Home Again

I am just back in Cairo.

It has been a complicated and often difficult period away. My daughter Kim is recovering so well. Her burns are healing and though she must wear pressure bandages for some time on her arms, her face is unscarred.

My husband has had his hip replacement and other than enduring lots of 'hip' jokes - 'hip hip away', 'into hip hop', all 'hip and trendy' and so on - he is recovering well. He walks with a stick - when he remembers it. He has stayed in Australia on doctor's recommendations. Clotting is a serious risk after such surgery, and he has a meeting in Canberra that he must attend in early October. One flight would be a reasonable risk - three is pushing the envelope. He will return after the meeting in mid October.

I have done my time around hospitals. I am not willing to spend time in another for at least a month or so. I have moved something like ten times, stayed in three houses, four flats, and a smattering of hotels - oh - and a hospital hostel. In that time I managed to make ten quilts - though three of these were tiny. Thanks to the generosity of Bernina I have sewn on round tables, dressing tables, small square tables and lacking my usual design wall I have draped pieces all over beds, floors, and curtains.

I made nine for tACTile - the ACT group of quilt artists I work with - as these will start to travel in January and we need to have photography done.

The other was a quilt for Kim. My lovely Southern Cross Quilters group on the internet, joined by a large number of Canberra Quilters, had sent 'healing hearts' - a six inch (finished) block with a green heart (Kim's choice of colour) on a cream background. I joined them into a stunning queen sized quilt with a deep green border - and quilted it - in my last three days. A friend is binding it for me and will send it to Kimbi. Photos will follow as soon as I find Kate's Bible and follow instructions to do that as I have forgotten how!

We flew in over Egypt and across the desert to the south, banked just in time to make sure we couldn't see the pyramids, then flew into what looked like a large dark grey bowl upended over the city. One of the things I have not missed is Cairo smog.

This was 'official' travel as it had intended to be our midterm leave, so I was met by one of our lovely embassy drivers whose wife is due to deliver their new daughter any day and the conversation was all on pregnancies and deliveries. The sun was just risen as we drove in through the silent Friday morning, and buildings were bathed in golden light. It was almost romantic if you could just get past the dirt and rolladoors.

I checked email, showered and slept for a few hours. I have visitors arriving within a few hours of my arrival and they wish to spend the afternoon at the Khan. It was about this stage that I realised that I have absolutely no Egyptian money.

I walked the short block to the Bank Misr on the corner. At I drew level with it I was looking in an absent-minded way at the circular holes in the glorious polished dark green stone that surfaces the underside of the portico over the road. It is the sort of marble that we might use - at huge expense - to surface a kitchen bench top in Australia. Here it faces the building and even covers the undersides of the portico! I was wondering why they had cut circular holes in it, then realised they might be in the sort of locations that woudl take a light, and wondered why they were fitting new lights. Then I looked down as I stepped up to the footpath level from the road I was walking on.

They have bricked up my bank. Worse - the handiteller was gone. A sign says that the bank is being rebuilt but it is in the 'total destruction' phase inside from what I could see. Probably the equivalent of the stage of tidying my bedside drawers where I upend the lot on the bed in the theory that I then cannot sleep till the drawers are sorted!

OK. I thought 'I can cope with this - after all this is the Middle East and you need to be resilient. I will go on to Saudi supermarket and get some money from their handiteller (which works about a third of the time).'

Saudi was closed. Saudi is NEVER closed except between 2.00 am and 7.30 am. Oh - and midday prayer time on Friday. Perhaps a good clue would have been the street outside at the cross road covered with green plastic mats and men in prayer.

Prayer time shifts according to sunrise - and because I have been away I have no idea when the midday prayers are at the moment. It was hot in the sun.

Cairo has such a long hot summer. I had been watching temperatures while away and worrying about the unremitting heat - 37 to 40 most days and not showing signs of letting up. The asphalt at the crossroads is deeply embedded with bottle tops which have just quietly sunk into the tarmac, and I suspect archaeological digs of the future will reveal perfectly protected bottle tops embedded like nuts in peanut brittle and up to fifteen centimetres deep. Here the caps are all from soft drinks - in Australia they would be from beer bottles.

As prayer time approaches all over Cairo people spread green plastic mats over the tarmac (without which I suspect archaeologists of the future might also find embedded knees)and left just enough space on one edge for the omnipresent taxis to squeeze through. This is to take the overflow from the small mosques and prayer rooms on suburban corners like ours in Zamalek.

In a bid to get out of the sun I walked into the crowded coffee shop on the corner - Costas. It was cool and airconditioned and very pleasant. It smelt of terrific coffee. I explained my 'no Egyptian money' predicament and asked if I could sit and wait till Saudi opened. No problem.

Then a waiter walked over to tell me that Saudi would be half an hour. Would I like a drink? I pulled out American money, Australian money and even some leftover rand. No problem. Pay later. I chose an iced coffee which was utterly delicious and texted my good friend Dagmar complaining that someone had bricked up my bank while I was away, and that the alternative was behind locked doors during prayer time.

She wrote back mentioning the "battle between God and Mammon!" At this point I realised it was churlish to complain. Despite the importance of God in modern day Cairo, He only rates half an hour a week when He becomes more important than the matters of commerce. I was in an airconditioned coffee shop packed with chatting students, drinking a coffee on credit (welcome to Egypt!) and life was really pretty good.

I watched the beautifully choreographed prayers from my very secular viewpoint. Stand. Hands flipped up, palms forward. Kneel. Prostrate from kneeling position. Hold for one minute. Up to knees. Hold. Stand. Repeat whole sequence five times. While watching I realised that very few Australians would show their devotion to their religion on a street corner. Here it felt very natural.

The whole sequence of prayer in Islam - clean hands, face and feet, pray five times a day in sets of five and including a sequence of movements designed to keep men limber - makes so much sense as a guarantee of cleanliness, fitness, and social reliance on a set of rules intended maintain a social structure, to say nothing of a belief in God. Here and there an older man stood and bowed his head when others dropped to their knees. I suspect these were men who couldn't get down, or feared that if they did they would not get up.

It was a nice welcome home - a bit of everything that Egypt could throw at me in a morning. Smog, a beautiful dawn, the affection of a very nice driver, a bricked up bank, Friday prayers, and then a coffee with a relaxed 'pay later' attitude that might be greeted with suspicion elsewhere in the world.

Prayers ended, the supermarket opened, I found the handiteller working perfectly, and am now awaiting my friends and a visit to the Khan.

Life is good.

Children

I have been teaching and traveling. I had a week in Lyon, in France, for the Quilt Expo which was run in part by Quilts Inc who run the huge quilt show in Houston. Then a few days back in Cairo and to South Africa, seven days in Port Elizabeth, then three in Cape Town with a traveling day between. I am back now, but will be on the move again in a few days. More on that later.

There is a small boy who has appeared in our area of Zamalek. He is very little, and I would guess at his age being somewhere between four and seven, though if it is seven he is very small for his age. I first saw him going through roughly tied rubbish bags at the side of the road in the street where I live. It seemed odd - he was too small to be one of the usual street children. Even more surprising, when I approached he ran and huddled against a wall looking frightened, where the more usual street children might have asked for food or money.

I moved on that time, only a bit concerned that I had frightened him. He was very small, dark and obviously Egyptian with the large and melting eyes that are utterly compelling and which plead without even trying. He was scruffy and dirty. He has no shoes, and his trousers are stained and too short. He has a shirt which was once green and the sleeves are too long for his arms, a look that exaggerates how little he is.

I saw him another couple of times. Once curled with his hand in his mouth and a face that looked as if he had been crying and sound asleep in a pile of rather nasty garbage. An hour later I saw him with some of the guards from a nearby office. I stopped to ask where he had come from and one of the men gave an expressive shrug. I asked where was his mother and one of the others said that no-one knew. I asked how long he had been in the area and one of the men said about two weeks.

I went to the shop and bought a pack of freshly baked small pizzas, yoghurt and plastic teaspoons. I asked the men to give some to him and eat some themselves and they thanked me and said that they were watching that he got some food every day.

I talked about him to Bob and he suggested that if I pointed him out he would contact one of the agencies that look after street children. It was shortly after that that I had to leave for Lyon and I have not seen him since. The sadness that has struck me every time I think of him is that he was not wanted by his family, and that he was abandoned with the sort of casual disregard with which some westerners would discard a puppy that had been digging up the garden. He was so obviously unprepared for life on the streets, frightened and unable to beg, and yet perhaps that was in his favour as he was very endearing. The only thing that I can forgive his family for is that he was brought to a prosperous area with possibly more generous garbage than most.

I have just discovered that he was taken home to be looked after by one of the guards I spoke to. He said that his wife has only one girl, and he liked the little boy. It is so good to hear a happy ending.

There is another little boy who works on a corner near one of the main supermarkets. He sells flowers and is obviously part of a family who operates that corner. He is about ten, lanky, with a crop of curly hair and awkward and sharp and funny. I shop there occasionally and every time he runs up to ask me to buy his roses, or carnations, or larkspurs - or whatever is growing that week. He knows that I will never buy as I go into the shop but he gets an "In'sh'Allah" when he tries to pin me down to promise to buy later when I come out.

I meet many people who find this expression infuriating. It is impossible to get a promise from an Egyptian without "In'sh'Allah" being tacked on. Literally it means 'If God wills it" and many visitors to Egypt see it as the ultimate cop-out, the way of excusing themselves if they choose to. It is sometimes translated as 'maybe' but the more I live here the more I like it. In the west we tend to promise without thinking of the things that might go wrong. Then when cars break down, or children are sick, or any of the many things that can make us break appointments happen, we excuse ourselves. Egyptians promise with the rider that implies that they will of course be there, if nothing goes wrong. In some ways I find this a more honest promise than ours, and it is becoming an automatic part of my speech.

This little flower boy knows me very well, and he will always be there when I come out with his ridiculously cheap bunches of roses. So often I find myself carrying far more than I can reasonably manage, with wet and soggy newspaper unwrapping itself as I walk, and long and vicious thorns dragging into my arms. By the time I have gone two blocks there is no comfortable way to carry them left, and the last few blocks are painful. It is about this point that I remember that he carries twice as many all the time, and he is very small and they are very sharp.

I was in Africa last week when my lovely daughter Kim was badly burnt while burning off long grass on their country block. She was rushed to hospital by ambulance as her husband was afraid to even touch her. She spent a day and a half in Intensive Care and was so afraid that out reaction would be to jump straight on a plane to rush to her that she would not allow her husband to tell us that she had been hurt. She was airlifted to Concord Burns Unit a few days ago.

She has second degree burns to her arms, neck and face. I was intending to rush straight from Cape Town, but she begged me not to, pointing out that she was not in danger, that there were so many family members around her, and that she might need me more later. It was hard, but I taught the last class and packed and came back to Cairo. I am booked to travel on Wednesday, though even those bookings were hard to get. I will be in Sydney on Thursday.

Bob has gone to Damascus with others from the Embassy to try to set up ways to help Australians caught in Lebanon to get out through Syria. At the moment he has no idea how this is to be done. Every border point has problems and the team from the Embassy here - which looks after Syria - will have to play it by ear. Most are probably safer just staying where they are. There is a lot of "In'sh'Allah" in the Middle East.

Kim is recovering well, though she has a lot of pain and a long road to travel, but somehow all those children encapsulate her for me at the moment, and any kindness I can show feels as if I am helping my daughter. It is funny how trivial the small stuff is when someone you love is hurt.

And I still call Australia home.

What it is to be Free

Just before I left Australia I had a conversation with a good friend made about the Middle East. She said that she loved to be Australian because she was free. I was puzzled by the comment in its context and asked what she meant. I think all my friends in the Middle East, in Syria and Jordan and Egypt - think they are free. Those friends who live in Palestine - well, perhaps not.

My friend pointed out that she could go wherever she chose and vote for whoever she wanted, and that she was free.

Tabbi was talking to a friend of ours in Syria. He makes perfume. Name it - whatever major perfume you like, and he mixes a copy for $2 a 150ml bottle. We watched in amazement as he took out an identical bottle to a very well known perfume, added oils and essences and an alcohol base for an eau-de-toilette, and sprayed some into the air to check it. He then added a hint of colouring so it looked the same as the original. He carefully resealed the top, and took out a flat sheet of cardboard which, before out amazed eyes, became the original printed packaging for htis known brand. When we asked where he got the bottle and box he just smiled. He then sealed the box into crisp trimmed cellophane. At this point I would have bought this perfume in any duty-free in the world without a hesitation. He then reached into a drawer and pulled out a narrow roll of tape. With one finger he peeled off something transparent and carefully fixed it onto the bottom of the package. Then he twisted the pack around so we ccould see it.

It was a barcode, printed on a tiny transparent sticky label.

We watched in a mixture or flabbergasted awe and horror at blatant ignorance of the international laws of copyright!

When my daughter Tabbi was in Syria my friendly perfumier mentioned to her that he would like to open a perfume shop in Australia. She and Peter were travelling together, and both are law students. Wondering how to put it tactfully, Peter said "I think you might have some trouble with copyright."

He said, "Copyright, copyright, copyright. You think you are so free in the west. In Syria we have three rules.

One, do not talk about the government.

Two, no guns.

Three, (and he tapped his nose) no cocaine, no drugs.

In Syria we are free. You are not free. You have copyright."

This sort of copying is not illegal in Syria and all sorts of things including music are copied and sold. It is horrifying to us, but they see nothing wrong with it at all as there is no law against it, and no feeling that it is in any way wrong.

It made me think about what freedom is to other people though.

Floods

I walked out on to the balcony off our bedroom a couple of days ago. I have no idea why. It is awkward to get at really - especially since I have a couple of suitcases stashed in the doorway. It is too hot to be pleasant to stand barefooted on sundrenched whit marble. I haven't been out there for ages - probably since last time it was washed and by the look of the drifts of dirt and leaves and soot that was a long time ago.

Even with a housekeeper I am a lousy housekeeper. I probably should have suggested it be cleaned - but then I hardly ever use it.

There was a big pool of water on the balcony.

Now, bear in mind that we have had a couple of weeks of over forty degree temperatures (over one hundred for those in the United States)followed by a week of comparatively cooler weather - around thirty two to thirty five degrees. It has not rained. The balcony has not been washed in weeks.

I stood for a moment looking rather stupidly at the puddle. It was a good six feet across and deepish near the drain. It just should not have been there and my brain was having trouble accepting that it was. I even looked up but there was nothing but dusty sky.

I had to accept that somehow the water had actually come out of the drain. It had climbed a floor level to do so, so it was obviously very determined.

I rang the Embassy and they called in a plumber. He removed a large supply of rocks and sand and builder's debris, declared the drain unblocked and proceeded to pack up his tools. I asked where the water had come from. He pointed to the drain. Well, I knew that - but why was it even in the drain when the balcony had not been washed in weeks. He told me that it was fixed now and left.

I went out next morning and came home to the dubious sight of piles of listing cardboard boxes with ominously soggy bottoms on the lawn. Veronica reported that there had been a flood in the basement, but she had cleaned it up. When I queried this, she said it was from the drain that the plumber cleaned, because it had been cleaned out.

Next day Bob went down to the basement to get some wine for a felucca ride. He shouted for assistance - and was assisted by Ahmed to clean up the now mounting pool of water with yet more cardboard boxes ankle deep (can a box be ankle deep?) in it. Unfortunately some of these were full of curtains, now very wet and heavy.

The plumbers came again and diagnosed a broken water main in the wall - hence the constant supply of fresh water in our new indoor swimming pool.

It will be fixed in two days - and meanwhile we mop regularly and often. At least it might help to soak some of the salt out of the walls.

Now wouldn't you think that water appearing from a drain on a second floor would be a clue to the fact that something other than a blocked drain was wrong?

Not in Egypt!

The Grey Ghost

My youngest daughter Tabbi has gone. She left for Australia from the house two days ago. At the airport (and she had been asked to present herself at checkout three hours early) she was told that the plane was going to be two hours late. Two hours later and still no sign of a flight. She had arrived at the airport at twelve and finally left at eight pm. Worst of all, she had missed her connection in Bahrain, so the airline put her into a hotel - to pick up the flight she should have been on a day later. She sent a text that commented that she was the only female in the hotel, and that Bahrain was like a sauna. She spent all her time in airconditioning, and found the heat almost unbelievable.

Even two days later the house feels very empty. In Australia it always takes a while to clear the odd bits of clutter that follow guests - the things that won't fit in the case, the bits and pieces left on shelves in bathrooms, and the jobs left to be done. Here, with my lovely efficient staff, things are whisked away and out of sight, the bed was stripped and remade and within a few hours it was almost as if Tabbi had not been here.

There were odd little things that happened though. A bottle of water in the bathroom had been tipped onto the floor and left water everywhere. I kept feeling strangely as if I were being watched. The house often makes odd noises, and our neighbours can be noisy, but there seemed to be more times when I looked up from what I was doing and thought 'what was that?' I kept seeing flashes of movement out of the corner of my eye, but when I looked up there was nothing there. We have security film on all our windows. It cuts out a lot of available light and makes the house dark, but it also keeps it cool and at this time of the year I am grateful for that. Disconcertingly though, it turns each window into a mirror if it is darker outside than inside, so when the film first went on I often caught movement from the corner of my eye, only to realise that it was me! This seemed to be at times when I wasn't moving around.

None of it was anything to put a finger on - it was just a bit odd and I was happy to believe that I was missing my lovely daughter and her bubbly presence.

This morning Bob brought me a cup of tea in bed. I would like to pretend that is unusual but it is almost routine - but never unappreciated. He gets up earlier to go to work, I tend to like to work late into the nights and then sleep like a log in the last few hours of the night. It is school holidays so there are no beeping cars and school assemblies singing raucous versions of the National Anthem with more enthusiasm than melody. Without my early morning wakeup tea I would probably sleep till eleven. He often brings snippets of news with the tea - a really interesting bit of news from an email or Aussie papers on the internet will actually mean that I drink it hot!

This morning's news was "I find this extraordinary, but there seems to be a cat in the house".

Talk about instant attention! This house is impregnable. I used to think that meant that it couldn't become pregnant. I know know better, but certainly it seems odd that anything could get in uninvited. The windows are kept tightly shut as the air is full of dust and heat and keeping the house closed keeps it cooler. For security reasons doors are always closed and locked. Local cats - even the two that I feed - are too shy and skittish to come in even invited. The two slender apricot males that sleep on our doormat will leap up and seethe and undulate back and forth a safe three metres away till fed.

However, the evidence was irrefutable. A nasty smelly pile was deposited in the centre of the small bed in our dressing room.

Our first assumption was that the cat had been in, used the bed as kitty litter (I don't much like that bedspread either) and gone. On second thoughts I started to put together the odd glimpses of movement and realised that I might not have been imagining it.

So today I cruised the house quietly, shoes off, scaring Veronica half out of her wits when I suddenly appeared beside her. She did not believe the cat could still be inside. I was starting to agree with her. We saw no other evidence. Then at 12.30, having spent too long on the computer in chat with family at home, and in great haste I was rushing around to get ready for a trip to the museum to investigate Tutenkhamen's underwear.

I grabbed some lunch and took it upstairs to eat as I changed. I brought the plate down to the kitchen and there was a flurry of movement from the sink as an elegant charcoal cat - in that lanky stage between kitten and cat - erupted from the sink and whirled around the room, skittering sideways on the tiles in its frantic haste to get away from me. I tossed it a piece of not-time-to-eat-it-chicken as I stepped away and back into the doorway. I moved out of sight and watched the chicken, to see the cat apporach it slowly. He is beautiful and I have seen him often before. He is long and slim and elegant and with the large ears and long face of the classic Egyptian cat. I must have moved because he saw me, and with his piece of chicken in his mouth he took off up the back stairs.

I had to leave for the Museum - but left instructions that he was to be quietly tempted out of the house with a food trail, not chased and frightened or they would have more mess to clean up! I arrived home after my staff had left, but have no idea if I still have a cat inside or not.

I love cats, but not when they are raging around the house untrained! It is nice to have the ghost mystery cleared up though - especially since Bob very kindly did the worst part of the clear-up!