Waiting For Lunch

A flock of cattle egrets patiently await a farmer who is harvesting berseem clover for his animals. They know that they will have some choice pickings from the insects, grubs, and flies disturbed by the farmer's work and he gets his field cleaned.




copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Full Service

They were closed so I couldn't see who was doing what but the concept is brilliant. I just want to know if you do the tatoo after the taxi or after the destination or the internet. Could get busy.

copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Taking On The Tiger

On a government TV channel a talk show hostess and guests discussed the effects of Facebook on Egyptian society with all the abilities and facts that one would expect from Fox News. The recent fuss over the photoshopped picture of Mubarak at the Arab summit in the US was a pretty clear indicator of the internet abilities and sophistication of the print news service so it isn't really a surprise that the conversation, when it managed to be correct factually, was pretty naive. The response from Egyptian bloggers ranged from scorn to hilarity. One of the very interesting suppositions was that the internet hasn't really penetrated Egyptian society. Cairo is one of the most well-served cities I've seen and even in the villages there are internet cafes everywhere. With many mobile phones capable of accessing the net and Facebook, it is astonishing to see who is on Facebook.


Global Voices in English » Egypt: Bad Bad Facebook

copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Women Writing; Women Reading

Arab women get a bum rap to my way of thinking. The stereotype is a silent acquiescing figure wrapped in black just waiting for her master's voice, but as I've been happy and eager to tell friends abroad, that is so not the reality. I'm not saying that life for women in the Middle East is all sunshine and lollipops, but I am saying that women are not the doormats that they are imagined to be either. Just recently, I followed a lead from one of my favourite bloggers about Arabic literature in translation, M. Lynx Qualey, who writes (appropriately enough) Arab Literature (in English) on Wordpress, to a site Arab Women Writers. This site contains biographical information and references to Arab women who live all over the world (including the United States) and who write in a variety of languages. I consider myself fairly well-versed in Arabic literature, at least in translation, and I was awe-struck by the extent of the list of writers catalogued on the site.

My enlightenment regarding the role of Arab women first came courtesy of my mother-in-law, God rest her soul, who was a force to be reckoned with. She never stood in the limelight, but she certainly directed the lighting crew and everything else. No one, but no one, crossed her. Once I moved here, my education continued. I met women who were working at the highest levels of business and banking, women like Iman Bibars the director of the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women,Noura el Daly who runs Animal Haven and many others who completely ignored the stereotype and were working hard to change it.
.
For those of us who can't just hop a plane to travel to wonderful new places to see and learn, books offer us the chance to visit and learn from our living rooms, even more so, I feel, than films and news. Books about women are terrific- but when they are written BY women they are the unique voices of experience. I've written before about Dr. Leila Ahmed's book, A Border Passage, which remains one of my favourite books and one that gives a unique picture of Egypt in the days before Nasser. Lucette Lagnado, who left Egypt with her family for the US as a child, wrote the wonderful Man In The White Sharkskin Suit, which gives insight into the lives of the Jewish Egyptian families prior to the Nasserist diaspora. Through the eyes of these women we can move in time and space, gaining wisdom from our sisters all over the globe.

As an added bonus, I'd like to recommend Nahla Hanno's blog Born Again Egyptian, which she writes in both English and Arabic. Unfortunately, I can't read Arabic so I have to be satisfied by the English posts, but they are more than satisfying. She's living in Saudi Arabia and writes about her experiences at home and abroad and about her love of Arab women's writing. A marvelous post titled Both Right And Left Handed talks about a book by a Syrian woman who interviewed women throughout the Arab world about their lives. She found food for thought and hope among the Tuareg women of North Africa. And who knows who we will discover tomorrow...

copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Photoshopping the "Real" World

About a week ago an Egyptian blogger noticed something odd on the Al Ahram website. While news sites from all over the world had published a photo of Obama, Mubarak, King Abdullah of Jordan, and the heads of the Israeli and Palestinian states all walking into begin a new round of peace talks, Al Ahram had published a slightly different version of the photo with Mubarak walking in front of the others. As Wael and subsequently many, many others pointed out, the picture was obviously photoshopped. One discussion of Wael's post quoted him as saying that this approach was typical in Egypt. When there was a problem to be solved, rather than really doing something people preferred to "photoshop it".

Adobe may not be too pleased to see that the name of it's photo processing program has become a verb, especially one with such controversial underpinnings, but it most definitely has. Discussions of the use of Photoshop to alter body shapes for models appear online at Jezebel.com and in media articles. People gasp and say "horrors" but the visual distortion of our world has become so commonplace that looking at something warts and all can be shocking.

I was sitting with some friends on Friday enjoying the afternoon with lunch in a garden and the talk turned to the terrible piles of rubbish that one finds at the very end of the Moneeb portion of the ring road. The road was intended to go around the back of the Giza plateau to join up with the highway to Fayoum and the other end of the Ring Road near 6th of October City. UNESCO and other groups protested the proximity of a highway to the antiquities and construction was stopped on the road abruptly. The dirt road bed still exists and is, in fact, used extensively by cars and trucks wanting a short cut to the Fayoum road. But at the end of the highway portion, trucks carrying rubbish to the Giza dump take advantage of the fact that no one is around to see them to drop of their load on the end of the highway, thereby saving the driver both time and the money that he would normally pay for entrance to the dump site. This particular spot is also one of the best places to take a distant shot of the Giza pyramids...as long as you crop out the enormous piles of stones and rubble in the foreground.

Some of the people who live in the city were asking why the government allowed such dumping and those of us who live out here just began laughing. The "government" does nothing out here and sees the need to do nothing. Every so often someone important will visit and in the weeks before the visit trees are suddenly planted along roads, canal banks are covered in truckloads of sand to disguise any ambient garbage and so on. This is like the transformation of Cairo University (which included banning most of the students) for Obama's visit. If it looks good for a photograph, then that's good enough.

But at the end of the day, we don't live in photographs, do we?


copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbanis

Here Comes The Cloud

Masry el Youm today reported that the farmers have started burning the rice straw in the fields in the Delta. This happens every year and every year I get angry about it. The smoke comes from the north nearer the sea, but is blown south to the Cairo/Giza area by the prevailing winds which blow southwards up the Nile. So in addition to the horrible mess that the cities produce in the air made up of industrial pollution, diesel exhaust, gasoline exhaust and so on, we have smoke. Throats become sore, eyes tear and swell, noses run and get stuffy. The ordinary day to day pollution of the valley is so bad already because of the inversion layer (heat and pollutants rising from the valley is trapped beneath a layer of cooler air from the sea and desert) that we truly don't need this.

The real annoyance to me, however, is the fact that rice straw is a perfectly good animal feed. There has been almost no education done among farmers who know it as bedding or compost only. Here we have a total waste of animal feed in a country where animals are still so much a part of our lives. Part of the problem is the lack of baling machines in the Delta where they grow the rice. Last year we did some checking around about the rice straw situation figuring that maybe we could get it cheaper from the farmers...which we could if they had baling machines.

Egypt could solve one of its annual problems with something so simple.


copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Saudi Hypocrisy

Global Voices reported today the response from other countries in the Middle East and North Africa to their recent ban on young Moroccan women coming to the Kingdom to perform omrah, the pilgrimage that takes place during Ramadan rather than during the Great Feast a month or so later. These women, apparently, have been decided to be a threat to the sanctity of Saudi male morality as they might be prostitutes (and one must assume, of course, that the required male accompanying them would be their pimp). To say that the Moroccans are a bit miffed is a major understatement. This is a blanket indictment of Moroccan society by a group of people who are notorious for their travels throughout the region for the purpose of sexual enjoyment.

In Egypt, there are villages outside of Giza and Cairo where male Saudi tourists have made a tradition of offering young girls sizable (for the girls of course, peanuts to the Saudis) amounts of money for the "privilege" of an informal marriage to the tourist for the summer months. The girls are then left to fend for themselves, and the fortunate ones find someone who is practical enough to appreciate a girl with some money to start a life with. Not a pretty picture. Apparently, this is common enough practice in Morocco as well to cause Moroccan legislators to pass a law requiring Saudi wives to be informed of these marriages before the marriage can take place. Since the law was passed in 2007, this ban is probably not in retaliation.

The assumption that Moroccan women are looser in their morality and thus probably prostitutes is highly offensive to all Moroccans. Morocco is less strait-laced than Saudi, to be sure, but then the Saudi's are notoriously less strait-laced the second they set foot off Saudi soil as well. It seems to me to be a serious case of the pot calling the kettle black. An article in the Guardian looks at the stereotyping involved. By the same kind of logic of "loose morality", given the stereotypes of North American and European women, one would have to ask if Muslim women from these areas have special problems going on pilrimages as well...and why are Egyptian women not banned? Maybe that's the point. These pilgrimages are getting to be very crowded, so perhaps it's better to make them gender-specific and cut the crowds down?




copyright 2010 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani