout of infection, I believe, that instigated another leg chewing episode and we had to amputate another section. It's now too short to be able to wrap it but it's also too short for her to be able to chew as well. She'd better not chew it because if anything goes wrong, we've had it. So far so good. She has sticks in her cage that she turns into sawdust and whistles at me in demanding tones until she gets her cuddles.

Bamba is a sweetheart and a lesson in birdie prejudice. Until a year or so ago, I assumed that she was a Cuban Amazon like Rosa and Blanca. Then those two chased her out of their cage with a ferocity that was startling. I let her move in with Ali and the chickens (and Mona whenever she decided that she liked Ali better than Fritz, the tart), a spot that she's very happy in. When I began looking to see why they might have driven her out, I discovered that there are some Cuban subspecies and I believe that she is a Bahamian...even though the expensive DNA testing that I had done when I first got the three birds said that they were all Cubans. I guess subspecies only count to the birds. Funny, I know a lot of people like that too.