Living in Egypt

A Brotherhood Among Dogs

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Wed, 19 May 2021 10:05:00 +0000

Our pack of thirteen dogs has its rules. Some of the rules they get from me, like "no growling in the house" but some of them come from the boss dogs. JC brought his girlfriend Marte from a dirt road next to us to the farm last summer. She came in all confidence and sureness, thinking that she was going to take over control with JC, but Calypso, who rules the house, was having none of it. There weren't any serious fights but there was a lot of posturing and I scolded Marte for not paying attention to the pack structure. Gradually, she settled down and came to an agreement with Calypso that Marte will be a boss outside the house at night, while Calypso is sleeping on my bed ensuring that I can't sneak out. It all gets a bit Byzantine. About the time that Marte was adjusting to pack life, a new dog showed up. Peter Pan (just Peter for short, or F***ing Peter when I find him alseep on my dining room table) is young enough to be Marte's son, but we have no real idea. We managed to give him a rabies shot while he was being petted by Mariam, but he won't stick around during the day... at least not until recently. He is friendly but shy and sometimes can be petted but he's not keen on bathing as we found out the other day.

Our first clue that all was not well with Peter came when I found him asleep in a dark corner in my bathroom at about 9 am. I went to pet him, which normally is an indication in the morning that he should get a move on, but he just rested there. He'd lost weight, had no interest in food or water and simply wanted to sleep. Our vet and I conferred, and since he is wild, getting him a blood test or something was not going to be manageable, so we opted for giving him a wormer and a shower with shampoo containing sheep dip to get rid of fleas and ticks. He did not like the shower. As soon as he had finished soaking absolutely everything in the bathroom, he was gone. But he was cleaner and had been wormed.

Peter didn't come to my house that night. Instead he went to Beit Renenet where a family are renting the ground floor to do some civilised camping with their six kids while they consider the possibility of moving into our neighbourhood. JC, as he is a bit starved for the company of children with visits to the farm being still very slow between Covid, heat, and other obligations, has adopted the children and is generally over there supervising them, coming to the house for cuddle breaks and something to eat. The family told me that he, Marte and Peter were spending the night in the garden, playing with children before they go to bed and sleeping on the grass. They had also noticed that Peter had lost weight, so we asked them to try to give him a Vibramycin tablet in a piece of meat or cheese every 8 hours, as the best bet on what is wrong with Peter is that he's contracted one of the tick-borne diseases, virtually all of which respond to that medication. They told me how they had decided to give some food to Peter the night before and that JC's behaviour was really remarkable. They sent me photos that they had taken.

In the first photo at the beginning of the post, they had put a plate on the ground in front of Peter, and JC came over to check it out. Marte and BenBen were also there and wanted to have some. But JC began growling at them to keep their distance. Peter approached the dish in an extremely submissive stance and JC allowed him access.

While JC watched over him, Peter cleaned up the dish of food. The other dogs just lay on the grass watching them. Our neighbours were fascinated. They had expected to see a fight break out over the food but no one challenged JC at all. JC also didn't attempt to eat from Peter's plate. One would imagine that he realised that Peter really needed the food. All of our dogs, Peter as well when he comes to the house, have access to food 24/7 because we have a dog door and leave trays of kibble near the water cooler where they can eat whenever they are hungry. Lately one of the farm rats has discovered that he/she is heavy enough to push through the flap of the dog door and I suspect is coming in to snack, so I believe that I will take up the trays just before I go to bed and close the buffet. Most of the dogs don't eat at night anyway, and if Peter is going to come over, he comes earlier.

Once Peter had finished his food, the dogs all relaxed on the lawn in the coolness of the night. Our daytime temperatures are about 35 C on good days and You-Don't-Want-To-Know C on the bad ones, but because we are close to the desert and not surrounded by asphalt and concrete, the nights are generally comfortable.

The next morning Peter was still there sleeping in a semi-enclosed area next to our oven, and the family began giving him his medication in a piece of bread and cheese. He stayed in their garden all day yesterday and was clearly feeling better.

We also had a traveler join us on her way hopefully to South Africa yesterday. She's a Dutch woman traveling in her car with her German Shepherd companion and she'd contacted me to see if she could camp here. Her dog is a spayed female, so I thought that the odds would be good that the dogs of the Renenet garden would accept her. JC, naturally, had to inspect her first, after which Marte, BenBen, and Ursula came over. Kaira, our Dutch dog guest, is fluent in dog and has a lot of experience in meeting strangers, so she handled things very well. I stayed around talking to Saskia while they all got acquainted. Interestingly, it was Peter who was most interested in playing with the new girl. JC is fine with the visitors, but won't let either Saskia or Kaira come anywhere near the children. He is fiercely protective of children without regard to whether we have requested it or not. Probably things will be even calmer today.

The longer I live with my dogs the more appreciation for the complexity of their social lives grows.

Living in a Dog Pack in Egypt ... Transitions to Now

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 15:20:00 +0000

I started writing Living in Egypt in 2003 when I was still living in our family home in Maadi, a nice suburb of Cairo. I had a pack of dogs at the time but I don't know how organised they were. Since about 1998, I haven't really had less than almost a dozen dogs at a time, but a dog pack is very different from a bunch of dogs. A dog pack is a social organisation run by dogs for the welfare and benefit of the dogs, and it may or may not be associated with humans. There are probably more dog packs on farms or homes that can tolerate a lot of dogs than we are aware of, just as it wasn't until about 2006 or 2007 that I became aware of the fact that I lived with a dog pack.

My education about dog packs began with the sandy beige fellow sleeping on the dog bed at the left above. His name was Finn and he was about 3 or so in the photo. I don't know where he came from but he appeared in the food tray, eating kibble as fast as he could while all the other dogs looked on approvingly. When he first came, we had Morgana, a female Great Dane, Koheila, a Dalmation, and Terra, my oldest American Rat Terrier, who were mainly in charge of the dogs. Koheila and Terra were both exceptionally intelligent dogs, especially Koheila. She was partially crippled but very vocal and would bark orders to the other dogs and would often come into the house if I was inside to announce visitors. Gradually, as Finn matured and the old ones died, he took over the pack with astonishing organisation.

Not long after JC joined us, a gardener who was also working as a night watchman in the villa next door let his children adopt a puppy from the street. This was Rocky (above). This was before we had built a wall between our land and the garden next door and the children used to tie Rocky to a small tree near the fence between us with a string that was so tight that it gave him scars which he carries today. My staff would put their hands through the fence to untie Rocky, hoping secretly that he would take revenge on the children who left Rocky covered in scars and with a short tail that had been amputated with a mattock. No amount of talking to the gardener and his family could help Rocky, but after a while the house was sold and the gardener's family left, abandoning Rocky, who promptly came to our gate where he waited patiently for me to let him come in. Finn was still young and not so pleased with the idea of another male dog his age, so when we did let Rocky in, Rocky took off to the far end of the farm by the horse paddock and ever so slowly worked his way back towards the house. It took him months to actually approach my home an over a year to be able to come inside. Meanwhile, he very gently got to know Finn and after a year or so he was Finn's second in command, his "wingman". Despite his heritage, which clearly includes mastiffs and pitbulls, and his history, Rocky has been with us for over 10 years and has never lost his temper with anyone at all. He is now, after Finn's passing, the alpha male emeritus, and all of the dogs defer to him and pay canine obeisance whenever they come into the garden or house and find him resting.

This photo of my canine supervisors was taken before Finn's death. He is trailing behind a bit, I suspect more for the ability to watch the others than due to disability. He was in quite good shape until he decided that he'd had enough and was ready to leave when he was about 14 years old. He had also taken on the training of Calypso, the very dark brindle mastiffy baladi dog to my left. He often would correct her more firmly than the others and he was watching her carefully checking that her behaviour was correct. Additionally, and a few times to my painful discomfort, he corrected my behaviour towards her, as she was at a difficult age and was pushing boundaries, much like a human teenager. Twice when he clearly thought that I was being too rough on her scolding her for misbehaving I got a sharp nip on my butt. In the photo, Rocky is at my right hand, while Rosa our Saluki is in the middle. She was rescued from a situation where she and her brother were receiving insufficient food and care when they were quite young. Her brother had many health issues and only lived to be about two, but Rosa stayed with us until she was almost four last summer, and decamped to Germany with a lovely family with two little girls where she could be what she most loved, the pampered only dog in a largely female household. While she was here, there was a bit of an uneasy rivalry between Rosa and Calypso, both of whom felt that they owned me exclusively. Bedtimes involved quite a bit of diplomacy as both young ladies wanted to sleep under the covers on either side of me, as neither has any sort of undercoat and they both get quite cold at night.

At the same time that Finn was taking on the training of Calypso, he was also pushing to have JC, on the right, take on more responsibility. Often he would be in the garden and if someone came to the farm gate, he would bark sharply, and Calypso and JC, or perhaps one of them only, would go to check on the arrival. As Finn's wingman, Rocky was never really taken in hand by Finn before his death. I suspect that they all knew much more than we did about the transition. Finn had brought JC into the farm one day when he found the pup, who was about a year or so younger than Calypso, trying to dig under the farm gate. My initial concern with JC was that perhaps he had some Huskie blood in him due to his colouring. To my point of view, this would be less than optimal because of the abundance of thick hair on that breed, which can make life miserable in the summer. When JC was about 6 months old, I began to notice some rather odd behaviours in him. One of them, was a relatively sudden aversion to a direct gaze. Most dogs are quite comfortable with a direct gaze, but wolves and coyotes are much less comfortable. In addition, rather abruptly, his body language with the other dogs changed in some odd ways, including odd very submissive postures when greeting the older dogs, and then he taught the other dogs to howl. Around this time an Egyptian friend who is quite knowledgeable about canines was visiting and commented that JC didn't seem to speak the local dog dialect all that well, which was leading at times to misunderstandings between him and some of the other dogs. There are wolves in Egypt, most of whom live in the desert where they largely hunt rodents and scavenge near the trash dumps. I had seen them myself briefly while riding in the desert near us and this thought sent me to search for the few images of Egyptian wolves on the internet. There are not that many, but I have known friends who also had found themselves with wolfdogs due to mates between some of the village dogs living along the desert's edge and the wolves hiding out there. Egyptian wolves quite naturally do not have the thick furry coats of the wolves of the northern hemisphere and are very much similar to JC. Not having anyone to do a DNA test, we assume on the basis of behaviour that he likely is part wolf.

When Finn decided that he was done with living it was a shock to us. He'd been fine in the morning but by mid afternoon he was clearly tired and not really interested in interacting with anyone. He was of a good age, and also a dog who, unlike Calypso who loves a car ride, had no intention of visiting any doctors. We have a canine vet at the other end of the farm and when Finn caught him leaving his clinic after a tough evening trying to perform a blood transfusion on a young dog carrying a plastic bag with some bloody rags in it, Finn decided that the vet was clearly The Enemy and not to be tolerated. Having a clinic onsite is great, but any time someone had to visit the vet for some stitches, for a spay/neuter, Finn had to come along and check out the clinic. He would then wait outside the door until we emerged successfully and walk us home. If he caught the vet on his own, he was definitely not welcoming an I was always relieved that we never lost a dog on the operating table. There were a couple of dogs who had to be euthanised in their old age with catastrophic issues, but for that the vet came to the house and somehow Finn understood the gravity of the situation and made allowances.

Finn chose to lie down on the lawn near one of our mango trees and essentially stopped paying any attention to any of us. The dogs would come individually to check on him, but there was little response. He did not give any signs of pain or distress so I just let him be. He died in the morning and the entire pack watched the gardeners dig a deep grave in the corner of the garden near a pomegranate tree where he liked to jump the wall to go greet visitors. The dogs were all extremely quiet for a few days, didn't even bark at people arriving at the gate. No one howled for almost ten days. We were all curious as to how the pack was going to take the passing of the leader. Gradually, Rocky began to quietly take charge and direct Calypso and JC who would spend a bit more time together than they ordinarily would. Both of them became more solicitous in their greetings of Rocky as well. None of the dogs questioned the change in the power structure. Oddly enough as well, none of the dogs jumps over the wall from Finn's grave.

Watching Peter Domesticate Himself

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 09:13:00 +0000

One of the things about Corona has been the fact that the focus of life has changed enormously for everyone. People I would never have expected to have baking skills have been turning out some astonishing loaves of sour dough. One family got an egg incubator and hatched a few duck and chicken eggs that they got from the farm. I have found myself paying more attention to the social lives of my dogs this year as the pack at the farm seems to have attained some sort of maturity. It was formed initially by the incomparable Finn, who passed his authority on to JC and Calypso, with Rocky acting as regent. One of my fantasies in creating the farm was to have a space where I could do some of the ethological studies that had interested me in graduate school. I must admit that between my own busy life and a certain level of human myopia, it wasn't until Finn was getting on that I realised that I had a self-determining dog pack to look at.

Last spring, a friend of mine was looking for a couple of dogs to live with his sheep and goats at his new farm. He'd managed to find a livestock guardian dog that someone had mistakenly brought to Egypt as a pet later realising that the dog was going to be far too massive for a garden. Someone had brought me a baladi pup at the same time as I'd gotten our Great Dane pup, and while they were great friends while young, the baladi was one of the really deeply feral dogs who, while he could be very sweet on occasion, was not at all focused on relationships with humans, and was only really polite with dogs much larger than himself. He and Fulla, the guardian dog got to know each other on neutral territory at a nearby boarding kennel and have become a perfect match. She is a lot larger than he is and he is happy living with his enormous lady friend where he doesn't have to interact with people all the time. We rarely re-home dogs, but this one worked out.

Later this summer, two of my male dogs began jumping over one of our garden walls to frolic in the dirt road by the farm with a female baladi dog. Eventually, almost as if they were offering her protection, they coaxed her into coming into the farm and joining them. For a street dog she was in good shape, not too thin or too insect infested, but she has gotten quite sleek in the past few months. She seemed to be accustomed to humans around her and was easy to handle, so we gave her all her shots just to be sure, and Marte settled into life at the farm. At least this way, the boys weren't jumping out of the garden, a feat that was not inconsiderable since the walls are about 3 meters high. When puppy season started, Marte's behaviour changed and the boys, all of them, were all much more interested in her, despite the fact that all of our dogs are neutered. We had courtship going on at all hours and all over the farm. There were plenty of times when I was quite relieved that we had no child visitors to observe the festivities. It was time to check to see if Marte had been spayed, which it turned out that she had been...partly. Someone had removed the uterus and left the ovaries, which were in turn rather inflamed and one of them was encysted, making Marte quite grouchy. Life returned to normal of sorts once her plumbing problems were sorted, except for Peter. Peter was a totally feral baladi dog that had been consorting with Marte outside the wall and began coming into the farm while Marte was experiencing a false heat.

Peter was interesting. He was very polite, never caused any trouble with the other dogs, and although he never showed any interest in getting to know the humans here, he also showed no aggression towards us. Most of the time he would come at night, play with our dogs and Marte and then leave. Again, the sense from the other dogs was that they were offering the protection of the farm to Peter, to the extent that one morning I found him fast asleep on one of the dog beds in the living room. He took off quickly when he awoke to see me there. The girls told me that usually he would sleep near my house and raise an alarm if any of them came over for something at night. He seemed to feel that I needed an extra level of protection.

Lately his visits are more frequent, and he's taken up an evening residence on my back porch overlooking the garden. Occasionally I hear a warning woof from Calypso and BenBen who guard me at night while snuggling under the covers of my bed and I suspect that Peter has come to the dog food dishes that are in the hallway outside my door. The girls have told me that they have seen him scooting out the dog door if they come in early which makes it seem that he has been comfortable enough to join JC, Marte, and Rocky on the living room dog beds. The young dogs sleep in the girls' house for the most part. Mariam, who is our official dog whisperer, has been gradually working on getting within petting distance because if he is going to be hanging around our dogs, he needs to get a rabies shot at some point. We aren't terribly concerned about vaccinations for corona, lepto, and parvo because he is about a year old and if he hasn't died from these things yet. he isn't likely to. But getting a rabies shot is important for him and our dogs as well.

While Marte was at least partially accustomed to human company, and I've had the experience of taking Rocky into the pack from a totally abusive situation, Peter is our first completely feral dog to come to us as an adult, and it is fascinating to see how this is going to work out.

They Are Talking But Are We Listening?

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 14:22:00 +0000

One of the things that I was intrigued by in graduate school was how communication could work between humans and animals. Sadly, I was studying at the University of Waterloo where the social psychology department was entirely given over to the game playing, semi deceitful variety of lab experimentation. There were no animals involved with this and I had serious doubts as to whether these studies really were telling us anything about human beings as well. This didn't make me a lot of friends in the department and I ended up leaving with my MA and my sanity, to go teach in community colleges and raise a couple of kids. When my children were still in elementary school we moved to Egypt as I'd had enough shoveling snow on my own in Toronto while their father was spending most of the winter in Alexandria. Not long after we moved to Alex, a family who had children at the French school with our children offered us a baladi dog, telling us that they were sorry but she simply was too stupid to deal with. When we went to meet her, we found that Pepsi was being kept on a balcony while an extremely annoying little poodle was living in the house. The family was upset that when they let Pepsi off the balcony to go through the living room and down the stairs to the garden to pee, she sometimes did it in the living room. Personally, I didn't think that this was a mark of stupidity but it was clearly a statement of territory. Pepsi turned out to be one of the smartest dogs I'd ever met. She settled right into our home, which had a garden and we all adored her.

If we were out for a while and came home, she always greeted us with a call of "Haroo", which was remarkably similar to our "Hello", and when my husband and I had to go out at night and would leave one of his employees to be at the house with the kids, Pepsi would station herself just outside the children's bedroom doors, so that whoever was there could go to the front door, the kitchen, or the bathroom, but there was no way in hell they could go near the children. Best babysitter I'd ever had. When she vanished one day after a move of houses, we were all devastated and spent weeks searching for her. After a month or so one of the baladi dogs at Smouha Club gave birth to a litter and I promised the children that we would take one of her pups. The day that we went to pick up a husky little brown female we found that someone had taken the mother to their farm and the pups were scattered throughout the stables. We found a white one with a black face and took her home despite the fact that we had wanted her sister. When we saw her sister a few days later, the contrast between the clean well fed pup and the hungry dirty one was too much, so we took her home as well with the spoken intention of finding a home for her. Like many people I had never had more than one dog at a time in my life. That was my introduction to pack life because Stella and Milligan were with us until their death many years later and following that I would never consider having just one dog.

It's been twenty-five years now that I have had multiple dogs living with me and over time our relationship has changed. I have recently been wondering if the change had something to do with changes in me or changes in the dogs, or whether I'm just beginning to notice the changes. One of these changes has been the increase in vocalisation between me and some of the dogs living with me. One of the first dogs, other than Pepsi, to do a lot of talking to me was Koheila, a rescued Dalmation who likely had been imported from the Ukraine and landed up at our home in Maadi and then moved out to the farm with me. She would come and tell me when someone was at the front door, would greet friends coming to visit with vocalisation, and so on. At the time I was amused by it and I noticed that it seemed to be quite purposeful, but it was just Spots being weird. When the pack was firmly founded by Finn at the farm, Koheila was still around giving orders and chatting with the other dogs and myself, and not too suprisingly, Finn became a very verbal dog himself. In his later years he would sometimes argue with me about actions I might take with dogs in the pack if he disapproved. It was never disrespectful, but his intention was very clear. His vocalisations would run the gamut from affectionate mumbles, to warning growls, to sharp barks of concern if he wanted my attention right away.

My current pack was largely set up and formed by Finn. I rarely have gone out to look for a dog to live with us. Most of them have arrived at the front gate and been invited in by the dogs. Rocky was one dog who came to us as an abused adult when the night watchman at the villa next door was fired and abandoned him. He lay down in front of our gate for three days, never leaving, and overcame my concern that he might be a danger to the children who visit us. Finn's successor, JC, was attempting to dig under the front gate when Finn pulled him in and introduced him to the pack. I thought that was a bit odd at the time, but I have learned that it didn't scratch the surface of oddness. I can joke that there is a sign only visible to dogs outside saying "Safe Haven" or something similar, but I've begun to think that it is more complex than that. Just lately, JC and Rocky began jumping our 3 meter brick walls to cavort in the dirt road in front of our farm with a beige female baladi who seemed to have been dumped here. Eventually they coaxed her into the farm but there was some friction between Marte, as we called her, and Calypso since they are both highly dominant females. After a few months she appeared to come into heat, but a vet exam had indicated that she'd been spayed so we did some ultrasounds that indicated the spay had been incomplete and one of her ovaries was encysted and congested. Once her plumbing problems were sorted she's become more relaxed. This is the first time that the dogs seem to have actively recruited a newcomer. JC and Rocky's attachment to Marte is extreme as well.

There was a male baladi that lives in our road in front of the farm, we call him Peter, who was very interested in Marte when she was going through her false heat, to the extent of jumping the wall to come into the farm with her. Oddly enough, there were no fights among the males. All of our dogs are neutered but it doesn't at all mean that they don't enjoy sex if a female either is in season or thinks that she is, as in Marte's case. After we had Marte re-spayed, we didn't see Peter again for a while until some of our goats gave birth. That evening the goats were put away in their shed and the girls were woken by the sounds of dogs fighting outside. Marte had invited Peter over and they were headed to the goat pen but the other dogs disagreed with this course of action and attacked the two of them. The goats were fine and Marte and Peter took off, but the worst thing you can have at a farm with animals is a livestock killing dog. The next day I asked a friend to take her over to another agricultural area about 9 kilometers away and I gave him a bag of dog food to feed her with. However, he dropped her off only about 3 kilometers away as reported by a friend who saw her shortly after. I was quite annoyed about this but I told my staff that she would be back here by morning, surely, and she was indeed. She also seemed to understand that she had broken some serious rules and modified her attitude significantly.

So have I taught my dogs to do all of these things? No. Definitely not. For the most part, I let the dog pack train the dogs. Once I have taught one of the older dogs about housebreaking, the younger ones watch and learn. As the young dogs watch the older ones informing us about things with vocalisation, they try it themselves. This afternoon while I was chatting with a friend at my kitchen door, Calypso walked up to our water cooler and took a drink from it by pushing her nose against the lever and letting the water run down her tongue to her mouth. I was astonished. Apparently our Great Dane, who has learned how to open the kitchen door with the handle, also does this. Perhaps dogs are smarter than we thought they were, and also I suspect that letting them live in a natural pack offers them much more chance for social learning. The friend I was chatting with suggested that I look up an article written about some research on wild kangaroos to see if kangaroos ask for help from humans when they need it, despite the fact that they don't live in proximity to humans. They do in fact solicit assistance from humans much the same ways that dogs might. I have noticed this with my horses as well. They lived in paddocks in one large herd and two smaller groupings, and very frequently they will approach one of us to show a cut or scratch or some similar issue that would best be solved with primate fingers.

Gone to The Dogs

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 11:35:00 +0000

I realise that I went to the dogs years ago. I have had over a dozen dogs at any given time since about 1997. That's a long time. At first we were a normal family, sort of. We started with one baladi dog in Alexandria, and when she vanished one day we collected a pair of sisters from Smouha Club. We stuck with two dogs for a while when we moved to Cairo, until my daughter and I went to Greece on a spring break, and we found Molly sitting in the snow on a mountain. From the face she looked like a Golden Retriever and from the butt she looked like a Corgi. We brought her home, telling my husband as we took her off the luggage carousel that we had another baladi dog, but a Greek one this time. Then came the Rat Terriers.

My husband had built an enormous grain discharge terminal in Alexandria that was wonderfully computerised. Because Alex can be pretty wet in the winter, he built special tunnels to keep his computer cables dry. The rats loved the tunnels and enjoyed filing down their teeth on the computer cables, so I was instructed to find a green solution to the rodent problem. I found American Rat Terriers, a small working breed (meaning they don't have to look like anything in particular) that specialised in hunting rodents and other vermin. We started with a pregnant female and a young male figuring that since they were totally unrelated, Bluto could work as a stud for both Terra and her daughters to be. The only problem was that she had three sons in her first litter so we had to get a couple more females. In no time at all, RatBusters (we registered the kennel) had an easy dozen dogs to add to the three already there. Some of them went to the grain terminal to work and some stayed in Maadi with me. When my husband died, I had a pack of six males in Alexandria and a pack of six females ready to go to Borg el Arab to the soy bean crushing plant there. And I still had some that stayed with me along with a variety of homeless hounds that wandered through.

My move to the area near Abu Sir to buy land for my farm was accompanied by at least a dozen dogs. I moved about ten of the Rat Terriers who were shortly joined by another six from the grain discharge terminal because my brother-in-law hated dogs. I had our old baladi dog, Ganja, a crippled Dalmation, the Corgi mix from Greece as well, and shortly thereafter I got a young Great Dane. Our next move to the farm was quite simple and was accomplished by donkey cart for the furniture. The dogs and I just walked the 80 meters from the door of the old garden to the new front door, as we had been doing ´very day over the previous 6 months. Once we'd moved into the new house on the farm, it was a matter of training staff to close doors so that the dogs wouldn't wander and terrify the neighbours.But not long after I'd moved to the farm, a pup arrived there that was going to change my life enormously.

I'm not sure how Finn arrived, but the first time I ever saw him he was standing in the baking tray that I used for dog kibble, eating as fast as he could, his normally curly tail stretched straight out in concentration. The dog pack was standing and sitting all around him, looking on with interest but no animosity, so I decided that he clearly was meant to be here and we accepted our fate. I called him Finn after Huckleberry Finn, as he seemed very assured of himself and was obviously adventurous. Finn was the archetypal baladi dog, sand yellow, short haired, curly tail, tipped ears, and a small bit of white on his toes, the end of his tail and a flash on his chest. What was not archetypal was his size. He was much taller than any of the local baladis, and I always wondered if he had a touch of Dane in him, as there were some Great Danes in the neighbourhood, occasionally consorting with the baladi females. There was nothing of the Dane features in his face however. When he arrived, sometime around 2005 or 2006, the pack leadership was in the hands of Koheila, the Dalmation who had an intellect that made us decide that she was actually an extraterrestrial, and Terra, the first arrival and the ranking female in the Rat Terrier pack. Koheila was not a large dog, but she took it upon herself to order the others to go attend to the gate if anyone came, while she herself would come to me to announce the visitors. Terra was a tiny dog with a fierce personality who never left my side and could intimidate anyone who came to see me if she felt that something was not right. These two ladies trained Finn well.

Terra and Koheila were getting older. Terra died at 17 and Koheila at 14, but I had time to notice that they were in fact training Finn to take over leadership of the pack as they were aging. They spent a lot of time with him, possibly conversing...who knows? They were tougher on him than others when he made mistakes. And eventually he took over as pack leader. Koheila still did the announcements and Terra owned the pillow on the bed, but they sat back from the more physical interactions with the other dogs as they aged. If Finn was out of the garden for a while he would check in with the old ladies, licking them on the face and lying on his back before them. It was clear that they still wielded quite a lot of canine power and I was getting better at watching it all and understanding. At this point most of the visitors to the farm were coming to go horseback riding, and, while they might stay for a cup of tea, they weren't staying all day the way that people do now. As the old terriers died, new dogs came to the farm to take their places. Most of them were baladi dogs and most of the time they just appeared. We did take in a couple of adult Great Danes after Morgana died, but they never challenged Finn's leadership. The male, Zook, basically ignored him good naturedly. Mindy, the grey female, became Finn's special friend and consort. They were devoted to each other. All the time there were young dogs coming and old dogs leaving, and I gradually became more aware of what a great job Finn did of keeping everyone in line. When young dogs became too excited at the arrivals of friends, he would growl a bit to tell them to relax.

One of the things that I discovered with Finn was that he would talk to me about things. It took me some time to learn to understand what he was trying to get across to me. He disapproved of any physical punishment of dogs, not that it was often used. One time when two of the younger dogs got into a tiff, and I swung a foot at them in frustration (missing them entirely I must say), I felt a pain in my gluteus maximus that was a nip from Finn. I was shocked and stood there staring at him. He stared back without any shame at all, making his point. Conversations with dogs, like conversations with horses, are often on a level that is almost a form of telepathy. Until Finn, I hadn't really had dogs that bothered to vocalise, and he had a remarkably wide range of sounds that he used to get information across. The dogs that have grown up in his pack are extremely vocal and talk to us all the time. JC, our baladi wolfdog, came during Finn's last years and Finn chose him to take over the alpha position with Calaypso who has a mix of mastiff and pitbull in her background. At about six months, JC's wolfy side began to appear and he taught the pack to do some very reputable howls. They also talk to visitors that they know well. Just today a family arrived and announced to me that Calypso, JC's co-chief, had come up to their care and talked a streak as they were walking in. I've learned a lot from the pooches and will probably continue to do so.

A Pandemic Project In The Neighbourhood

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 14:25:00 +0000

"Y’all will never believe what I have been doing during this quarantine/vacation. I’m not sure that I entirely do, but it is something that I am quite proud of. There are a lot of people in the equestrian world who know me even outside of Egypt, and in 2012 I was asked by a friend to check out a group who were said to be helping horses in Nazlet Semman. The group went by the rather odd name of Prince Fluffy Kareem, but I found a contact for them and I tried to arrange a trip to see where they were working and what they were doing. I was unsuccessful at the time and I told my friend that I was unable to meet with them or to get more information about their activities than was on their Facebook page at the time. If she wanted to donate to them, that was fine with me, but personally I felt a little bit uneasy not being able to contact and/or visit them personally. Subsequently, I was asked by other people about the same thing, and I had no more information to pass on than I had the first time, so I could only reiterate my concerns. As time went on, it was clear that the group was very successful in terms of collecting donations, if a bit mysterious. Sometime in the last few years PFK (as it is known in the interest of brevity) announced that it had moved its animals to my neighbourhood but I didn’t really know where, nor was I in any sort of rush to find out.

Imagine my surprise when a few weeks ago, about the time the voluntary social distancing was first being put into operation, I got a call from the head of the Board of Trustees for PFK, which was registered as a charity in the UK under the supervision of the Charities' Commission. Apparently Marte, who had started the group about 8 to 10 years ago had, in the face of the oncoming viral pandemic and an audit by the Charities Commission, retired and moved back to Norway. With Marte gone, and Sherif’s English skills a bit dodgy to say the least, they needed some local staff to take care of things like the translation of receipts and so on. (In fact, Sherif is illiterate in both English and Arabic and could not even manage the receipts and such in Arabic.) She asked if I could help them find the right people since I live in the neighbourhood, but with the advantage of about twenty-five years of experience here. I admitted to being rather more than just a bit surprised, but I agreed to help them out, feeling that for a successful charity to fall on the rocks due to personnel changes would be a real tragedy.

In the past two weeks I have visited Boxland and Fluffylands 2 and 3, I’ve seen the horses and donkeys and I have worked to set up systems of feed deliveries for horses, donkeys, cats, and dogs, so that they can be easily monitored by the Board of Trustees in the UK, which makes it infinitely easier to handle the running of the rescue. We are putting in a proper bookkeeper/purchasing agent who will oversee the financial part of running PFK as per the requirements of the UK Charities Commission, which leaves Sherif free to look after horses. (In the end, Sherif proved to be completely uncooperative and we had to find an independent manager who could be trusted...which we did.) This setup process seems to be coming along very nicely. Naturally since many of the horses who have gone to PFK have been in very hazardous condition, not all of the inhabitants are in the greatest of shape, but there are a lot of horses who are in excellent condition, which is a testimony to some good care. One of the organizational tasks is the creation of a database with photos of the horses, medical histories, and origins of the horses, as well as their status as a foster, a patient, or a horse that PFK has bought.

To most PFK supporters, at times my name has been, more or less, the equivalent of the arch-nemesis of PFK. I am aware of that and as always can only respond that I was presented with a certain lack of transparency which made me hesitant. At this point, there is no longer any lack of transparency. The policies and staff being put into place will satisfy the needs of the Charities Commission who, due to PFK’s success, have requested much stricter monitoring of daily operations. At this point, I can comfortably recommend PFK as a worthwhile project for anyone to support."

This was the diplomatic Facebook story for how I spent part my pandemic spring, but the reality was not so easy or calm. The reality was that while Marte and Sherif may have started the charity with the best of intentions, I suspect that the influx of cash changed the priorities quickly. They started in 2011 in the summer before the revolution (I believe) with the purchase of a beaten up grey stallion to nurse back to health in the comfort of the stable where Marte kept a horse and where Sherif worked, and I suspect that not many people noticed them that winter. The fairly appalling name was given by a British woman who started a Facebook page for their effort unbeknownst to Marte, who initially was angered at the intrusion into her privacy.

By the spring of 2011 there were stories in newspapers worldwide about the "starving horses of Giza" which were generating a lot of interest in the charity world. We had a number of international charities coming in to offer food for horses in Nazlet Semman, which has been home to a huge number of fairly terrible riding stables interspersed with a few decent ones since some time in the 70's and even before. PFK began with people sending tack, medication and equine paraphenalia in suitcases to be distributed to the more down and out stables in the hopes of improving the working lives of horses who generally had to carry their passengers in battered, broken saddles that injured the horses' backs. In the spring of 2012 I recall standing and talking to an Egyptian vet who was working with a charity under Princess Alia of Jordan while we watched people coming to a station near the Sphinx where a truck was parked with 50 kg bags of yellow corn that were being loaded into horse carriages. Yellow corn is mostly sugar and is truly not a feed of choice for starving horses, but most of this was going to end up being sold anyway. All along the efforts to feed the starving horses of Giza have had some serious nutritional issues. Many horse feeding stations bring green berseem clover, which is sort of like handing a starving horse a popsicle since it is 90% water. But it is easy to handle and better than nothing I suppose. The dried hay would be much better for the horses but for some reason this has never been used. PFK settled into a stable near the Sphinx and began doing clinics with some invited vets and farriers. This attracted quite a lot of attention through skillfully written Facebook posts. At the same time in Egypt, during the summer of 2012, a young Australian woman, Ashley Lotherington arrived in Egypt with a couple of suitcases full of supplies and tack for PFK. She saw an interesting business plan and opened a horrific alleged horse rescue, The Egypt Horse Project, which she milked for all the money that she could get while allowing horses to suffer in her stable. So there were two groups working in Nazlet Semman but while they were collecting donations like mad, it was incredibly difficult for anyone to visit and evaluate their work. About four years later, Lotherington moved back to Australia where she has since been charged for animal abuse and the like.

Sometime around the same period that TEHP moved out of Nazlet Semman and Ashley left, PFK told supporters that they were opening a space for retired horses south of Giza and there were rumours that it was in my neighbourhood, but I never really pursued the search for the location. Later there were rumours that Sherif and Marte had moved into the neighbourhood and that Sherif had bought land here. The latter I laughed off since the price of land in our area is outrageous, but it turned out to be true and as a matter of fact he had commissioned a 50 box stable with a house that the Board of Trustees was entirely unaware of. It is partly built but he still owes money on it. I also heard rumours that Sherif had a herd of dairy cattle as well. In the interest of peace, I let the rumours slide. But when the Board of Trustees called on me to help, I felt that I really should. After all, they had the financial resources to do the job that Marte and Sherif had been claiming to do for years, although it was clear to anyone living in Egypt that they were not doing it. They had made it impossible for anyone with an IP address in Egypt to see the Facebook page some years back, and of course any name of someone who had been in the least bit critical was also blocked from viewing. From time to time, however, friends abroad would send screen shots to keep people in Egypt up to date.

The month that I worked with them was fraught with tension and implied violence on the part of Sherif and his brother Abdelnabi, who were quite unwilling to see their golden goose removed. They had rented a nearby stable as a commercial venture while telling the donors that Sherif had to find an outside job because the charity was paying him so little. Of course the horses for the stable had come from PFK or from PFK funds, and the charity was paying for the feed for the stable as well as the rent for the stable in all probability. There was indeed a herd of water buffalo as well as sheep and goats being stabled on the land paid for by the charity and being fed by the charity. All of the care for these animals was being done by the workers that the charity was paying to care for horses. The brothers were not keeping any sorts of accounts and were just dealing with large amounts of cash. Within a week of my going to help sort things out, it was clear that there was a lot of major corruption. The tactic of the Farag brothers was to threaten not to feed the horses or to turn them out, or later to threaten other things. When I called their bluff on this, knowing that they were not going to do it, they waited a week or so to ask us to provide money for feed, but when I insisted on proper accounting for purchases and shipping, it was clear that the real costs were only a fraction of what had been claimed previously.

With the assistance of the local authority, the brothers were pried away from the operations of the charity and a new manager was brought in to reorganise the work on the land rented by PFK to care for the horses and donkeys staying there. Within a month or two, the feed costs were about one quarter of what they had been claiming from the board before, and all the horses were actually gaining weight. They now have, thanks to the work of the new manager, well-organised and well-trained staff whose only job is to properly care for the animals on the land and any animals who might stop by needing medical care. The manager has also arranged for one of the best equine clinics in Egypt to handle the veterinary care for the horses who arrive at the gates needing assistance, since, other than one clinic down the road, there are no real veterinary clinics in the area to care for the horses and donkeys of carriage drivers, carters, and farmers who cannot afford private clinics. Having the horses at PFK in paddocks out of doors is a real advantage for those who need time to rest, eat, and recuperate.

At the end of my month I was able to step back and return to my own projects on my farm. This was a huge relief as PFK had been taking up almost all of my waking hours for the month. I still speak with the head of the Board of Directors regularly, but now they are generally just calls to chat, thankfully, and I am in contact with their manager frequently as we refer a lot of cases to them when Rural Wellness Initiative's outpatient treatment won't do the job. But I have made it clear to everyone in the area that I have not become a part of PFK, nor will I in the future. I have plenty of work to do on my own. I am not getting any money from PFK, nor do I want any. Everything I did was to prevent the waste of a good group that, with proper management, can do excellent work for animals.

Timelessness Isn't So Great

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Fri, 03 Apr 2020 11:48:00 +0000

What day is it anyway? Without the Friday/Saturday family crowds, without the Tuesday clinics, it's too easy to forget where we are in the week. Currently the schedule for people living in Egypt is that we have a curfew from 7 pm to 6 am every day and then on Friday and Saturday any place one might want to visit is going to be closed and there are no public transport services. There is a rumor that the 7 pm curfew is going to be changed to 3 pm next week and then a possible 100% lockdown soon after. Maybe the idea has been to ease the population into this. Egyptians, like most people, are not keen on being told what they can and cannot do.

Christina and her girls discovered a gang of rats living under the aviary where we have poultry.

I've been keeping the guys who work here up to date on the news of how things are progressing because not knowing is much worse than knowing when things are not so great. I'm wondering how people are rationalising a complete lockdown in farming communities that are supplying food for people who are living in locked down cities. As well, much of Egypt depends on recyclers who are in personal contact with rubbish that may well be contaminated. The ramifications of this pandemic are mind-boggling. Still, we are living in relative comfort compared to so many.

The guys helped out on the day that everyone was making life hard for the farm rats.

The last time I spent this much time at home was in 2011, during the revolution. There was a saying that "this revolution will be tweeted" and I guess that this is going to be the same way.

Dahab schmoozing with a chick.

Isolation Updates

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Sat, 28 Mar 2020 11:06:00 +0000

Like many governments all over the world, the Egyptians have been told to stay at home unless it's absolutely necessary to leave their homes, schools have been closed and there is a 7 pm to 6 pm curfew every day. In addition public transport has been stopped on Friday and Saturday. In a country with so many people living in rural areas where there is no public transport, this poses some interesting issues.

How close is too close now?

For many in the rural areas, walking is the main means of transport unless one owns a donkey cart or something similar. But I have noticed some greater sense of social distance. I have a car at the farm and if I need milk here, someone has to go to buy it. The tetrapacks of milk are at a grocery store about 8 km away. There is no delivery. But there are not crowds entering and leaving the shop, and as I am parked outside (I am the chauffeur) people are not standing on top of each other. We buy our fruits and vegetables from a roadside stand that I have been using for almost 20 years. I can stand an easy 2 meters away and be given the items that I need. I ask the girl if anyone in the neighbourhood is sick and she says, "No. But people here are staying away from the city." This means that the virus will likely come more slowly to us. She also gives me her phone number and says that since she has to be closed over Friday and Saturday, if I need anything to call her and she will provide it from her home if I can send someone. I think that we will be ok.

Most of the "villages", which are simply small to medium cities without services, have water issues and in our area larger farms and homes have installed water filters that are attached to an outside wall to provide clean water to poorer neighbours. These water stations can be quite crowded at times. Since I'm hardly ever out of the farm I don't know how this is working out. Our water comes from our wells on the farm and the drinking water is filtered in the kitchen. Tests have showed that the water is clean but highly mineralised, which is really rough on electric kettles and such. That is the main reason for our filter. But we are self sufficient for water at least.

Here at the farm, the guys have work to do spread out over 3 feddans (acres) so again social distancing is being observed. My friend and her daughters are wandering around with their own projects or helping the guys, so they are also out of doors a lot. If anyone is inside much, it is me since keeping up with the news these days is almost a full time job. I'm spending a lot of time catching up with friends abroad, with events in the neighbourhood, with friends who are all going slowly mad in their homes and apartments in the cities. With a 7 pm curfew, the guys are here all day, go home to their families, have a bite to eat, and everyone goes to bed pretty early. On the first night of the curfew, the police did arrive to shut down a couple of weddings in the area, and no one has heard any more. Weddings out here in the reef are generally held out of doors so that all the neighbours can "enjoy" the music that is played at maximum decibels. There are some silver linings.

I have more time available to observe the social interactions of the dog pack lately. We lost our alpha male, Finn, who formed our pack some 15 years ago, a few months back. He had taken some time to train JC, our wolfdog, and Calypso, a baladi who looks exactly like a Cane Corso and is my self-appointed personal assistant, to take over his job, but nevertheless actually doing the job has been a pretty steep learning curve for them. Finn generally just sort of cruised around watching and giving very subtle orders to the others. He did have to get a bit louder with the 6 month to 1 year age group, the teenagers who need to learn that there really are limits, since puppies under 6 months old are treated quite kindly. JC is only about 3 and Calypso is only 4 years old, so they are working on volume control when disciplining the teenagers. When we have school trips here, one of the most common questions about the dogs has always been, "Who is the boss?" and why. Is it size? In that case Bran our doofus Dane would be boss, but that is unlikely ever to happen. Is it strength? That could be a real toss-up. I suspect that it is a combination of emotional intelligence, communications skills, and organisational intelligence. I could see Finn spending more time with JC and Calypso in the last months of his life, so it was clear to me that he was working at teaching them something, although I wasn't sure of what it was.

How am I doing? Well that depends. I am not bored. Not in the least. The planning and logistics work continues apace. We are replacing the crazy old yellow house in what we call Narieda's garden with a new house of two floors that will each have three bedrooms and bathrooms, a big living area for meetings or gatherings and an enormous kitchen that can be used for teaching, cooking, teaching cooking, first aid classes or whatever. So I have workmen pouring concrete and doing all that housebuilding stuff at the other end of the farm. The guys are working on the gardens and green house as well as the horses, goats, and sheep, since this is the time of year when ordinarily we would be making at least one trip to the plant fair in Orman Gardens... but of course those trips aren't happening. I'm corresponding with a farrier in either Switzerland or India depending on his schedule and a vet professor in Italy. Bernard is currently in India but is quite isolated (he sent photos to prove it) and Sergio is laying low in Italy with success so far.

They were here earlier this winter and we are hoping to be able to set up a school for farriers and for veterinary paramedics if the stars align themselves in the coming year with the help of Giza University. And of course in my free time I'm supposed to be writing my book. I don't know whether the blog qualifies on cheating at that or preparation for it.

copyright 2020 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

A New Meaning To Mindfulness

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 11:41:00 +0000

My morning started with a good friend of mine who lives with some pets in a house in a rural area and, when there are no viral shut downs, she's a teacher in an international school. Oddly enough, she and some other friends of mine, many of them connected with schools but not all, came down with a really nasty flu, for lack of better identification, that involved high fever, aching limbs, a dry cough, and no real respiratory symptoms...but this was in November/December before COVID-19 had even been identified as far as we know. For my friends a penny dropped with the symptom description, but as far as anyone knows, this virus hadn't been even identified in China at that point. Egypt does have a huge number of Chinese companies and workers, but there is no way that I know of to identify what this was in hindsight. And just for the record, all of them survived the experience or I would never have heard of it. But recently she had gone to another part of Cairo where she walked into a shop to buy a bagel (most other things were closed) which she ate while watching the Nile. Later a couple of her friends were very upset with her for doing this and she was wondering where the anger was coming from. I suggested that the vitriol that sometimes is spilling out into statements of what someone should or shouldn't be doing in this time of concern over disease is probably based in fear.

All of the people that I know, not just this group that got sick before, are sheltering in place, trying to avoid contact and possible contagion. For some people this carries a lot of emotional baggage and I do know people who are spending much of their days in a fog of anxiety and fear. I know people who have dogs in the city who have to go for walks furing which they encounter people who demand to know how they can be endangering others in this fashion, and I know dogs that have been dumped by people who can't deal with that. Two of my dogs recently brought home a lovely spayed, flea and tick-treated female dog who had been hanging around my front gate for a month. She is definitely a family dog down on her luck and no one identified her on the page for lost animals that I run here on Facebook. She's quite happy to have a home. I have horses who live in a 3/4 feddan (acre) paddock where they can run around, and dogs who have all of 3 feddans (acres) to run in, so I don't have to venture off my farm due to animal need pressures.

I can hole up in my home, I can wander around and work in the gardens...for me this shut down is just fine, other than the fact that my animals still need to eat and I still need to pay for their food and my staff's salaries. I am one of the fortunate ones and I will never forget this fact. And for now I'm reading things online that are very thought provoking. Susan Sontag's Disease as a Metaphor was published in the New York Review of Books in 1978 and is primarily concerned with how we use disease to define our personal and political world, as in "Communism is the exasperation of the bureaucratic cancer that has always wasted humanity. A German cancer, a product of the characteristic German preparationism. Every pedantic preparation is anti-human….". However, what struck me as I was reading it was the automatic assumption that unless something from our environment like a bacteria or a virus attacks our bodies, we are somehow clean or healthy by default. In fact, research in science since she wrote this has indicated that every human body is a delicate balancing act involving billions of bacteria, viruses, fungi, as well our own tissues, and much of health is defined by keeping all of these things in balance. This is an entirely different world view. Yes, a virus or bacteria or fungus that throws off this balance can cause havoc as we are seeing with COVID-19, and some of the "risk factors" mentioned with regards to who is getting very ill as opposed to who is just sick, are in fact imbalances among the normal inhabitants of the human body.

Another article from the Atlantic that appeared in my timeline is more recent. The Pattern That Epidemics Always Follow is one of the most rational articles that I've read regarding the current situation in the world. Karl Taro Greenfeld was the editor of Time Asia and was based in Hong Kong during the SARS epidemic in 2002. This was an outbreak that was quite similar to the current problem. It was also a product of the wet markets for wild animals but it was spread quite differently, which meant that the "solution" to the problem was different as well. Where Sontag was looking at social and political systems that have been described as medical problems, Greenfeld is much more pragmatic and is discussing how people react to epidemics.

"Which brings us to the last stage of epidemic grief: rational response. After denial, panic, and fear, we can finally get down to the business of basic sanitary measures and infection protocols. At Time Asia, we urged better hygiene. We reminded anyone with a fever to stay home. We looked on as the medical establishment formalized the clinical response, determined diagnostic criteria, and isolated the virus."

Greenfeld reminds us that epidemics are inherently terrifying for people because they are larger than people. It is only recently that we have identified the tiny culprits, the bacterias, viruses, molds, and fungi, that instigate the epidemic, but still we are frightened because the imbalance in our families, communities and social structure is enormous and debilitating. When we take a deep breath and look at the data from the World Health Organisation we will see that there are 189 countries reporting cases of COVID-19, there are 267,013 reported cases of it worldwide, and that there have been 11,201 confirmed deaths worldwide. If we look at the numbers of deaths from road accidents alone in Egypt as reported by the same organisation we will see that there are generally around 12,ooo each year with the figure rising slowly but surely. There were more deaths from traffic accidents in Egypt last year than there have been deaths all over the world from COVID-19.

It is easy to say that this comparison is unfair. The figure for traffic deaths is for an entire year and we are looking at a few months for COVID. This is true. But again, this is only for one country. What if we looked at the worldwide figure for traffic deaths in a year? This is currently 1.3 million people. Cars and driving, especially when combined with alcohol, are still vastly more endangering. Will COVID-19 turn out to be worse? It is possible, but I don't think that any medical person would predict this.

What is so disconcerting to all of us is the sudden imbalance in the availability of medical assistance when many people need the services but hospitals and doctors are overwhelmed by a rush of demand for their help, the lack of transparency on the parts of many governments who refuse to acknowledge that any problem even exists (which adds a great deal to the general stress and anxiety), and the fear that each of us could be a target for some tiny thing that might make us ill in varying degrees...or that we might pass on to our loved ones. So it's time to take a deep breath and look at all of this rationally.

What do we do in this situation? COVID is spread by contact with a virus in fluids that can remain on surfaces or contact us directly. Staying as far apart as possible is a good idea. Isolating ourselves if we feel at all unwell or if the risks to us if we become sick are much higher than for other people is also a good idea. It isn't possible for some people to stay home from work, starting with medical staff, but also for people who have to transport our food from fields to markets, for people who work in the sources of our food such as markets and shops, for people who work in banks or other services, for the people who are in police forces or ambulance personnel , for the people who collect the refuse, for the people who work in gas stations, for farmers, for transport drivers (cabs, buses, metros and so on), for people who simply cannot afford not to work for fear that their families will have nothing to eat, for many more people than we have even thought about for many years. This is a good time to look at our links to our communities and consider how those links can teach us to care for each other.

May everyone remain well.

copyright 2020 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Living our own Decamerons

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Sat, 21 Mar 2020 13:33:00 +0000

When I was about ten years old or so I found a copy of Rats, Lice, and History in our local library. My mother had already made it clear that I was allowed to read anything at all that I wanted, so I checked it out and entered a fascination with the changes that epidemics can bring to society that continues to this day. In the process of reading about the medical history, the economic and political history, and all the updates to our knowledge in the past 60 years, I also read the Decameron, which was written by Boccaccio almost 500 years ago, although that came rather later. Essentially, the book is a series of short stories told by survivors of the Black Death in Italy, and the stories run the gamut to the extent that they are not entirely appropriate for ten year olds. Summaries of some of the Decameron tales

Now every morning I open my computer to read the current stories from all over the world trying to cope with the situation of a virus run amok. It seems to me that there are a couple of generations of people who have had a lot of consistency in their environments, politics, and health. I'm one of those infamous Boomers, born in 1949 not long after World War II. While I doubt that there was any time at all while I was young in the US when the country was not involved in a war somewhere, there was little sense of danger or urgency for most of my childhood. We were fighting people in places like Korea, Vietnam and so on, and life continued happily. This was something of a golden time for many Americans when mothers could stay home to raise kids if they wanted because it was financially possible. I was probably part of the last group of young people to be able to work their way through college. I was part of the grand polio vaccination and remember some of my friends' parents suffered with paralysis and had to spend time in iron lungs when I was in secondary school. But I don't recall there being a problem ever that involved closing down schools, shops, and life in general in such a scale as is happening now.

When the issue of self-isolation came up, I wasn't concerned. After all, I live out of an urban center. I'm not in the habit of spending time in the city or in crowds. Why would I be endangered? My children had other ideas and very quickly took me to task with lectures on why I need to stay on the farm as much as possible and why the farm has to be closed to guests. Reading the news over the past week has convinced me that my children were right. I don't believe that anyone outside of areas of central and west Africa have any experience with what the world is seeing now. Articles on the problems with ebola simply do not have the same impact as seeing Italy empty its streets.

What remains to be seen are the after effects in the world's economy and social structure. Will everything go back to where we all were at the beginning of November 2019? Will we see that a new path must be taken. The speed at which skies cleared of pollution has been heartening. We saw the same in the 18 days of 2011, but it didn't take any time at all for the streets to become even more crowded and the air to become even more polluted than it was before. Perhaps if there is a way to work through this virus and come out of it with something of a healthier environment and social consciousness, it will all be worth it. But I believe that for now we are mainly gathering and saving stories to tell.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51799.The_Decameron

copyright 2020 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Starting Over

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 14:42:00 +0000

I began blogging in March 2003 because it seemed to be a good idea. I wasn't quite sure why it was such a good idea, but it surely appeared to be. I wanted to give friends of mine who were living everywhere other than Egypt, an idea about why I loved living here despite its eccentricities, oddities, and peculiarities. I continued writing regularly about my life in general in Egypt for the next about eight years, while I moved out of my home in Maadi in January 2004, built my farm, and became a fixture in my new rural neighbourhood. I was quite settled out here about 45 minutes from Maadi when the revolution showed up in 2011 and my children, who were both living abroad called and insisted that I stop my blog at once. I wasn't writing about anything political, but why take any chances when everything in Egypt seemed to be up in the air? Instead, I began posting news articles to Facebook, the products of my research into just what was happening in Egypt and the Middle East. Gradually, I realised that the things that were happening in my part of the world were often mirrored in events elsewhere, for example the way that the Trump/Clinton in the US was almost a rerun of the Morsi/Shafiq election in Egypt bordered on frightening. As things got more complex, I moved the news service to another page on Facebook, The Peoples' News Group, which is a page where news items from all over the world can be shared.

Much of my research was now public, political, and fairly unemotional, but I downloaded all of my blog entries and began reading them, which led to more personal and emotional thought. I had been writing my blog imagining myself describing and explaining life in Egypt to foreign friends, but I began writing it in the spring just before I decided to rent out our family home in Cairo, to sell our long unused-by-us family home in Toronto, and to buy land out near Abu Sir in the neighbourhood where I had kept my horses over 10 years, and which had proved to be a haven during my years in Cairo. My move, my farm-building, my establishment of my own personal life as opposed to previous lives as "the wife of", or "the mother of" was a complex and subtle process. For the first six months that I lived out here, I would drive into Maadi at least four times a week, until one day I realised that the only thing that happened on most visits was that I would spend money that I really didn't need to spend. At this epiphany, my finances got a real break and I began spending more time working with my horses and gardens. I began a fairly successful equestrian tourism business that was built on a different model from most riding stables here. We were more National Geographic on horseback, taking riders from all over the world through farms and villages on horseback while talking with them about the environment, social issues, history, antiquities and so on. We invited friends and visitors to lunch after riding or just for fun and I remembered how much I love cooking and designing dishes that were economical, locally sourced and produced, and highly nutritious. In short, I was discovering who I was.

The abrupt involvement of all of Egypt in the questions of change, how to enable it, how to thwart it, and just what on earth it really was brought many of us to a rather abrupt halt in 2011. We all endured at least four years of confusion, indecision, stagnation and all sorts of other quite unpleasant experiences. I saw friends of all ages leave Egypt in the hopes of finding better futures elsewhere. I watched other friends tentatively come home to try a new idea at home, offered suggestions, and often hugs and condolences when things didn't work out as anticipated. We gave up on equestrian tourism when a combination of increasingly stringent security measures in the deserts took many of our favourite desert trails and the decreasing interest in Cairo as a tourist destination saw our work lessen. We changed the farm's focus to education and service, offering field trips to schools, a venue for crafts, gardening, and a program to assist the local farmers with health care for their animals. Our work has grown exponentially, sort of like the spread of the virus that currently keeps me here on the farm maintaining a safe social distance.

These are odd times everywhere. The corona virus has governments at least encouraging people to stay home to avoid infection, and at the strongest authorizing complete lockdowns of cities and rural areas. However, you can’t really lock down agriculture because someone must do it so that everyone can eat. My farm isn’t one of the main providers of food for anyone but us, but still animals must be fed, plants cared for, and therefore my staff are being careful of everything they do but they are still coming in to work. At 71 with a history of bronchitis, everyone is telling me to stay on the farm away from the public, and as far as I can do this I will do so. It isn’t really a hardship since I’d rather be on the farm than anywhere else.

We had a massive rainstorm on Thursday and Friday just before they began muttering about having people stay home. A lot of us were expecting the announcement since we’d been watching the events in China, Italy and other places. But sadly the news in Egypt has been de-emphasizing the virus, which in turn undermines orders to avoid other people. You really can’t have people cajoled into feeling safe and at the same time get them to avoid social and physical interaction because it carries a danger. It’s totally impossible. I’ve gone for the warnings and explanations for my staff and a discussion of symptoms and how to handle them. The rainstorm’s main effect on the farm was to turn paddocks into quagmires of prime manure that had dried nicely and was about to be collected for renewing the earth in the gardens. That’s easy to do when it is dry, fluffy, and easy to spread. It isn’t quite so easy to do when it is thick, sticky and wet, but some of the lawns do have a nice layer of brown goo on them. Ordinarily, spreading manure around has to take into account the sensibilities of clients, but since there are no clients these days, we can just slather it on.

What Will I Be When I Grow Up?

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 16:39:00 +0000

Next month I am going to be 70 years old. I read that with a bit of shock because it truly doesn't seem quite real. I was just over 50 when my husband died and my world changed forever. Plenty of people at the time (mostly people who really didn't know me at all) told me not to worry, that I was "young and could still remarry". I just looked at them with disbelief because I was fairly certain that was NOT going to happen, although what was going to happen was not at all clear at the time. What did happen was that I had to deal with some pretty serious economic and psychological chaos, that I decided after about 4 years that I'd spent enough time on that and I bought the land for my farm, and just before that I began this blog. A year or so ago, I downloaded my blog posts, all of them... over about eight years worth, and I read them. It was an insight into my own life.

When I started writing the blog one of the sentences in the short bio I provided for it was something to the effect that I still didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. Sometime between 2003 and 2011, that sentence disappeared. In reading the blog posts, I tried to figure out when, why, and how I removed it. I honestly have no idea at all. But I now realise that my blog chronicled my transition from one life to a totally new one. At some point I grew up and I became something, and for months I puzzled over just what that was. Prior to 2003 I was a wife and mother, a teacher, a writer, a lot of things. I was the chief logistics officer of the Gabbani family and after my husband died, I was the chief mess cleaner-upper. Realising that the stress of the clean up process was doing nothing to either make my current life more pleasant, nor to extend my life, I decided to go back to my personal roots of small town/village living and I created the farm. Almost immediately, I began seeing the health benefits. My blood pressure and cholesterol levels on tests went back to my normal low levels. I slept better and had no need for coffee to keep myself going. A cup of tea in the morning and I was good. But that didn't answer the question of what had I grown up to be.

From the time I was young I absolutely knew that I wanted to raise some children. I wanted to be a mother. Being something of an academic over-achiever, I was told that since I obviously had the smarts to be a doctor, lawyer, or fill-in-the-blank, I had some kind of obligation to do so. Being told this only irritated me, and I steadfastly bounced from possible career or study to another equally interesting. Eventually, I did finish a university degree, and then another one, only to come to the conclusion before finishing a third one that my heart wasn't really in it. When my dean of graduate studies in the psychology department at the University of Waterloo asked me what I thought I might do next in my exit interview for leaving with my MA instead of a PhD, I told him that I might start a Mexican restaurant in Toronto. But I didn't do that. I did marry and have two marvelous kids, eventually about eight years on I moved to Egypt with my husband...and then I was just as multi-focussed as ever.

Handling a household with four different cultures in its makeup (my husband was Sudanese/Egyptian and I was American/Brit) was sort of normal in Canada, but we never really went back to Canada, and Egyptians, regardless of their wildly heterogenous cultural and genetic heritage, value homogeneity. There was a bit of a balancing act for all of us to manage. I taught English to French-speaking school students, did some writing during my first few years in Egypt, then I did supply teaching at the American school in Maadi for some years while my children were attending there, got into writing and editing for a magazine, but for the most part, logistics still took up the majority of my time. My husband was almost constantly traveling, so it was up to me to be the steady point in my kids' lives, and to make sure that the moving parts didn't slice off anyone's legs as our family members moved in and out of our mutual physical space. I recall a period when I was in my early 40's of wondering what the hell I was doing with my life and why I had needed a graduate degree in social psychology to do it. After beating myself around the head and shoulders with these questions for a few months, I finally decided that however lunatic my planning had been, I did have responsibilities that needed to be handled and that my life overall wasn't a terrible one, so I'd best just get on with it. And I did.

When the crash came, it was a big one. My kids were in their late teens when their father died, one in university in the US and the other about to join him. When they both were away at college, it was just me and the pack of lawyers, bankers, and businessmen who were disemboweling the businesses that had been my husband's life work. I looked on from a spot of relative safety and knew that there was no way in hell that I wanted to drop myself into that insanity, although I had no doubts about my ability to manage much of it. It is a very troubling situation to look at work that you know could could do better than a lot of other people who are doing it, but to want to walk away from it because it isn't your work to do and you feel that it would damage you to do it. It rather reminded me of how I felt at graduating from high school and being told about all the wonderful careers that I could have that I really didn't want. Very disconcerting.

Quite abruptly, I began writing my blog, the first writing I'd done since my husband had died, and I decided to move from Maadi to a rural area near Abu Sir. It was my offsprings' turn to be disconcerted. I rented out the family home and came to an area where I knew a lot of people and had friends living in the area, which somewhat reassured them, but what the hell was I doing building a farm and living in the back of beyond? My kids had only known their somewhat odd but urban mother. We all moved past the shock, my life began taking on a form of its own without my late husband or children defining it in any way, and it was sometime in this period when I decided that I had grown up. But what was I? Again, like about 15 years previously, I spent some months worrying about how to answer this question, and again as during my previous time of fretting, I guess that I sort of decided that this question was too hard to answer. I got on with the building of the farm, exploring avenues for income, becoming proficient in equestrian tourism, and enjoying the fact that my job was what I wanted to do even if I had to pay to do it. Not bad.

About seven years down the road, the revolution took place in Egypt, another outrageously abrupt event that I had absolutely no intention of missing even though I was just a spectator from the safety of my home in the country. I had never been someone who speculated about politics before, but I suddenly noticed that while I might not have been interested in politics, politics were certainly affecting my life and the lives of people that I loved and respected. My life took on a new facet as I turned my attention to trying to comprehend what the crazy forces at work in the Middle East and North Africa had in store for my home, myself and all the people around me, rural and urban alike. While eventually it would seem that the revolution changed little politically, it did change the way that we all looked at our lives, our country, and ourselves. My farm community had to relinquish tourism and find other outlets for ourselves. There was a lot of learning, studying, trying things out, and the farm has evolved even further. My staff, most of them with me for the past ten years or so, have changed, learned new skills and taken on new roles in our working community.

So here I am at almost seventy, and what have I grown up to be? I've become me. It truly is only very recently that I have realised that I don't need a label to slap on my forehead to let people know who or what I am. I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up because somehow I always assumed that it would be some kind of classification, something outside of me. But it simply isn't. I am me and I am very happy to exist as that. Perhaps much of the philosophical advice we pick up in books and conversations points to that conclusion. I currently feel that our job in our lives is to perfect being ourselves, and the things that we build, invent, create, and pass on are just byproducts of that process. My husband left a legacy in infrastructure for the grain industry in Egypt, but he most certainly was not that legacy. I hope to have a legacy of sorts when I move on to wherever it is that we move, but I most assuredly will not merely be that legacy. It will be a byproduct of my being me. If all we have to perfect is our me-ness, life is so much simpler.

copyright 2019 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Holding Lifelines

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 06:16:00 +0000

I've taken to waking up about 6:30 am each morning. A series of puppies who joined the pack and needed to go out and felt that they needed to play at an ungodly hour instigated the change but it has become habit now. I can't say that I like the call of Koko, the Amazon parrot, who begins his commentary on the day as the sun is rising. He sounds like a bad door hinge for much of his vocalisations. Sometimes I wonder if we could just teach him to whistle or do something socially more pleasing. On the other hand, I imagine that it all would mean something to another Amazon if we had one around.

The real attraction to the hour, however, is the quiet at the farm. Almost everyone is still asleep at home now, there is no one asking for my attention, other than the latest young dog, and I have the time to have a train of thought rather than the odd boxcar or caboose. I can write, plan the next batch of seed harvests, consider an exercise regime for our aging horse herd, and try not to think about an image of a world hurtling to disaster that assaults my mind every time I connect to the sources of the news that I use. We are all everywhere under this assault if we have the time and energy to connect to the world outside of our small domains, but sometimes I almost envy the villagers around me who don't have newspapers, who don't watch television news (and if they do, it is generally governmentally sponsored and designed not to rock any boats), and whose primary concerns are at the level of village politics, crops, and children. They are largely unwitting passengers on this terror-inducing ride that we all are sharing. They are, however, aware of how events in the country around them are affecting their small pockets of concern, such as the rising costs of electricity and fuels, the strange ways that the prices of foods increase while the amount of money they get for their crops does not increase, and the difficulties in getting medications for children and animals. Not being satisfied with the small picture of my neighbourhood, I know that I will connect to try to understand what the pattern of movement in the world in general is. This is what I began doing in 2011 when I could see that what was happening in Egypt was also happening in Tunisia, Syria, and Bahrain, generally with equally unsatisfying outcomes although each has been different.

Sometimes, however, I try to have a day in my domain, leaving the world beyond the farm to careen as it will, whether I am aware of it or not. Yesterday we had no visitors booked at the farm, and there was time to catch up on some left over chores. We had harvested most of our karkade before the weekend and I had spent some time peeling the thick petals of the seed pods off to dry for tea, while saving the pods to dry to supply us with the next year's crop. This is peaceful work, albeit colourful, since the dark wine red petals stain my hands a burgundy hue as I work. I asked one of the guys to collect the rest of the pods from plants that had been growing along the driveway so that I could finish the job and hope that the purple thumbs would go away soon. I had forgotten that one of my young women friends was coming by to interrupt my morning collection of depressing news items for my timeline, so her arrival was very welcome. I also got a phone call from a Toronto number, which was a young woman visiting Cairo who called to see if she could come out to go horseback riding. I have no idea at all how she'd heard of us, but I suggested that she come, and I ended up with a couple of women to chat with during the day.

We sat outside at the big wooden table speaking of photography projects, Egyptology, what to visit in Cairo and why, canine pack behaviour, lost loves, friendship, the search for guidance and clues in navigating our lives...the usual sorts of things I suppose. Not at all usual, I suppose in one way. I have never been very good at inconsequential chatter, so the kind of topics that allow our hopes and fears to bounce off a shell don't often come up. It was our visitor's birthday and she had decided that downtown Cairo being rather intimidating, she wanted to spend it in a more natural, calming situation and found herself at the farm. Cairo is intimidating. It is fast, crowded, nonlinear, deep, profound, with layer upon layer of history both modern and incredibly ancient...layers that push up from under sidewalks for the casual visitor to stub one's toe on. As Cairenes (ex-Cairene in my case) we advised deciding on places to explore that would create ripples in questions in herself and encourage her journey. As it happens, she told us that she had worked in IT for years and was finding herself attracted for some reason the writings of Jungian psychologists.

Our visitor went out for a ride with my staff for a couple of hours, my friend and I continued our conversation about the twists and turns of life during a three month period when she had been traveling, and I found myself with an image in my head that was becoming clearer and stronger. I have often spoken with friends about a web of old women who, like spiders, feel the tugs and jerks of events and concerns in our planet, but who are not there to prey on victims but there to keep the web steady so that the younger folk can repair connections, and strengthen the threads. I can list many of these women and my heart blesses them daily that they simply have the strength and health to exist, while I notice younger women who are working their ways from the center to the edges where eventually they will take the places of those of us who will go on. I don't know why the image is of women; it simply is. I'm not going to question that although when I have talked about my image with a few other women, they do understand. I know men who are supportive of the web, and perhaps they have a web of their own that I am not a party to. I'm comfortable with that.

Part of the clarification of the image came just last week when a former yoga teacher of mine, Debra, appeared suddenly in Cairo accompanying her husband on a trip here. We hadn't seen each other for about fifteen years as she and her family had moved to South America in a work transfer for her husband. We haven't really been in touch, but she has been in my thoughts almost constantly, since she was the instigator, the catalyst, for enormous change in my life and in the lives of a number of my friends who were also her students. We studied yoga with her, but we also learned how to hold and protect our souls while changing our lives to be more expressive of who we all were. We didn't have much time together during her visit, but, to use an utterly mundane image, I felt like a battery that had been popped into a socket to recharge. She told me that she had been dreaming about me and felt a real need to see me in the flesh and see what I was doing. As it happened she and her husband showed up at the farm just in time for lunch and I waved my hand over the dishes proclaiming that "this is what I am doing much of the time", preparing and serving food to sustain and strengthen the body and soul hopefully. We both had a good laugh because my claim was both true and too simple and we both knew it.

Perhaps my image of crones holding the lifelines of the world is just a way of reassuring myself in frightening times. I'm not sure. I doubt that I will ever be sure in my lifetime. Our visitor from Toronto mentioned that one Jungian analyst from Canada who recently died had been saying that a pendulum has been swinging in the universe from a masculine to a feminine axis and that much of the misogyny, violence against women, and the attempts to roll back rights for women are stemming from the reactions to this change in orientation. Perhaps this is true. I don't know. But at the depths of my soul I can feel the need for balance among all the aspects of the world, human and nonhuman, and we will continue to try to protect this balance in my pocket of the world.

Putting Some Things Back Together

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 15:31:00 +0000

For about the past eight years, I have been posting news on Facebook, partly at the request of the offspring who worry about my well-being. There are all sorts of well-being, however, and I have found that I miss my blog. It never was about politics (although these days politics sadly infuse almost all aspects of our lives everywhere...and not in very gracious ways.) and I will continue that policy. But I needed to come back to Living In Egypt.

So where was I before I was so rudely interrupted? I was quite a bit younger, that much I know. I will be 70 this spring and I find it little short of amazing. I've outlived both of my parents and the inside me consistently finds the physical me annoying. I have to keep reminding myself that I can no longer do everything in the world, or even at the farm, myself. A recent visit to my mechanic (aka the orthopedic surgeon who has replaced my knees, revamped my shoulders, and put a plate in my right leg when I broke it with a stupid misstep) revealed that while my left shoulder has a better range of movement than my right, it also only has one muscle holding it together instead of the two gnarly ones in my right shoulder. What that meant was a stern warning to keep my hands no higher than my shoulders if possible, and this combined with the numbness in my right foot following the fall, has put paid to my horseback riding. Riding has been so much a part of my life and sanity that it is excruciating to read what I just wrote. I haven't even been able to write it because writing it made it real. I still have the horses who have a home with me until they move on to wherever all the creatures are waiting for me, but I can't ride. I can't ride. The pain of that sentence is something that can simply not be explained to anyone who hasn't had to give up their soul activity.

Riding to me was never about learning to do the perfect 20 meter circle, or about jumping a fence taller than I was, or about earning a blue ribbon in a show. It was about freedom and companionship. A horse can go just about anywhere a person on foot can, and they are much smarter than to waste their time walking around malls and shops. My earliest memories of heaven are the trail rides that the Balboa Park Stables (now long gone) used to reward the lesson kids with every couple of weeks. A string of horses ambling along under the eucalyptus trees with kids... I know that the stables were on their way out at the time. A freeway had cut through much of the trail area for the stables already. But my family moved from San Diego to Ojai where one was greeted by a large yellow "Yield To Horses" sign on the way into town. Here there were horses everywhere and most of the roads in the early 60's had wide dirt shoulders for riders. I had truly found heaven.

Riding is not just a pastime, however, it is a lifestyle and one that can be rather unforgiving, especially if you own your own horse. In a sense, I was lucky not to own one as a youngster. But nevertheless, the demands of university and the costs of riding in the US and Canada meant that from the end of high school I might have ridden about twenty times in as many years until I moved to Egypt. I was so busy with learning, marrying, living, having children and doing all of those normal things that I essentially forgot about riding, but everything came back when my husband came home one day in Alexandria to announce that I was now the owner of a young Arab mare. I'm sure he had no idea what a Pandora's box he opened in 1990. Ten years later when he died I had five horses to care for.

Within four years I had about fifteen horses as friends who were moving begged me to take horses from them to keep them from going to pyramids' stables, and I started an equestrian tourism operation here based on the concept of leisurely travel through the Egyptian countryside and desert rather than a frenzied dash near the Giza pyramids. I was exploring trails on horseback when I wasn't riding with clients and I decided that I needed to be living out in the same area where my horses were living and working. I bought the land to begin designing and building my farm while renting a small home and garden close by. It was a relief not to commute from Maadi, but there was more than enough work to keep me busy. There were many days when I was in the saddle between four and six hours a day with hours of supervising builders in what time remained. The revolution and subsequent drop in tourism tossed us into a new path of educating first my staff and later others. Now most of our work is in education in many aspects, but the horses are still here although others are riding them.

It's been a hard transition to make. The broken leg involved almost four months without being allowed to walk much, but the broken heart has taken much longer. I've avoided the horses, I realise now. My lovely grey gelding reminded me just the other day of this when I helped walk him with a young student from one of the schools visiting us. While I was telling her how Doobie and I had been partners for about 20 years, I caught his eye on me as if saying, "And where have you been lately?" It's time to put things back together.

copyright 2018 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Looking To The New

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 10:44:00 +0000

Last day of the year and I don't know whether to breathe a sign of relief or hold my breath in fear. I suspect that I'm not alone in this. The world is such a peculiar place right now. Day before yesterday someone attacked a church in Helwan, shooting a guard and later being shot himself. A video of the shooter showed a man wandering aimlessly in the street in front of the church carrying an automatic rifle while the people living along the road hid behind their shutters and exclaiming and filming. It was hard to figure out if the man was totally drugged, mad, or had an appointment. One of the normal aspects of life in this part of the world is our tendency to look at everything with a very jaded eye. All too often things are not what they seem.

But while my daughter is huddling indoors hiding from the lost Arctic blasts sweeping through Wisconsin, I'm sitting in my living room with the doors open to my garden. The clouds are gathering against the hills on the other side of the Nile so the domes on the evil dog kennel next door to my horses are picked out by sunlight and gleaming against the dark grey. The dogs there, happily, seem to be quiet and content for a change and the noisiest thing in the garden is Koko, our rescue Amazon whose father must have been a peacock to judge from the melody and volume of his calls. Pretty bird who sounds like the worst rusty gate in the world. The advantage of being closer to the equator in all of this climate change muddle seems to be that things don't change that much here along the earth's waistline, although the summers are longer and a bit hotter than before. I think that I will be able to cope with climate change for a while more, even with my not liking air conditioning. That is a point on the good side while looking at the coming year.

We have been very busy at the farm this winter with more families coming out to relax in the gardens, more local people coming to ride in the countryside, and more schools coming to do classes for children about nature, farming, animals and so on. While busy can be tiring, it is good for my staff and for the budget. I'm not seeing immediate signs of issues that will be causing problems for us in the new year, but then, on the other hand, who really knows? One of the things that I see my friends in North America learning these days with the strange one running the show there, is our wait-and-see attitude about the future. We are used to being surprised by our leaders but this is a new experience for people who have been lucky to have more stable individuals before.

So let's hear it for stability and some peace.

copyright 2017 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Where Did I Go?

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Wed, 20 Dec 2017 18:22:00 +0000

Fifteen years ago I started writing Living in Egypt because friends of mine in Europe and North America were worried about my safety and well-being in the "dangerous" Middle East. I wanted to tell them all the ways that Egypt really was no different from anywhere else so that they might be reassured, but in 2003 finding general information on the internet about what passes for normality in Egypt was very difficult. At the same time, I moved from my urban home in a very comfortable upper middle class neighbourhood south of Cairo, Maadi, to a farm that I began building in the villages north of Abu Sir. It was a period of enormous change for me, and to be honest, taking the time to read my own blog from beginning to end recently was quite an eye-opener. I had decided that having been a career wife and mother for so long, it was time for me just to be me whatever that might be. I wasn't completely aware at the time that this was what I was doing, but it most definitely was. Just as the years from 2000 to 2004 passed in a blur of discovery, panic, fear, worry, and feeling out of my depth in my late husband's corporate world, the years of 2004 to about 2010 really were a more leisurely, but equally disorienting, exploration of myself and my relationship to my world as I was redesigning it centered around my farm and my neighbours. It took me months to realise that I didn't really need to be in Maadi almost every day and to be relaxed about being home in the country. At the time, many of my friends out here in Abu Sir were commuting into the city to work, and that seemed normal.

During the first few years there was a lot to organise at the farm. We were fairly busy doing equestrian tourism and I was riding almost daily with clients. I'd forgotten how hard I'd been working at this until I re-read my posts. At the time, I had help at the farm to care for the horses (we didn't have the goats and sheep yet) and the young men working with me were pretty standard grooms. They would assist me with the riding, but they couldn't communicate with the clients unless they were Egyptian, and it took me a long time to teach them a basic premise of my work out here. I felt that while riding in the countryside it was utterly necessary to be courteous to the farmers in the area because they were working around me, while I was having fun. Many of the young men felt that simply being on a horse made them somehow of a higher class and were inclined to imperiously order a donkey cart driver to move to the side of the track to let us pass. That kind of behaviour didn't earn anyone any points among the neighbours. Horseback riders in the countryside were almost unknown at the time, and I wanted our interactions to be friendly. Gradually, I sorted the staffing issues out, culminating in a day in 2008 when I fired every one of my grooms in one fell swoop, necessitating a grand staff search. The reason for the firing was simple. One or all of them had taken to selling the manure from our paddocks as an independent project. I was unaware of it until one day I saw the cart leaving with a full load, and when I happened to check that same day the manure had not been deposited at the land we were renting to grow berseem for the horses. When I asked where the donkey cart had been going when it left, every one of the young men just sat and looked at me without answering a word. I gave them time for me to drink a cup of tea to think about answering me and told them that if I didn't get an answer, they would all be fired. They did not and to their immense surprise and the shock of the neighbouring farms, I told them to take their things and leave immediately. This left me with a young girl from Alaska who was living at the farm and helping out, my best friend from Toronto who was my age and knew nothing at all about horses, a gardener, and my man Friday, Mohamed Said, to take care of about 20 horses. When friends called me to ask me what I was going to do, I told them that I imagined I would be feeding a lot of horses for a while. It wasn't as though I didn't know how to care for them after all.

My farm was already known as a good place to work and it only took a few days for word to get around that I needed help. Pairs and trios of men showed up at the front gate and they were quickly weeded through to find the ones that were not going to have a heart attack at working with a pack of a dozen or so dogs. The first group lasted 24 hours since they were impolite to the people working at the farm. The second included an older (mid-30's) man who came in and patronisingly informed me that he knew everything about horses and would have the farm sorted immediately. Unfortunately for him, he didn't know anything about listening to instructions and following programs, and he was out on his butt in 48 hours. Within a week though, I had the start of my present staff and things were looking up. I had established my reputation as a real boss and someone who had to be reckoned with. The farm rules that included the necessity on the part of the staff to be polite to each other (and of course to me), not to have voices raised in shouting matches, and that a polite request from me meant an order to be obeyed right away were odd to the guys, but they soon learned to appreciate them. A courteous working environment is important. It took me years to teach them to become proactive, and take initiative, and much of that change occurred after 2011. There was a revolution then, but it wasn't at all what anyone thought.

I was as astonished as everyone else on the 25th of January, 2011. I had been aware of rumblings on Facebook about a protest against police brutality and I was aware as well of a deep discontent. I had joined Facebook as a means of seeing the holiday photos that my kids were not sending to me directly, and I quickly found how nice it was to make contact with friends who were now living in other parts of the world. I didn't use it much other than posting riding photos and dog pictures. When we found ourselves glued to the TV for 18 days watching events unrolling in Cairo, I began looking more seriously at the use of Facebook as a news source and to investigate Twitter for a means of listening to the conversations (only the ones in English sadly) of individuals who were in the streets to have a more immediate source. My children immediately contacted me from the US in concern, and while I made it clear to them that I wasn't going to evacuate for any reason, we did agree that my blog should be put on hold as we were not sure how things would turn out and no one wanted a reason for me to either land in jail or have to leave the country. This was why the blog went quiet for so long. The days when the phones and the internet went silent also gave me some thinking time.

I had made friends via my blog with people from Global Voices, a group I highly recommend for information about life in all sorts of people, and on Twitter I began following them. From that point, I looked at who they were following, and so on down the food chain, to find people who were on the ground and knew what they were talking about. My daughter in New York also did a similar exercise and we divided up the day so that I was online from 7 am to 7 pm and she during our nighttime hours. We mined Twitter for up to date information which was initially passed on to friends in the US who posted it on Facebook for people looking for news. Eventually as abnormality became normal, the kids agreed that it was ok for me to post news articles on my Facebook feed as long as they'd been published elsewhere and I made no comment that would get me arrested. I was doing a lot of online research not just about Egypt's issues but also about Bahrain, Tunisia, and Syria, where similar uprisings were happening. I really wanted to understand what was happening, and having done the work already I decided to share it with my friends. Most of them appreciated it, since the "normal" news is generally written from at least arms length and also fairly slowly. The Facebook feed has turned into a news service and both of my kids have unfollowed me because it simply contains more news than they like on Facebook. I don't mind that at all, and in fact recommended that they do it. This was the beginning of the political part of my new self. I had always avoided politics carefully, but when a huge wave washes over your nice little section of the beach and pulls you into the water, learning to swim suddenly seems like a good idea.

The events of 2011 had much more far-reaching effects on my life than I had imagined. The tourism that had been a major activity at the farm suddenly dried up as people outside Egypt decided once again that Egypt was way too dangerous a place to visit. Even worse, the insurance companies affiliated with embassies, companies and so on here in Egypt went through a period of forbidding expats in Egypt from traveling outside of their own neighbourhoods. Not only were we not getting visitors from abroad, but local people weren't coming out either. From 2011 to about 2014, Egyptian society itself was confused, unstable and unsure. The changes that occurred during those years would confuse anyone and I was very, very thankful for the peace of the countryside. Farmers simply don't have time to protest. Someone always has to care for the animals and crops. It's a 24 hour a day job.

We had decided to look into breeding goats in the beginning of January 2011 and I had an appointment with a friend who bred milk goats for January 27 to go buy some stock from him. Needless to say, we postponed the appointment, but on February 12, we went down to his farm near Beni Suef and bought a trio of goats that formed the basis of our current flock. We named the buck Google, and the two does were Twitter and Horreya. They were Alpine/Nubian/Saanen mix and the offspring of Google and our baladi does already in residence were given political names like Suzanne, Hosny, Tantawi, Bashir, Bashar, and so on. With not much else to do, we all began learning about goat breeding and care, a huge change for a bunch of young men who saw themselves as keepers of horses, as horses are much more noble animals than goats. Unfortunately, horses do not produce milk and cheese (something the guys also had to get used to) and mostly just stood about costing us money since there were few people coming to ride. And awkwardly, our horses are rescues, meaning that they come for the duration of their lives and selling them is out of the question, even if there were a market for them. A life change for all of us was in the making.

With the unsettled times of the post revolutionary period we saw price increases at exactly the same time that places like the farm were finding themselves without any clients at all. Hotels and restaurants were closing all around us, and I found myself with a group of young men who were smart and beginning to open their minds, but who were incredibly bored. Some permaculture classes were held at the farm, and the guys were told to help with the work and to study this. We began using the new knowledge to put one of the main outputs of the animals (manure) to work, growing our vegetables. If I didn't have income to give the staff raises, at least we could offset some of the food costs for their families. Sometime in 2012 one of the vets working with the Donkey Sanctuary branch in Egypt came to me asking if I knew any young men who wanted to learn to be farriers, the people who trim and care for the feet of donkeys, horses, and mules.

Thinking of my staff, I told him that I had a number of young men and assigned them to the staff of the Donkey Sanctuary once a week for about six weeks of training. Initially they saw the assignment as a distinct demotion, but their teachers were excellent and they all came home bubbling with information and ideas after the first day. About the same time, an idea that had been simmering with me for some years came to a boil and I collaborated with a young vet about the possibility of helping the farmers in our area who were having a very tough time with veterinary care. With the increases in the prices of gas, medications, food, the costs for a vet visit had risen to the point where a farmer could not pay, and there were no free vets available. I had long thought that by providing anti-parasite medications, wound treatment, and other preventative medications along with education, the farmers could avoid many of the major problems. I had done quite a lot of research finding local alternative sources to the active ingredients in worming medications, for example, and had found that I could worm a donkey for about 5 LE. This meant that our work would be quite reasonably priced. In 2013 we started the Rural Wellness Initiative to help the local farmers.

When you can't necessarily make money, it is better to make sure that your time is well-spent. Until 2013, there wasn't much income out there. Luckily, our expenses were kept to a minimum that could be covered by my income from other sources. What was increasing in my farm staff was the confidence and self-worth of my staff. A group of fairly average young men from the villages around me, who had not finished primary school as their teachers had told them that they were too stupid for school, were accomplished farriers, trained vet assistants, understood the rudiments of organic gardening, and were discovering their skills in teaching farmers how to better care for their animals. And, even more important, they were discovering that helping others simply because you can felt good. They took more pride in their work and were more interested in types of training. We had a Cadre Noir-trained instructor come to work at the farm while his wife was based here in the Dutch embassy. The guys learned so much from him about training riders and horses. They harassed him for information and knowledge. Gradually, the companies, schools, and embassies were easing up on regulations about coming out to the dangerous farm areas and people began coming out to the farm more to enjoy the green space, play with animals, and feel safe and calm. With schools coming out more, I began working with my staff so that they could take over more of the teaching duties on their own. I needed people who could give good lessons in basic horsemanship, talk knowledgeably about our gardens, discuss the care and feeding and milking of our goats and sheep and so on. What had been very much a one woman show needed to branch out, because I was also getting older and simply couldn't do everything anymore.

Now approaching 2018, Al Sorat Farm is much, much busier. We have school visits on an average of about once a week in the winter, and families coming on weekends. I feel that I can trust my core staff to handle almost anything. They have even been teaching themselves English and are fairly fluent in it although the vocabulary might be a bit limited. I have also decided that I need for my own sake to renew my work on my blog. It is still about living in Egypt, and about the commonalities and differences in human existence. I'm going to leave political commentary to experts. But I do hope to do more writing off of Facebook.

copyright 2017 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Ramadan Greetings.

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Sat, 27 May 2017 13:10:00 +0000

The wind today is hot and dry, enough to parch you from the inside out, and it is the first day of Ramadan. My staff are mostly fasting and given that the temperature is over the 35 degree C cut off level, they are resting (sleeping) in the shade of their reed hut. The temperature limit for work was initially created for the horses who have a hard time cooling their core temperatures when the ambient temperature is too high. Humans do much better cooling themselves, but honestly once the temperature hits over 35 degrees C, aestivation becomes a very interesting word. Aestivation is the heat-induced version of hibernation wherein an animal becomes very quiet and rests in the shade to avoid the heat. It is mainly considered a habit of reptiles, but it makes sense for other animals too in Egypt in the summer. The weather forecasts say that the temperatures should drop day after tomorrow, which will be a relief to everyone.

Ramadan is moving gradually into the cooler months of the spring, winter and fall in the weird backwards crawl of the Islamic calendar through the Gregorian calendar. Subsequent Ramadans will be cooler, have shorter fasting days, and will require a different kind of patience because it is harder to justify the long naps on shorter cooler days. This is more or less the end of our string of summer Ramadans for a number of years. The adaptation of our society to this fasting requires an adaptation of its own to the difference in the length of the days. But the fact is that no matter how long the days, the month of festivities that mark this month in Egypt is disruptive to routines.

When my children were young and were learning about Islam I was fasting with them and preparing iftar every evening. Ramadan was one of the few times when my husband would actually be home at dinner time, unless he had social engagements...business iftars are almost every evening. Later I found that I had an issue with highly reactive blood sugar and was warned by my doctor that fasting in general wasn't good for me and I stopped doing it. But during Ramadan, our family routine did not change that much. We were not addicted to the Ramadan television festival that keeps people up all night. There was school and work the next day, so everyone turned in at a reasonable time. We also didn't change our diet much during the month, having a light evening meal without any sweets at the end of it.

Now that I am living alone at the farm, my Ramadan schedule is even quieter during the summer fasts. Visitors to the farm usually come in the morning to be able to head home before the pre-iftar traffic insanity. Driving during the two or three hours before sunset is essentially something that one only does because it is absolutely necessary, so no one is going to be traveling out here at that time. My staff live nearby and they go home just before sunset, having taken care of the evening meals for the animals. Of course the wives and mothers have done all the work for the iftar. I remember my riding friends in Alexandria who used to invite me to ride before iftar...their way of distracting themselves from hunger and thirst. It was a nice idea, but I had to point out that they all had wives who were getting their meal ready and in my case I WAS the wife who would be doing that. The lightbulb would switch on over the heads and there would be a rueful shrug. I don't bother with iftar since I am not fasting, but my diet is lighter during Ramadan and I have something very simple and easy. If anything, Ramadan is a bit of a holiday for me since the work of visitors to the farm is much less.

This year the general happiness that characterises the Egyptian approach to Ramadan has been sadly tempered with the tragedy of the attack on the Christian families in the south and the news that Egyptian planes are bombing in Libya in retaliation. The connection between these two events is not entirely clear, but then most things in Egypt aren't generally entirely clear. Perhaps some clarity will come later, but perhaps not. While the month is one of fasting which seems very solemn, Egyptians focus on the breaking of the fast with friends and family, which makes Ramadan here almost like a month long Christmas season with gatherings at night, special meals, and a huge emphasis on family. The fact that this season has been started out in blood has not been lost on us and we are all mourning. I hope that it will not also end the same way.

copyright 2017 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Changing Gears

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Mon, 22 May 2017 09:07:00 +0000

Six years ago things happened in Egypt that changed much of how we saw ourselves and how others saw us. All of a sudden with the alleged Arab Spring in early 2011, the eyes of the world were on Egypt and other countries in the Middle East. To say that things didn't exactly work out as planned or hoped (since there really wasn't much planning involved in the events of 2011 and the following years) would probably be the understatement of the century. At the time of the unrest my children asked me politely but very forcefully to stop blogging for a while. I like my children and I could understand their concern (like if I got deported I would be driving them out of their minds) so I went along with it. Meanwhile I was trying to make sense of the political activity in the area and was doing a lot of research with journalists on Twitter and other forums, and I was sharing that information on Facebook for friends of mine who had lived in Egypt, visited in Egypt, or who were just interested in Egypt. My Facebook feed turned into a news service of sorts where odd bits of information are shared with the world about life in the Middle East. That was the original goal of Living In Egypt, after all, to give people outside the country an idea of what it was like to actually live here. But after six years of mostly doing the news, life has changed again in Egypt and I've decided that it is important to document this change.

My farm went into the Arab Spring period as a place where people came to do equestrian tourism. We had visitors from abroad who would come to stay for a week or so in Egypt and would ride our horses seeing Egypt very much up close and personal. Immediately after the uprising in 2011 we still had a few visitors but the numbers fell quickly to nothing. This was, to say the least, a very difficult period. Not only were there no visitors from abroad but many companies, embassies, and schools in Cairo were extremely nervous about their people even traveling around the city, fears that most of us living here found quite baseless...but no one was asking us. Financially we managed, but for me the most difficult issue was how to keep a group of bright young men occupied while most of our work languished. The opportunity came up with The Donkey Sanctuary to have them trained as farriers and vet assistants, so I decided that if they weren't working much, they might as well learn. At first they were reluctant, but realising over time that they had real skills and knowledge was a powerful push for them to learn more. These were young men who had never finished primary school, having been told that they weren't smart enough...but it was not the case at all.

In 2011 we began a goat breeding project at the farm to add the characteristics of some European and Middle Eastern goats to the local baladi Egyptian goats to improve the production of both milk and meat. We are now on about our third or fourth generation and our herd is a mix of Syrian, Saanen, Alpine, Nubian, and Boer goats along with the baladi base, which is important for its hardiness. We have since branched out into breeding Sudanese sheep, which are a short-haired sheep that give very nice milk for cheese. During a period of serious power cuts in 2012 we began looking at improving the viability of electricity and water at the farm. There is no provision for water supplies out here in the countryside and the electricity is somewhat eccentric to say the least. We arranged to dig a new 40 meter well closer to the animal paddocks than the original 20 meter well behind the house and I contacted a friend of my children's who had come back to Egypt to work in the alternative energy field about installing solar power. That began a four year project to gradually provide solar power to the farm and to ensure that we had sufficient water supplied for all the animals and our growing agricultural projects.

With all of these projects going on, we also started an initiative to provide free veterinary care to the local farmers who were becoming increasingly harmed by the inflation in gas, electricity and medical costs. Vets work with us and most of our work is caring for wounds and doing maintenance on the farm animals to teach the farmers that it is easier to keep their animals healthy than it is to fix them when they are broken. Even with the demise of tourism in the Cairo area, we were keeping fairly busy, and once the panic over security dropped we found a new source of income and visitors in the schools and families from Cairo who wanted to come to the farm to learn about animals, plants, farming...or just to take a nap under a mango tree. With the general stress level for Cairenes increasing as well, a quiet spot for relaxing in a green space has been very appreciated.

So living in Egypt has definitely become a new game. We are dealing with ferocious inflation here, insecurity about what is going on in the region in general, disillusionment with the hoped for social changes in the country, and concern for what will come next. The political sphere is ephemeral and uncontrollable it would seem, so I see no point in commenting on that. Here at Al Sorat Farm we are concentrating on doing agricultural research and development introducing new varieties of vegetables which we grow organically (one of the contributions of the many horses and other livestock at the farm) and then harvest seed to provide seedlings to other growers. We are experimenting with goat, sheep and buffalo cheese. We have increased our selection of unusual trees with lychee, longan, pecan, neem, karob, and sapodilla trees in the garden. So the focus in the blog is going to narrow a bit to life on the farm and our activities here. This is only appropriate since as I approach my seventies, I am less and less interested in subjecting myself to the craziness of Cairo traffic, the crowding and the pollution, and all the other urban problems. This blog has always been about my life in Egypt and these days it is more about plants, animals, and people in the countryside. For old readers, I hope that you enjoy my posts, while for new ones, I hope that they give you an insight into another lifestyle.

copyright 2017 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Categorising Ourselves And its Price

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Fri, 05 Jun 2015 06:07:00 +0000

The recent controversy surrounding Caitlyn Jenner's coming out as a transsexual has brought up some extremely important issues in human interactions in general for me. A good friend posted an article by Nuridden Knight looking at a comparison of the issues body image and self love for black people and for transsexuals. I personally would not have made those comparisons, but then I am about as WASP as they come in terms of my externals and have always enjoyed the benefits of belonging, at least as far as surface characteristics apply, to the privileged class in this world. I think that she has made some excellent points in this article and the viewpoint interests me because I have never been able to view the world as black/white even with shades in between because I was raised to believe that the colour of a person's skin was one of the least important attributes of that person. It was an issue that was never brought up in our family, although we had very few friends who were persons of any sort of colour other than vaguely pink partly due to my father's job as a Navy scientist (this was in the 50's and 60's) and partly due to where we lived. But considerations of colour or ethnicity were also not applied to Hispanic families in our area either and to even parrot a word of discrimination was to bring the wrath of the parental units on us.

My first boyfriend when I was growing up was of mixed race and ethnicity and it was a massive shock to me to encounter people's animosity to us as a couple in the early 60's. I moved to Canada in my early 20's where "black" people were from the Caribbean for the most part and very different in culture from the "black" people that I'd known in the US, which to me validated my parents' teaching. After all, how could the attributes of "black" people be so different if they were determined by skin colour? My late husband was Egyptian/Sudanese and the reactions of people in Louisiana to him when we visited New Orleans in the 70's was at once hilarious and horrifying. He was sporting a fairly impressive afro and was pretty dark from a lot of time in the sun, but as the nephew of the first president of Sudan he had no preset option for being of a lesser status due to the colour of his skin or the curl of his hair, and people we encountered, who on seeing him initially as "black", generally were very taken aback at his complete ignoring of that category in his interactions with them. Happily, he was a charming individual and things never got difficult, although it was extremely unsettling to a lot of people there in Louisiana. So the binary of "black" versus "white", while as a couple we probably exemplified it, was simply not workable.

I've always felt that while we see sex as being a binary...you are either a man OR a woman...it isn't really. That word "or" is a dangerous one. While working in Vancouver as a cocktail waitress to put myself through university, I was lucky enough to meet a number of transsexual individuals who while they might look like a man or a woman externally definitely gave off the "opposing" vibes, but how opposing were they in reality? As I grew older I realised that just as one's personal mannerisms were not a binary, neither were one's sexual preferences. For women sliding across sexual preferences can be easier than for men. After all, as mothers we are as loving to our sons as to our daughters, or at least we should be. It is quite natural to us to hug other women to comfort them as it is to hug men, and the division between simple interpersonal caring and loving sexual behaviour isn't a fence but a pasture or sometimes a forest.

Perhaps because men have not been so much a part of the parenting/nurturing culture in western society, it is easier to see their sexuality as binary, but it is also a continuum...or there wouldn't be so many strong male bonds. Despite being married and having children, I know that I have characteristics that might be labeled as male, and here in the villages of Egypt, I have indeed been called a "man" as a compliment (which I find rather odd and sometimes uncomfortable) because I am happy to be living on my own, running my farm, and taking responsibility for my people...and because I don't scare easily or back away from a confrontation when I feel I'm right. But is that really the behaviour of a "man" or is it the behaviour of someone who is simply certain in my own role, responsibility and power within my community and family? As well, I've been blessed with many nurturing, gentle male friends...so are they womanly or even, gasp! gay? Not at all. They are, however, more complex and interesting individuals than those who block away that aspect of the personality.

Life is so much simpler and less taxing to us when we categorise our world into little boxes, but in reality we dribble outside those boxes all the time. Living without our category boxes is infinitely more work. We actually have to pay attention to the individuals with whom we are interacting and see them in their glorious complexity. This takes time that modern society and human laziness often would like to avoid, so we categorise them. But what happens when we don't avoid the reality? Our world is so much larger and full of possibility and promise. With my work with our veterinary/farming charity that operates out of my farm, I have gotten to know the villagers, both men and women, as well as their children, as individuals rather than as inhabitants of that large box of "fellahin". There are those with whom I really enjoy spending time, others that I could cheerfully toss into the nearest canal because they refuse to open their eyes and ears to new ways of caring for their animals and families...but this is to be expected. Not all humans, dogs, birds, horses, or cats are enjoyable companions for every individual, and there is usually someone who likes the individuals that I do not like.

Looking at the question of how we accept the variety of individuals in our world whether it be through the lens of colour, sexuality, sex, gender, or social class clarifies the same issues at stake here in Egypt with the tendency of many to divide Egypt into social classes. We have the wealthy, theoretically educated (since they have financial and social access to "good" schools) and we have the poor and uneducated who have been told that they cannot be judges because their father was a farmer or trash collector. "City" people ascribe attributes to "country" people that don't necessarily fit in the actuality of individuals in these categories. And the opposite is also true. "Secular" people ascribe attributes to "religious" people that are equally without a good fit. Recently I've had groups of women who wear niqab bring their children out to the farm because my staff (who are mostly men other than myself and my housekeeper) are considerate and will stay away from the garden so that the women can enjoy the air without the black veil that they choose to wear in public...and they are well-read, well-travelled, interesting, questioning women, fascinating to talk to and very enjoyable as companions. Once you lose the category of Darth Vader clones, they are marvelous people. I do not necessarily agree with all that they believe but I do find them to be people with whom I am happy to spend some of my time, and I feel that I have been enriched by this interaction. The important point here is to appreciate the differences and enjoy them rather than to block because of them.

In her article, Nurredin Knight talks about learning to love herself as a black woman and accepting her entire being as what she is and what she should be. She questions whether sexual reassignment surgery is such a good idea. Wouldn't it be better just to accept on a societal level that just as there are people of different heights, weights, colours, athletic abilities and so on, there are also people of different aspects of sexuality and gender? When my children were young, one of their favourite books was called Leo The Lop and it was about a rabbit who had floppy ears who felt that somehow he wasn't normal because his ears didn't stand up like other rabbits. This is, of course, an oversimplification of a massive issue that touches every aspect of human endeavour. What is "normal" anyway? Much of the sectarian strife in the Middle East is rooted in the idea that there is only one "normal", just as sectarian issues in North America, while not necessarily expressed in religious terms, are also. One group can not decide that it is "normal" but no one else is. In this world, we need to lose the categories, all of them, and look at people as individuals who are individually kind, productive, inclusive, and honest...or they are not. And individually as people they should be part of our lives...or not.

Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

June 5, 2015

On Bombs

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Sun, 08 Mar 2015 14:14:00 +0000

Yesterday I was greeted on opening Facebook, one of the best sources of information in Egypt, by a post by the daughter of a close friend saying that the police had shown up in a very timely manner to take care of what appeared to be a bomb near their apartment building in Maadi. She had been contacted by a neighbour who informed her of the arrival of the police and her boab (the doorman to the apartment building) told her that someone had seen something near the large electrical box on the corner that had wires and looked very suspicious, so the police had been called. There subsequently was a small boom, then a larger boom, and the problem seemed to be sorted.

Today her mother called me before bringing a friend visiting from Finland to see me here at the farm and we were talking about the incident. Naturally, everyone is very happy that the object had not blown up the electrical connection or caused any injuries, and she was very happy that she and her friend had been at the beach at Ain Sokhna, thus missing the excitement. I asked if there was any further information about what exactly was involved and what had happened. She told me that while the object had looked suspicious, as far as she knew there was no official statement that it had been a bomb. Apparently the police brought along a big metal box into which they placed the offending object and then performed a controlled detonation. It might well have been a bomb, but now it is in a thousand bits, so it would be hard to tell. On the other hand, she pointed out that the piles of garbage that were usually surrounding the electricity box on the corner were now gone, so perhaps it was a plot by the neighbourhood to get the spot cleaned up. As usual, no one really knows.

There are odd homemade bombs going off in various parts of Egypt, this we do know. Today one went off at Carrefour in Alexandria killing one and injuring six. Most of these are aimed at the police, much like in the 90's when the police and Islamists were in an informal war. Most of us who live in Egypt do our best to avoid the police or government buildings if it is at all possible (also like during the 90's), but then we try to avoid them most of the time since contact with the government and police is almost never very pleasant. I have to go into the dreaded Mogamma (the abyss of state bureaucracy in Tahrir Square) sometime soon to renew my residence visa, but I keep putting it off simply because I don't want to go there, not out of fear.

Yesterday, while this excitement was going on in Maadi, we had a couple of families at the farm with their children to play in a wading pool and romp with dogs and baby goats. Neither family was particularly concerned, though one had been redirected when driving near the site of the bomb that cleaned up the corner electrical box. I'm sure that somewhere in Egypt people are very worried about all this, but to be quite honest, I don't know them. Most of us accept the fact that much of this falls into the "Shit Happens" category that we really can't do much about in our daily life. You take reasonable precautions, pay attention to the news, and get on with your life. Many people say that they'd rather deal with the odds of these random bombs than the possibility that some unbalanced individual might decide to shoot them over some imagined slight or something. Death really is one of the unavoidable things in life, so losing time worrying about it doesn't seem terribly logical.

copyright 2015 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Catching Up To Myself

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 16:26:00 +0000

The last few months have been a whirlwind of strangeness in the Middle East. I keep up with the news on my Facebook page for friends who have lived here and perhaps left but who are still interested in an area that is a weird kind of black hole in the normal media. People hear about either the most irrelevant or the most horrific things that might happen here, but when you live in MENA (short for Middle East/North Africa) the real news runs the gamut from things that make you laugh out loud, although not nearly often enough these years, to things that are simply hard to believe. This range is normal everywhere, of course, but to people who are not getting MENA news from fairly ground level sources, only the really huge stories manage to force their way to the surface of television or newspaper news.

I became a news addict in 2011 when during the revolution/uprising/disturbances/readjustment in Egypt when the divergence of reality from the broadcast was so amazingly huge on television here and initially I found myself becoming impatient with the slowness of the updates on the major networks covering Egypt. I'd signed up with Twitter years before and followed a few friends who were luckily for me good journalists. I began working my way down to street level activists and journalists in order to see what was happening in Egypt in a more timely fashion and to see where it was being reported. Then came the work of trying to make sense of patterns to understand what events meant and to try to guess what might come next. I have to admit that I'm not the best guesser in the world, but it has been interesting to try. I realised today that the work I've been putting into my Facebook page has seriously cut into my blogging, along with some reasonable anxieties about posting anything political in the modern Egypt...and these days EVERYTHING is political in some way. I decided to post something, opened Blogger to write and found the post below. It's about four months old and sadly enough it is still timely. It's winter in Egypt now and nights are cold but today the sun was warm, friends stopped by the farm to visit and in general life was good. I think that is the most important thing to remember when life at large looks pretty frightening. Just back things back down to a manageable scale, like a garden, a kitchen, a walk with a child, a game of ball with a dog, and it isn't nearly as frightening but it is just as real, in fact, perhaps more so.

I woke up this morning to the sound of bird song and the beautiful wind chimes that I brought back from the US this last trip. The air is fresh and cool, the sky blue with those wandering puffy white clouds that signal the onset of blessed autumn in Egypt, with its relief from the relentless heat of the summer that simply drains every shred of energy from your body. I came out to my desk and turned on the computer after the inevitable crash of a late night power failure and Twitter was the first tab to open for me. I found this tweet from Hussein Ibish, who is someone whose comments I've learned to pay attention to:

Hussein Ibish @Ibishblog
. @hisham_melhem best article yet - and he's written some really great ones - but this is truly superb

So, sipping on a glass of water, I opened and read one of the best and worst articles on the ills of the Arab world that I've ever seen. I'm not sure what to do now. I feel as though Hisham Melham has summed up all the monsters that have been crawling around in the darkness at the back of all of our closets here in our turbulent part of the world. And having examined them we are left to try to shut the door and pretend that somehow keeping them in the closet will be enough.

The saddest part is that, while this sums up the Arab world's issues pretty clearly, it doesn't look beyond that part of our entire battered, bruised and bleeding human world, which seems to me to be almost as much a hopeless case. All of the concerns of fundamentalist sectarian issues are equally present in the "West" with religious leaders pushing political carts that are loaded with the baggage of the corporate leaders of what currently pass for democracies in Europe and North America. Africa is seething with equally damaging issues while being attacked from within by one of the most frightening diseases humans have seen in a long time, Ebola virus, which while it may not decimate human populations, will most certainly decimate economies. China and the far east are struggling with both economic issues and similar sectarian battles, however little we pay attention to them. The only area that seems relatively free of these damaging religious/sectarian/political feuds looks like South America, but this area has been pushed hither and yon by corporate pressures stemming from the north including the drug trade and who knows if they can bring themselves to a position of stability and leadership in a world that seems to totally lack both. Years ago when my ex-husband and I were looking for a haven from the insanity of the Vietnam war, we thought of New Zealand, at least partly from a wholly selfish view that it has some of the best trout fishing in the world, and aside from its rather unfortunate tendency of late to massive earthquakes, it is still seeming like an odd haven of sanity and peace. Heaven knows that Australia is writhing with its issues of why a country of immigrants who treated the indigenous population with massive brutality should deny haven to the next wave of immigrants.

I'm sure that there are pockets of peace and sanity in the world. There always are. There are happy farmers' markets taking place throughout the world where people can forget that they are being pushed to purchase and eat food-like objects that will ultimately harm their health so that some corporation can count their imaginary wealth. I can get on one of my horses and meander through the fields out here greeting neighbours who are planting cabbages and clover. There is a ground level reality that can sustain our hopes that life is worth living and perhaps it's just best not to look up the food chain too far. I think I will be doing some gardening today.

Learning To Live And Living to Learn

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Sat, 09 Aug 2014 18:00:00 +0000

I was talking to a friend today about this blog post and he told me that there is an Egyptian saying "If you do something, you might make a mistake and be punished, but if you do nothing you can't make a mistake."

Once a social psychologist, I suspect always a social psychologist. I went off to graduate school at the University of Waterloo in the mid 70's with a lot of illusions, but mostly I went there because they had a very short application form and one of my peculiar oddities is a horror of filling out forms. I can always think of other ways to answer the questions on them, ways that won't fit into little boxes, so I'm always left with a feeling of failure and confusion. Probably Waterloo wasn't the place for me academically, but it was where I met many beloved friends and where I met my late husband who was, in traditional Egyptian fashion, an engineering student. The social psychologists were experimental social psychologists, people who basically played experimental tricks on people to find out things about social behaviour. My advisor, Dr. Melvin Lerner, was an archetypal Jewish psychology professor and specialised in a field that studied victim blaming. He would undoubtedly be turning in his grave these days seeing my stand in social media for a just peace for Palestinians, but that is neither here nor there, because the parting of our ways came as I decided that I wasn't cut out for academia. I was interested in studying the development of verbal concepts of fairness in children, a topic that he didn't find very exciting, and his lack of support made me realise that this was not to be my life. When the graduate officer in our department asked what I was going to do next, I told him that I was considering opening a Mexican restaurant in Toronto...which, by the way, I never got around to. But much of what I learned to question and the concepts that helped me to formulate questions have continued to be useful to me in my very checkered career as a corporate wife, mother of multinational children, unwilling prisoner of corporate life and now living on the farm.

Dr. Sergio Forapani demonstrating dentistry to my staff

Before January 2011 many people in Egypt and beyond the borders never thought that the Egyptian people would rise up against the military rulers of the country. The reasons for this assumption were usually framed in terms of the "eternal patience" of the Egyptian people, citing millennia of authoritarian rule. But having watched methods of childrearing in Egypt, I had my doubts. My in-laws, who were more or less upper middle class educated Egyptians, found it odd that I spoke to my children from the time that they were infants, explaining the reasons for my decrees as to what was acceptable or unacceptable behaviour. I was living in Canada most of the year but would spend a month or so every winter with them in Cairo, during which time I drove my mother in law in particular rather mad by insisting that children under the age of three had no need of additional sugar in their diet, so her boxes of candies went untouched, or by refusing to allow a child who passed up a sandwich at lunch a couple of cookies later. "But he's hungry!" she would cry. "If he were that hungry, he would have eaten lunch, but in the meantime he can have a carrot or a piece of fruit." was my cold-hearted response. I was terrible, I know, by refusing the request for a random toy when we went to a store. "But you have plenty of money!" "But they have to learn that you don't get everything you want it when you want it. Sometimes you have to work for rewards; it's called delay of gratification." She was utterly unappreciative of the value of a master's degree in psychology and thought that everything I did was completely mad, until one day she complimented me on my 16 year old son's skill at being a host at a family iftar and told me that she'd always thought that I was crazy but had decided that perhaps I knew something. I took the compliment with good humour, knowing that was as good as it ever was going to get.

Even one of my husband's uncles, a celebrated gastro-enterologist, told me flat out that it was pointless to talk to children under the age of four because they couldn't understand anything. I asked him how children were taught behaviour in Egypt and he just shrugged. Obviously, he'd never troubled himself with this problem, but his wife certainly had since his children of his first marriage, who were good friends of ours, were lovely people. When I moved out into the villages, my children were independent adults living and studying in the US, but I enjoyed the chance to watch parent/child interactions in the villages. One of the patterns I noticed was a sort of benign neglect. Children ran about under the more or less watchful eyes of parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents and older siblings, but they were not engaged in conversations by individuals older than them. They might talk to each other, but in general they would answer a simple question from an adult with a wide-eyed stare and no comment. This was true of my questions and I noticed that it also happened with most other adults. In my book of upbringing, not to answer a direct question in some fashion would be a major fault, but it seemed fairly normal to most of the adults. The children could speak when they wanted to, that was abundantly clear watching them together, but they rarely spoke to or were spoken to by adults. When I asked how the rules of life were learned, one father told me that people figured that by the age of ten or so a child was assumed to have learned them and would be punished for breaking them.

This fascinated me. Rules were almost never delineated or explained but breaking them brought punishment. It reminded me of the old learned helplessness experiments I'd learned about many years before. Basically, these experiments involved shocking or imposing other unpleasant experiences randomly to individuals in a learning task with the end result that the individual seemed to decide that it was irrelevant what he/she might choose to do because something bad was going to happen no matter what. The individual would no longer seek to do "the right thing" or try to avoid "the wrong thing" because it didn't matter. Essentially outcomes were random and uncontrollable, so why try. That essentially was the life for many children. They weren't told what sort of behaviour would bring a particular response....they had to find out for themselves and the outcome might not actually have anything at all to do with what they'd done. If Dad came home in a bad mood, you'd get hurt, no matter what the behaviour. Since the parents had also been raised in the same fashion, it all made a sort of perverted sense to them.

When I began looking around at day to day life in Egypt, the same random response pattern showed up. Even things like taxes for companies have no cut and dried rules, but are negotiated with someone, with the outcome completely unpredictable unless you figure out the right amount of lubrication to be applied. Students at universities and people competing in sports often find that who you are related to has much more to do with your success than what you do. One of my friends who visits me in Egypt from New Zealand on a regular basis always posts a blog of her trip and one year it was entitled "Egypt: We Do Random Well", so it isn't me who notices the tendency to random outcomes, punishments and rewards. The Egyptian school system is a prime candidate for the imposition of learned helplessness. In the first place, most teachers are just people who couldn't get another job. They aren't trained in any way at all. They are certainly not qualified to impart knowledge since their main qualification is a lack of qualifications for any other work. The curriculum could honestly be said to have been created by that famous room full of monkeys with typewriters. I've tutored village children with their English homework, and it is utterly insane. One little boy was given a text to read that went something like this:
"Fatima and Hamza are brother and sister. Their father is a doctor who works in a hospital and their mother is a teacher who works in a school. Every day they go to school, study their lessons and come home to do their homework after school. On Friday their father washes his car and then the family goes out to the park or perhaps to the swimming pool."

My first job was just to see if any of this made any sense to this boy. No women in his household worked outside the home. It is considered shameful if they do. Of course the fact that there is little in the way of transportation that could take women to jobs and even less in terms of jobs out here might also be a factor. None of the children in our village have a doctor for a father. Most of them rarely see doctors. Their fathers are labourers or farmers. In Egypt, NO ONE but possibly a cab driver washes his own car! If you can afford to buy a car, you can afford to have someone else wash it for you..so this part of the story is fantasy. And finally, the little boy had to ask what a park was. He'd never seen one. He's seen pictures of swimming pools and maybe even seen one once but he's never been in one. How could a primary school child make any sense of this, especially considering the fact that probably the teach was mispronouncing the words so much that the language hardly resembled English at all? And then, even now corporal punishment is still common in schools and most of the people I've spoken to from our area experienced it and, in fact, quit school because of it. When I asked them why they quit, often the answer was something along the lines of "I could get hit at home, so why go somewhere else and have a stranger do it. I was too stupid to learn."

Dr. Sergio (left) and Dr. Mohsen (right) at a clinic

I have a staff of ten at my farm, five young men in their mid-twenties, three younger boys whose parents asked me to take them on to teach them, a housekeeper and my late husband's driver who is now my right hand after twenty years. Only Mohamed has any education. The rest never finished school and were convinced that they were too stupid to learn. I had often talked to them about going back to school but the answer was always the same....they thought there was no point. After the revolution, when there was no work in tourism for us, I noticed that the guys were getting really, really bored with just the daily chores, so I sent them out in ones and twos to work with the Donkey Sanctuary to learn to trim donkey feet. At first they were very reluctant, sensing another evil experience with the dreaded learning situation, but they came home energised and enthusiastic. The vet they were working under Dr. Mohsen Mohsen, is a skilled teacher who encouraged their learning instead of punishing their every mistake. They were happy to realise that the training I'd given them in horse and donkey care actually made them quite experienced in the field, which gave them more confidence.

Egyptian and Italian farriers demonstrating for my staff at a clinic

A biomechanics class with Dr. Sergio and vets, farriers, and grooms

After some months, after talking to some large animal vets who were saying how the gas price increases and increases in veterinary medicine prices were making it almost impossible to work with farmers who didn't have the cash to pay increased fees, a vet friend and I decided to try setting up a veterinary charity in our neighbourhood to help the farmers with their animals. We got a number of vets to work with us, both experienced and fresh from school. My guys were amazed to find that while they didn't have the technical knowledge of the new graduates, they did have much more experience and much more comfort in handling the animals, who ranged from pigeons to even the odd camel, with the majority being donkeys, goats, sheep, cows, water buffalo and poultry. This again was an enormous morale boost. We've been doing our work now for two years and every day farmers and cart drivers bring animals to the farm for treatment. We've had master farriers and a professor of veterinary science from Italy come to stay and give classes and practical lessons, often extremely technical work, and the guys are there for every class and every lesson, even coming in on their days off. One of my gardeners has set up a chicken raising project for his wife and other women in his family to supplement their income, and they are raising some wonderful chicken. Friends from town make the trip to come to buy them, and there is an ego factor in knowing that professors and such are making a special effort just for your produce. Their veterinary knowledge is being used to raise better, cleaner, healthier animals and to teach others how to do it too.

I've watch typical learned helplessness victims turn their lives around and change their attitudes completely with giving them the chance to learn and use their knowledge to help others. One of the most impressive things, and something that I think has been extremely important, is the fact that they are not being paid for their veterinary work. It is all voluntary, even the work that occurs almost every day after working hours at the farm. This is a point of pride. Not only do they know things, but they can help people and do so without benefit to themselves. It isn't enough to give them knowledge...much of it they had before we started the veterinary work...they need to use it too.

copyright 2014 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Losing A Voice of Reason in Egypt

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 05:17:00 +0000

A young man died yesterday who by any reasoning should still be here with us. Bassem Sabry was a writer, analyst, activist of the highest ethical standards whom I first encountered online during the winter of 2011. At times, reading the discussions on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, I was struck by his strong wisdom and innate kindness. When he published this on his blog I was stunned to realise how young he was, only 31 at this death, and how wise he was beyond his years. I posted many things that he wrote because he did it so much better than I did. I would urge everyone to take a moment to read this post from last May and think on it. If we all learned as much as he did in his thirty years, surely this world would be much better.

copyright 2014 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 08:36:00 +0000

Revolutions are interesting things. While they can be quite exciting, frightening, exhilarating, and hopeful at the beginning, as we saw in 2011, they tend to drag on as a society tries to readjust and recalibrate...a process that is draining, frustrating, and often very boring. When it became quite apparent that the uprising in Egypt in 2011 was having a severely adverse effect on tourism which had been the main source of income for my staff at the farm, I began looking around for ways to keep a staff that was used to escorting tourists around our area busy with new activities. One of the things that I did was to sign some of my grooms up for a donkey care course that was being given by The Society for The Protection Of Donkeys and Mules In Egypt (a local branch of the international Donkey Sanctuary). They weren't thrilled at first since donkey care is held in much lower esteem here than horse care, but they came back from their classes lit up with the new skills and ideas that they were being taught. It was terrific to see the eyes open again after months of mind-numbing boredom. The routines of caring for horses and gardens at the farm really wasn't very stimulating.

One of the things that happened in 2011 was a number of newpaper articles here and abroad bemoaning the fact that the horses at the pyramids in Giza, horses who have always been a source of concern and dismay to visiting horsemen as well as the local variety because even in "good" times they've always been abused, were "starving" to death due to a lack of income for tourism. The situation was infinitely more complex than that, but local and international charities rushed out there to help the starving horses of Giza by distributing large bags of corn to people who often showed up with well-fed horses who I even saw being fed pastry as the owners waited to get their corn. Not only is corn NOT a good feed for starving horses having way too much simple sugars, but the wrong people for the most part were getting the corn, parceling out the grain into smaller bags and selling it in the markets at a very nice price. Most of it was not going to starving horses but no one was sticking around to find out.

Into this fertile ground fell some visitors to Egypt who realised that animal rescue was becoming a growth industry. Two separate young women set up "horse rescues" in Nazlet Semman soliciting funds through Facebook accounts to care for horses in Egypt during late 2011 and early 2012. Both of these charities touched the soft spots of animal lovers all over the world and collected significant funding, mostly from abroad, to care for the Giza horses, but unfortunately neither of them are either registered charities in Egypt and neither of them are precisely transparent in their financial dealings, leading one of them, the more successful, to block their page (Prince Fluffy Kareem) locally, meaning that anyone using Facebook from Egypt cannot even access their page. After having some problems with the Egyptian authorities over the fact that they are an unregistered charity, they opted to become invisible in Egypt. While there are questions about some treatments and account transparency, in their favour, they do help to feed the horses of at least some of the stables in Giza. The other charity, The Egypt Horse Project, has not done so well with its track record of care here and seems to be undergoing a metamorphosis of some sort lately. It is too early to see what is really happening and they have their own very serious issues of accountability.

About a year ago, having watched all the hullabaloo over the horses in Giza, I decided that the knowledge gained by my staff with the Donkey Sanctuary vets should be put to use in our neighbourhood to benefit the farmers. Before the revolution there had been vets employed by the Ministry of Agriculture who would travel around the countryside giving bird flu innoculations to the flocks of small farmers, giving vaccinations for cows, sheep, buffalo and goats to prevent brucellosis (a disease that can pass on infection through milk to humans), Foot and Mouth disease, Rift Valley Fever and a fairly intimidating array of other diseases, both zoonotic and veterinary. In an emergency, the farmers could call one of these vets to come and treat a sick or injured animal, who often represented a huge investment and was the major producer of disposable income for the family.

Since 2011, frankly, most of these vets have not been seen and I was concerned that the situation for the farmers was becoming much worse than that of the tourism horses in Giza, so I contacted a local vet who was working with and Egyptian animal charity, Egyptian Society of Animal Friends, and he and I began finding a way to help the farm animals in our neighbourhood without cost to the farmers. We started a Facebook page called the Rural Wellness Initiative Egypt to tell people about the work and to invite people to learn more about rural Egypt. At first ESAF helped to sponsor the work with the donation of the vet's time, but when he got a job at The Brooke, we had to find a new vet to work with us, which happily we were able to do. Our focus has always been on preventative maintenence such as worming, hoof care, feeding instruction (we weigh donkeys and let farmers know when they gain and lose weight so that they can learn to feed the proper amounts), and wound care.

It isn't flashy and the necessary medications have for the most part been bought by myself and a neighbour. We registered the charity here in Egypt this fall and have managed to pick up a corporate sponsor for our work to relieve the financial pressure on myself and the neighbour, so we've been very happy. Our vet is paid on a daily basis, but the work itself is done by volunteers, mostly my staff who have become extremely proficient in the technical support part of veterinary work, learning how to clear the blocked tear ducts of donkeys and horses, and being trained in basic dental work by the Donkey Sanctuary. We aren't doing the required government inoculations as we don't want to step on bureaucratic toes, but we would like to expand to do rabies shots for the farm dogs. We go out weekly with our donkey cart to one of five treatment stations where the farmers can bring their animals for treatment and the farmers know that they can come to the farm for treatment if needed. If it is something other than a hoof trim or wound care, we call in a vet immediately. Happily, there are vets in the area who are willing to help.

Yesterday was one of our usual treatment visits to a small village not far from the farm. We treated donkeys, water buffalo, cows, a horse, and lots of poultry, rabbits and goats, as the women take care of those animals at home while the men are working in the fields. It was a fairly busy clinic but nothing overwhelming, and after lunch my staff asked to sit down with me for a discussion. What I heard from them initially knocked me off my feet, but on reflection it is sad but not surprising. Apparently farmers who don't read local papers or visit Giza ever are not unaware of the business aspects of animal rescue and they had been asking some rather pointed and at time quite rude questions about how much money my staff were making from this work. Since we don't charge for our work, I was initially puzzled but the questions were in fact aimed at the idea that no one helps other people without profiting from it, so there must be some form of profit for myself and my staff. Incorrect, but in this very profit-driven world the logic is undeniable.

Since the people that we are working with are the friends, neighbours and families of my staff, these questions and insinuations were very hurtful. One of the things that had pleased me so much about this charity work was the fact that it had given my staff a sense of pride in their work and a community spirit that they could help others. It has opened them up to a joy of learning, an appreciation of intellectual growth and a curiosity about animal care where there was simply rote training before. We are often joined by visitors on our clinic days, visiting vets and vet students, photographers and filmmakers wanting to document village life, and adults and children from our expat community who want to help, so their knowledge of other cultures and habits is increasing dramatically. Next week we have two Italian farriers and an Italian vet coming to help out and to give classes to improve the hoof care knowledge for my staff and local farriers. We have no farrier schools here in Egypt, so this is their only real chance to learn.

We were all quite depressed after yesterday's conversation about the incorrect assumptions of the villagers regarding the financing of our project. I value my staff greatly and the fact that this work could be causing them problems is troubling. I'm not sure how we will handle it but I truly am extremely irritated at all the faux animal rescues that are giving charitable work a bad name. I knew that there was a good reason that I've always referred to my farm as a retirement home for nice horses and dogs rather than a "rescue", even though friends and family laugh at me and tell me to call it what it really is. But if an "animal rescue" is a way to make money by pretending to help animals, I can't call it that. A major part of our work at RWI is educational, trying to make the farmers better animal keepers because healthy animals help to keep the families healthy. It is a sad puzzle.

The Power of One

noreply@blogger.com (Maryanne Stroud Gabbani) — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 20:04:00 +0000

Tomorrow we will be driving downtown to Sednaoui hospital with my housekeeper's son Ali and a friend of mine here who works as a groom and has a son with cerebral palsy so bad that he has fallen over many times and broken his chin. We are going to consult with my friend Dr. Mostafa Shokry, who is one of the best orthopedic surgeons I know (he's reconstructed one of my shoulders and replaced both my knees) and also the administrator of Sednaoui hospital, one of the dreaded governmental hospitals...but one that he is transforming into a real hospital. For some odd reason, an orthopedic surgeon has always been one of the first doctors that our family would have to find when we moved somewhere.

Ali was kicked by one of my horses over a year ago, an accident that broke his upper arm in about 5 places. It was in the evening and I had clients about to go out, so I splinted it carefully and sent him off to a local doctor who xrayed it and put it in a cast. The next day we xrayed it again and it was clear that the initial cast was NOT going to suffice so I sent a photo of the xray to Dr. Mostafa. He had us bring Ali to Rabaa Adaweya hospital for the initial surgery to put a titanium plate in his arm to keep all the pieces in place while they healed. We did the surgery to remove the plate at Sednaoui about ten days ago and now we will remove the stitches and that will be that. Khamis is bringing Omar for an assessment of what they can do to help the repeated injuries to his chin. Caring for a disabled child in the villages is a really tough job but Khamis and his wife have done their best.

Government hospitals in Egypt have a well deserved horrific reputation. They are underfunded, understaffed, have had almost no security since the revolution 2011when the Ministry of the Interior decided essentially to go on strike. One of my first experiences in Egypt when we moved here in 1988 was with the government hospital in Alexandria whose ICU was the only place we could get the correct medication for my husband who had suffered a heart attack. It was all I could do not to run out of the place screaming because it was like my worst nightmares of Dickens. He was there for two weeks and survived, but it certainly wasn't because of the hospital. So when we were going to Sednaoui I was apprehensive to say the least. What I found was a real surprise.

Once we got Ali settled in his room to wait for his day surgery, Dr. Mostafa took me to see what he's been doing at Sednaoui. Since he's very important to the maintenance of my arthritic old body, I hadn't been all that thrilled when they'd named him hospital administrator, and I'd sympathised with his stories of frustration and exhaustion as he first undertook the task, taking courses in hospital administration at the American University in Cairo as well as working all day at the hospital and evenings in his clinic with his private practice. We had chats about how to encourage more active participation by staff members in the process of improvement as I was working on changing my staff from labourers to real partners at my farm. It has been a very tough year for him.

The first place that we noticed a difference was in the room that Ali was assigned. It wasn't large or fancy, but it was very clean and bright. I've had much worse rooms at some private hospitals in Cairo. In fact the first time Dr. Mostafa had to do surgery to reconstruct one of my shoulders after a fall, we were in a private hospital that was so horrible that we all agreed to get me out of there absolutely as quickly as possible. The nursing in my home would certainly be better than at St. Peter's in Heliopolis, and the premises were a thousand times cleaner. As we walked around the hospital I could see that our conversations about staff motivation had paid off at Sednaoui. All of the staff from the doctors to the men doing the renovations were welcome to speak to Dr. Mostafa and clearly respected and liked him. Well, from my point of view, of course they would since he is a terrific person.

One of the initial things that the hospital had to do when Dr. Mostafa was trying to upgrade it was to improve security. Since 2011 there had been many incidents of people attacking doctors and nurses either in frustration at a lack of service or, sadly, to acquire the drugs available at hospitals. There is a security company working at Sednaoui now that is responsible for maintaining security at the gate. One of the more difficult day to day problems is the fact that if a poor Egyptian (Most of the users of government hospitals fall into this category.) is in hospital, vast numbers of his family and friends will come to see and want to stay with him. Unfortunately dealing with more than one companion in a hospital is not conducive to effective work, so the numbers have to be restricted. As well, since we all know that hospital food is boring at best, most people bring home cooking, which can wreak havoc on a prescriptive diet. A major part of the security staff's job is trying to thin out the visitors. Unfortunately, last summer Sednaoui was the receiving point for many people killed and injured in protests at Fath mosque near Ramses and the courtyard became a triage stage to try to facilitate treatment. Dr. Mostafa's usually cheerful face went a bit grey at the memory. Orthopedic surgeons, pretty much by definition, don't generally have to deal with people who are dying of wounds.

One of the things that I was very impressed with was the way that the hospital working areas were being redesigned. The doctors' offices have examination areas and computers, along with a small room with a cot for the residents whoh have to stay at the hospital at nights.

A long sunny room that is currently being used as a cafeteria for the staff will be a waiting area for families of cancer patients who are visiting to receive chemotherapy or radiation treatment.

The bathrooms were in serious need of renovation. New tiles, fixtures and doors have been installed. This isn't luxurious, but it is clean and functional, which is what one needs in a hospital after all. On the public wings where treatment is free, if not extremely in expensive, there are these joint bathrooms. On the private wing, where two patients may share a room, they also share a bathroom.

The old design for the ward bathrooms had very little or no privacy. These are being torn out for renovations.

The nurses' station prior to renovation, kept the nurses away from the patients and their families, tucked away behind glass windows, but for nurses to be effective they need to be aware of what is going on around them and accessible to the patients.

The newly renovated nurses' station is open and the nurses are accessible to the patients and their families. Not that the nurses' dress is very neat and clean. Government hospital nurses are not generally known for this.

This is a shot of one of the wards after renovation. It could be any private hospital.

We look around Egypt and we see problems and difficulties in every direction. It is incredibly easy to feel that bringing things around to the way they need to be is a hopeless task. To do everything at once is a hopeless task really, but seeing what one intelligent, caring, hospital administrator/doctor can accomplish gives us all hope. We just have to keep working one step at a time.

copyright 2014 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani