Welcome to Cairo

Cairo Journal September 1, 2007

I typed this letter last night at the internet club and when I hit SEND, the page had expired and I lost the entire letter. To get home internet, I call Nile Online and speak to Mahmoud whose English is good. He sends the ‘Collector’ to my door to collect 50 LE and to sign a contract (LE is Pounds Egyptian, but in spoken language it is ‘guinea.’ 50 LE is about $8.50). Last week was teacher orientation so I could not be here to get the service connected. This week, Inshallah.

I hope you all are well. Thank you for so many responses to my first letter home—no matter where I am, I love hearing about what you are doing. I am well and am adjusting to the climate and the city. The streets of Cairo are congested canyons of supercharged heat augmented by car engines. I thought the air would be consistently dry, but there have been several very humid days and on those days if breeze dies down, people are miserable. Cairo is hot but I saw in the newspaper that the temperature in Riyadh, my former home, has been 113/114 recently. Wow!

On the final night of orientation, we met at the Nile Hilton rooftop café. I love the panoramic views of cities. From there I could see the island that I live on, the river boats, the busy part of town where the university is located. The river as it passes through Cairo is not the romantic, majestic river of literature; it is an economic and entertainment entity, but it is still very energizing to be near it.

Classes have not begun yet and the university spends four days on new teacher orientation. Part of our orientation was a session on Living in Cairo, and it was very informative. I admired one woman in particular; she was honest and unapologetic: “We are a male dominated society. The men dominate our lives. Our fathers, our husbands and our sons dominate our lives. If there is a question, we ask advice from our fathers, our uncles, our husbands.” “Our families are the most important thing. Our children live at home until they are married. If the son is 45 and still not married, he still lives at home.” Another of her topics was social occasions: Dinner Parties—“If you are invited to a dinner party at 8:00, you do not go at 8. If you go at 8, no one will be ready for you. You go at 8:30 or even later. Even if I invite you and I say 8, do not come at 8.” Hospital Visits—“If you visit someone in the hospital...it is not like in the West. You can take flowers or chocolates, but you will find many people in the room. The whole family will be there, laughing, talking.”

Another topic was Social Customs: Dating and Marriage—“Young people can not just marry themselves.” (I love the language of non native English speakers). “There is no dating........well, young people date but we don’t talk about it.” (such honesty!) “That way there are not mothers alone.........THAT does not happen.......I mean.........it happens, but not very much. Maybe it happens one percent. But when happens one percent that doesn’t mean it happens.” (right)

My favorite presentation was bits of advice from another Egyptian woman. She broke her topic up into 10 categories. (The comments are mine unless in quotation marks or otherwise indicated to be the speaker)
Her topic:

Try to Live Up With:

1. Dogs and Cats

I have not seen many dogs—of course there is one barking just twenty feet down the road from ME—but there are countless cats just as in the other parts of the Arab world. I believe the prophet Muhammad liked cats so they are left in peace to get by as well as they can eating from the garbage (# 6). There were countless cats in Azerbaijan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. In Yemen there were neighborhood dumpster containers and at night if you tossed a sack of trash in, you were startled by seven or eight cats jumping out. One of the teachers here was at a restaurant and had mercy on a stray kitten. She decided to take it home and the Egyptians were totally aghast. They probably would not recognize the kitten now in its second life—fat and sleek, but cross eyed, and it has a tendency to balance itself against the back of the sofa, on its round fat bottom and stare at you with its crossed eyes. Very disconcerting. The teacher, says its crossed eyes adversely affect the cat’s peripheral vision and it frequently attacks her.

2. Nightlife: “We love noise.” I have often wondered about this. The Arabs I have worked with can work with any degree of noise and distraction. Not only that, but they are supreme multi-taskers. In a job interview in America you might be asked if you can multi-task and you nod ‘Yes,’ knowing you can answer the phone while you are reading the paper and drinking coffee. I promise you that in a contest, the Arabs will win hands down and leave you feeling like pencil and paper in an instant messenger world. They will talk on the phone, wait on three or four people at once, ring up items on the register, make change, smile, pat a child on the head, greet a new customer, and insist on giving you an Arabic lesson—all at once, or at least, all within the same two or three minutes.

3. Honking: Honking is a problem here because it is used so often but the horns are for the most part, the beeping kind, and they are nothing compared to the horns in Azerbaijan where cars have horns that reproduce ambulance sirens, fire truck sirens, any trite piece of rhythmic Western music, any irritating electronic pulse sound you have ever heard... and a pack of wild dogs. Again I refer to Kamran. He and his friends were walking in Baku and suddenly a pack of crazed dogs was behind them about to attack. They were instantly terrorized. But, no, not dogs-- it was a car horn. Well, young Azeri men don’t like to be frightened especially in front of their friends, so Kamran and his friends opened the car door, jerked the guy out and beat him up. I haven’t seen THAT here.

4. Seat-belts. I haven’t seen one so I am not sure what she is talking about. 

5. Crossing the street. This was so funny. The speaker came to this point. “Crossing the street....” (she paused and looked out at us innocents).....she grabbed her head with both hands and cried, “Oh my God!”
It was so funny. “The worst thing you can do......problem even for us.” Her advice, “Go to the light, wait for the light......... (another long pause)....... but sometimes, the cars, they don’t follow the rules...they don’t stop, so you must wait and maybe the cars will stop.” Then she told a joke: There was a driver and a preacher who died and went to heaven. Allah said to the preacher, “You go to the low place”, but to the driver he said, “You go to the high place.” The preacher said, “Why? All my life I tell people about God. Why do I go to the low place?” And God said, “All your life you tell people about God but they don’t pay attention. The driver gets into his car, and all the people begin praying.”

6. Garbage. The Egyptian advice? “Well, there is garbage so we have to live with it.” In my building there is a small interior open core, and a special door in my kitchen opens to the trash can that sits in that open space. Each apartment has its own door and trash can. The man comes daily and takes the trash. Golly. This place is labor intensive and there is labor to fill every need. That is interesting but there is more—I know because I saw the garbage truck on the road. It is a little red Toyota or something like, with some decorative paintwork and with the sides built up, and it is heaped with plasticized white gunny sacks and odd bits of cardboard and other things. I see it every day because the physics of keeping the trash on top of the truck is complicated and takes time to arrange. I first noticed the truck one day, parked under a tall acacia tree and looked up at the top of the heap and there was my trash man, about 14 feet in the air, rolling trash bags around. I was surprised. He gave me a shy smile and raised his hand.

7. Weather. “The weather is hot. What can we do? Nothing. And there is dust. But this is not the fault of the government.” We laughed. There are so many problems that are the fault, by deed, misdeed, or no deed, of the government, but the weather and the dust, well, those are God’s business.

8. Beggars. There are quite a lot of beggars, especially around this time of year—near Ramadan. I am afraid that it has been my habit to ignore the beggars unless I am moved at the particular moment. In Baku, there are elderly beggars and Elchin says some of these old folks really must beg in order to eat. But here, the women in orientation agreed that we should give to the beggars. It is not our business why they beg, but it is good for US to give.

9. Driving and 10. Parking. Both are big problems in Cairo. It is a very densely built city and there is simply not enough room for all the cars. Even the streets here multi-task serving as traffic corridors during the day, and parking lots at night. Double parking is standard. Cars are required to be left in neutral so the street parking attendants can push them bumper to bumper when needed. I laughed the other day though when the cars on a nearby street piled up for a block or so. I looked and at the intersection, bounded on all sides by parked cars--a man had parked his car in the single moving lane to take something to the dry cleaners. In the countries I have visited, cars and parking interest me because you know that by and large, Americans follow the rules, and are considerate drivers who plan ahead when possible, usually indicate turns etc. And when we don’t follow the rules, trouble happens. I remember once on Montana Street that two of the kids happened to park facing the wrong way and both got $30 tickets. The street in front of the house was only about 120 feet long and had no traffic but for the three houses that fronted it.

I arrived in Cairo in the daytime, and I could pay attention to the traffic. I knew I would see something funny. Within about two miles of the airport, I counted five cars that, for various reasons, had stopped in the right hand lane of traffic. I imagined the driver thinking, “Ah, this looks like a convenient place to stop...plenty of room.” I remember in Aden, Yemen, our director telling us about a ticket he received in Aden. There are still not a lot of cars in Aden so drivers can really get up to speed, and regulations, if there are any, are not enforced; anarchy rules the roads. When I was there, in that city of about 400,000 people, there was not a single traffic light, but at some point in the past there was one, and Edward got a ticket for turning right, after stopping, on red. Years later, the memory still rankled.

That was the end of orientation and it was all very good, very useful information about living in Cairo. I would add a couple of other items that we must put up with. The trouble with ‘small change’ and ‘rounding up’ to the benefit of the market, but, I think I will save that for the next letter.

And by the way, the maid is in the kitchen cooking today. The maid story is a long story involving much misunderstanding, many Egyptian pounds, English as a curious language and lots and lots of food. Right now, as happened last week also, she is cooking several different dishes and cooking multiple servings of everything. I am one person, but that just can’t be, can it? When she leaves I will have about forty servings of food. hmmm...why don’t you all drop by!