SANDStorm

That’s right, it’s online fundraising season again! And although this year nobody is paying me to help them raise money online, I just couldn’t help myself…

St. John’s Church in Maadi, Cairo has put together a nifty online catalog for donating to various Egyptian charities, many of which run long-term programs with the Anglican/Episcopal Church in Egypt. You can choose to give to literacy classes for Egyptian women, books for community libraries, schooling for a Sudanese refugee child, and more.

Click to St. John’s Spirit of Giving catalog to learn more about the projects and donate online. Believe me, American dollars can go a long way in Egypt.

Or paste the following URL into your browser window:
http://maadichurchstjohn.org/catalog/catindx.html

When we first met K (this is short for an Arabic name, but most of our readers would have trouble reading the Arabic letter) last week at his brother’s “Jaffa Phonix” (they are an amazing hip-hop – heavy on the hop – group who sing about Palestinian politics) concert, he asked us what we do for a wild night out. A wild night out in Cairo? The best we could come up with was karaoke at Harry’s (but to be fair, would I have even known where to find a wild night in DC? Not likely).

On Thursday, K indeed showed us a wild night (and a great Thanksgiving). The evening started out tame enough. We didn’t try to do anything special for Thanksgiving because it’s only the two of us and we have no American friends. So, after a dinner of creamy pasta with K and a couple of Canadian birds (shout-out!) we went to Harry’s Pub for the usual weekend night of karaoke.

The karaoke crowd was especially supportive tonight – D and our friend A were like rock stars, due to their recent fame in the newspaper (ok, well, the waitress said she saw the article). When the karaoke ended at 2am, our new friend K wasn’t ready to head home yet (he was on vacation, visiting family in Cairo), so he took us to the Hard Rock Cafe at the Grand Hyatt Hotel on the Nile for late night/early morning dancing.

Walking into the Hard Rock Cafe, I could never have guessed where I was. Never. The strobe lights flashed and the bass was pumping loudly throughout the restaurant. The dance floor was full of people dressed in the latest fashions, shimmying their hips and waving their arms in the air.

All the tables were filled with young, Middle Eastern men and women sitting together, drinking beer and picking at massive plates of fried foods. Beer bottles seemed to be on every table; bottles of vodka and gin as well. Women dancing at the tables were out to impress and be seen – flawlessly made up with heavy eyemakeup and long, streaked blonde hair. Many wore halter tops or backless shirts, tight jeans or miniskirts. The men were clean cut and handsome, wearing the latest designer sunglasses and tight white t-shirts to show off their muscles.

I was definitely witnessing a different side of Cairo.

When a new song was mixed in, the crowd clapped together and a trill or two sometimes rose up from the other side of the room. I went out to the dance floor, because I figured, “when am I EVER going to do this again?” The music was very difficult to dance to, as the beat was slow and irregular to me. I tried to mimic the people around me, which had K cracking up because I chose to imitate men rather than the women who were swinging their hips all around (I don’t want that kind of attention here). There were stone-faced, suited, enormous bodyguards on the dance floor who pulled apart couples who got a little too close.

The entire scene was opulence like I’ve never seen before and it seemed somehow “off” to me. Turns out, the crowd wasn’t Egyptian – K assured us that the crowd was mostly vacationing Saudis. He could tell because most of the music was from Saudi Arabia, the people looked like Saudis (not sure what that means), and the ladies smelled “like Saudis” (which means, I think, that they were wearing a lot of strong perfume essence). Canadian A bought a shot of tequila that cost $10 American; K bought a double gin and tonic that cost slightly more than $20 American. The average Egyptian government engineer or teacher might make about $100-$200 a MONTH.

As I watched the spectacle around me I tried to imagine the women covered up in black veils and coats like the images I’ve seen from Saudi Arabia. It was impossible to do. I also realized that no one bothered with staring at me – I felt like a fly on the wall, greedily witnessing a private party, and nobody seemed to care that I wasn’t invited.

I know that we’ve been pretty lax in updating the blog recently. Life hasn’t been filled with endless new adventures like it was two months ago. We’ve settled into our routines and daily life is now fairly predictable, in as much as it can be in this very unpredictable city.

So, I’ve outlined below our usual week for you, starting with Sunday, the first day of the work week (but not the first day of the Arabic week – that is Saturday, yoom el-sabt, the day of rest). Sunday is yoom el-Hadd in Arabic, meaning “the first day.” Likewise, Monday is “the second day,” and so on until Friday, which means literally “day of reunion.”

Sunday (yoom el-Hadd):
First day of the work week, I get up around 9am to go to my Standard Arabic private lesson. The market is usually pretty quiet when I walk through it to my class at 9:45. After the two hour lesson, I usually end up going to the grocery to pick up some eggs or pasta, or I stop off at the kushari shop on my way home and get two orders of kushari, one large order for D and a small order for me. D and I eat lunch together and then he goes to his private lesson, leaving me all afternoon to fritter away my time reading the news on the internet or watching Dr. Phil.

The front door to our apartment building.

In the evenings we sometimes go to our local coffeeshop for tea and to finish up our colloquial Egyptian homework, due the next day.

Monday (yoom el-itneyn):
We trek to Maadi every Monday for colloquial Egyptian Arabic class. The class starts at 11am, so we have to leave the house by 9:45am to take the metro to Maadi, usually a 30 minute ride spent standing. Once we are in Maadi, we greedily take advantage of the numerous amenities which cater to the large American expat community in that neighborhood. We usually feast on western food – a burger or a Ceaser salad are favorites of ours – and then sometimes we go to the Grand Mall to walk around and check out the latest fashions.

The very adorable cats which hang out in Maadi.

In the evenings, there are often lectures at AUC which interest us. A few weeks ago I learned about the ins and outs of doing work as an NGO in Egypt and this upcoming Monday I’ll go hear about astonomical observations of Egyptian monuments.

Tuesday (yoom el-talaat):
Hmmm, Tuesday. Usually I just get up late and lounge around the house all day and evening.

The lobby of our apartment building.

Wednesday (yoom el-arbae):
Maadi again. There’s usually something happening on Wednesday nights which we attend, maybe a lecture, a concert, or a show. This week it was a lecture on granting temporary protection status (TPS) to Palestinian refugees; the week before it was a concert of Sudanese music. This upcoming week we’ll have to make some hard decisions: a lecture on amending the Egyptian constitution, viewing Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” on the rooftop of a downtown Cairo turn-of-the-century mansion, or going to hear Brain Candy at a venue next to the Nile.

Thursday (yoom el-khamees):
Yay! It’s the end of the week! I start it off right at 7am in order to drag myself to my standard Arabic class at 8am. By the time I get back home, I usually just want to crawl back into bed. Thursday afternoons are reserved for cleaning the floors – a very big job when you have granite tiled floors and a constant stream of sand and dirt filtering through the window screens.

Thursday evenings are a grab bag. Sometimes we go out for dinner and a lecture (we are indeed learning quite a lot while in Cairo), or we go to our friend’s house for wine and cards on her balcony while watching the chaos on the street (her neighborhood never goes to sleep).

Friday (yoom el-gomea):
D is usually trying to finish up his work for the week, so I try to stay out of his way. I do grocery shopping, read or study, sometimes at a cafe.

Friday night is reserved for karaoke at Harry’s Pub, a ritzy “English” pub in the Marriott in Zamalek. Karaoke ends at 2am, so you better believe we are never home before 2:30am on Friday nights.

Saturday (yoom el-sabt):
I have standard Arabic class in the mornings, but in the afternoons we try to get out and do something “cultural,” like go to the Egyptian museum or the zoo. Tomorrow we are going on a walk through Islamic Cairo from Khan al-Khalili to the Citidel.

I can read everything on the whiteboard. Eeeeee!

I learned a lot of useful phrases in my colloquial Egyptian language class yesterday, included two ways to say “shame on you,” depending on the severity of the transgression. I’ll keep those phrases close to my tongue when walking through the streets alone.

More importantly though, I learned that I have committed, on more than one occasion, a grave insult to Egyptians. In the past, I have thrown away bread.

In Egyptian Arabic, aeysh means bread. It also means life*. Therefore, throwing away bread is forbidden, or haraam and someone who does so is worse than wasteful. I’m not a wasteful person, and I always try hard to eat the bread we buy. However, the local bread goes bad really quickly. We try to eat the five or six pieces in the same day we buy it, but sometimes we just don’t.

I knew I was being wasteful, but in my defense, I didn’t know it was haraam. My classmates seemed to have already known this rule though. A student from France said it’s really bad if someone is found throwing out bread in France (but really, is there any stale bread in France? How could anyone possibly not eat the entire loaf of French bread in one sitting? I’d never waste crusty French bread!). Another student let us know that it’s also forbidden in Spain; my Arabic teacher suggested it’s because Muslims once lived in Spain.

Our teacher suggested we should give our leftover bread to poor people, but I don’t feel too good about giving slightly moldy, stale bread to someone to eat. Instead, last night, I opened the screen on our window, tore up the piece of leftover bread which I purchased four days ago, and threw it onto our balcony. I don’t really want to attract pigeons (or ferrets) to our balcony, but I certainly don’t want to offend our doorman when he takes our garbage from us.

*As an aside, aeysh also uses the same root for the verb which means “living in a country.” My teacher taught me a useful phrase to say if I believe someone is cheating me: “Thief! I live in this country.” I’m pretty sure I’ll never use that phrase.

1. Crosswalks and/or pedestrian bridges across four-lane roads.

2. My anonymity. [I really miss this one.]

3. My car. But even if I did have a car here, I don’t think I would make it much further than a mile from our house before running into an old man standing in the middle of the street, or a wagon full of cabbage hulled by a donkey, or a dented, bumper-less minibus, or all three in one blow. So, it’s best I don’t have the temptation.

4. My simplistic view of America’s role in foreign affairs – I could never have fully understood the impact the decisions our leaders make until I came to the Middle East. It was so much easier to fall asleep back then…

5. Kraft macaroni and cheese – no spirals or fancy white cheddar powder. Just the original dayglo orange version.

6. Conversations which are slightly more complex than:
“How much is a kilo of oranges?” or
“My brother is a doctor.” or
(as complex as it gets…) “I am happy today because I am here.”

7. Watching the Sunday morning pundits cut each other down (preferably seated on my couch with a hot cup of freshly brewed coffee rather than Nescafe), especially in the run up to the midterm elections. Will the Democrats take the House and Senate? Have the Democrats given the American public a clear message on what they stand for? And, what exactly do they stand for again?

Oh wait, no. Wrong list.

8. George W. Bush. Remember, before he destroyed the world, how we could laugh at that guy?

D and I just returned from Makan, a concert venue in downtown Cairo which hosts live traditional music every Tuesday and Wednesday night. The building is just a block from a Metro stop and across the street from the imposing, sloped walls of the Pharonic, yet oddly Soviet-esque, styled mausoleum of Saad Zaghloul, the Wafd party nationalist leader who was prime minister in Egypt in 1924.

The entrance to Makan is set just slightly below street level and I instinctively duked when walking through the door. The main room is open and the concrete walls are unfinished, full of pockmarks and scars. Although the walls are barren, the atmosphere is very intimate. Red and white wooden chairs line the railing of the balcony which overlooks the room. Chairs and floor cushions are placed on the large, red oriental rugs which cover the floors and the whole room is lit by small, soft, orange light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

Tonight’s concert was Setona, a group of eleven performers who play Sudanese music. As the musicians sat down, someone’s phone rang out, “Hello? Is that me you’re looking for?” Yes, the phone played Lionel Richie.

I have never heard Sudanese music before. Or at least I thought I hadn’t, until I recognized the third song they played from one of the various “World Music” cds I used to own. Every song Setona played tonight was up-tempo and lively, enhanced by the crowd’s singing and clapping – the songs were definitely familiar to many in the room. Occasionally a woman’s high-pitched voice rang out from the crowd, “tttttttttrrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiii—iiiiiiiii—iiiiiiiiiiiiiii—–iiiiiiiiiiiiii—–llllllllllllllllllllllllllllll……….” and the crowd responded with fists pumping in the air.

Most of the instruments were recognizable to me: four types of drums, an oud, a six-foot long wooden xylophone, a red velvet-covered accordian, and various percussion instruments like a clapper and something which looked like a cheese grater. Two men and two women clapped and sang in the background. Another man played three round drums which floated in a three-foot diameter metal laundry bucket filled with water. The lead singer, a large woman in a pink and gold wrap which sparkled under the lights and mezmorized me, played a drum under her arm. When the pace of the music got faster, she switched to a large, wooden mortar and pestle. She stood up and pounded the pestle into the mortar, her whole body shaking as the loud knocks rang out and directed the tempo changes to the other musicians.

As Setona entered into the second hour of music, the crowd did not show any signs of restlessness. The triller and a few others from the crowd got up and danced in the semi-circle in front of the musicians. The triller moved her torso in slow waves and threw her head back, her face to the ceiling. One of the male dancers put his fingertip on her forehead, as if turning her around and around like a top. I couldn’t stop watching and hoped they’d never get tired of dancing for me. By the end of the night, I felt like I was sitting in a friend’s living room with fifty of my closest and newest friends.

D, on our life in Cairo (and after a few glasses of wine):

“I think I just need to embrace consumerism – this whole search for worldly truths is just depressing.”

Yesterday D and I walked down the street and past a fifteen story apartment building with mod half-circular balconies that we’ve admired many times. There were two people standing near the entrance with their necks craned up to the roof. Around them, concrete blocks, debris, and dust was strewn across the street. And under the building was a small white car, its’ roof crushed in and windows shattered, concrete blocks settled into the rear passenger seats.

Wow.

Falling balconies – yet another hazard to watch out for when walking on the streets of Cairo.

The black cloud has arrived in Cairo again this year, hovering menacingly over the homes of millions of residents. After reading this article, I’ve decided not to stay in Cairo a day over five years.

Black cloud threatens Egyptians’ health

We were awoken this morning by the sound of pitter-patter outside.

Rain. The first rain we’ve seen since early July.

Contrary to what we’ve been told, the rain did not evaporate before hitting the ground, as the streets were still wet hours after the storm. There were no stormy, grey clouds in the sky; only a dusty, brown glint hovering above us. We’ve been told that the rain in Cairo will stain your clothes, but unfortunately, I did not test that myth this time. Next time it rains – maybe in another four months – I promise I’ll test it out.

This morning at the community center in Maadi I overheard a woman declare that winter has really arrived with the first rain in Cairo. I’m still holding my breath for “winter.”