Warning: Slow Gerbils

kids.JPG, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

I might as well warn my readers that my posting to the blog seems to be dependent upon the rate at which the gerbil that powers my server is running. Lately, the gerbil hasn't been too happy and I'm lucky to get 30 thou Kbps, which barely downloads my email. To be able to post with a photo takes a webpage and the gerbil-powers-that-might-be have to be very happy for me to get a webpage. OR I can haul my laptop to a friend who has a decent connection.

There is a rumour that I might be able to get DSL sometime in the near future. This would be heaven on earth.

So any vibes from you all to keep my gerbils happy in the meantime would be much appreciated.

Dorika's Ears

Dorika's Ears, originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

We have a holiday starting tomorrow, the Eid el Fitr, also known as the Small Feast or rather irreverantly as the Cookie Feast. Tonight is the end of Ramadan and parents are madly shopping for new clothes for their children, and maybe even for themselves. My son and a number of friends have gone to our house in Sharm el Sheikh to enjoy a long weekend in the sun, but I am going to be spending the feast hopefully looking at scenes such as that in the photo.

The ears belong to my 17 year old Arab mare, Dorika, who was named for her first owner's Hungarian niece. She's recently been given a new chance on life after having been diagnosed with a disintegrating sesamoid, which would in relatively short order become so painful that she would have had to be put down. Luckily for us, a general in the police had a horse with a similar problem and talked a visiting American vet into bringing the one thing in the world that would save her life, a shock wave machine.

This is similar to the machines that are used to crush with sound waves the stones in kidneys and such. What it does is to cause microscopic damage to the bone that encourages the damaged joint to heal extremely well and quickly. She had two sessions two weeks apart and my vet promises that she will be 100% shortly. Meanwhile, she's already been able to go out for walks in the countryside, which is where I took this picture.

So I will take great pleasure in watching my neighbours taking time out from their work, since even the farmers take the Feast as a holiday. I plan to go for long walks with the love of my life, this savvy Arab mare, to see the children in their holiday finery riding the newly washed donkeys who are getting a break of their own from carrying loads from the fields to the houses.

Some of my clients have already asked if I would be traveling over the Feast and when told that I'd be around, they indicated that they might take the time to come for a ride. And now, for the first time in about 4 months, I can ride Dorika. Life is very good.

Cold Turkey

It won't surprise anyone to learn that I'm a Net-addict. I switch on my laptop as I'm making tea in the morning and set it to download my email while I'm chopping the vegetables and fruits for the parrots. Usually I take a break to drink my tea and scan my email for anything particularly important or interesting before feeding the birds, and then I take my time over my reading while the dog food boils. Email has made an enormous difference to my life since we got the internet in Egypt.

My family lives in New York, Illinois, Oregon, California, the UK, Australia, and Sudan. Letter writing was so time consuming that it tended to never get done. Now I can do a multi-mailing and let the aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters (plus the various offspring thereof) know what is happening in my life in one fell swoop. And I even get news back sometimes...especially when one of the kids is in need of something, right?

The usual magazines that I used to get in Canada, like Scientific American, National Geographic, and so on are on line now, so reading is easier. And with the menagerie, a constant source of veterinary information is necessary, which is available through a veterinary email list and Merck's online manual. I correspond with riders all over the world, some of whom have actually made it to Egypt to visit over the years, and some of whom I have managed to visit on trips abroad.

I moved to Egypt as a member of a family of four that was joining a larger extended family here. We were unusual in that extended family in that we had our own pursuits, like sailing the 10 metre cruising boat my husband brought over from France the year before we arrived or running on Fridays with the Alexandria Hash House Harriers. I extended my world with friendships with other women living in Alexandria, with writing the American Women's Association newsletter for a couple of years, with our project of a guide for families moving to Alexandria from abroad. But when you are restricted to the contacts that you make physically, your world is by definition rather small. And as ex-pat friends moved on to other postings, it was far too easy to lose contact with them.

Email was a miracle to me. The world expanded enormously. I learned from endurance riders in Europe and the US how to attempt to manage a 120 km horse race in the spring of 2000, just before my husband's death. No one else locally had the slightest idea so it was a bit of the blind leading the blind, but in this case the leader at least had people whispering instructions in her ear. When Diaa died I was utterly overwhelmed by the outpouring of sympathy from my email riding friends, both endurance and ordinary. All of a sudden I realised that I wasn't alone in the world. Even though I'd lost the center of the family universe, I had friends all over the world who were checking in on me, encouraging me in my struggles to understand and deal with the insane economics of our situation, and telling me to get out there and see my horses to stay grounded.

I've been able to get advice for myself and neighbours about unusual veterinary problems from my contacts with vets in Europe and the US. X-rays can be scanned and sent abroad to get second opinions. Equipment and medications can be ordered online to be carried back by travelers. How did I ever survive without email?

Well, for the past couple of days, I've been finding out. I use the Apple server for my email and the Apple server got sick sometime on Friday. It's Sunday morning and I haven't had any email for - GASP! - almost two days. I've been haunting the .Mac boards with other suffering email addicts to find out why, when, and how we will be restored. Not much news coming back except that I will have email sometime this afternoon, inshallah. On the other hand, the other posters on the board are complaining from Tasmania, the UK, all over the US, and other unnamed points. Hopefully, Apple will get things sorted out and I really will get my email today.

Even without the immediate contact of email, the windows that were opened with the internet stay open. My father was one of the people who helped to set up sections of the internet back in the early 70's. When he retired, he moved to Vancouver BC for a couple of years to enjoy the salmon fishing and to help to connect Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Victoria, and the universities in Washington state just south of the border. He told me about the project and I thought that it was interesting, but at the time I'd never even imagined a personal computer and I never thought that it would have such an impact on my life. Well, Dad, you did a great job and I hope that you're enjoying watching us all wander the universe that you helped to create.

Portable Language

My home seems to enjoy a constant stream of visitors from abroad, many of them the now grown children of friends who are more than happy to explore the exotic East from the comfort of a relatively familiar base. I have amassed quite the collection of guide books that get left behind and a good collection of "Teach Yourself Arabic in A Week" books as well. But there are some Arabic words that are essential to every visitor to Egypt and quite a few that export well also. So I decided to make my own list of Very Useful Arabic Words:

Salaam Aleikum - Peace be upon you, the standard greeting with the standard response of Wa Aleikum Salaam in the short form.

Zayik or Zayek - the first being feminine, How are you?

Ilhamdulilah - Thanks to God is the response to "zayik", as it is the response to almost anything, including the signal that you have eaten all that you possibly can at a lovely dinner table and will burst if offered one more pastry.

Bukra - Tomorrow is when everything happens, unless it happens "Fil mish mish" or in the apricot season which means don't hold your breath. Apricot season used to be so short that if you blinked it was over. We have a longer season now, but things still are happening fil mish mish.

Ma'alesh - A wonderful Arabic word meaning so many things. I just ran into the back of your car? Ma'alesh (I'm sorry, it's not so bad, sh*t happens) I walk into a store looking for something and don't find it so I say "ma'alesh" as I'm leaving in apology to the clerk. Your dog dies and you are feeling miserable? Ma'alesh. These things happen. I'm sorry you're sad.

Yani - My all time favourite useful Arabic word and the one that most visitors take with them. It means "that is to say" or "it translates to". Why doesn't English have a cute little word like this? Example: "We're coming over at 4 pm; yani, when the kids get up from their naps."

Inshallah: As God wills. This is the tag to every statement of intent. I will be there at 7 am, inshallah. I will go to the Opera Thursday, inshallah. Used to drive me crazy until I noticed that things do indeed tend to happen as God wills. I may plan to meet a friend for coffee but if the sink plugs and I have to wait for a plumber, it isn't going to happen. In the US people assume that if they say something will happen, it is simply a matter of will. I guess will isn't good enough in Egypt and you definitely need the help of the Creator.

There are many more words that are useful to visitors and residents but not so many that give the sense of the difference in culture. Nothing here is cut and dried. Everything is conditional and has its own fate. Human desires and actions are not enough to ensure that something will happen. One of the first and hardest lessons to learn on moving to Egypt is to throw away those long pads on which people write the list of all the things that they are going to do that day and to buy a very small pad. I used to be able to complete ten or twelve tasks a day in Toronto with two small children in tow. In Cairo if I get two done, it's been a very good day.

Aleikum salaam wa rahmat allah wa barakatu. Upon you be peace and the mercy of God and his blessing.

Looking For Slightly Crazy Egyptians Stateside

The Ride and Tie Association Homepage - Two People, a Horse, and an Exhilarating Race!

I was recently contacted by a variant of the endurance population in the form of Carol Ruprecht on behalf of the Ride and Tie competition that will take place in Libby, Montana on July 9, 2005. This is the world's championship race and they are hoping to field an Egyptian team to compete. Since Montana isn't on the itinerary of most of the people that I know, I thought I'd try to put the word out almost any way I could.

For those of you unfamiliar with Ride and Tie (and don't worry, that includes roughly 99.999% of the entire world), this is a competition for two people and one horse. The idea is that one person rides the horse for a certain distance, ties the horse and takes off running. Meanwhile the other person has been running behind (one would assume) the rider to the place where the horse is tied, where he/she unties the horse and rides on ahead to the next tie spot. The team continues leap-frogging down the trail until the end of the race.

Obviously, some willingness to run over trails is a prerequisite for this sport as is a certain ability to ride a horse. Likewise, a patient and willing horse is asset. Personally, I'd suspect that a reasonable level of mild insanity would also be useful. From everything I've heard the R&T folk are a cheerful, friendly bunch and Carol will try to help people to find a local horse in Montana to assist them. This is not cut-throat competition at all. Considering what they are doing, how could it be?

The R&T people contacted me last spring about the 2004 race last summer, but I couldn't find anyone mad enough to try it out. I'm really hoping that we can find someone this year. So if any of you know any manic trail-running Egyptians who want to go to Montana in July, please pass the word and the website. Thanks.

Not Seeing the Pain

A number of events in my life recently have made me ponder this point at some length. Last night I drove with a friend of mine to visit an American vet who has been traveling back and forth between Egypt and the US for some 25 years or so. He has a small flat in the area of the stables near the Giza pyramids. If ever there was a neighbourhood that needed a vet, this is it. Here is a neighbourhood of small houses, many of which have tiny horseboxes built attached, where the men who follow tourists around offering camel and horse rides around the pyramids live. The area is old, really. Once a village of antiquities miners, it now primarily caters to tourism and has done so for the past few hundred years.

When tourism is at a low, like during the first Gulf War when for some bizarre reason everyone assumed that Iraq and Egypt were next door neighbours while they are actually nowhere near each other, Nazlit Semman was ghastly. The camel and horsemen couldn't make enough money to feed their children, much less their horses, many of which were walking skeletons. It was horrible. When tourism is hit here, it hits everyone right down to the farmers who don't get as good prices for their produce. Tourism is good here now, despite things like Taba, and most of the horses look okay. Not great but okay. But the men themselves are usually doing pretty well to look okay as well. As a horseowner, it still makes me very uncomfortable going there because there are so many horse, donkeys, and frankly humans, who need help and I am only one person with limited resources.

Many new residents in Egypt have difficulty coming to terms with the needs of the country. We have feral dogs and cats in the cities and countryside (and to be honest, we need them to keep down some of the other wildlife) and people get crazy seeing kittens and puppies being produced just to get hit by cars or to live very difficult stressful lives. Animal rights organisations try to adopt out these dogs and cats, but there are limits to what can be accomplished. If we got rid of them, we'd be overrun by rats, mice, weasels and so on. And animals are not the only problem. There are children working at the ages of 7 or 8 years in the shops and workshops of the country, but the schooling is not really sufficient and adequate for many of these children, so in some cases, they are in fact better off working if they have someone who will also teach them to read and write at the same time. In addition, their families need the income.So many problems, so little time.


I'm interested in endurance riding, an absurd sport that involves traveling on a horse for 50 to 100 miles in a day, and I subscribe to an email list that includes some of the best riders in the world. Some of the American riders and their horses have been invited to travel to Dubai in January at the expense of the United Arab Emirates to participate in the World Endurance Championships. Much of the costs of the trip will be paid by the ruling families of the UAE. Recently HBO has aired a program called Real Sports that I've heard about but not seen. I don't own a television and we don't get HBO anyway here. But this particular program documented the sport of camel racing in the UAE where these same ruling families have been using small children as jockeys for years. These children are often essentially bought or kidnapped from Pakistan and Bangladesh for this purpose. They live in much less than optimal conditions and are often injured or killed in the course of training or competition.

The Americans on the endurance list have been horrified by this program. The charges documented can be checked with a simple Google search on the subject of camel jockeys, and there is plenty of evidence that NGO's, governmental bodies, and other groups have been very concerned about the practice for many years. I pointed this out to the list, trying to let them see that the information about the world is out there. These things aren't state secrets. Life in North American can be so easy and comfortable in many respects that it's easy to forget that life everywhere isn't the same. So many of the resources available to the world for solutions are in places that maybe don't need so many solutions.

But what is the answer? I don't know. The riders invited by the same people who have the children riding camels in the UAE are having to ask themselves whether they can be comfortable going. Can they help more by going and drawing attention to the situation or by staying home in protest? I don't know. Is it better to take the pups and kittens off the streets to try to adopt them out (but often condemning them to a life in cages in a shelter) or to let the ecosystem work its way through, however brutal it may be. Is it useful to get into an altercation with someone abusing a donkey, one of millions working hard throughout Egypt, or can something else be done?

The only thing that I do know is that it is the worst possible choice to simply not see the pain and the problems. The world has ugliness, pain, suffering, and abuse in it. We have to keep our eyes open to the beauty, but we also have to accept the existence of the evil in the world so that our hearts can be strong enough to fight it. To allow the pain to debilitate us such that we can't be active enough to build new things that might improve situations does none of us any good. I try to keep my eyes open to it all and to remember that emotion never built a bridge.

So Why Are You Foreigners Anyway?

Young girl riding sidesaddle on her donkey., originally uploaded by Miloflamingo.

An old friend of mine came by to go riding the other day. I've known her for at least ten years and we've gone through a lot together. Both of us are technically not Egyptian, but this is our home. We've raised our children here, survived many years of marriage here, and at one time we ran a magazine together here. She was away for much of the summer and then was called away again to nurse her mother for a few weeks in France, so we had a lot to catch up on as the horses ambled along the paths in the autumn sunlight.

Years ago my friend was injured in a serious riding accident when a horse fell on her in the desert. In recent years she hasn't done a lot of riding, so we were taking it easy on our way through the countryside to a place where we could loop back through the desert from the pyramids at Abu Sir. Moving along a trail behind my house, we met up with a young girl, probably about 12 years old or so, riding a small white donkey. I've met this girl many times before in the area and just as before she asked me hopefully, "Baksheesh?" Baksheesh is Arabic for "tips", or as it is usually used, a handout.

When I first started riding in the countryside where there are always lots of children and farmers, I was warned that I would be harassed for baksheesh. One of my neighbours went with me the first few times as I was walking a mare who needed rehabilitation on firm ground rather than the sand of the desert. Seeing kids asking for baksheesh every so often, he suggested that I take a bag of sweets or something with me, but I vetoed the idea. My theory was that if the kids learned from day one that I never gave anyone anything, after a while they would stop bothering me.

I chose to handle the situation with conversation and jokes. When the children would ask for baksheesh I would turn to them as if I'd never thought of it before and say "Yes, please. I really need five (or ten or fifty) pounds. I'm completely broke." They were usually so stunned at hearing this from a foreign woman that they would stand there with their mouths hanging open. Any listening adults generally fell about laughing. After over five years of practice, the children do know that there really isn't any point in asking, but some of them do anyway. One group in a particular village do it just to hear their mothers laugh at them when I ask them for money instead. Once in a while I will explain patiently that there is no point in my carrying money while riding since there are no stores on the trails and nothing to buy. Funny how this point has seemed to escape my questioners and when the idea sinks in, they are a bit embarassed.

So there we were facing this young girl on her donkey and for the millionth time (she's a bit slow on the uptake) I was explaining that I don't carry money when I ride horses. Puzzled, she looked at us and asked rather plaintively "Wa entu khawagat lay?" which is roughly "So why are you foreigners anyway?" We looked at each other and burst out laughing to the total bemusement of our young donkey rider. You know, after all these years, we really didn't have an answer for that one.