A philosophical rambling that comes of spending too much time afloat on a river

When was the last time you did nothing? I mean really and truly nothing?

If you’re anything like me, then “nothing” is not an activity that you engage in regularly. I feel this need to be constantly surrounded by people, with a long list of things to accomplish. Sitting still is not something I do very well. Last semester, the closest I came to doing nothing I think was driving 13 hours from Oxford, Ohio to my parents’ home in St. Paul, Minnesota. I would complain about how busy I was, but the truth of the matter is that I was never still because I chose not to be.

I think stillness in general makes me uncomfortable. Part of it is my extroverted, energetic personality I think, but a big part of it is cultural. I think aversion to stillness is a defining trait of Western society—one that I have inherited from my American side and that becomes all the more acute when I am on American soil.

Think about it. In America, we squirm at pregnant pauses in conversation, we cover white walls with paint or pictures, and we fill planners (or iPhones if you’re cool like that) with appointments. We wear watches that keep time down to the second and from a young age, we are taught how to responsibly “manage time” as though it were a wild beast that we needed to train. We of course, understand the need for leisure and good social interaction, but these quickly become just another sort of appointment: we carve out special hours for physical exercise and naps, and we schedule coffee dates with friends in the in-between spaces in our busy days, conveniently taking care of any otherwise useless “free time.” We value efficiency, strategic planning, and accomplishment. We don’t really value doing nothing.

This whole value system is flipped on its head though the minute you venture outside of this realm we call “the first world.” Nowhere is this more apparent than here in Egypt. Egyptians view time, and by extension, life, in a completely different way than Westerners do. It drives all the white people positively batty, much to my amusement.

I got to thinking about time and busyness and all this last week when my friend Raustin and I decided to go for a little cruise on the Nile from Aswan to Kom Ombo in the south of Egypt. We hired two Nubian boatmen to take us on their old-fashioned sailboat felucca on a two-day, two-night trip down the river. Nile cruises are a common activity in this part of the country, though most tourists opt to take big, lumbering, boxy cruise boats with 5-star restaurants, pools and plush rooms. These big boats zoom down the Nile, getting from Aswan to Luxor in as little as 3 nights. Onboard, their passengers watch the river go by as they sip their ice-cold lemonades from the deck, and the crew provide them with entertainment and activities throughout the cruise so as to keep them from getting restless.

We opted for the student budget option. Instead of 5-star restaurants, we got simple potato stews and fish cooked to perfection over a tiny gas burner. Instead of pools, we got the Nile itself, clear as glass stretching on for miles and miles, icy cool and inviting. And instead of plush rooms, we got one thin mattress to share between the four of us and thick, musty-smelling blankets to keep us warm. While we watched the big, boxy cruise ships lumber past, hurrying for who-knows-what-reason, we simply floated, carried by the current and the wind.

At first, I found myself squirming every so slightly at our slow pace. I am not used to being able to stare at the same patch of grass for very long whenever I am in a moving vehicle. But I realized that time and speed needn’t have any hold over me here. We had nowhere in particular we were going and no reason to get there in any sort of a hurry. Our Nubian captains certainly didn’t think so. Every few hours or so, they would tie our vessel to a rock and take off to visit some village or another under the pretext of picking up some supplies, leaving us to mind the boat and keep ourselves entertained. And it was thus that I found myself doing absolutely nothing. I drank a good deal of tea, read a book and a half and slept an average of 15 hours a day. I loosely kept track of time using the position of the sun in the sky, but it really didn’t matter much what hour it was, let alone what minute. I had no appointments to keep, no schedule to mind. After the sun set, we saw by the light of a huge full moon and a small candle until we decided it was time to sleep some more. I was aware of time passing but instead of trying to master it, I was simply floating along on it.

Sort of like the river, actually. The Westerners tried to harness the river and conquer it into submission in their big cruise boats, while it simply flowed beneath us, connected to us, but somehow very much apart from us. Likewise, in the West, we fight with time, we wrestle with it, squeeze it and try to box it into a force that can be used to suit our needs. But in Egypt and much of the rest of the world, it is seen as an entity that can be ridden, but not coerced. They are aware of time, just as we were aware of the river; aware that it flows, that it affects us. So they allow it to flow beneath them, but on-board their sailboat, they go about life as they please. They enjoy several cups of tea and many rounds of shisha. They talk and listen and enjoy each other. And yes, they work diligently as well.

Time just doesn’t have the same sort of hold over them that it does over us in the West. In an attempt to master time, I fear we have become its slaves. And when we whiz along against the current, watching life from inside a box, we miss out on the cranes looking for fish among the reeds, the boys splashing in their rowboats and the glorious feeling of taking a nap for no other reason than because you feel like it.

So I recommend doing nothing sometime if you dare. Defy your Western understanding of time just long enough to see if maybe our Egyptian friends might not be so crazy after all for daring to show up 30 minutes late to an appointment.

 

Bombs in Boston as seen from Egypt

Thanks to Twitter, I found out about the tragedy in Boston minutes after it happened. Headlines from all the major news agencies and live re-tweets from witnesses at the scene flashed across the screen. And then the responses began. Within minutes, streams of shocked, sympathetic and outraged tweets filled my feed. It is worth noting that, having only gotten into Twitter since coming to Egypt, more or less all the people I follow are Egyptian. Many of them are activists in the thick of the fight here in Cairo. For them, 200 injuries is a semi-weekly occurrence, and yet they were sympathizing with the people of a city thousands of miles away. It was touching to say the least.

These reactions did not stay on the social media though. Over the next few days, everyone, from the man who cooks my kofta (ground beef) sandwiches, to my coworkers, to women I didn’t know on the metro, had the same message for me: “I am so sorry that this happened. I don’t know what sort of person would do this.” Though I distantly knew people who were injured in the event, I had no real personal grief over it. And to be truthful, I think these Egyptians may have had more sympathy for my countrymen than I did. With the overwhelming barrage of problems facing the people of Egypt, it would be easy for their eyes to remains fixed on themselves. But they didn’t. Their concern and grief for Boston were genuine, despite the fact that they undergo attacks with far greater magnitude on a consistent basis.

Perhaps even more inspiring were the responses from the people of Syria, Afghanistan and Palestine. For days, the Middle East echoed with sadness and outrage over the deaths and injuries in Boston. And this was right. When needless violence results in death and pain, everyone should grieve. But where is the grief for the deaths that happen in this part of the world? Just this morning, I saw that the most recent estimates list 70,000 deaths in Syria. 70 thousand. Hundreds fall a day in Damascus– where are the cries for justice? Where are their messages of sympathy and grief? They don’t even make headlines anymore. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The media are of course, largely to blame for this. An issue is only covered for as long as it sells newspapers and every event has an expiration date in people’s attention spans. But we as individuals are not guiltless here. The information is out there and we should care enough to seek out. The bottom line is that we rarely have eyes to see beyond our own immediate problems, and we typically have to be connected to an issue in order to care about it. The people of this part of the world have proven to be an exception to this though. If anyone had an excuse to be absorbed in their own problems, it would be them. And we all have a thing or two to learn about compassion from their reactions.

 

 

 

When the fight becomes the cause

I think maybe I understand war a bit better now.

It starts out with one person throwing a rock or firing a teargas canister or shooting a bullet and the next thing you know, lines are drawn, battle stations are set up, and the adrenaline kicks in. And from then, it’s the adrenaline that decides peoples’ actions, more than anything. It becomes more about the fight than the cause people are fighting for.

At least that’s what it looked like to me when I found myself quite suddenly in the middle of a battle on the streets of Cairo Saturday.

I had been following a peaceful march from one neighborhood in Cairo to the high court building downtown, covering it for my newspaper. We arrived shortly after sunset and joined up with several other marches from around the city to form a group of over a thousand filling the streets surrounding the court. They were chanting for the resignation of all the major government officials, waving banners and beating drums, but by no means acting violently. I met up with my coworkers who had been covering the other marches and we headed to a nearby hotel to send in our pictures from the day. I thought my work was finished and ordered myself a Turkish coffee.

But no sooner had I taken my first sip than I heard four or five loud pops, followed by the sound of masses running. My three coworkers’ heads jerked up from their laptop screens.

“That’s the sound of teargas,” they said. It was a sound I would learn to recognize myself before the night was over.

We threw our computers and cameras back into our bags and ran out into the street. I could hardly believe my eyes (which had begun to sting just a bit). Three bonfires cast an eerie glow on the street that had been teaming with people just moments before. Scattered clusters of angry men gathered around the fires, yelling and occasionally throwing rocks at the building.

Teargas and smoke filled the air, stinging my eyes and burning my lungs. I tried to hold my breath while we bought medical masks (the sort dentists wear) for one Egyptian pound each from a nearby vendor. I quickly tied my scarf around my head in a Bedouin turban, covering my blond hair and shielding my face ever so slightly from the poisonous fumes,  and followed my coworkers toward the court (lest you begin to fret, they were all strong, gallant, street-smart men who took excellent care of me the whole time).

I stood there, taking it all in, when suddenly, several loud shots emanated from the upper floors of the building. They’re firing at us! Everyone scattered and I retreated further down the street toward a parked ambulance, my hands over my head. Adrenaline surged through my veins. This is absolutely crazy. All around me, people were running, scrambling, like ants from an anthill. They hardly looked like the same people who had marched in a slow, organized procession earlier that afternoon, chanting in unison for their joint cause. Perhaps they weren’t the same people.

We followed the crowds of protestors as they regrouped down the street, but before the mass could grow too big, another canister of teargas landed just in front of us and the scrambling began again. I breathed in quite a bit of the stuff and began to choke and cough. It left a sharp taste of pepper on my tongue and a fire in my lungs. We sought refuge in a nearby field hospital where they doused my face with some combination of vinegar and water, bringing instant relief to my stinging eyes. Wounded and unconscious people were brought in and laid on the ground. Minutes later, when we had wandered back out into the street a ways, we saw two streams of teargas land right where we had been.  They fired teargas into the field hospital. It was so wrong. All of it.

We took up position on a road around the corner from two armored police vehicles. I watched from a distance as a crowd of about 30 or so protestors banded together and charged down the road toward the police, yelling and beating their drums. What could they possibly hope to accomplish? All they had were rocks and sticks; the police had birdshot, teargas and armored vehicles. What is their purpose now?  Sure enough, no sooner had they rounded the corner, than the police fired a few rounds of birdshot at them and they were sent running back down the street.

The scene in which I now found myself began to feel like a game of “Capture the Flag” or Paintball. I watched again as the group reconvened, yelled and rushed back down toward the police. It reminded me of the times at summer camp when my team would decide our best strategy for “Capture the Flag” was to form a big group, gather our courage and run across the dividing line into enemy territory all at once, only to be swarmed by the other team immediately after crossing the line, scatter, and scurry back into safety.

It’s not typically a very effective strategy, I wanted to tell them. But then again, one only needs a strategy if one has a goal—and I certainly couldn’t see any sort of goal behind they protestors’ actions. Or the police’s for that matter. The cause that had brought the protestors here originally seemed to be all but forgotten amid the mayhem, and the police were certainly not fulfilling their purpose of defending the people and keeping the peace. No, I saw no purpose to either side; I saw no cause. I saw only a fight.

And in the moment, with the teargas choking my lungs, drums beating the smoke-filled air, and streams of people running around me, I felt it: the rush of excitement mixed with anger and fear, the energy of the crowd pressing around me, our feet hitting the pavement in unison, the surge of rebellion against a clear enemy who wanted my harm. It was enough to make me nearly forget why I was there: to be a journalist. I just wanted to run, to see the chaos, to beat the teargas.  And as I watched the pandemonium around me, I could see how the same spirit filled the wild-eyed men setting fire to the streets.

It was the rush that drove their actions more than anything I think; not a love for Egypt or a desire for democracy. It was the thrill of the fight, the tantalizing feeling of hatred and spite.  And it began to make sense to me why violence persists past the point of absurdity, why riots will last for days on end here and wars have lasted for years on end not far from here.

Somewhere, in the second it takes to pull a trigger, peoples’ focus can shift from the cause they are fighting for to the fight itself. And when that happens, everyone loses.

P. S. Check out the story we ended up writing about all of this: http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2013/04/06/clashes-mar-6-april-anniversary/

How I went sight-seeing and ended up in the ER

Sunday, March 25–

I leaned forward out of the saddle, gripping the horse’s flanks with my calves, his powerful legs thundering beneath me. His hooves danced over the surface of the sand as we flew in the shadow of the Great Pyramid.

An equestrian since the age of 10, there are few places in the world where I am happier than on the back of a galloping horse. A grin stretched across my face as my hair blew in the wind. Cliché, I know, but if any of you have tried it, you’ll know it was every bit as romantic as it sounds.

I urged the horse on with my legs as we raced up the dune. Ahead, I could see a paved, asphalt road cutting through the sand. Maybe I should slow down, I thought. I knew the pavement could be slippery under the horse’s shoes. But I was flying and I didn’t want to stop just to cross 15 feet of asphalt. We could cut across that in one stride, my horse and I. Free, free, I’m flying free.

Then, slam. Blackness.

The world around me went quiet and my eyes opened slowly. I felt disoriented. What happened?  My horse was getting up and I was on the ground. I tried to raise myself to my knees but as I did so, I looked down to the pavement to see big drops of blood, my blood, falling like rain. I fought panic and pivoted myself to look for my friend, Raustin who had been riding beside me.

“I’m bleeding!” I called to him, thinking of nothing else to say.

I’m bleeding. A lot. I didn’t know what to do. My mind went numb, so I laid back slowly on the pavement, trying to remember to breathe. (I think looking back on it that I went into a mild state of shock at this point that lasted the rest of the ordeal). Raustin (who is trained wilderness guide) appeared above me and took charge of the situation, asking me questions, wrapping my head in my brand new scarf, calling for water. I laid there, hearing myself answer his questions, swallowing water as he commanded, aware of sharp pain all over my body, and yet, removed from the situation somehow, as though I were only half-present.

My friend Charlotte and our guide Said also appeared over me. I heard a car approach. They helped me to my feet and my vision blurred.

“I think I’m going to pass out,” I heard myself say.

“Don’t,” Raustin said. “You can’t pass out.”

He helped me into the car, and I leaned on his shoulder, wanting very much to just lose consciousness as he applied pressure to my wound. Charlotte (who is a trained lifeguard) began to talk about stabilizing my neck and put me in something resembling a full nelson (a wrestling move my dad taught me), wrapping her arms around my neck and shoulders. We drove down to the exit of the pyramids where I was transferred to a horse carriage that took off at a brisk trot down the street. A few minutes later, I was transferred to a taxi (yes, this is mode of emergency transportation number three) that drove me the rest of the way down the road to a tiny, hole in the wall clinic.

The nurse didn’t seem too phased by the gaping hole in my head, so I guess this must be a fairly regular occurrence in these parts. Without a word, she laid me down on a medical bed and poured some iodine on my wound. Then, the doctor came along and, also without a word, jabbed me a few times with some local anesthetic. I continued to sit there in a daze as Charlotte and Raustin engaged me in conversation and the doctor pulled stitch after stitch through the gash—somewhere around 15 in all.

No more than 20 minutes later, I was all stitched up, my various scrapes had been properly doused in iodine, and I was ushered to the reception where I was asked to pay 350 Egyptian Pounds (around 50 dollars or so). At this point, Said, who had been quietly overseeing this whole process, stepped in to object.

“I’ve brought people in here before and they never pay more than 150!” he said in my defense.

I chuckled to myself. Out of context, it would have sounded like he was a tour guide bargaining for rug for me in the souk. Lesson learned: there is nothing you can’t bargain for in Egypt—not even emergency health care. Dear Said managed to bring the final price down to 250, which was still, I’m told, a rip-off, but I wasn’t too concerned at the time.

He then brought us all back to the room where he lives at the stables, cleared off a spot for me on his bed and brought us a feast of chicken and tea—an incredible act of generosity for someone of whose livelihood has been all but eradicated with the terrible drop in tourism lately.

Incredible generosity: that is what I experienced in Egypt on Sunday. Incredible generosity, tender compassion and unbelievable grace… Friends and strangers alike stood by me and cared for me with pretty unconditional love.

And I cannot overlook the grace of my God who protected me and cared for me pretty supernaturally. A large horse fell on my leg which could have broken it, but it’s only just a bit bruised. My head bounced off the asphalt, but I have no brain damage, or even a concussion. My neck and back and undamaged. My stitches are healing nicely and I am completely without pain in my head, though I haven’t taken a single pain-killer. I have to give Him glory for taking such good care of me

So there you have it. My first injury and my first trip to the ER: a gallop through the pyramids, an emergency carriage ride through Giza, a few stitches, some pretty heroic friends and a very gracious God.

Post script: Right around this very same time, back in Chicago, a very dear friend of our family who is about my age was also hospitalized for some sort of heart failure. He, like me, was in full health, in the midst of exciting growth with great adventures ahead. However, unlike me, for reasons I don’t quite grasp, he was not given the grace I was given. My heart breaks for his family. May you rest in peace, Graham Stevens.

A few lessons I learned while my taxi was stuck in the desert

Last weekend, three of my friends and I decided to make our way out to Wadi El Rayan, a beautiful nature preserve in the middle of the desert, about two hours from Cairo. This preserve is home to a gorgeous oasis, complete with waterfalls, and I was excited to spend some much-needed time away from the cramped streets of Cairo. We took a microbus from Cairo to the city of Fayoum where we picked up a feast of food and then hired a taxi to take us out to the preserve and spend the day with us.

We got to the preserve—an endless expanse of sand with a stunning lake in its center—and began making our way toward the waterfalls on a nicely paved road. Then quite suddenly, for reasons I still don’t understand, our dear taxi driver Mohammed slammed on his breaks, backed the taxi up about 10 yards or so, and took a sharp right—into the dunes.

We were all fairly surprised by this decision; I had certainly never thought of taxis as off-road vehicles. But if there is one thing I’ve learned in my time in Egypt so far it is to never underestimate what public transportation vehicles are capable of. So I laughed and cheered him on as we slid and fishtailed through the ochre colored sand. But about 100 meters off the road, the inevitable happened.

We got stuck.

After a few minutes of revving the engine, it became clear that no forward motion would be happening anytime soon, so we piled out of the vehicle to find our front tires half-buried in the sand. We then spent the next half hour digging, pushing, pulling, propping, revving, and spinning our way deeper and deeper into the sand until it was clear that we would not be able to get out of this on our own.

We were now very stuck.

And I felt positively giddy about it. I looked around at all the space around me, mounds of fine, soft, Sahara sand in all directions, birds flying overhead, the crystal blue lake on the horizon. Aside from my three friends and our very frazzled taxi driver, there wasn’t another person in sight, and aside from our sad, stuck little taxi, there wasn’t a car to be seen. No high-rises stood between me and the beautiful sun, no smog and exhaust choked my lungs, there were no offensive horns to pierce the silence. And there was no car that could take me away from here for the forseeable future. I was jubilant

I took off my shoes and proposed that we leave the car for now and go down to the lake to enjoy our lunch. My friends, who thankfully seemed to share my glee with our current state of affairs, readily agreed with this plan. Dear Mohammed, who was not nearly as amused with our situation (perhaps because his livelihood was currently half-buried in a sand dune), declined and headed off toward the road to seek help.

And just like that, we were completely alone in the vast expanse of desert. I wasn’t sure how long we would be stuck. All I had with me was a little bit of water, some food and my camera. My plans for the day had definitely been derailed. And yet, I was utterly joyful. Instead of fretting about the uncertainty of the situation, I was just reveling in the beauty of my surroundings and the companionship of my friends. And though I had no idea how we would be rescued, I had complete faith that Mohammed would sort something out eventually so I was completely at peace.

 Lesson learned: Occasionally in life, we find ourselves unexpectedly stuck in a desert with no clear path out. We can either choose to fretfully try to dig ourselves out, which will usually only leave us dusty, frazzled and more stuck. Or we can choose to have a picnic and seek out what beauty there is to be found in our surroundings, resting in full confidence that there is One who is sorting out the situation.

Sure enough, Mohammed pulled through. Just as we were finishing up our lunch, an enormous army truck came lumbering over the dunes and out jumped five soldiers in camouflage pants who got straight to work digging the car out with their shovels and hooking it up to the truck with a large chain. Within a half hour, our car was out—and within 2 minutes after that, as Mohammed attempted to drive back toward the road, the car was stuck again. This time, the truck couldn’t reach it to pull it out and it would come down to pure man power that even all the army men couldn’t provide.

Luckily for us, at just that time, a band of Bedouins came flying across the dunes in a pickup truck. The soldiers began waving their arms and shouting for them to come over, which they did. The scene in which I now found myself was so odd that I had to laugh out loud: five Egyptian soldiers (two of whom had now removed their boots), four Bedouins in traditional galabiyas and turbans and one mournful-looking taxi driver all pushing and pulling at a white taxi buried in the sand as four Americans watch on.

And as I watched, it dawned on me that out of the group of 10 men hard at work on our rescue, nine have typically be labeled as “bad guys.” Five were members of the Egyptian army, an institution accused of oppressing the Egyptian people and committing a number of different human rights violations, and four were Bedouins, a people known for kidnapping foreign tourists such as myself in Sinai. And yet, here they were, hard at work in the sun and the dust to help us for no benefit to themselves.

And so, even though the horror stories about the Egyptian army and the Bedouins are many, I have the privilege of telling a different story. A story about how 10 kind-hearted Egyptian men took over an hour out of their day to help a group of tourists stranded in the desert to dig their car out of the sand. The stories of injustice and violence must be told. But the stories of cars pulled out of the sand must be told too. And as a journalist, I want to do a better job of seeking out both.

Lesson learned: We should be wary anytime we are only being told a single story. While all the stories of ruthless Somali pirates, Muslim Brotherhood radicals and Wall Street moguls are undoubtedly true, I’m willing to bet there are other stories to be told. So we should seek them out.

Let there be light

If you drive out past Helwan on the outskirts of Cairo, take a left at the large mound of trash and drive for about 15 minutes on an unpaved trail through piles of refuse, you will reach the “15^th of May” settlement. With a church, a mosque and a restaurant, it is every bit its own village, with a population of perhaps a few hundred or so. A good distance from the noise and bustle of the city, the “15^th of May” might make a charming place to live were it not for the unsavory surrounding landscape. So why the odd choice in locale, you might ask? Why would anyone choose to live in a garbage dump?

The answer is startlingly simple: because the dump is both their home and their livelihood.

Cairo is lacking in many things but garbage is not one of them, and there is a whole social class that makes a living off it.  The saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” could not be more true for anyone in the world than it is for the zabbaleen. By night, they collect the trash from around the city and by day, they sort it: whatever food can be found is given to their livestock and the rest is sold to recyclers.

 It is a well-established enterprise that has been given a clearly marked position in Egyptian class society. Often, the lines between the lower, upper and middle class can be hard for me to see in Cairo: all live in dust-colored high-rises on crowded, noisy streets. But unlike humble kiosk-owners or maids who live in poverty but rub shoulders with the rest of society, the zabbaleen live apart. They are outcast to a handful of settlements on the outskirts of the city and only come into the city to rid it of its waste by cover of night. They are not seen, heard from or spoken of.

So driving into the “15^th of May” to me was like discovering a secret treasure trove. Hidden away where few others had ventured were some of the most beautiful, friendly people I have met yet in Egypt. Barefoot little girls with bright eyes and toothless smiles peppered me with questions about my family and giggled at my frequent Arabic mistakes. A group of young boys invited me to join their game of marbles and patiently taught me how to play. I talked with three teenage girls about school and their dreams of the future, and one told me with excitement about her recent engagement. I snuck into the back of a Sunday school class (it was called this even though it was held on a Friday hehe) and listened in on part of the creation story.

And I loved every minute I was there.

To be honest, I was so enthralled by the hugs and smiles that I almost forgot I was in a garbage dump until, at the end of Sunday school, the children were given twinkies and juice boxes and they began to discard the wrappers on the ground. Instinctually, I wanted to pick them up and find a bin where they could throw their trash instead of littering. It took me a moment to realize somberly that this place was the bin.

I was in a trash dump. And it would have been a horribly dark place, were it not for all the little lights.

Quite poetically, my friend Amir was hard at work on the church roof to bring some light there—in the literal sense. He and his friends have discovered a way to make a lightbulb out of a plastic bottle, bleach and distilled water. You just fasten the water bottle so that the bottom half is inside the house and the top half is sticking up on the roof and then the water and bleach refract whatever light there is outside to light up the room as much as a 60 watt bulb. Because it depends on sunlight, it doesn’t work at night time, but it does provide ramshackle, windowless homes with much-need illumination during the day. So this incredible group of college students has taken on the project of installing these bottles bit by bit in the homes of this forgotten community– and I got to be there to see it start.

The jubilation on Amir’s face when he saw that his experiment worked lit up the room as much as the “water-bulb” itself. It was one of the highlights of my time here so far actually, and a good reminder: light can come in the darkest places in the strangest of forms.

 

Egypt’s New Revolution: the Fight against Sexual Harassment

Yep, I’m going to write about this.

It’s been ruminating in my head now for a while as a topic I should probably cover in this blog because it has certainly become a topic of conversation here in Egypt in recent weeks. Before I begin though, I want to make it really clear that this is by no means a critique of the male species as much as it is a description and commentary on the anti-sexual harassment movements that have been started in Egypt. I have been blessed with fantastic men in my life, men who deserve all of my respect and honor.  So it is my hope that you will not mistake my contempt of sexual harassment with a contempt of men in general.

That being said, the topic of sexual harassment is one that unfortunately, I am quite familiar with. I can remember vividly the first time a man backed me into a corner and asked me for a kiss. I was six years old. I remember the smell of alcohol on his breath as he bent down and reached his arm around me, and I compliantly planted a kiss on his scruffy cheek. Kisses were something a child is expected to give liberally in Morocco so I honestly didn’t think too much of it at the time. But at just that moment, our neighbor and dear friend, Mrs. Reid, came walking past, and became very angry by what she saw. She forcefully told the man to go away and told me that if that man ever came near me again, I was to run away. This made no sense to me at the time—in my childish innocence, I did not see anyone as a threat, not even this scruffy, drunkard—but  I now look back on that moment as my first exposure to sexual harassment.

And sadly, it was far from the last. While all women in Morocco are subjected to verbal and physical harassment, my blond hair, fair skin and blue eyes made me even more of a target. It was impossible for me to fly under the radar, and the rampant promiscuity of American women as portrayed in the media did not help my case. I soon found that it didn’t matter how conservatively I dressed or how I carried myself; my blond hair alone sent the message that I was game for a good time and looking to be pursued. It was largely outside of my control. I could, and did, choose to make wise decisions about where I traveled and how I got around, but in the end, I couldn’t avoid the whistles, cat-calls, followers and occasional grabs that came with being a young foreign women in an Arab country.

So I accepted it.

Whenever I passed a man on the street, I put my head down, quickened my pace and did my best to ignore whatever happened next. I rarely responded or stood up for myself, even though I was plenty capable of doing so in Arabic. I figured putting up any sort of fight was likely to just aggravate the situation and the best thing for me to do was to just put up with it. For as long as I can remember really, harassment has been the norm. I didn’t enjoy it, but I just accepted as a fact of life that I would always be harassed by men and nothing could be done about it.

But my Egyptian sisters haven’t.

From what I am told, the sexual harassment in Egypt has grown progressively worse over the last few decades. One common line of reasoning behind this phenomenon is tied to the economic situation of all things: as the economy has declined, Egyptian men have struggled to save enough money to be able to get married, leading to a great deal of pent up sexual frustration which comes out in the form of harassment. Along with this, harassment has come to be seen as a validation of one’s masculinity and young men are often encouraged by older men to harass women as a part of achieving their manhood.  Rising unemployment not only makes it difficult for men to marry, it challenges their masculinity, making it all the more necessary for them to harass women. And on and on the cycle goes. From my analysis, sexual harassment is just as much a symptom of an attack on masculinity as an attack on femininity. In recent months, there have been conspiracy theories circling that the atrocious acts committed towards women in the revolution have been attempts by the government to keep them from participating (thereby dealing with 50% of the threat). And for many women, this has worked. I know the things I’ve heard have certainly been enough to keep any of my desires to go to protests at bay!

But an increasing number of Egyptian women have had enough. They are done complying, done putting their heads down and dealing with it. They are taking a stand and demanding to be treated with honor and respect. And they are calling their brothers to join with them in this fight. Anti-sexual harassment movements have begun springing up all across Egypt. Tahrir Bodyguard is a movement of men who have pledged to watch out for women at protests. Harassmap is a website that charts instances of reported harassment and offers help to women being harassed via a hotline. The Street is Ours is a movement of women who have pledged to hold men accountable for their actions by taking physical action against them: spray-painting the hair of harassers, threatening them with knives if need be… And these movements have gathered support not only in Egypt but around the world as well. Last week, 34 countries organized marches in solidarity for the women of Egypt.

There is beginning to be a shift in the way sexual harassment is seen in Egypt, both at the legislative and political level, and at the societal level. There is now a process by which a woman can press charges for sexual harassment in court (though it is nearly impossible to provide enough evidence to convict someone, and the sentence is fairly mild). But the true victories, the really exciting stuff is happening on the societal level. Both women and men are beginning to change the way that women are seen and treated. But it has begun with Egyptian women deciding on their worth and demanding to be treated commensurately. Such action is bold—much bolder than anything I would have dared to do. They are challenging a deeply-embedded social structure.

I am here to witness the very beginnings of social change; the sort of thing that thrills me as an Anthropologist, fills me with pride and admiration as a woman, and inspires me as a human. 

A snapshot of my life in Cairo

I write this on a bus beginning the long trek back into Zamalek from AUC’s campus out in the desert. The drive typically takes about 45 minutes, but in the evening on a Thursday (the equivalent of Friday in the US), it can take up to two hours. I’m sincerely hoping that isn’t the case tonight.

I have now reached the end of my second full week of classes and work, and the cloud of dust from my initial arrival in Egypt is beginning to settle. I have hung up all my pictures on the walls of my dorm room—which by the way, is massive in size compared to the broom closets we’re given in the US. Dorm life here has a few notable differences. For one thing, there is a free housekeeping service that will come and tidy your room for you anytime you call them. I also just discovered that if you put your dirty dishes outside your door, they magically return to you clean. I’m being quite spoiled to say the least! Another major difference I’ve had to adjust to here is the strict segregation of guys and girls. There are guards posted outside the entrances of each dorm to ensure that no intermingling occurs! And if a man has to come up to a girl’s floor for maintenance or something, he is accompanied by a woman yelling “man on the floor!” at all hours of the night and day. I realize the main impetus behind this is that the majority of the girls I live with wear the veil in public—it’s only fair then that their living quarters be free of all males so they can remove it. 

I have been surprised by how much more noticeably conservative Egypt is compared to Morocco. Because Cairo is such a bustling city, I assumed it would be fairly similar to Casablanca where I was raised. But I realize now just how much European influence there has been on Morocco and Moroccan culture, particularly in the urban, coastal areas. Egypt, on the other hand, is not only geographically distant from Europe– the presence of the Al-Azhar religious complex in Cairo makes it the heart of the Islamic civilization. It makes good sense then that its people would be, on the whole, more conservative in their dress and perspectives. Alas, no shorts for me come summer time!

The differences between Morocco and Egypt are indeed many. For one thing, though the language spoken in both countries is called Arabic, the two tongues have very little in common! I’ve had to start practically from scratch, but with the help of my fantastic roommate and floor mates, I’d say I’m making promising progress. Egyptian food is also very different from Moroccan food. While the staple in Morocco was khobz, a round, yeast-dough bread, Egyptians tend to eat more rice and pasta. Their signature dish is called koshary, a blend of pasta, rice, chickpeas, lentils, tomato sauce and onions, topped with garlic sauce. Much to my delight, there is a lovely place right by my dorm that sells a big bucket of the stuff for 3 pounds—less than 50 US cents J Another common snack is fuul, a concoction of mashed fiva beans stuffed in a pita, and taamaya, commonly known in the US as falafel. One of my favorite sweets is fateer, a flakey, pie-like, delicacy that can be served with honey, powdered sugar, or Nutella. Vegetables are a little more difficult to come by in Egyptian cuisine… to get my daily dose, I typically go down to the vegetable stand, get a handful of peppers or carrots and eat them raw—without a knife since I don’t have one.

It’s been nice to develop friendships with the various shop owners around here: I’ve got my vegetable guy, my fuul and taamaya guy, my phone card guy, my baker… all have become part of my day to day life in Egypt. My weekly routine has become more or less solidified as well: class on Mondays and Thursdays, work on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and a three day weekend to look forward to at the end. With my free time, I usually explore the city; I am not likely to run out of things to see anytime soon! In the evenings, I enjoy going out to one of the million little cafes around here, getting some tea or coffee and just sitting with friends. That’s one thing I love about Egypt– there is somehow always plenty of time for a nice long sit at a cafe.

Hopefully, this blog post has given you all a little peek at daily life in Cairo as I’ve been experiencing it. (Note the absence of tear gas, rioting and molatov cocktails). The bus is inching its way onto a bridge to cross the Nile—meaning I should be out of this prison within the next 20 minutes or so.

*sigh* Traffic: now there’s a word to sum up the Cairo experience. 

My First Day at the Daily News Egypt: Or How I was Thrown Into a Whirlpool and Ungracefully Doggy Paddled My Out… For Now

I walked off the rickety elevator and into the office of the Daily News Egypt. 

So, this is what a newsroom looks like, I thought. Rows of cubicles with computers, a small TV mounted on the wall at the rear of the room, a whiteboard at the front. Around the room, journalists were firing up their computers and popping on their headphones– real journalists doing what real journalists do. I was giddy and trying really hard not to show it. I introduced myself to Sarah, the editor of Politics– my new boss. I could tell from the first she was a no-nonsense sort of lady: friendly, but all business. She reminded me in every way of newsroom editors from the movies: brisk, authoritative, matter-of-fact, energetic… 

“Do you speak Arabic?” she asked.

“Well, yeah. Sort of,” I said. “I speak Moroccan Arabic fluently, Fousha decently and I’m learning Egyptian Arabic.”

“We don’t hire anyone who doesn’t speak Arabic,” she said. 

“Well then, I definitely speak Arabic,” I replied, swallowing hard. 

“Good. Then you can start today,” she turned to the rest of the room. “Time for pitches, everyone!”

Everyone gathered in a circle in front of the whiteboard and Sarah took her place at the front, wielding a dry-erase marker. It only took a few minutes for the whiteboard to fill with story ideas. I sat in dumbfounded silence, realizing I had no idea what any of these story pitches were about. I quickly realized just how big the gap is between being an avid consumer of news and a producer of it. The only “news” I could think of to contribute was what I’d read in yesterday’s paper… and the people around me wrote yesterday’s paper. And now, they were all on their smartphones, reading off intriguing tweets, sharing things they’d heard from friends– filling the whiteboard with news that wasn’t news yet. 

     -Lesson Number One: If you want to work for a newspaper, you can’t get your news from a newspaper. Where do you get it from, then? Twitter, apparently. 

Once the stories for the day had been decided, people began picking the ones they’d like to cover. I once again sat in terrified silence as all of these looked infinitely bigger than anything I’d tackled before. My vast journalistic experience consisted of writing stories about construction and service dogs in training for my school newspaper. The stories on the board included: the death of an activist who had been jailed and tortured, Ahmadinejad’s visit to Cairo, a protest near Tahrir square… I was in so far over my head. I almost ran right then. 

I was given last pickings: coverage of a press conference about some detainees in Alexandria. I wouldn’t actually be attending the conference, but I was to write a story about it: who would be there, what it would be about, etc. Then, I was given a cubicle and told to go for it. Right, I thought. It’s the same idea as writing about Fair Trade items in the dining halls.Except the editors at my student newspaper always gave me a list of contacts and ideas for questions to ask them. All I had in front of me was my laptop.

  -Lesson number two: Real journalists don’t get an email with an outline of how to write their story and a nice list of all the people they should contact.

I began frantically googling to try and learn whatever I could about these detainees, which wasn’t much. Before long, I had exhausted the information on the internet and was beginning to despair when some of my wonderful colleagues sent me the shared list of contacts and highlighted a few that would be useful. I was saved!

Until I dialed one of the numbers and the man on the other end answered in Arabic. Gulp. My Egyptian Arabic is iffy at best, and my Moroccan Arabic is useless here. I managed to stutter out my question and tried to simultaneously decipher his response and take notes on it. I was fairly certain he’d said that many of the detainees would be present at the press conference– but I wanted to be sure on that point. Accuracy is key– one thing I remembered from Journalism 101. So I passed the phone off to one of my colleagues, asking her to confirm that I’d understood him correctly. Turns out, I did– but Sarah was not pleased. 

“Hend has her own pile of stories she’s working on,” she said. “If you can’t understand the people you’re talking to, you won’t be able to do this.” 

I nodded and assured her I’d be fine, but I returned to my desk deflated. Maybe I’m not able to do this, I thought. Learning to do real journalism would be enough of a challenge without throwing in a complex language to boot. I could quit; the thought seemed very reasonable. I could tell Sarah I couldn’t do it, walk out and do a normal internship later, making coffee and writing obituaries at some nice newspaper in the Midwest. *sigh*

Or I could write stories about human rights violations against detainees in EGYPT. Yes. That is what I would do, or I would go down trying! I would make do with the Arabic I had, and what I didn’t know, I would learn. 

    -Lesson number three: Google Translate is God’s gift to those who have to do a phone interview in a language they don’t quite speak. 

I whipped out Google Translate and began making a long list of words and phrases I needed to know. Then I started calling people: spokesmen for political parties and activist groups, the lawyer of two of the detainees (who are both 14 by the way… and one has cancer and hasn’t been receiving treatment since being arrested)… And slowly,sentence by shaky sentence, my story came together. It wasn’t the best piece of journalism you’ll ever read but I did it. 

And this morning, I opened to the third page of the Daily News Egypt to see the headline “Alex Detainees to Testify on Human Rights Violations.”

And beneath it, those sweet, beautiful words: By Emily Crane. 

 

Switching the channel

I stared at the TV in horror. The word “Live” in Arabic flashed in the top right corner of the screen; it was around 9:30 PM on Friday, the worst day of violence yet in Cairo. 

The camera showed a dimly lit street, empty aside from a crowd of around 6 policemen or so, dressed in riot-gear, standing in a circle around something on the ground– no, someone. A man, stripped of his shirt, crawling on his hands and knees. He seemed dazed and disoriented as he tried to break out of the circle of policemen who took turns whacking him or jabbing at him with their batons. At one point, he had nearly gotten away when one of them dragged him by his wrists back toward an armored police car. His pants came off on the process. He was now completely naked as he helplessly continued to try  to crawl away, only to be met with more blows.

“Live.” The word continued to flash at the top of the screen. This was happening right now. In the same city as me, not far from where I go to school everyday. I couldn’t look away; I kept hoping someone would come along and stop this madness, stop the raining blows on this man’s naked body, stop the–

The screen went black for a moment, then a band of skeletons crawled across the screen toward a frightened Brendan Fraser wielding a torch. It took me a moment, but I soon recognized it as a scene from “The Mummy.” I turned to see one of the Egyptian students wielding the remote and shaking her head.

“Khalas,” she said. Enough. 

Enough of watching her countryman suffer from behind an impenetrable glass wall; better not to watch at all.

———————————————

Earlier that afternoon, I had been chatting with Selma who had only just emerged from her room.

“I’ve been hiding all day,” she told me. “I tried to sleep for as long as I could so that I didn’t have to know about what was going on. And when I woke up, I just watched season 2 of Grey’s Anatomy. I’m tired of all this shit.” 

This from Selma, queen of the Twittersphere, always in the know, scoffing at tear gas and fighting fearlessly for freedom. I could hardly believe this was the same girl who one week ago, had been decked out in the colors of the Egyptian flag, eager to march to Tahrir to remind them that “the revolution is not over.” The girl before me now was weary, deflated. Worn from week of protesting that had yielded nothing but a growing death toll. And no response from the president. 

“I don’t know what to do,” has been the refrain these last few days among my Egyptian peers.

And so they switch the channel.