Copyright trailing grouse

Cairo is the City Victorious. She is. No matter what happens, she wins.

I trundle along in my rather mundane life, ignoring her, ignoring her richness around me and then it happens. Without fail. She chews me up, lacerating me with her sharp teeth, smothering me with her sandpaper tongue and as I fight to gasp a last mouthful of air, she swallows. I find myself deep in the uncertainty of her underbelly. Who to trust, where to go, what to believe? Everything is turned on its head and a black  scream forms inside my gut. It moves up, too loud for my voice, the screams echo inside my head, “I AM LEAVING. GET ME OUT OF HERE!” and then the words that later feel so disloyal, “I H-A-T-E  E-G-Y-P-T!”

Disloyal because also without fail, shortly after that, I have one of the best days of my life and know that Cairo is truly Um el Donia.*

Such is life in this megacity, that those of us who choose to live here because we love Cairo, cannot leave for fear of never finding somewhere that makes us feel as alive as we do when we’re in her arms.

*Mother of the world

Hundreds of graves.

Hundreds of names on walls.

I went to El Alamain recently. It was the first time I’d found the Commonwealth War Memorial.

Everything is beautifully simple and well maintained.

The Gordon Highlanders

Royal Indian Engineers

Standing in the middle of an overseas graveyard of fallen soldiers, sailors and airmen, it is hard not to think about the individuals who are risking their lives right now on our behalf, whether we want then to be or not.

I recently received a comment on the Foreign women and orfi marriages in Egypt post. It was addressed as “Hi All” so I thought I’d post it here to maximise responses. To you all you lurkers, yes you, you know who you are (and I know you’re there!), this is a time to delurk and put in your 5 cents worth. You don’t even need to introduce yourselves!

“..I have just returned from Sharm el Sheikh where I met this wonderful Egyptian man…A ll we did was talk about everyday things a few days before I left. He was being ulta nice to me and I do believe he is genuine, as he didn’t seem the type to come on to girls, he was rather quiet – there was many girls around and he never seemed interested in any of them. I had only been there a few days when I first noticed him. You look and watch their actions etc., but all he did was work, work, work. During the last few days he was telling me I had the most beautiful eyes…on the night before we left, he was at our table all the time, so on leaving we said nice to meet you etc., gave him a good tip [and] said we may return in the autumn… The next day when he..finished work, he came to the pool where I was sitting and said he had to say one last goodbye. I gave him a hug and he had a tear in his eye. We exchanged mobile numbers and I never thought for one min he would text. I was at the airport and he should have been sleeping..he texts saying he had great time meeting me… to be honest I was flattered. Well 6 weeks have gone by and everyday night he texts me..now he wants me to go back. He will take 2 weeks off work and we will rent apartment, which he will pay for – he offered. He wants to cook listen to music and ???? I said I was worried about law in Egypt. He then [mentioned] a contract to stay together, which i believe is the orfi marraige. If I want to get that we will, if not we won’t, as it will be ok for us. Its up to me what I want. He says [I can] just put [the]paper in my bag and after [the] holiday if I still want him keep it for when I visit again..or put in the bin, but hopes i would keep it if we get one. He then says he wants me for life and one day we both stay in Egypt and go to Cairo for full contarct marraige if I want. I guess alot of people will think WAKE UP but he sounds so trusting and to be honest I do believe him. We now text when I wake in the morning, when he goes to bed at lunchtime, before he starts work and before I..go to sleep. Sometimes he calls around 4 in the morning because it’s quiet then… and this is everyday. Does anyone think I am getting taken for a mug?????? How can he know he wants me if nothing really happened when I was there?”

………

How can he know he wants me if nothing happened when we were there? Exactly. He doesn’t know your personality, not from when you were there. He doesn’t know how amazing you are, what makes you truly happy, or how horrible you are when you’re grumpy. You’re right.

Let’s look at what he does know.

He knows you have money. It doesn’t matter how much money you think you have or don’t have, at minimum you have enough money for a holiday abroad and enough to plan another holiday abroad. In Egypt that is something only the very rich can imagine doing. In Egypt, working as a waiter in Sharm is respectable, but imagine Bill Gates staying in a hotel in London and a waitress starts telling him she likes his eyes.  Shouldn’t he be just a little bit suspicious? Imagine she sends him texts for weeks and calls him sometimes. If you were Bill Gates’ friend, wouldn’t you be highly sceptical of the waitress’ intentions? If you were the waitress and you saw that the millionaire was flattered by your advances, wouldn’t you continue? I mean, what’s to lose?

He knows you have a foreign passport. As much as he probably loves Egypt, as much as he may (and you haven’t mentioned this, but as it’s a common story, I’m filling in this blank) say he does not want to leave Egypt, the truth is that working abroad will make him far more money than working in Egypt. Leaving Egypt is not so easy as other countries get tougher on immigrants, but if you get married and after some time, get the passport, suddenly hundreds of doors open.

He knows that you will sleep with him. Sorry, this isn’t exactly tasteful, but it’s something that cannot be overlooked. While it is totally accepted in our culture to have a ‘fling’ in Egypt it is absolutely and utterly not.  Not at all. No way. Sex before marriage is pretty impossible. It doesn’t mean people don’t want it though – we’re all human. Imagine the thought of two weeks of sex, in a country where having a phyisical relationship with a girlfriend means holding hands.

Something worries me slightly: you do not know this guy. Staying in a flat with someone you hardly know,  other than through phone calls, in a foreign country and culture, is a risk. Chances are the risk is minimal, but why put yourself in that position? And what would you do in the worst case scenario? Sharm is incredibly spread out and very difficult to get around without a car. If  you had to get to the airport or hospital in a hurry, how would you manage that? It’s not as simple as just dialling an emergency number, or calling a cab. If you’re not staying in a hotel in Sharm, life it really not as straightforward. The hotels are there to make things easy. Taxis wait around them and reception will organise pretty much anything you ask them to.

Think of it like this: would you want your best friend to go and stay with someone she hardly knew in a country where she doesn’t speak the language and get a contract/marriage she doesn’t fully understand?

The other thing that this guy knows is that you like attention and flattery. Really, who doesn’t?! It’s not a weakness, it’s totally normal, but just because someone pays you a lot of attention, does that mean that you should be considering marriage – either full or orfi?!

If you feel like having an adventure, by all means go back to Sharm, with a friend to look out for you and stay in a hotel. Don’t get any sort of contract, don’t stay with him. Don’t make it so easy for him: if it’s true love, he will understand why you don’t want to stay with him just yet.

…….

It would be fantastic if you lurkers would get in on this. In case it adds to anything, our commenter is 35 and the waiter is 24.

This post is not about Egyptian men. There are no generalisations made other than this: women are women, men are men and nationality does not determine ‘goodness’ (or ‘badness’). All comments are moderated and no rude, rasict or otherwise derogatory comments will be accepted.

I wrote a while ago about foreign women marrying Egyptian men. It led to a full inbox of questions. I thought I’d take it a step further and explain that there are two types of marriages in Egypt.

First is the ‘official’ marriage. This is where the bride is dressed up (usually in white) a large venue is booked, official photographs are taken, videographers are often present, and copious numbers of family, friends and colleagues gather, dressed up to the nines and celebrate as lavishly as the couple’s families’ budget allows. For Christians there is a church service beforehand and for Muslims the religious ceremony happens before the wedding party, sometimes months before, and will always involve at least the bride and groom’s close family members. This is because, for marriage to be fully sanctioned in Islam, it is essential that ’society’ knows about it. It is unheard of for a couple to disappear and come back together married.

The second type of marriage is called orfi marriage. This is a fully sanctioned Islamic practice. This wedding, however, does not involve the family, does not have a party and for, the most part, is done in secret. Within the religious culture there are explanations for its existence. In reality it has seedy connotations, (the equivalent of legalising prostitution), as well as romantic starry-eyed ones (students who want to get married but know their families would not agree). It is, however, regarded by NOBODY (the State included) as being an ‘official’ marriage.

The problem with orfi ‘marriages’ between Egyptian men and foreign women (perhaps the same goes the other way around too, I just haven’t heard of it) is that there is usually a huge gulf in understanding the concept of orfi ‘marriages’ between the two people. While the man/Muslim who has been brought up in a culture where he understands the difference from day one, and is used to the idea that the sanctity concept of the word ‘marriage’ applying only to the ‘official’ type, the woman/non-Muslim (or recent convert) often doesn’t fully understand this.

In reality, orfi ‘marriages’ are little more than a contract that allows the couple to live together and share hotel rooms together. They call each other husband and wife, but, and this is where the problems often come in for the foreign party: despite the husband/wife terms being used, there is absolutely no necessity for the underlying intention to be together ’til death us to part’.

The heartbreaking confusion that unfortunately seems to arise from this misunderstanding is common. Neither side is to blame – it’s just one of those cultural misunderstandings arising from cultural differences. It took me about five years of living here and watching how things work to get my head around the fact that when a man is calling someone his wife, it doesn’t necessarily mean she is his life partner if the marriage is orfi.

Perhaps most importantly, in an orfi ‘marriage’, there are no provisions for the wife if a divorce happens and fathers of children in orfi marriages have only recently been made to take some (limited) responsibility for them. The children, as I understand it, would not have a father’s name on their birth certificate. Orfi ‘divorces’ anyway rarely occur, a separation just takes place and both parties disappear into the ether in exactly the same way as they would had they been boyfriend/girlfriend in the West. In contrast, in the ‘official’ Islamic marriages, there are strict religious and social conventions that are followed before the marriage that set a framework for provisions in the case of divorce.

There are some common stories (involving foreigners) I’ve heard throughout my time here:

- A man from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait ‘marries’ a new Western convert. The wedding cannot take place in his home country for some reason that sounds fine to Western ears, convert or not, but is in reality socially implausible (as there is no instance where he would have an ‘official’ marriage without large numbers of extended family present).

- Egyptian man and Western woman get ‘married’. She believes they are now husband and wife…

- Egyptian man and Western woman get ‘married’. She understands it’s a contract, however, after months of referring to her partner/boyfriend as her husband and being referred to as his wife, the connotations of those terms begin, somewhere deep inside, to arouse feelings of the type of security she associates with ‘full’ marriage. When it ends, she feels her ‘husband’ wasn’t taking it as seriously as her.

So, bottom line: orfi ‘marriages’ are not marriages in the Western/Christian concept. Orfi ‘marriage’ = contract to live together without the police interfering.

Perhaps most importantly, not all Egyptian men are love rats. Not by any means. Just as not all American, French, Japanese or Outer Mongolian men are (or aren’t). There are huge cultural differences between this culture and Western culture, with both having some amazing points and both having points I don’t like quite so much. When two people from such different cultural backgrounds come together, particularly when the female partner is from the West, there is a labyrinth of problems that arise purely from cultural differences. Linguistic problems often conspire to make it even harder and of course, there are the typical issues that arise when two characters meet.

Relationships between Egyptian men and Western women can and do work out, but they typically take an enormous amount of time, effort, understanding and patience by both parties. And ultimately, the chances of success are limited if one party does not fully understand the framework of their relationship’s basis.

In the very centre of St Katherine’s Protectorate live these beautiful girls. So ecstatically happy in this picture, because they have just been given a colourful toy. With the cut of their mother’s knife, it will turn into something sweet and juicy to eat.

Image from stock.xchng

It’s difficult to get married these days in Egypt. It’s not that Egypt has Australia’s ‘man drought’. Nope. It’s hard cash that’s the problem.

Just as in the West the bride’s family traditionally pays for the wedding, in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, there are traditions about who pays what. As couples don’t leave home until they get married, buying a place to live is key to tying the knot. Tradition dictates that the groom buys the home and white goods (picked by the bride) and the bride furnishes it – completely.

The problem is that house prices are so high that the majority of people cannot afford to buy. For those that would never be able to buy anyway, rents are also on the rise. This often results in children living at home until well into their mid-thirties when enough money has been saved to buy a small apartment.

There are a multitude of problems arising from this, not least, that with sex before marriage severely frowned upon/forbidden amongst both main religions here, unmarried twenty and thirty somethings’ lives just aren’t what adults would define as ‘normal’ in the West. It is even worse for the women, as they are often living with curfews right up until their marriage. I am not joking on this either: a friend of mine, unmarried and in her forties, who had previously lived and worked in Dubai, sans parents, had a 10pm/midnight (depending on circumstance) curfew imposed and upheld upon her return to Egypt.

There are so many ways in which our cultures are different that it can be hard to understand why on earth a 40 year old woman would accept a curfew. Parents are held in such high esteem in this part of the world, that openly disobeying them is an almighty disrespect.

Anyway, back to marriage. The issue about lack of affordable housing has been cashed in on over Ramadan with a TV show offering unmarried couples the opportunity to battle it out and win a two bedroom apartment. It’s been essential watching. Luckily for you, I’m not going to attach a youtube clip in Arabic, the good old BBC has helped me out and made a short report that you can watch here.

Someone I know is having an affair. It’s serious. It’s with a colleague. He wanted my opinion, so bearing in mind cultural differences, and what I knew of the situation, I gave it.

In response to a point he had made about the “other woman” liking his wife and that she would have liked to be friends with his wife, I pointed out that if that were true, she would have done so when she had the opportunity (long before the affair started – and then, perhaps, it might not have begun).

I certainly don’t know everything there is to know about Egyptian culture, but I do try to remember the pieces of the jigsaw I discover. After all this time, it is unusual for me to hear something about it that I have never come across before. A gem came in response to my observation: the “other woman” colleague could never have become friends with his wife.

Apparently, it is socially unacceptable for a colleague of the same sex as your spouse to become friends with your spouse.

Why?

Because it would ignite suspicions that your colleague has amorous intentions towards you and wants to get closer to you via your spouse.

I have no idea if this is the same in any other country/culture, but it baffles me.

And certainly did not work in this case.

Actually, there are two words on the Street right now.

First is that we are not going to change the clocks this year. This has yet to be proven as we normally do it three weeks to a month later than the UK, however, the theory I’ve heard is that it is because of Ramadan. This year Ramadan is due to fall on or around 1 September, when the weather is still pretty hot. Last year, Ramadan started a week before the clocks normally change, so they were changed early (a week or two) – hence the ‘word’. We’ll see.

The second word is that tomorrow there is going to be a national strike. There has been no official approval for this strike, so we’ll see if people decide to stay indoors. The strike would be about (as I understand it) the rising cost of living. I’m not sure what the would-be strikers hope to achieve though, as with food, the government has been sheltering a sizable part of the population from what is happening on the global markets by way of subsidisation. With petrol, this is so for the entire population. Saying that, prices are rising far faster than salaries, and times are extremely tough for many. Again, we’ll see.

~~

Our bowab (doorman) works hard for the building. He is up every morning washing the cars, he cleans the stairs, which has been no small job with the number of workmen in the building for the past 18 months and generally keeps it looking good.

He also does a lot of running around town for The Lady Downstairs (TLD) who has a business and seems incapable of going to the bank or offices on the other side of town herself. The business has employees and sizable funds, given where it advertises, for marketing. Her mode of transport is a BMW, his, because she won’t give him a taxi fare (which is nothing here) is the microbus – Cairo’s most dangerous and crowded form of transport. His pay for all this is minimal. On top of that, she treats him as a verbal whipping boy. Living above her, I am treated to her daily (on average) screaming fits. The bowab isn’t the only recipient, however, being close at hand, he is yelled at daily for absolutely nothing.

The day before yesterday, I was waiting for the elevator and heard him downstairs ringing her doorbell. Someone came to the door (not TLD, probably her maid) and he told her he had the electricity bill. Next hurried footsteps came to the door, followed by TLD’s raspy screaming, “You’ve got the electricity bill for me? Give it here!”.

Nice, huh?

So, Mr Bowab told me last month that he would be leaving for his home in the South for a few weeks at the end of March/beginning of April because his wife is going to give birth. This would be the second time he’s seen her in the past 12 months as the job of doorman does not come with holiday time.

Yesterday I realised that it was well into April and he was still here. Why? Apparently TLD won’t let him go because she has too much running around town for him to do.

And she has him by the short and curlies, because everybody knows that jobs are scarce and people on his his salary have few savings. What he does have though, is a savings account of hatred towards here growing with compound interest.

Due to some work engagements of Mr S, I found myself heading to Alexandria again this weekend. I didn’t mind that he had to work, I was planning to take it easy at the hotel, reading my book on the balcony and looking over the sea.

I expected there to be a problem when we got to the hotel, there have been the two previous times I’ve stayed there. Apparently 5-star grading doesn’t take into account check-in (or check-out!) procedures. Anyway, I am not going to whine about staying in a 5 star hotel. Primarily because I think the stars are there purely as decoration, not as part of any rating. I will say, still not whining (only because I’m saving it for another post), that it is the only time in my life where I have told the manager of a place of accommodation directly to their face that I do not want to stay in their establishment. It was not a good weekend.

We took the train to Alex. It’s a decent train and usually runs pretty much on time. I’ve done this journey plenty of times over the years and until today, had not realised that every time I have gone, I have arrived in the morning and left the same day, or another, in the late afternoon/early evening. What brought this to my attention today was watching the commuter trains arriving.

You can forget right now any polished notions you have of commuter trains. These trains had not seen a lick or a spit probably since they were purchased in the seventies. A lot of the commuters themselves were not on the way to the office in freshly pressed suits, but were traveling in from outlying farming communities to sell their wares at the market.

I did not take any pictures of what I am about to describe, because I was so shocked and so sad at the suffering that I did not want to capture a moment of it on digital celluloid. A picture may say a thousand words, but in this instance, your imagination and compassion are required and words are infinitely better at conjuring them up (I hope I can do justice – and I am not going to weave a tale of whispering hubbly bubbly smoke and minarets in some far gone exotic land, that can be saved for the movies and writers wanting to make a quick buck off a Western myth).

Also, before I continue, I would like to clarify that although I now live in one of Cairo’s most exclusive neighbourhoods (so exclusive that I barely consider it part of Cairo), I have not always and I have worked for organisations actively working to improve life for some of the the most unfortunate in this country, so I have a fairly good idea of how life here is for many.

So, back to the platform. It was 7.45am and our train was due at 8am. The platform for the Cairo train is an island between four sets of tracks. We were standing on the platform as it filled up with other Cairo-bound travelers. Hawkers were working their patch selling newspapers and magazines, there were a couple of elderly female beggars moving from passenger to passenger looking for a small act of kindness that would secure their food that day. There was nothing unusual.

A train appeared down the tracks and Mr S commented that he had never seen third class carriages in Egypt. I assured him there were many, particularly on the type of train that was approaching. The engine passed and the first carriage was passing. Inside it was jam packed to the extent that people were hanging out the doors that were by now open. Movement inside the carriage of people wanting to alight made those at the doorways literally ‘pop’ off the train and onto the tracks below. They would then make their way over, in no particular hurry, to our platform.

Once the train jerked to a halt, the work really began. A boy about eight years old jumped off, on to the Cairo bound tracks and took a 1 metre diametre aluminium pot piled full with vegetables across the tracks to our platform. Then he went back and got another. His portly mother, in her long galabeya, sat down on the floor of the carriage and jumped out onto the Cairo tracks and took a sack of potatoes, easily 10kg and heaved it across to our platform. The little boy clambered back on the now moving train while she stood on the Cairo bound tracks waving him off. She then made her way up onto our platform and proceeded to drag her goods pot by pot across the platform to the other side. Once gathered there, she made her way down onto the tracks coming from Cairo, and heaved one of her pots over to the next platform, then made her way over to the tracks coming from Cairo. Just in time, because another train arrived. Doors open on both sides again, this woman then lifted her two pots and sack of potatoes onto the train, clambered aboard and slid in the single pot from the adjacent platform, just before the train left.

This story was repeated many times over, with her train and subsequent ones.

The train following hers, however, was (somewhat impossibly) even fuller. As the engine rolled past along with it came two young men, straddling the train buffers, holding on to the train with flat palms against steel of the engine and the front carriage.

Sure enough, at 7.55am they, as with many others, jumped off the train, onto the Cairo tracks and made their way, without much haste onto our platform. More women with lead heavy sacks and pots made their way across the tracks, either unaware that a train was due at 8am, or not caring much that it was.

The whole scene, in contrast to us holding our first class tickets and waiting for our plush seats in our air conditioned carriage was, and still is, extremely difficult to stomach. Of course I knew that the trains were crowded, extremely crowded and I’ve been squashed up against voluptuous female bodies on the Cairo metro at rush hour, and I’ve heard of people traveling on the roof on Delta trains. Mostly, however, I have not seen it and I was led to believe by the people describing it to me, that it was teenage boys who wanted to be dare devils. Perhaps so in some cases, but this was something quite different.

In all honesty, worse that watching it, was knowing that there is nothing I could do to help. I mean, yes, I could have tried to help the women carry the potatoes etc, but in reality, I would have been a hindrance more than a help.

So this is life in Egypt. You can live in a cocoon and never see anything like this and complain about how tough life is, or you can get out and about and see things what life can be like. The thing is, a poor reflection on me perhaps, it doesn’t stop the grumbling for as long as perhaps it should.

Queue for subsidised bread taken by and copyrighted to Les Parents

There was a little cafe in the wee village I grew up in that offered a ‘clean plate surpise’ for children who finished all the food on their plate. It was a good tactic and the ‘surprise’ ice cream seemed to work with everyone (apart from Lil’ Bro – but that’s a very boring story about the world’s slowest eating child).

Then there was the “There are starving children in the world who would love your food” when those greens were lying around on dinner plates.

Now, chances are, if you’re reading this blog, you have not been to my little village in the Central Highlands, but you are very likely to have heard about the starving children somewhere far away in the world when you were a child.

Recently I was lucky enough to have dinner at a swanky hotel restaurant. It happened to be buffet night so the choice was endless (well, for Cairo anyway): Australian beef, New Zealand lamb, sushi and sashimi carefully prepared by the Japanese chef with produce flown in from afar, mountains of desserts with Swiss chocolate. You get the picture.

It was as I reached for my plate and realised I had to decide what I would eat that it suddenly occurred to me how obscene this was. The world is currently facing a crisis of food. Multiple causes of course, but the end result is rising prices on the international market.

No doubt wherever you are in the world, you’ve noticed that your pint of milk costs more, that a loaf of bread is more expensive than a year ago and that fuel prices are rising. More than likely you’ve absorbed these costs, albeit begrudgingly.

Egyptian’s too have faced price rises over the past year, but the effect is incomparable to what we have felt. According to a World Bank study in 2005, one fifth of the Egyptian population live in poverty with a further 13% just above it. Baring in mind that prices were significantly cheaper back in 2005 and wages (for those that have a job) are not much different, it is probably safe to say that a good part of that 13% have now dipped below too. Add to that the size of the population: the UN’s 2007 estimate is 77 million. All in all, that is about a third of a lot of people.

The problem in Egypt is compounded by essential governmental subsidies on wheat and fuel (amongst other things). So, while the Egyptian people have been experiencing rises, they have not yet felt the full brunt of the international market’s gains. The government, however, has seen subsidy payments eat further into its budget and logically, cannot sustain the situation for ever. In a country where much of the population is dependent on the government, difficult times for all may be ahead.

While I have a curiosity in things such as this and am lucky enough to have had an education combined with experience that provides me with a modicum of understanding about daily life for the ‘average’ Egyptian (ok, who exactly is ‘average’ is an issue in itself) most expats do not. For somebody arriving in Egypt to Maadi or Qatameya, living in a comfortable apartment/villa with a team of staff, getting used to a new country, it is absolutely understandable that life struggling to buy bread that costs about US$0.01 is extremely hard to imagine, even though it’s on our doorstep. It is also not that easy to see as our normal hang out places are quite removed from the subsidised bread queues.

I am not apportioning blame: this is a local problem caused by a global phenomenon. It cannot hurt, however, if those of us who live cheek-to-jowl at least in global terms, offer a little more patience, and perhaps at the very least slightly larger tips, to those who are in our lives and are struggling to eat half decently, while we gorge at the smorgasbord life has given us.