Dear Taxi Driver

Dear Taxi Driver,

If I need a cab ride, I will be sure to hail you. In the meantime, it is not necessary to announce your presence by incessantly honking your horn the moment you see me walking down the street. You also need not slow beside me and query, “Taxi? Taxi?” while all the drivers behind you honk. Further, it is unnecessary to flash your lights at me to let me know you are coming. I see you. Even if I didn’t see you, I suspect it wouldn’t matter, because it is clear that you are not going to slow down. You don’t slow down for ancient people with canes; you don’t slow down for babies and children. We pedestrians understand that we must be on the defense. I suspect, in fact, that were I to trip before your car, we would find ourselves in a predicament known as vehicular homicide in another part of the world. To conclude, you must believe me when I tell you that I will let you know if I need a ride.

Thank you, Mr. Taxi Driver,
A

A Friday in Egypt

I Like Egypt

The guy who drove us back from the airport last night didn't know where he was going. He skidded between vehicles, all going too fast, and neglected to slow for speed bumps. My jolted spine was encouraging the old habit (formed last fall) of Egypt-fatigue; I had the thought once again that I had made it all the way from the Midwest just to get into a horrible car accident with no reason other than the complete disregard for others on the road. I've made up my mind that this attitude, though, is going to end. After being home, I saw that the recession is not quite as bad as everyone acts like it is (in terms of the majority of people still having plenty of excess that they can expunge before they are truly in dire straits - if you want to view dire straits, come to my neck of the woods), but I can see how it is going to get worse in the U.S. I can see that I have many reasons to be grateful for my situation and to appreciate this place. 

In that spirit, these are a few of my favorite things:

1. The Eats. The fruits and vegetables of Egypt are marvelous. My dad loved the fruit juice. It's hard for him to enjoy the waxen, tasteless, preservative-laden fruit of the U.S. now that he has had fruit from the Nile Valley. U.S. organic stuff doesn't compare, either.

2. Generosity and Trust. I have frequently had experiences with kindheartedness from strangers, acquaintances, and friends alike. Once an Egyptian family has you over to their house, you are treated like family and always welcome. In Jordan, we were invited to tea upon passing people's homes. This is not unusual in the Middle East. The guys on our old street in Zamalek would often offer us a bite or drink of whatever they were consuming at the time. You can trust people -- if a guy doesn't have change, he will bring it to you eventually. At the same time, if you don't have enough money, storekeepers will often tell you to just bring it when you have it - that happened to J the first week we moved here, when he bought some flowers. The guy didn't know J but told him to come back whenever he had the money. When you are treated with trust in this way, you tend to start acting the same way. We couldn't afford a desert trip when we went to the Bahariya Oasis, and, after we had talked him down on the price anyway, the dude from the hotel told us we could pay him when he came to Cairo a few weeks later. It was a verbal deal. I also remember the time Bryan and Adriana visited and we were lost in the streets near Bab Zuwayla. A guy carrying a heavy piece of lumber showed us the way out of the labyrinth of alleyways we had gotten into. When I tried to give him money (as people here often hint they want when providing a service, even giving directions), he seemed offended. When you get off the tourist path, the generosity of Egyptians (particularly the poor ones) is striking.

3. Everybody Knows Your Name. If you go to a store once, buy something, and return months later, chances are the shopkeeper will remember you. At the university, there are a few students who have failed my classes who certainly dislike me, but I'm amazed by how many of my Egyptian students (even ones who have failed) are glad to see me when I pass on campus, shaking my hand and stopping by my office and showing continued interest in me long after I am done teaching and evaluating them. I know it's not just my otherness; I see Egyptians treating each other the same way. I just don't get that feeling of personal interest from many people in the U.S.; in fact, it seems customary at times where I am from to pretend as if you don't know or see people you are perfectly familiar with. It is a shame that, at home, people are often treated with suspicion until they prove otherwise. I don't think it was always that way.

4. Specialized Work. In most neighborhoods in Cairo, there are several types of specialized shops, many the size of a pantry. People, particularly in the poorer parts of the city, know how to DO things - I saw a man one day walking down our street, a spinning wheel tied to his back and two children holding his hands. He was calling up to the buildings, seeking some business. There is a shop next to a butcher in Zamalek, where a portly man sits on a tilted chair all day mending clothes, which are piled in the shop and spill into the street.

5. Insha'allah. If God wills it. I usually talk about this Islamic phrase in the context of something irritating me (such as when my students attribute the completion of a paper to God rather than personal responsibility), but it reflects a sense of submission to the possible chaos of life that is admirable when sincere. 

6. No Winter Doldrums! I didn't realize I used to get the winter doldrums until I moved to a place where I don't get depressed around late January-February. We just returned to Egypt, and already I have a feeling of lightness and contentment that ice and snow do not inspire. Mind you, I love the seasons and am always irritated by those in no-season locales who don't appreciate my Midwest. I especially miss autumn.

7. Il-hamdulillah. God be praised. It doesn't matter what Egyptians feel like, they will usually end their greetings and discussions with "God be praised." It's another Islamic phrase but is often used by Egyptians of other faiths. There is a communal feeling to Islam and a sense of submission (see Insha'allah, above) that, in the right context, displays the heart and intentions of religion. 

8. Devotion to Cleanliness Amidst Dirt. The desert is dirty. Sandstorms, windstorms, and duststorms are at the worst end of the daily, mundane battle with dust. People hose down roads and sidewalks to keep down the dust. I have seen people sweeping sidewalks (which will be dusty again five minutes later) with makeshift brooms, with paper or a few bits of straw. It bothers me when people think that the dirt of Egypt reflects a lack of hygiene. The infrastructure is horrible here -- there are too many people, and it is a governmental failure that the garbage cannot be dealt with properly. This cultivates an attitude that garbage can be thrown anywhere. When people have the means to keep things clean here, though, they usually do. For the amount of dust that can collect inside a home in just a day, it is amazing how sparkling the insides of apartments can be. The buildings often look dirty on the outside, but the apartments themselves are often gorgeous. It's interesting, too, that cleanliness before prayer is so strictly observed. 

9. The Rent-Free Deal. J gets a free apartment with this job, and we're never going to live in an apartment this nice again. I'm not one for extravagance, but it's amazing to have my own room where I can write and work. This is an important thing to keep in mind when I think I want to move back to the U.S. We can't afford a place like this in a city at home, not even before the recession. I was paying $550 a month for a studio in Minneapolis and $920 for a two-bedroom. I know in other cities this is cheap, but seriously.

10. Love for Children. You can take candy from strangers here.

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Inauguration

On the day Barack Hussein Obama was elected, I walked into a classroom. My students were beaming. My Egyptian students. You have a history, I thought. You have such a rich history. You are ancient Egypt. You are the bearers, the inventors of so much. My students were looking at me. "Are you happy?" asked one. I looked back at them, the current inhabitants of a sham democracy, who know better than me that even they, the elite, don't have a choice, that to make change they will have to go through far more troubling and violent times than you or I when we ticked our ballots. "I hope someday you can experience this feeling, too," I said, wishing I had the power of voice, the power to transform, the power to give them hope.

A

How Cold Is It?

I'm wincing thinking about posting this to a blog, where I could be subjected to hateful commentary. But sometimes I'm too soft, too worried about rejection. During our first year of blogging, someone in the ether commented on a benign entry in which I had described the landscape, saying that if I didn't like Egypt, why didn't I just leave and that people like me made her want to puke. I felt shamed.

It's a measure of the hypnotic power of the internet that such a comment (made anonymously and therefore offering strength to the person who made it) would affect me so personally. I deleted the comment but thought long and hard about what I could have said to offend someone. I had been careful about my entries; I had been careful to describe and to give the new people and place a chance, to try not to judge them or to sound as if I hadn't thought enough about the situations I wrote about. I still try to be, even though I am surprised when anyone but my parents appears to be reading this blog.

Although I focused on nonfiction writing in graduate school, nonfiction scares me - you can't take back what you write once you let it go. You throw it out there and don't know what you could get in return. You have to come to terms with the idea that your perspective will evolve and that something you wrote about a few months ago might not be valid for you now. It's not a safe genre if you're honest about what you write. It's not safe if you acknowledge the complexity of life.

So. All of a sudden people are asking me if I am worried about Palestine and Israel in terms of personal endangerment. I'm not, but this wouldn't be a surprise to anyone in Egypt. It's geographically close to Egypt, so it seems dangerous to someone who doesn't live in the Middle East. But living closer to the conflict certainly makes it more prominent in my mind. So I try to explain Egypt's role as begrudging peacemaker. It's harder to explain that I don't wholeheartedly believe in either side's fight. Bringing this up in Egypt is about as effective as hitting yourself in the face with a cast-iron skillet.

The conflict is more complicated than any of us with mere opinions can say. Israel just happened to reshape its borders, for instance, so that it encompasses the main water supply. So it's pretty easy to withhold that resource from the Palestinians. Many of the olive tree fields that belonged to Arabs in Israel, as part of their livelihood, were razed, and the evergreen tree, that ubiquitous sign and a plant that produces nothing to eat, took the place of the olive trees. It's hard to understand why this had to be done and why Arabs were then forced into ghettos. On the other hand, Israelis are under the constant threat of being atomized should anyone get a hold of the proper weaponry, which would make anyone a little twitchy. And I have heard some of the most ludicrous things about Israel while in Egypt. When people tell you they think the Israelis were responsible for JFK's assassination, it's time to leave the room.

Lately, I have had requests for my electronic support. Groups on facebook dedicated to anti-semitism in the guise of an X over an Israeli flag. Emails in which I am supposed to "vote" for either Israel or Palestine. Too many of these groups feel like just another way to spread hatred. It seems to me that when you are joining a group called "I Hate Israel" (one of the least offensively-named ones) or when you are part of a group that believes Israel is unfairly treated by the media, you might be lacking some perspective. Semester after semester, I am charged with teaching perspective. Too often I have noticed that there are few examples for my students to follow, particularly in the sphere of the internet. No wonder my students don't believe me.

Real people exist in this conflict; human beings exist who are actually enduring this conflict. They exist on both sides and in between. We are all victims of greed and the idiocy that ensues when people feel they alone have some special right, especially when "god-given," concerning land. We are all in some way the conquered and the conquerors. Muslims, Christians, Jews: they have complicated histories and are part of the same family of religion. Each has killed the other. Each has pillaged the other. Each has extorted from the other. Maybe we are too afraid to admit that everybody might be mistaken, that crazies exist in all walks of life, and that it's up to the rest of us not to align ourselves as devotees with notions we haven't investigated with an open eye to all existing sides. 

For instance, there are many people on both sides who are trying to organize for peace. Where are those people? Could we please hear about them? Could we please show them some respectful acknowledgment and question them about how they've arrived at their views? Musing over Joe the Plumber and laughing guiltily at Ahmed the Terrorist is easier. It's too easy, too, to make the claim that you don't have the right to talk about something because you're not experiencing it. But I think most of us can say that we have experienced the lash of simple hate, that we have been guilty of simplifying a situation because it's much easier than confronting the notion that we might have done something wrong, too (or that our ancestors might have done something wrong, or that we have actually forgotten who cast the first stone), and that most people aren't evil, that most people want peace. It's hard to let one's sense of personal peace and comfort and solid opinions go when feeling this peace becomes a way of not seeing complexity. I think we all know this well enough.

A

Devotion

I'm reading a book called A History of God, by Karen Armstrong, which covers the major monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I became interested in this book when I started to realize I had few grounds to discuss religion in Egypt, the heart of so much conflict and creation. Today I got to the first Islam chapter, which is the most engaging (though all of it has been fascinating thus far).

Since I've been in an Egypt funk this fall/winter (for no logical reason), I've felt as if all I have observed are the things I consider to be nuisances. Case in point: we live next to a mosque, and each Friday I grow successively more irritated that I cannot escape the loudspeakers. And a little tic has commenced: I walk through the apartment for an hour trying to find something to do that doesn't involve having to think, and a juvenile "SHHHHH!" escapes my lips as the imam's recitation intensifies.  

But you should see the beauty of the prayer rugs spread on our street, a colorful assortment draped over the cracked manhole covers. I look out the window, and the men and boys - the teens texting on their mobiles, the taxi drivers, the shopkeepers and bawaabs of our street, men rushing up who could not get to their regular mosque in time - never seem to look up or see me; they are waiting and listening, readying to prostrate. They do not bother to look at the Asian couple weaving through their ranks or the blonde American with his backpack, standing on the perimeter, uncertain about how to get through this knot of locals filling the street. I am privy to this public devotion as if I'm looking through mashrabeyya, the intricate wooden shutters that created a space for women to look out but not be seen, in those days described by Naguib Mahfouz when women rarely left the home. 

The imam often sings in a rich voice, and you can pick out the repetitions of words. It is the repetition, Armstrong writes, that so many Westerners do not understand. When they try to read the Qu'ran or the Torah in translation, they can get hung up in the repetition and become bored, for in English it doesn't carry the same power. In Arabic, it is an art, conjuring the transformative response we have to poetry. The Hebrew, the Arabic, the languages of this region are known for their beauty. 

Strange to think that before I came here, my experiences with Arabic consisted of translated sound bites from Al-Jazeera, and every word sounded angry. 

I remember watching my grandpa sitting in his rocking chair, thumbing through his well-worn Bible, and the first time I heard a hellfire sermon at the little church in Nason that he attended with my granny. I was brought up Catholic, and I must have looked scared because my mom sent me down to Bible school in the basement, where we learned the story of Zachariah -- acted out with pastel characters on a felt board -- and ate cookies. I loved the stories, but I wondered what was going on up there in the wooden pews, with the painting of Jesus and his flaming heart hanging over the worshippers. I was worried about what it meant when people were saved because the preacher had forecasted that someone was going to come forward that day and accept Jesus. Until my mom sent me downstairs, I was worried that it was going to have to be me. But I also didn't want to miss the harmony of Southern-lilted hymns, my granny's wailing alto, the Old Rugged Cross. 

I remember my grandpa's devotion. It was simultaneously demonstrative and private, as if he knew a secret, and as I watch the men kneeling toward Mecca with their foreheads on the rugs and their feet bare, I do feel as if they have some secret, and whether it is language, or devotion, or some other form of faith, I am able for a moment to comprehend the inescapable and comforting sameness of humans.

A

Look Behind You

Thanksgiving 08 

T and me

Yesterday we walked through the new campus for the last time with one of our good friends who is leaving to get back to the states to be with his wife. We'll miss him, bunches. As we were almost to the gate, we came upon fake Christmas trees advertising the university Christmas party. (Our university makes use of Muslim, Copt, and Western holidays, as well as Thanksgiving - no complaints here.) T put down the chicken crate that was holding his office supplies and handed J the camera. He posed beside one of the trees. J was snapping away and then giggled. "Look behind you," he said. T swiveled around and snorted.  The tree was in front of a men's bathroom we had never noticed before, which for some reason has many uncovered windows, and it was full of men because the sun was going down and everyone was washing up to pray. We found it funny because we are all rather irreverent, but mostly because it was just another example of poor planning on the new campus. I looked over at a security guard who had been watching us, and he smiled at me and laughed at our realization. I think this is only funny if you know T, but it was a great closing moment.

Hers and His

When she was too small to remember, the cross was seared into the inside of her wrist. As she grows, it gets larger, a tattoo that expands and fades. Some Copts have the Cross on the side of their thumb. Recently she heard the screams of a boy receiving his cross, and she wondered if she had sounded like that, too.

He thinks that harassment of women didn't exist before American movies made their way into Egyptian society. Men who are so stifled must find an outlet. He means poor soldiers from the sticks. Over the Eid, he will go to Sharm El Sheikh, where he will drink and ogle the Russians. It doesn't count there, like Las Vegas.

She wears hijab because it says to in the Qu-ran. She is usually color-coordinated from the veil to the shoes to the designer purse. She is firm about the hijab. I give her my standard opinion: "It's just something I can't wrap my mind around." That's an easy answer.

He expresses a hatred for Egyptian women, a hatred laden with class envy and rejection in the tone of a child. Since I am not his wife or future wife, I am related to as a mother or a sister. He doesn’t have to say that out loud for me to understand it. I am his only female friend. He calls me his sister. I accept this for a long while, trying to be culturally sensitive, until, in the height of Ramadan on a hot afternoon of dehydration, his pronouncements get too invasive, as if any time now he might give me a curfew and forbid me from seeing the boy I live with. I realize that I am not sure he has ever heard a word I have said. He is nothing like my brother.

She is willowy, with a fringe of bangs swept to the side that cause her to tilt her head and pass the back of her hand over the hair every once in a while as if to keep it out of her eyes. She believes that only the Prophet's wives wore hijab and that it is a choice. When she presents this view, she can barely get the sentences out before she is interrupted.

He remembers a protest in the nineties after a few gay men were arrested. He was a child. He watched a clip on television. He says he could hear the soldiers' nightsticks hit the protestors' bones and that, if he were there, he would have beaten them too. He is willing to be friends with a gay man if he doesn’t “act like a girl.” I lean in close to him. I tell him he is free to believe whatever he wants, but his opinions, to me, are simply garden-variety homophobia of the kind I can find in my own country. This is a lesson in audience, for both of us.

Then I talk over him, and him, and him. I just keep talking.

Images of Ma'adi

Gaya is our new favorite restaurant. That's J passing by.

The cafe at the end of our block. It says "Green Mill Fish," but I haven't seen fish on the menu. We've only been in the cafe under the green awning - there's a restaurant below that. Good cappucinos.

J pets the resident cat from the antique store around the corner.

J at the head of our block, Green Mill to the left.

A

Compelling Messages

All semester I’ve been shuffled back and forth to the new campus in “Family Transport” charter busses, wedged in with other faculty, staff, and students. Sometimes it’s like a social experiment on this bus – those who don’t have i-pod buds jammed in their ears can hear complaints about students mingle with whines about assignments, can watch teary-eyed girls fret about GPAs, can observe women saving seats for their friends and telling people the bus is full, can listen to faculty members exchange pedigrees. The conversations are just one part of an eclectic, dissonant ride that features the poor being transported to or from, hopefully, work and the increasing rate of billboards for compounds that feature happy, white, blonde families. This is a blog entry unto itself that I probably won’t write.

All of this becomes relative when the air conditioner breaks. Some of the Egyptian women fret and freak, opening and closing windows, complaining to the driver as he navigates the Ring Road, distracting him from his job of moving us safely through the speeding, no-lane, death-defying traffic. Suddenly everyone on the bus – and let me remind you that all of us live in a desert climate – is a hothouse flower. A couple of people get upset when the green polyester curtains flap outside in the wind. Shut up, please, I think, because I can be a mean old miser about my personal parameters in a public space.

But soon we are stuck fast on a curved bridge. After the Minneapolis I-35 bridge collapse (I used to live a few blocks from it), I noticed how many bridges there are in Cairo, how much we rely on this questionable infrastructure. On this curved bridge, we are surrounded by pale-green Izuzu trucks, their beds packed with yams, or crates of tomatoes, or men. Some men nestle for naps into bumpy piles of onions. They would be asleep even if we were moving. There are BMWs, too, inches from Peugeots. Boxes of tissue and the Qu’ran and furry rugs over the dashboards, prayer beads hanging from mirrors, everyone on a cell phone.

I have cultivated a sense of removal from this place, not always consciously. But today I’m pissed. For me, this has become a personal matter. It’s actually the perfect temperature now that the infamous black cloud has faded for the day. I should be enjoying the fresh air and sunshine, considering how everyone else in my family is bundled for winter in the Midwest. I don’t even mind being stuck in traffic; I have a book I can read; I have the visual bombardment of Egypt to entertain me whenever I want it. As we sit here, though, my right eye twitches tightly, just once. Exhaust pipes are leaking blackness, and it’s coming inside. Particles seep in.

I have to admit I’ve been disappointed in my poor attitude since I’ve gotten back from a summer away, and I like to blame it on a minor illness, though I know there is probably more to it than that. I have just begun to get over a sinus problem that I thought would be forever chronic – undoubtedly caused by the pollution of Egypt – hazardous garbage (rotting and burned and piled in the streets), the fumes of leaded gasoline, agricultural burning, and – to a simpler but no less foul-seeming extent at the moment – the occupied forefingers and thumbs of the smoking population. (One of the first of many complaints from students about the new campus was that there wasn’t a cigarette vendor. I mean, apparently McDonald’s and Pepsi and Cilantro are our university’s corporate sponsors, but the cigarettes are where I draw the line. Anyway, I have my own petty complaints.)

This sinus thing has plagued me since the spring. It creeps in me; it has crept; it lurks. The word “sinus” is so sniveling; these are powerful things, I’ve discovered. It’s a pulsing above my left eyebrow, at times so painful it feels like a hole, some festering round button of hurt with jagged edges that can force my left eye to a squint. My eyes shrink; sometimes they look pinched on the sides. Probably only I can see this. I went on and on with doctor visits and decongestants and antihistamines and sprays, and in a week of desperation started having a shot of fine Egyptian “Auld Stag” whiskey (complete with Bambi’s detached father on the label) every night before bed as my otherwise teetotaler grandfather might have prescribed, and then I quit the medications after the associate director of our department, the expert homeopathist in the region, told me first that most pain comes from a psychological stress that I need to identify and then about a natural salt water spray. I considered what psychological stress my sinuses might be alerting me to then I went to the pharmacy and got my salt-water spray. After a few weeks of using the spray, suddenly things started moving. You don’t need to know the details of my mucus except that I was so pleased to find out that I had some in me, as apparently there had been a knotted jam of it up in my forehead. And I had been thinking about sending the homeopathist, a man who looks wiser by virtue of his crisp white Sufi beard, a balloon bouquet.

A couple of men in the truck beside the bus wave their cigarettes and laugh and stare up at the complaining bus inhabitants. People honk viciously. The phrase “lay on the horn” is made for Cairo. Where I come from, people usually start to annoy themselves at some point when laying on the horn, and then they stop. Maybe they get out of the car to see what the holdup is about. Maybe they yell. Maybe they bring out their easily-purchased assault weapon and wave it around. Here, we plague ourselves in addition to others. Sometimes that’s what it seems like. One day James and I saw this woman who had been jammed into a parking space by a double-parker just sit in her car with her hand on the horn until people started coming out of buildings. She never got out of her car, never did anything but lay on that horn. Eventually, a man came out of a building and headed to the car. She did not remove her hand from the horn. She honked even as she drove away.

My eyebrows tense like muscles, warning me not to breathe until I get back home to the air purifier from Radio Shack. I wish I could comply, eyebrows. No one else on this bus seems angry about the quality of the air they are breathing. Is the wavy, stinky, dizzy, almost-blankness I am feeling with each breath a mirage? It must be that I am the hothouse flower. After all, it’s just a sinus problem. All I have to do is take a drive around town to see more than enough people with worse problems, usually associated with poverty – amputated limbs, malnutrition, weird eye and joint issues – all preventable. Shut up, you, I think, and my eyebrows, though skeptical, agree. There are compelling reasons to stay here and compelling reasons not to. The homeopathist is right – my body has sent its own compelling message.

A

Piles

The only good sidewalk on the way to the bus stop this morning was piled at intervals with manure. The smell reminded me of home. 

On the side of the road, men in green and orange work-suits use straw brooms to collect mounds of sand and dirt, and these, too, are placed at intervals that periodically get trampled or run over or blow away. 

At a gas station by the university, a giant pit waits for a building to fill it. In the meantime, it's a dump for the gas station. 

When Al-Azhar Park (one of the only continuously green spaces in a city where there isn't enough green to fill each inhabitant's foot) was built, it replaced a centuries-old trash heap. Embedded in the heap was a forgotten relic - an ancient wall now celebrated and restored.

A paleontologist told me that the layers of rock representing our era will be nothing but plastic bags. 

A 

New Campus Note

Desert foxes. Actually, I haven’t seen any, to my disappointment. The university happened to build a desert campus right in the middle of their habitat, though. Apparently, a sighting last week caused “panic” among the student body and has caused security officials to suggest that poison be placed on the perimeter of the university grounds. From what I understand, the desert foxes are comparable to the stray dogs (one of which I saw trotting along with a dead cat in its mouth this morning as I walked to the bus stop) and cats of Cairo – the foxes have adapted to human populations and human waste, and they are glad to scavenge our leftovers as easier pickings than the more difficult hunt. As a naturalist professor pointed out, a part of the mission on the new campus was supposed to be greater attention to the environment and to natural habitats. 

I imagine the desert foxes are less mangy and resemble the fascist bunnies from Watership Down a little less than some of the cats that were on the downtown campus. Still, I miss those cats because on campus I can see a great need for them, which is to keep the mouse population down. The mice I have seen are cute plump balls with large velvety ears, and I don’t really want them to be destroyed, but then again I don’t want them in my office. Last week, one colleague of mine noticed that a little mouse had settled for a nap on his foot. Cats seem a simple solution to the mice, particularly since there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of native wildlife hanging out on our concrete campus at the moment, except for those desert foxes, which I’m sure can take the cats in a brawl unless said cats are of the Watership Down variety. At any rate, I really hope the university doesn’t poison the desert foxes just because some students freaked out.

A

Gallabeya!

Not much to say now, so here you go – a photo of yours truly. Laugh away, fillies. This is a gift given to me last spring by the maid for my mom. I sense that it is currently neatly folded and not being worn. Plus, it is twenty times bigger than my mom. Not to make fun of the gallabeya or whatever, but this one is atypical. It’s like the ones (except sequined) they try to sell tourists on the cruise ships between Luxor and Aswan, with the price marked up and on the condition that tourists wear it to the “Gallabeya Party,” during which the bowtied Egyptian waiters encourage games and dancing and photos. The party occurs right after they serve you fuul and koshary for Egyptian buffet night.

Something Changed

My as-of-late snarky mood toward Egypt has changed considerably. All it took was to get in a cab last night, the young driver smoking and his forearm flexing as he shifted gears and talked on his mobile. To leave the roundabouts of Maadi and get out on the corniche and watch the part of Cairo that couldn’t afford to go to Sharm El Sheikh for the Eid moseying arm-in-arm in the streets, perching precariously on the bridge to Zamalek. To inch closer to downtown, take the curve that exposes a little park where the headscarved youth of Cairo are said to live some kind of hypocrisy by making out in the grass. To visit our old apartment building, where a friend still lives, and eat koshary, and look out on the skyline and notice that the World Trade Center has a new purple sign and that the bawaab-in-training got glasses and no longer has to squint so painfully to see us.

On the way home, to grab an already-occupied cab and hear the gentle conversation of the driver and his front-seat passenger. To see people leave the Ahly arena and watch fireworks bloom on the sky and listen to the driver and his front-seat passenger say, “Gameel.” Beautiful. To see people smiling, pushing into the street. To see people, rather than just desert and the suspicious scaffolding of “development.” To see the middle class, out and about, and the poor, celebrating. To be in the center. Back on the corniche, almost to Maadi, we got a flat tire just as a mini-bus – crammed so full that a teenage girl’s back, butt, and left arm were hanging from the window –  passed us. The driver wouldn’t admit it was a flat until he had pulled over in the middle of the devil-may-care traffic three times. “Five minutes,” he said that third time. “Only five minutes,” said the front-seat passenger, lighting a cigarette. To know that it wouldn’t be five minutes. To pay the guy anyway and tell him to have a good holiday and get into a different cab with its own personal rattling and leaking tires. To feel it all again. And then to return to the new street, so quiet, and to like it, too.

A

The Maadi Metro supermarket is a little more cramped than the one in Zamalek. More people have driven rather than walked or taken a cab here. At the entrance, a woman begs with two little girls. One of the girls wears a dingy white blouse with lime green, flared pants, her hair short and coiffed by filth, tinged with red, a tangled, stiff helmet.

I watch her through the glass. The man at the register nods and shrugs, looking a little nervous, and the three baggers do the same. The computer is still loading, stalling everyone.

But – I’m in no hurry, I think. Do I look as if I’m in a hurry?

The men are apologetic, anticipating a kind of impatience and disdain. At the Korean restaurant down the street last week, a British man with a handlebar mustache, smoking a cigar, didn’t get his beer fast enough and clapped and snapped in the air and called to the Egyptian male waiter: “Honey!” It's an extravagance -- this impatience, similar to the kind I've displayed in the last few entries. 

The men at the Metro market cash register – in the most Egyptian way possible, which is to say, barely – brace for my impatience. 

People are standing and waiting. We need change and cigarettes and detergent. Blonde, pasty people in shorts, black people in bright garb, Egyptians in designer sunglasses. The oversized cars wait in the street – too small, too strewn with garbage, too full of poor people who position themselves exactly where it is hardest to say no, when we emerge with our bounty of groceries.

Today, most of us say no. It is hard to say why – there is no real explanation or pattern concerning anonymous generosity or lack of it.

The computer is working. The groceries are added up and bagged. We emerge from the market and the girl with the stiff coif is upon us, wanting a pound – one pound, madame, one pound – for a package of tissues. We say no, hailing a cab. “Madame, madame, one pound.” Is this like brushing away a fly with your tail? The cab driver, an old man with prayer beads hanging from his rearview mirror, speaks softly to the little girl as her pleas increase. Peace now, he is telling her. Peace, he is saying as she sticks her arm in the window – “Madame, one pound, madame” – and he drives us off.

A

            

There is a mosque next door, a small mosque, with a passageway equipped with faucets where men clean their feet before prayer. The muezzin has a rich voice, so that even as the call to prayer echoes through our rooms, it’s become part of our everyday. The trickle of water in the passageway is pleasant. Then the sinus clearing begins. That part isn’t so pleasant.

Since returning I’ve focused more on the nuisances of Egypt. It may have to do with adjusting to a new neighborhood and a new campus. It may have to do with this being our third year, and how things that seemed merely foreign and bore some getting used to in the first and second year are now just getting on my nerves. It may be that I am still regulating my clock. It may be the heat.

The new campus is in the desert. It’s going to be beautiful, but right now it is a series of stone buildings with labyrinthine passages, very little shade, and very few working toilets. Those toilets that do work but are still under construction should not be entered. I found this out the hard way when I entered the ladies’ restroom in our department only to find unflushed toilets of the grossest kind and scattered cigarette ashes on the seat and floor. Although there is a men’s restroom just next door, the male workers prefer the ladies’ room, I guess.

Actually, when we were looking for apartments, and we came to our current one, there were men inside doing a few renovations. As we examined the bathroom just off the main bedroom, we found a similar pile of poo and ash. But the dishwasher and kitchen and counter space spoke more loudly, so we took it, and I bleached the hell out of the toilet when we moved in.

Back to the campus – I finally got a chair in my office today because I stole one with the permission of the department chair. This is not a tragedy, of course, but such are my complaints. One of my colleagues came to her office this morning to find moldy bread on the floor and dusty footprints on her chair. And, after an entire week of classes, a few flimsy garbage cans have been made available, though it is more in line with the habits of the students to leave their empty cups and cigarette butts anywhere but in a trash can.

Ah, but in our new apartment, we have yet to run into the zeballeen – the trash men who show up in the wee hours of the morning. You might recall that I became rather petulant with the Zamalek garbageman when he tried to get a bonus for first Christian (which we obliged) and then Muslim holidays – to which I said, “But you’re Christian!” And an argument in patchy Arabic and crystal-clear tones ensued. Yes, I’m a jerk, which is why James was the money man from then on. Here, in the new place, we set our garbage outside the door and the bawaab collects it. I am not sure when, which is problematic because of the cats. This morning, as I was waiting for the elevator, I clicked on the hallway light and found an emaciated orange cat with a gnarl of blood on his shoulder, staring at me. Maybe you are feeling sorry for this cat, and you should. But that cat looked me in the eye this morning, and this is what that look said: “You gonna leave or what? ‘Cause I got some trash to dig through and I will bite you, lady; I’ll bite-cha with my disease.”

But I had more important things to worry about. There is a free shuttle to school – which is great – but the problem is that the shuttle just kind of shows up whenever. So it’s supposed to leave at 7:55, for example, but if the guy shows up at 7:40, then there you go. Apparently, in my anxiety about making the shuttle (a cab ride would be pretty expensive), I missed the dead horse in the street that James would see later. I also was busy dodging cars, as usual. Maadi, created by the British, has roundabouts, and this complicates my understanding of when I should be dodging and where I should be looking.

The ride on the shuttle takes you out of Maadi, past sand and more sand and gated communities that are half-built – some more complete than others, some already like ghost towns. All extravagant, at least in the planning. There are other universities – one looks like a spaceship in the sand and is called Future University. Beyond these, desolation – the desert. Not the pretty Sahara – the dug-in Sahara, the uprooted sand, the desert on the cusp of pollution, the desert grasping trash. The shuttle has itchy orange curtains that you pull open and shut depending on the position of the sun. It is the sun, above all else, that I feel I am fighting when I go to work. It’s just always there, and the palm groves have been planted only on the outer edges of the campus, and there is never enough to drink, and it makes me realize how utterly unsuited I am to the desert, to any form of dehydration, and how pale I am, and how much the sun wants to chew me up and spit me out. 

There is going to be a turning point for me, I know, when I’ll remember the things I appreciate about Egypt. Not to worry. Just not today.

A

 

 

Top Questions I Get At Home and the Answers I Would Prefer To Give

1. Do you have to cover your face/hair? No. Foreigners get away with a lot here; foreigners are often coddled. We get a free pass. It’s telling that I found it much more difficult to communicate in France than I do in Egypt. However, you have to cultivate a sensibility about how you want to dress and what sort of confidence you have in your clothing choices. In some cases, covering your hair is seen as a matter of respect, as when entering a mosque. I haven’t covered my hair when entering a mosque. I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it. I’ll think about this choice. I do, however, remove my shoes. It’s all pretty confusing still. I’m in the phase where I have learned about the gender equality espoused in the Qu’ran, something I guess I missed in the Bible. I recommend the book Scheherazade Goes West if you are a Western feminist who hasn’t delved into Islamic feminism. Anyway, we just moved to Maadi, and people walk around in shorts here, and harassment is minimal. Even though Zamalek is a rich neighborhood, shorts were a rarity and leering was not uncommon. Around the corner from our apartment is a gym with TV’s attached to the treadmills and the cleanest showers I have ever seen. Welcome to suburbia. My parameters are changing. I miss Zamalek. I guess I will just have to drown my sorrows in the freshly-made tofu I can get down the street at the Korean restaurant.
2. Are Egyptian men hotties? This question is so weird to me, but I get it a lot from strangers. The word "hotties" makes me giggle uncomfortably. I didn’t go to Egypt looking for hotties, but I would say that the ratio of good-looking to bad-looking men is about the same as everywhere.
3. Do you feel safe? In a car? No. I’ve learned how to absorb myself in reading while being whipped around in a cab because there just isn’t much I can do about whether or not I get in a crash. I also fear getting hit while I am walking down the street. Yet, walking down most streets in Cairo, beyond the vehicles, I absolutely feel safe. I have been met with nothing but kindness and generosity. I have been lost in back alleys piled in poverty and people have led me out and been offended when I have offered them money. The only conflicts I usually get into are about money, and these arguments are usually with melodramatic cabdrivers.
4. Do they like us? Do they hate us? Who knows?  I think when you are living in any foreign country you are constantly met with generalizations and are constantly formulating your own. Here’s one: Egyptians constantly tell me what Egyptians are like. After a while, if I’m not careful, I believe it. Sometimes I find myself then talking about how generous and hospitable Egyptians are, for example. And they are. But I’m also constantly told that they are. By them. Egyptians often say they love Americans. To me. The comedians grin and say they love the American dollar. All in all, what I really believe is that many Egyptians are more willing to give foreigners a chance than Americans can be despite America’s foundations in immigration and equality, and they know more about America’s political status and history than Americans know about Egypt. That said, I’ve heard some pretty offensive things from Egyptians about Israelis and Asians that don’t always support the idea of hospitality. What is springing to my mind now is the multiracial diversity of the American athletes I saw in the Olympics. I felt a swell of pride about it, despite my anger at the way the women’s beach volleyball teams wore wedgy-producing bikinis while the men wore comfy tees and shorts as bikini-clad cheerleaders or dancers or something lined up around the men’s volleyball court. Anyway, when you look at these athletes beyond our obvious gender issues, it’s hard to understand why Americans could be hesitant about somebody like Barack Obama becoming our President, if this hesitation has anything to do with race. This diversity should be a source of pride, a symbol of the ideals that Americans should want people to remember about us. I actually read an opinion piece in the Galesburg Register-Mail before I left the U.S. in which some jerk from Arizona targeted Obama’s middle name (yet again) and then proceeded to say that electing Obama would be akin to electing someone with a Japanese name during World War II. I would hope that most readers would immediately catch the idiocy of that analogy on both ends. When people at home ask me about Egyptians, I give canned responses about how nice the people are, etc. I do this because I want people to know there is nothing to be afraid of, that the Middle East is not some cesspool of violence and hatred, that the Middle East is the root of so much of our ideals about democracy and "civilization." I come back here this third year more confused than ever, though. An Egyptian friend told me the other day that Michelle Obama was bringing down Barack's chances because she "isn't pretty" and Sarah Palin is "pretty." This is the same friend who hopes to have blonde, blue-eyed children one day. I don't really know what to do with comments such as this except become defensive and more confused. I hope to articulate part of this confusion in coming entries. --A--

I had been warned about the Metro, which is Cairo’s light rail, subway, tube, what-have-you. I had been warned that there would be so much staring, pushing, insults – that it was “survival of the fittest.” People would undoubtedly sleep standing up, breast-feed babies, sell cosmetics, push each other, and generally be unpleasant. And that was just in the women’s car. Apparently, the mixed gender car would be worse in that one’s chances of getting pinched and grabbed and harassed were much higher. I have heard stories of women taunting each other for the tint of their skin, of women in niqab shouting about Allah and how young women need to cover themselves. I’ve heard, too, that everyone stinks.

Yet I’ve ridden the Metro for two days, ever since we moved from Zamalek to Maadi, and the only creepy, unpleasant thing that has happened to me occurred just outside the Metro this afternoon. As I was walking under the street through a long corridor splattered with the same ubiquitous Pepsi ad, I could see someone walking next to me. OK, so we were walking the same pace. Fine by me. But the corridor is quite wide, and there was plenty of room. OK, fine, people have different space thresholds than me in this country. But this person was very close to me.

I adjusted my pace, and this person (a man, I could sense, though I was staring straight ahead), stayed with me. Finally, I looked over, thinking, Geez, maybe it’s just James being weird again. Alas, it wasn’t the face I wanted it to be. A man in a Tony Soprano shirt smiled and asked if I was Egyptian. I said no and stared ahead.

Had he said it in any other way, had I noticed kind eyes or simply an inquisitive expression, believe me, I would have talked to him. But I knew right away that this was a creepy man.

Creeps transcend nationality.

He spoke to me in Arabic, and I ignored him. He then said in English, “Can I talk to you?” “No,” I said. Then I heard him say “Sorry” quietly as he backed away. I kind of felt bad about that as I sent my ticket through the slot and pushed through the turnstile.

I stood on the edge of the platform next to where several women had accumulated, an indication of the approximate position of the women’s cars, which are marked in red and have a painted lady with a triangle skirt as you would see on a bathroom door. I stood there about five minutes. Sure, people stared at me, but I was the only one nursing a bottle of water and one of the only ones who wasn’t veiled. It’s kind of like when I see a veiled lady in Galesburg, IL, or, for that matter, any foreigner. It’s just hard not to stare when something is an anomaly in a given place.

So the metro came barreling toward the Sadat stop, and I got on, made my way down the middle of a row of women, and found a metal bar to hold onto. Then I looked out the window.

And there was Mr. Creep, just outside, blowing me a kiss as if I were his wife and we were briefly parting. GROSS. That artifice of familiarity instantly irritated me. I curled my lip in an ugly way that I have and looked away. I guess he had been standing there, behind me, the whole time. If something like this happened at home, I would feel a bit threatened, but in this case I knew that if I would have needed help, every other woman and man in that place would have beat that guy to the ground. Such is the trust I put in Egyptians. This sort of trust, unfortunately, doesn’t transcend nationality. This sort of security is something I expect much less in the U.S.

Safe is how I felt this morning, as I boarded the Metro during one of the busiest of times. It was strange to feel safe in that situation. All kinds of women boarded with me, and I learned the meaning of being packed like a sardine. There was no need to hold onto anything – we were like books on a shelf, carrying each other’s gravity. Indeed, you did have to push your way in, to toss yourself onto the Metro and somehow slip into the throng. At each stop, more women forced their way in, and I would think, There’s no way another person can cram in here, and then it happened anyway – we managed to become sandwiched just a little bit more.

At one point a short young woman in a black niqab, her eyes large and looming behind the mask, had her gloved hands pressed against my chest. Really, it was the only place her hands could have gone. I could smell her breath, and I imagine she could smell mine. I would find my hands and legs in strange positions that I couldn’t adjust. At one morbid moment, I thought, Gee whiz, I might be squeezed to death this morning. Mumkin (possible), as they say.

Yet it was quite bearable. For a while I stood there thinking, Wow, I could really freak out about this. Claustrophobia is for the privileged. I was only taking the Metro because it’s 1 LE each way – about nineteen cents – and it’s so much easier than taking a taxi from Maadi, which could potentially end in many hand gestures and surliness when the driver and I cannot agree upon a fair price.

While the Metro might be taken by more diverse classes of people than the terrible public buses, the majority of riders seem quite conservative and solidly lower middle to lower class. There were many women headed to low-paying jobs in the public sector and many young girls headed to school – and not to AUC, either. Few of the young girls wore their hair free; I suspect that they do not rationalize “taking the veil” as something that happens when they are “ready,” which is something I have heard a lot of my students say. Rather, they probably do it because it is time to do it, and that is that. All in all, though many of the AUC kids are more loaded than anyone I’ve ever met, I was sitting pretty in the Metro.

But even as the niqab woman pressed her gloved hands against my chest, and even as I, grappling for a handhold behind me, accidentally grabbed another woman’s breast or stomach or something fleshy like that, I felt fine. First of all, nobody stunk, for god’s sake. It’s like this – when it gets hot, people stink. I stink. You stink. Etc. But it was morning, and we may all have been as fresh as daisies, for all I could tell. I can't speak for the car with all the men in it, however. Second, a woman in a lime-colored hijab leaned to me and said, “Welcome.” When I responded in Arabic, a few women around me softened and gave kind glances.

As we neared Sadat station, a young woman tapped my shoulder to let me know it was time to start shoving toward the door. She assumed I was getting off there, and she was right. She and the “welcome” woman gave me a nod, and I tried to stick with them as we pushed through women – women staying, women going, and women trying to get on before others had a chance to get off. A Sudanese girl who was staying in the car got spun in a circle as easily as a rack of clothes, her braids flying, as we passed.

A sea of women – we crested then toppled out the door, gripping each other, pressing our hands against each other’s backs, patting each other in that womanly empathy that has become so familiar to me in Egypt. I can’t understand how I didn’t fall on my face, how I wasn’t trampled. And all the while, women were laughing. I was laughing. We had this in common. 

A

Maadi-ville

First impressions of Maadi? One: what are all these Asian people doing here? Seriously, on our street I see as many Asians as Arabs. And here I was thinking, all this time, that no Asians really lived in Egypt, except for the lovely crew at the Chinese embassy adjacent to our old digs in Zamalek. We would occasionally witness little ladies walking poodles and short, trim-waisted men marching down the sidewalk, making way for nobody, or presiding over the building projects taking place within the embassy, coolly watching as a gaggle of sweaty Egyptians hammered away at some cement or tried to operate a mixer.

Still, beyond the embassy? Nobody. I assumed this was no place for Asians. I was wrong. They’re all in Maadi.

Impression one.

The other impression? It’s quiet. In a city where noise is part of the ethos, the absence of noise is itself an obtuse presence, insinuating itself on everything. Granted, a man in the street was shouting—shouting—into his mobile the other day, for no good reason but to annoy me. And our new bowaab—goodbye, Neghi—argued with a man who drove the wrong way down our narrow street and refused to back off. And there is the mosque next door. Still, even the musical wailing of the call to prayer seems lonesome. In Zamalek, the closest mosque simply joined in with others, who together stitched a ghostly layer of keening that spread throughout and beyond the neighborhood. Here, just a single call, no accompaniment, no backup—no Jordanaires. Within a couple minutes, the call is over and silence rules again. Nothing withstands it for very long.

I’m also impressed by the restaurants on our street and scattered throught Maadi, the clean and efficient Metro market, the more liberal dress code. I wore shorts outside tonight, and nobody stared, unless to take a gander at my birthmark. Many women were dressed as they would be back home, and no lecherous street cop so much as batted an eyelash. I am also impressed, in a different way, by the metro I took into Cairo today, and will take all week. It’s another interesting segment of society here, a new addition to the adventure, another set of principles for considering. And so I will. In September.

James

I feel a bit anxious. Everything is actually great. But in two days we are moving to Maadi. In Zamalek there are these lovely trees flowering in red that I haven’t yet learned the name of in English or Arabic. They flower beside the girls’ school, surround the Chinese embassy with its newly installed, old-fashioned barbed wire discouragement. On this Thursday evening, the elevator goes up and down, and we on the top floor hear its two-tone announcement each time it reaches its destination, and we hear its telltale creak when someone is coming to our door. A satellite dish, caked in dirt, perches in the dining room. We had no idea we were buying that dish when it was installed. The spiders on the porch still watch me write, still materialize from behind the glass door that leads to the porch, the porch that I will miss though I rarely sit there. There came a point this spring when I was in a taxi, and I finally had the notion – as I easily read a book while the taxi jerked about, as the driver honked and lit a cigarette and cranked up the Quran on the radio, as the offending exhaust from every other car seeped in the open window, as kids in tight jeans and glittering shirts roughhoused within inches of murderous vehicles, as a traffic cop plunked his glass of tea onto the hood of a parked Hyundai – on that spring morning, I had the notion, the feeling: “This is normal.”

A