Unrest

Yesterday afternoon I bought two papers. The headline of Horeya wa Adela, the Brotherhood's paper read: "Million-man march at Etihadia Palace: the people support the President's decisions." The photo showed throngs of Egyptians waving posters of Morsi. Meanwhile, Al-Masry al-Youm, a liberal paper, declared: "The Uprising of November 23: Tahrir says to the President - 'Get lost'" and Morsi says to the Brotherhood - 'I will hold those who are out of line accountable.'" These are two perspectives on Friday's events. All week, protests have been heating up and tear gas and rubber bullet skirmishes erupting in the streets of downtown. People were angry about a number of things already, including the fighting in Gaza and an extremely tragic crash between a bus and a train in Asyut last week. And of course the direct impetus for this bout of unrest was the one-year anniversary of the Mohamed Mahmoud clashes. Many were dismayed to see the memorial become something of a repeat, but opponents of the Brotherhood were galvanized on Thursday by Morsi's constitutional declaration seizing additional powers for himself (supposedly just until the completion of the new constitution in a few months). In a situation in which Morsi already holds executive and legislative powers as a consequence of the dissolution of Parliament some time ago, to many the seizure of judicial authority as well seems a step down a dangerous path. An anti-Brotherhood and Mohamed Mahmoud commemorative march to Tahrir from Mostafa Mahmoud mosque in Mohandiseen that was organized before the declaration was attended by the three favorite candidates of secularists, liberals, and moderate leftists: Mohamed ElBaradei, Hamdeen Sabahy, and Amr Moussa. It appears now that they are working to form a political coalition, a National Front, though it's unfortunately late in the game -- if only they could have coalesced before the presidential election, the Brotherhood might never have been in power in the first place.

After the march on Friday afternoon, a sit-in began in Tahrir, with 400 or so still camped out in tents as of Saturday afternoon. Now, Sunday morning, Twitter voices are reporting that despite even smaller numbers, tear gas bombs have overwhelmed the square. On Friday evening, I was on a boat in the Nile, a bit south of downtown, when a friend texted me to report that another friend had just witnessed demonstrators lighting a police van on fire, with all the officers inside. (Eventually they escaped.) Another friend, a reporter who had spent the day in Tahrir, described how police had staked out the roof of a high school on Mohamed Mahmoud St. and were hurling rocks down on demonstrators at regular intervals. In Alexandria and Suez, demonstrators set fire to the FJP's headquarters. Anti-Ikhwan forces have called for another millioniyya on Tuesday. But will people show up? These million-man marches have become fairly regular in Egypt, and as my friend pointed out, sometimes he shows up and there are only 50 people. It's hard to gauge, from my perspective, how much momentum there is, especially without going to downtown to see events for myself.

Regardless, there are definitely two sides this time, and those who support the Brotherhood's leadership in general, and Morsi's declaration in particular, are also willing to go to the streets. While the Horeya wa Adela headline was a numerical exaggeration (everything seems to have become a millioniyya), the Ikhwan's people really do come out and get organized. Supporters say that Morsi's move on Thursday was necessary to protect the goals of the revolution, stabilize the civilian government, and help the country move out of its stalled transitional phase as quickly as possible -- in fact, to get the constitution finished and judges remaining from the old regime out of the courts. At first, even the liberal journalist Shahira Amin (see old blog post) came out in support of Morsi. She posted on Facebook on Friday: "My message to Egypt's liberals: Morsi speaks our language. He is saying exactly what you are saying and has the same goals in mind. If you support him, his message will be even louder and we will attain our goals quicker. Did you not hear him respond to the chants of 'the people want shari'a law' saying shari'a is rule of law, freedom, and justice for all?" (Later, though, she expressed her dismay with Morsi's failure to delineate a timeline for relinquishing his 'temporary' additional powers.)

I'm not sure at this point how the new decree will be applied. This is Al-Jazeera's summary, which is pretty grim:

President says new decree is aimed at 'cleansing state institutions'

Decree allows president to appoint public prosecutor for a four-year term

Morsi gave himself power to enact any law he wants

Morsi's decree effectively sacks the current prosecutor general, which means no authority can revoke any presidential decisions

Morsi has ordered the retrial of officials linked to killing of protesters

Morsi's decree to remain in force until a new parliament is elected

Parliament canmot be elected until a new constitution is in place

Morsi also extended the timeline for drafting the new constitution

Morsi says he has to have absolute power to protect the revolution

Critics have compared Morsi 's move to Hosni Mubarak's autocratic ways and denounced the move as a 'coup against legitimacy'

It's both reassuring to folks at home and frustrating to me that I can be so close to the action -- just across the river at least -- and have very little idea of what's going on. Even passing through Tahrir underground, in the metro station, there are no signs of the chaos above. Early in the week, it was even unclear to me what people were protesting about, because one regional and national crisis flowed into the next. First was Gaza, which enraged Egyptians, not surprisingly. In cyberspace, Egyptians used "we" to talk about Gazans standing up to Israel. "Share hope, we need no sympathy!" wrote one friend on Facebook. Then, even before Morsi had stepped in to negotiate the Gaza ceasefire, another tragedy occurred. In Asyut, a school bus crashed into an oncoming train while trying to cross the tracks. Again there have been conflicting stories about what exactly went terribly wrong: it appears that the warning light system was broken and the watchman who was supposed to stop traffic was asleep on the job. The result was the death of 60 children. Immediately people called for the governor and transportation minister to resign for tolerating such gross negligence (regardless of whose fault the crash was). The government announced the sum it would pay to families of the deceased and injured children. People were outraged that it was so low. When the same was raised, many were still outraged that the government would put a price on the life of an Egyptian child at all. Especially, though, people were outraged that the Prime Minister was in Gaza and the government (as was explained to me) seemed to care so much more about the tragedy in Gaza than the tragedy at home in Egypt. Basically, many Egyptians were furious that a Gazan life seemed to have greater value to the government (for political reasons) than an Egyptian life. People sat on train tracks throughout Egypt in protest, and these protests bled into the streets. And these in turn bled into the commemoration of Mohamed Mahmoud.

Follow the Protests

It has been a tumultuous week in this part of the world. More details coming soon, but in the meantime, you can read about Morsi's constitutional declaration here. While his decision to take over most judicial powers does, in fact, have many supporters, others are already throwing around the nickname "pharaoh". Here's the text of the declaration.

Opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood, especially supporters of liberal and leftist revolutionary groups that clashed with security forces last November at this very time on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, had already planned a commemoration of that event. But with Morsi's announcement today, many of the same people have tailored their message into a protest against this move as well. For a blow-by-blow account of what's brewing downtown (in English), I recommend Al Ahram's blog.

1434 AH

Today is a beautiful day in Cairo. The sky is blue for once, with a few fluffy white clouds and no apparent signs of smog or acid rain. It is the right temperature for a wool skirt and a sweater, but still warm enough (or finally cool enough) to sit outside. So here I am, in the garden of AUC's Tahrir Campus on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, where almost exactly a year ago infamous clashes erupted between security forces and peaceful protesters, including some of my friends. And just this Friday Salafi demonstrators pressing for shari'a in the new constitution spilled over from the square to paint Quranic verses over the revolutionary murals for which Mohamed Mahmoud has become famous. This morning new painters are out, at work on a fresh mural of Khaled Saeed. Downtown is peaceful today: even the KFC (or, "Kenticky" as it's known here) across the street is shuttered for the holiday, and I'm alone  except for two gardeners and a skinny black cat. Today is Islamic New Year, the first day of the month of Muharram and the start of the year 1434 on the Islamic calendar.

It seems an appropriate time for a fresh start. For the past week or so, for the first time in a couple of months, I have started to regret that I have only one month here before I go home for the holidays. I feel like I have finally begun to find a balance between taking on challenges and granting myself the comforts that will make me happy. September and October were rough - illness, theft, breakup, disillusionment, sexual harassment - I had just about had it with Egypt by the time November rolled around. But both the natural passage of time and a few calming getaways (which I will soon describe) have gotten me back on track.

The backdrop for my personal reflections on my relationship with this place and whether or not it has finally taken a turn for the better has been a series of conflicting news items and dramatically contradictory opinions about the state of politics and society five months into Morsi's presidency. Almost categorically, my Egyptian friends hate the Muslim Brotherhood and hate Morsi. Most say he hasn't done much yet, but are deeply suspicious of what he will do. On the other hand, analysts, including knowledgeable expats here, seem to be pretty impressed with the professionalism and expertise and apparently moderate stances of Morsi's team. In society at large, there have been two reports in the past month or so of a munaqaba woman (one who covers her entire body and face except eyes in a loose, usually black, robe) forcibly cutting the hair of uncovered women in the metro, and one case of a teacher doing this to a female pupil. Perhaps the metro snipper is just one person -- I certainly haven't started moving to the other side of the car whenever I'm standing next to a munaqaba in fear that she's harboring a pair of scissors in the folds of her robe.

Then there were the Islamist constitutional demonstrations last week. The night before, I drove through Tahrir with my friend, on our way to meet others for a nighttime Nile felucca. We were coming from a drive-in shisha cafe, where you smoke through your window and waiters hop from car to car stoking coals. It was an odd juxtaposition, then, to see large crowds of men in Tahrir rigging scaffolding and hanging banners with shari'a scrawled boldly across it. There was no violence the next day, but thousands came to the square. Technically, neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor Al-Nour Party (the main Salafi group) participated, although this does not mean their supporters didn't. The current constitution, from the Mubarak era, states that the "principles of shari'a" are the primary source of legislation, but the main demand of these demonstrators was a more literal application. What this would mean in practice is not entirely clear -- stay tuned for updates.

Discussing the growing boldness of the conservatives as we drove through the square on the eve of the demonstrations, my friend recalled a scene from the famous Egyptian film 'Omarat Yacoubian (The Yacoubian Building). Zaki Pasha, a scion of Egypt's faded elite, stumbles drunk into Talaat Harb Square in the heart of the old downtown with a much younger woman on his arm. It's the middle of the night and the square is empty. Zaki looks up in bitter despair at the grand buildings around him and tries to explain to the woman what Egypt was like in his youth. He came back from Paris because Cairo was even better, he says -- new fashions used to come out here before they came out in Paris! But now, he shouts, flailing about in the square, "Ehna fe zaman el-meskh!" It's this line that my friend wanted to teach me, an expression of what he sees as a descent down a slippery slope led by the Muslim Brotherhood, away from the first world and toward the third. According to the film's translator, it means "We are in the time of travesty," but there is no real translation for meskh: it is rottenness, disintegration, a state when, as my friend said, the time when everything good becomes bad and everything bad becomes good.

A taxi driver I rode with a few days ago was particularly fond of a certain metaphor. The people of Egypt are five fingers of the same hand, he told me more than once, and each one has a different fingerprint. Trite perhaps, but it's true that any person you ask on the street probably has a completely different take on what's going on here right now than the next. When I was here in January, the revolutionary climate still prevailed, if with less intensity and fewer diehards than a few months earlier. Now it's much harder to tell where things are going, whether to be optimistic or pessimistic.

The hand metaphor man was perhaps the paradigmatic Cairo taxi driver, in his jolly yet loud manner but also in his choice of conversation topics.
   Where are you from? Germany?
       No, America.
   What do you think of the Egyptian people? 
      Good people. There are bad and good everywhere, but mostly good.
   Really? Because a lot of Americans think we're all terrorists.
      Well, it's true that there are a lot of ignorant people. But I would not say the majority of Americans believe this.
   I think Americans are respectable people, too. But Islam is a good religion. Terrorists are not real Muslims. Like Osama bin Laden. Anyway, I know Americans and Europeans -- they always ask why Islam says we can have four wives! That's not true. Only in special cases.
       (My friend Lindsey) What are those cases?
    For example, if your wife is sick and can't give you children. You can marry another woman so that   
you don't sin. Or if you want children and you love your wife, but she's sterile. Then it's ok. 
     (Lindsey) Ok, but what if my husband is sterile and I want kids? Don't you think I should be able to  marry a second husband?
    (Good-naturedly) No, no. You should divorce your husband then and marry someone else! 
     (Lindsey) But aren't divorced women here stigmatized? Would you marry a divorced woman?
    Yes, of course! If her husband was a bad man -- if he beat her, for example, which is totally un- Islamic, absolutely. Beating your wife is wrong. If you beat your wife you are not a real man.
     Agreed.
   (Now stuck in traffic on Qasr el-Nil Bridge to Tahrir) But we got off-topic. We were talking about bin Laden. Now, who do you think was responsible for September 11?
     I know what you're going to say...
    You think it was Osama bin Laden?
    Yes.
    Both of you?! Really? Wrong! Then why did all the Jewish businesses in the WTC take a holiday on September 11? They weren't there when the attacks happened! 
    Many, many Jews died in 9/11. Where are you getting your information from?
   [The three of us went back and forth in this vein for a few minutes.]
  Well, the Israelis were behind it. Do some more research about it and you'll see. The hijackers were just put up to it by Israel. That's where the money came from. Do you really think those guys had the money or ability to plan attacks like that?! No way.
    But al Qaeda took responsibility for the attacks. Quite honestly, you're going to lose us on conspiracy theories, but we could probably agree about Israeli policy in the West Bank, for example.
    (At this point we had to get out of the cab.) Yes, yes, okay. You know, there are so many ignorant people out there. They don't read books, they get to college and don't know how to learn. I have a master's.  How much longer will you be in Egypt? It was a pleasure meeting you, take care.
   

The other piece of news that has come up fairly frequently lately is Obama's reelection. Because of the time difference, it wasn't possible for us to throw much of a victory party. (I woke up 15 minutes after the election was called.) When cab drivers brought up the results over the next couple of days, though, they had surprisingly little to say. Whether for my benefit or not, those I encountered gave me a thumbs up and a mabrouk. Perhaps they, like my professors, felt only that he was the better of two evils -- I'm not sure. Generally when I talk to people in Egypt, they have had very mixed feelings about Obama, and feel that he has not delivered at all on the promise he made to reinvent U.S. policy in the Middle East when he spoke at Cairo University in 2009. Still, no one I met had any illusions that Romney would be better. My favorite election moment this year, however, was a t-shirt I spotted while descending into the metro. The t-shirts of the shabab, or youth, are a frequent subject of bewilderment, as the t-shirt companies seem to throw on whatever English words (or even just letters) they stumble across, in no particular order. The gentleman in question was, on Election Day itself, wearing a tight purple imitation Zara brand t-shirt with the following slogan printed on the back: "Paid for by people with deep knowledge of the Romney campaign's strategic thinking." And then a bunch of nonsense words. Where did this come from?!

Obama was not the only fodder for election news of late. As of November 4, Egypt's Copts have a new Pope, Tawadros II, who will be ordained on November 18. Morsi has said he'll attend the ceremony, the first Egyptian president to do so. Initially, electors from the clergy and prominent Christian laymen whittled down a list of possible candidates to 3. Then, as per tradition, a blindfolded child picked the winning name out of a bowl in Abbaseyya Cathedral. Tawadros has said that Morsi is all Egyptians' president, is welcome at the papal enthronement, and deserves love and respect -- but also that Christians will not tolerate a constitution that heeds only the wishes of the Muslim majority. I tried with a few friends to attend the selection ceremony. We arrived at 4:45am, assuming it would probably be packed. In fact, we were the first ones there except for the guards. Turns out we needed to have a special invitation from the church in advance, and no wheedling could persuade them otherwise.


Meanwhile, there is never a dull moment in CASA. Each Monday, the program hosts a lecture, in Arabic, on some topic we've been discussing in class. Last week, it was Shahira Amin, the vice-president of state-owned Nile TV at the time of the revolution. A stylish woman in her early fifties, she spent much of her early life abroad, worked at CNN, and learned Arabic essentially as a second language: her Arabic was peppered with apologetic English. At Nile TV before the revolution, she said, there was little sense of censorship because she worked with foreign language channels whose express goal was to present a positive and open image of Egypt to the outside world. When the revolution came, she and her colleagues were expressly told not to mention the demonstrations on air. Her teenage daughter brought her to Tahrir, though, and after seeing that the people in the square were not thugs at all, Amin announced that she would not return to work at NileTV and was instead on the side of the protesters. She was banned from Maspero and put on a no-fly list. Her former colleagues, furious that she had called them liars for their (non) coverage of the events in the square, permanently broke off contact. Criticized by some for complicity with the regime's media agenda until it was convenient not to be, she told of how she had broken the story of Egypt's sky-high rate of female circumcision in the 1990s, when it was banned from discussion. (Then Suzanne Mubarak picked up the issue.) During the revolution, it was Amin who broke the virginity tests story -- that is, that the police and military were forcibly and invasively "checking" for female protesters' virginity. Since the revolution, she has gone back on air, and explained to us that she is impressed by Morsi's attitude toward the press. So far there has been no crackdown and "Morsi has done more in 3 months than Mubarak did in 30 years." Yet, she said, the current problem is that the ranks of felul journalists have not been purged, especially on national TV. They are used to regurgitating press releases verbatim and not to doing any investigative legwork. Politically, this old guard is still not quite sure what to do with the Ikhwan, and is playing it safe trying to please both the Brotherhood and the army. At the same time, so many new channels have been inaugurated in the last year and a half that the government has tried to put a cap on them. While not all these new journalists may yet have the training to produce top quality reporting, this bodes well for the future.

* * *

In pursuit of a tame adventure for my Eid El Adha vacation the last weekend in October, I headed to the Fayoum Oasis. The capital of this oasis governorate just 100km south of Cairo has gained notoriety in recent years as a bastion of Islamist and particularly anti-American sentiment. On the upside, that's not where we went.  Rather, an impossibly long white Peugeot station wagon with a furry dashboard arrived in Cairo the first day of the vacation to transport us to Zad el-Mosafer guest house in Tunis village. We were inching through Giza traffic, approaching the Pyramids, our jokey driver Eid fiddling with his gray and white keffiyeh, when the impossible happened: It began to rain. At first I was sure it was just air conditioner drip, but when the drops continued, we were like toddlers at Christmas -- sticking our hands out the windows, taking photos of the droplets on the windshield, transfixed by people's reactions in the street. It was the first rain I'd seen in almost five months.

First rain in five months

Ten minutes later it was over. As we left Giza, we passed herds of sheep marked for sacrifice, the main event of Eid El-Adha. After a long stretch of desert, we arrived at Lake Qarun, and followed it to our village. Tunis is known now as a getaway for artists from Cairo, who have begun to build mud villas in a more or less traditional style alongside the villagers' homes. It is especially known for its pottery: there are seven workshops.

The ecolodge consisted of cool, spacious mud and thatch "chalets" encircling tents with comfortable lounge pillows, a green lawn, date palms, and blooming fuchsia flowers. We spent our days reading, playing cards or Bananagrams, and eating fresh-cooked fish from the lake. At night, we saw the stars. The holiday itself was quiet, by which I mean that I heard no squealing sheep. Our buddy Eid, the driver, took us out to Wadi Rayyan on the other side of Lake Qarun for a desert adventure with impromptu offroading in his stretch Peugeot (which, it became clear very quickly, was definitely not a Jeep).

Home sweet home at the ecolodge

Street in Tunis village with artists' homes

We hired a fisherman and his three young sons to take us out in their rowboat to watch the sunset on Lake Qarun 

Wadi Rayyan, with Lake Qarun in the background

Just a few days later, I went on a CASA trip to a hotel of a very different kind: the Hurghada Marriott on the Red Sea. It would be wrong to say I did anything but swim in the sea, swim in the pool, gorge myself on breakfast and dinner buffets, sweat out toxins in the steam room, and don my snorkeling gear (always a struggle for me) for a look at some unbelievable fish. The coral seemed pretty dead (but how would I know), but those 3-foot eels and pencil-shaped purple fish with the long snouts were worth the trip. The strange part of Hurghada is how it truly seems to erupt out of nowhere, an improbable metropolis in a vast no man's land. We drove for five hours or so along the Red Sea, south from Ain el Sokhna, and passed only one village (an oil town/rest stop). Not so much as a pit latrine for hundreds of miles. Word has it there are desert bedouins camped out in the Eastern Desert somewhere, but we didn't see any.

On the Marriott beach, Hurghada 

Snorkeling in the Red Sea off the coast of Hurghada. I'm the one with the green snorkel in the very front.

* * *

Postscript:

I found myself sitting tonight at one of the cheap, outdoor cafes of the Borsa, surrounded by a trio of Egyptian poets and their friends. I listened in as each took a turn reciting one of his poems to the group, the others snapping or nodding to acknowledge the best verses. At one point, a wandering crazy man, getting on in years, came up to us and prepared to belt out a tuneless melody for us in exchange for cash. But when he realized the hushed group was listening to poetry, he, too, shut up, and bent over us to listen in. When the reciter was finished, the man -- in a dirty gray galabeyya and white turban -- took his turn. He grabbed the youngest of the poets by the arm and recited in near perfect fus7a a poem of his own choosing. When finished, he turned to me and said with a grin, "I love you," then marched off. 

Coming Soon to Theaters?

Yesterday, a man posted a notice on the all-purpose expat listserv Cairo Scholars that a friend was looking for foreign extras to appear in Egyptian TV series. Ever since I met the British and Syrian-Kurdish girls who did this for a living at my first bizarre Cairo expat party back in June, I had been waiting for my big break. My roommate Sarah confirmed that she was also down for an adventure, so I e-mailed the recruiter, Gamal. He requested our photos, and confirmed that he was excited to meet us because he has an American and an Indian roommate. I asked what this TV series was. No response. (Were we unwittingly signing ourselves up for an Egyptian porno? We hoped not.) We agreed to meet Gamal anyway, on a street in Mohandiseen. He walked us to an apartment building nearby, but our fears were allayed when we saw the sign that read Clakeet Casting Agency (or, alternatively, Clakeet Casting Agince). People of various shapes, sizes, and ethnic origins were gathered in the small waiting room. On one wall was a giant collage of Egyptian film posters, ranging from the hilarious classic Hassan wa Markos to the rather more melodramatic (it seemed) Gonoun el Hobb ("Crazy Love"). On the other wall were dozens of mug shots of (mostly foreign female) recruits, pasted into the image of a film reel. Sarah, Miriam, and I were called immediately into a side room, where a wiry man in a Castro-style hat was waiting behind a camera. Beside him (his assistant?) was a thirty-something woman in a tight black miniskirt with long, black tresses. I was first to be interviewed, suddenly feeling pretty dumpy in my jeans and bulky red sweater: we weren't expecting to make an appearance on camera. First in English, I recited my name, age, and height for the camera. Then the cameraman asked me to let my hair down and do a slow turn. I obliged. I posed with one profile, then the other. Then I repeated the procedure in Arabic.

When that was done, Gamal escorted me one room over. Three middle-aged casting bigshots were waiting. Two, the round ones, just sipped their Nescafe and watched. One sat behind a desk and scribbled my information once again, once again switching languages to test me. How long would I be in Egypt? What languages did I speak? Within five minutes, I was sent on my way. When my Indian roommate wasn't called, Gamal mumbled something about needing blondes. Strange, I'm not blonde either -- but I could be I suppose. Not much older than us perhaps, Gamal took our numbers and promised to call if any parts came up. We could be silent extras for 250 LE a day -- or, there was a faint chance, cast in a speaking role in an Egyptian drama. Until then, I can only dream. 

Life on the Cairo Doctors' Circuit

The last thing anyone wants to read a blog about is someone else's medical problems. I will try to keep these details to a minimum. The last 3 weeks I've spent trying to figure out what's wrong and get treated, though, has been an adventure into the medical underworld of Cairo (I mean this facetiously, I'm not buying paper bags of pirated drugs) and, more generally, into the confusion and frustration of trying to get the right kind of care in a foreign city.

I have already recounted my early October experience of receiving injections from the purple t-shirt man in the back closet of my local pharmacy. Unfortunately, those proved ineffective, as did the antibiotics that followed. When I started to feel worse instead of better, I visited one of the AUC doctors at the university clinic. She produced some giant pliers covered in cotton balls and antiseptic and shoved them down my craw with a flourish. Then I was sent on my merry way with prescriptions for a smorgasbord of sprays, pills, and gargles. None of these really seemed to work either, despite how wide she had cast the net. Commenting on the fact that I had lost much weight as a result of my inability to swallow easily, the doctor laughed - "I am old and I got fatty. I need to get tonsillitis so I am not so fatty." Then Dr. Susan sent me to an ENT specialist at a well regarded private hospital called Mostashfa El Salam (Peace Hospital). There is at least one good thing about the system as it's working for me, notably that AUC pays for all my prescription drugs and hospital visits, which by now would really be racking up.

It's worth pointing out that Egypt has both public and private hospitals. Public hospitals are generally considered to be pretty scary places, but of course they provide a very necessary function in the community because they are way, way cheaper. It costs perhaps 20 LE to see a doctor at a public hospital (~ $3) while it costs 120 LE ($20) for a consultation at El Salam. Especially if you're making repeat visits, which most people are, that's a really hefty sum for someone with a low-middle to low income. Then of course you add on blood tests, which cost me about 155 LE ($25) at the private hospital, and any medications. Fortunately, medications are incredibly cheap compared to what they cost us at home. Never mind insurance, a round of antibiotics often costs less than $10, and prescriptions generally aren't needed. (This makes me feel pretty sad about the astronomical cost of prescription drugs in America.) Anyway, at the end of September, the doctors' union announced a nationwide strike of all but emergency care physicians in public hospitals, protesting their pitiful government pay and demanding better working conditions. The strike is still ongoing and the doctors are asking that 15 percent of the national budget, instead of the current 5 percent, be directed to health. Several young doctors confirmed that the minimum wage for those in public hospitals, which is required for a few years after finishing medical school, is less than $20 a month. Of course, they all work several side jobs in private clinics to make ends meet, but this means that very little focus is given to the needy patients in the public hospitals.

Fortunately for my personal condition, the private hospital was running as usual. As soon as I walked in, I had a flashback to my one previous stay at a Cairo hospital. Rewind to 2006, when I got a nice pair of rear-end injections at one such hospital after a gruesome, McDonald's lettuce-driven bout of food poisoning. This time, when we finally found a check-in window (perplexingly labeled "Private" and "Contracts" rather than "Check-in"), I was told that the doctor with whom I thought I had an appointment was not working that day. Strange, I thought. (Or, actually, WHAT?!) Dr. Sherif Rafaat was here yesterday, but Dr. Sherif Magdy is here today! said the man at the desk. They have the same name and the same degree, you will be fine. Well, in that case, take me right on up! It turns out appointments don't really exist - you just wait in line, first-come first-serve. Fortunately that night there were only 3 or 4 others waiting. Dr. Sherif, his head decked out in some kind of giant headlamp, was not interested in small talk, taking my vital signs, or anything of the sort. He opened my throat, looked inside, and told me I had glandular fever. Within 5 minutes, he had written me up some papers for blood tests and drugs and shooed me out. In another building, my roommate and I were sent from unmarked window to unmarked window for paperwork, bloodwork, and more paperwork. A short while after I returned home that night, I received a text message from an unknown number who I suspect belonged to the man working at the check-in desk, though I can't be sure. "Hi my friend hope you better now and you will recovery soon rest a bit." 

The steroid I was prescribed worked well and fast. The antibiotic, as it turned out.... not so much. On day 2, I developed a grotesque allergic reaction and an AUC doctor came by for a home visit. His nurse administered another injection from a big black case. I napped all afternoon and it was great. My roommate discovered that our blender worked, although it was filled with dead cockroaches, and whipped up some fresh carrot juice. In the evening, I returned to Dr. Sherif #2. This time, I was Number 14 in the assembly line. While we waited, an hour and a half or so, I observed that stacks of medical records were piled up around our feet in the waiting area. Hmmm. When my number was called, Dr. Sherif was annoyed with me. Why had I not brought the test results? With all due respect, the bloodwork guys had told me that the entire point of this appointment was to get the results from him. How preposterous! he said, not actually using the word preposterous. He was about to leave for the night, so I'd have to come back on Sunday with my results and wait in line again to see him. We trekked over to the lab then and there, and picked up my results. Sure enough, they were positive. Go back and see Dr. Sherif now! said the blood man. He refused to see me. I insisted they call him and see what I should do. He was annoyed. You'll be fine in 2 days, bye. 

And that is where we stand now. On the one hand, I'm very lucky that I'm in Cairo, where there are many doctors, even if they are annoyed by my requests for information about my problems. I could, after all, be out in some village somewhere. Still, I find myself wishing there was a warmer doctor-patient relationship, with some small talk and a thorough investigation into one's medical history, allergies, and feelings. Things here are cut and dried. Open your throat. Get tests. Buy the drugs. In the long run, I think I will come to see it as an adventure, just as my first (dramatic, but much briefer) Egyptian hospital experience has provided fodder for six years of stories. It's also true that visitors rarely have to navigate these systems and institutions, so I guess I'm becoming more of a local. For better or for worse. 

The Uprising of Women in the Arab World

In a break from my usual long-winded rambles, I want to draw everyone's attention to an online campaign called "The Uprising of Women in the Arab World." (In Arabic: انتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي) Although the Facebook page was started last October, it was on October 1 of this year that the women behind it -- Lebanese, I believe? maybe some others, too -- launched a new campaign that has made enough noise to capture the interest of both the Arabic and foreign press. The Facebook-based campaign asks contributors to submit a photo of themselves holding a sign that reads "I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because...", with a personal reason given afterward. Within 2 weeks, almost 600 photos had been posted and over 40,000 supporters had "liked" the group.

Here is the link to the group. Many of the signs have been translated into English (or written in English originally). It's worth checking out.

While perhaps some of the things written are truisms, some are extraordinarily sad, others infuriating, and others give me hope and reassurance that there are many really tough women here who are not willing to take the crap that is dumped on them by misogynistic laws, society, and even other women.

A couple of the best, in my opinion:

A Yemeni man who wrote, "I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because on my sister's grave it said only 'somebody's wife.'"
An Algerian woman who wrote, "I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because I refuse to let shameless men touch their crotch in public while I should be ashamed and hide my beautiful face and body, even in private."
AYemeni woman who wrote, "My name is Shaymaa Al-Ahdal (and I am) with the uprising of women in the Arab world because my brother is ashamed of saying my name and my mother's name."
Another Yemeni woman who wrote, "I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because society teaches us not to get harassed instead of teaching men not to harass us."
A Lebanese woman wrote, "I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world so that there is no more minute of silence every time a girl is born."

And many more.

As a Western woman joining a group (and, more importantly, a cause) like this, it can sometimes be easy to get hampered by the orientalist shame that filters in somewhere over the course of being a Westerner studying the Middle East -- as much as one tries to avoid that kind of thing. What I mean is that there is a by now well-known criticism of "white men (and women) saving brown women from brown men." That is, that Westerners coming in and condemning Middle Eastern men for their treatment of Middle Eastern women hurts the women's cause more than it helps it. I only agree with this to a certain point. It's true that some of the talk of abuse of women's rights here that goes on in the West is patronizing, and really does cast the women as helpless victims. However, I think there is a place for thoughtful engagement of Westerners (and everyone else) in this fight: it's not right just to turn a blind eye in the name of cultural relativism. What I really like about this online campaign is that it is regionally driven but does not discourage participation from the outside, and certainly no one can cast the women who appear in it as pathetic victims. It's hard to say how a campaign like this might move from the online sphere to the terrestrial world, but it's an inspiring indicator that a lot of women are really fed up. Hopefully men (and women! who are responsible for most of the female genital mutilation and a lot of the preferring sons to daughters business out there)  start getting the message.

Escapes

What have I been doing for the last 10 days? Well, as it turns out, I've been unknowingly battling an acute case of follicular tonsillitis. I won't go into the gory details for fear that you might just stop reading altogether, but the bottom line is that I am now more or less sticking to my bed for a couple of days while round 2 of my antibiotics begins (inshallah) to work its magic. What better way to pass the hours than a little blogging.

One of the things I pledged as I moved out of the September blues was that I would find more ways to make myself feel balanced and happy, rather than moping around and inventing hallucinations of changing autumn leaves. (Down with all those people who've been posting beautiful autumn photos on Facebook!) One such escape, a much needed one, was my weekend jaunt to Alexandria. Last weekend, several friends and I took the train up on Thursday night, and I went to stay with my old friend Mai -- one of my other LINC buddies I hadn't seen in six years. Alexandria may have a lot less action than Cairo, but it has a number of big things going for it: green spaces, fresh, crisp air, and the sea. It was also nice again to stay in the comfort of a family home, and to reconnect with a friend I hadn't seen in so long yet find that we had so much to talk about. Since I've done most of the tourist sites on my previous visits to Alex, I spent the first lazy day sitting on the Starbucks patio outside the Four Seasons overlooking the Mediterranean, chatting with Mai and her friend Laila. We talked a lot about politics: like most of my friends here, they really do not like the Muslim Brotherhood and are hoping that Morsi doesn't do anything too awful. At the same time, most such people I've talked to seem to feel that he hasn't done much of anything yet. Incidentally, after my return from Alex, the public prosecutor, who is a holdover from the Mubarak era and recently refused Morsi's offer of reassignment to the Embassy to the Vatican, pardoned all 24 old regime stalwarts accused of orchestrating horseback and camelback assaults on protesters in last year's revolution. Then, this Friday, the Muslim Brotherhood organized demonstrations in Tahrir protesting the verdict while, simultaneously, liberal, anti-MB groups led demonstrations in the same place protesting Morsi's first 100 days and demanding a more representative Constituent Assembly. Some people began throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the other side (accounts differ) and more than 100 people ended up in the hospital by the end of the afternoon with head injuries.

Back in Alex...For dinner, we relocated to a restaurant nestled in the Montaza, or palace, which is surrounded by acres of lush gardens. People were picnicking in the grass (not a common site anywhere in Cairo except perhaps Azhar Park), playing ball games, and strolling through the green landscape. I was entranced. The spell was broken only for a brief moment when the waitress came over to ask me to please pull my shirt down -- a bit of skin was showing above my pants. (How embarrassing! On the other hand, many of my friends have said that strangers often come over and tug their shirts down or up for modesty's sake on the street. Interesting to meditate a little on boundaries of personal space and whose responsibility it is to maintain women's modesty, which is obviously an important value here.) When I parted way with my friends after dark, I made for the Qaitbey Citadel, one of Alex's main landmarks alongside the famed library. Jutting out into the sea, the fort was entirely illuminated for the occasion of the Farah El Bahr Arts Festival. Sponsored by the Anna Lindh Foundation and emphasizing cross-Mediterranean cooperation, both communists and anti-Zionists had protested the really very innocuous-seeming event during the week prior. As a result, the main draw, that is the revolutionary Egyptian rock band Cairokee, had withdrawn its participation. Still, a big crowd came to see a number of lesser-known Egyptian and European groups, which presented everything from traditional folk music to, in the case of some Austrian ladies in glitter tights, an angsty rendition of something called "Satan is our friend." (Was this really the audience for that? Well, fortunately people didn't seem to really be listening to the lyrics.) We nestled ourselves in a sparsely populated corner of the old fort and reveled in what was unmistakably a cool sea breeze.

Inside Qaitbey Citadel, Farah El Bahr Festival 

The streets of Alexandria have not lost their colonial charm. There are the tall, scrubbed townhouses with wooden shutters and quite a few airy seaside cafes. There are places in downtown Cairo where you can catch a whiff of this grand architecture -- but the last century, and many layers of dirt, have taken a much harsher toll on the capital. However problematic the European presence here, they (along with the Mamluks, bless their souls) erected many of the most beautiful buildings. At the same time, Alexandria is considered much more conservative than Cairo these days: it is no longer the stomping ground of a global cast of recluse poets, artists, and seamen, but the city where Egypt's salafi movement is rooted and a stronghold for Islamist political parties like the FJP. On my second day in the city, after breakfast with Mai, I spent some time meandering through the stacks of the reborn Biblioteca Alexandrina. Worthy of its place on lists of the greatest libraries in the world, it is remarkable as much for the sense of history it evokes and as a symbol for a recommitment to book learning as for its particular collections. The main reading room, which is filled with open stacks, tilts down toward the sea and beams of light float in through chinks in the library's silvery shell. This monument to Alexandria's long-ago reputation as a repository for all the knowledge of the world opened in 2002, 2,050 years after the Ancient Library of Alexandria was apparently burned by Julius Caesar as he fought his way through Egypt. In Egypt today, as many of my young friends have explained, readings books is not much of a popular pastime -- in their view because the deeply troubled educational system turns students off them from a very young age. The library, though, is always quite crowded (perhaps more with tourists than locals, I'm not sure), and hosts all kinds of art exhibitions, poetry readings, and multimedia services.

Soaking up knowledge in the main reading room of the Biblioteca Alexandrina

We ended our visit to Alexandria at Teatro, a trendy new cafe in a back alley lit with colored lights that has what one might call an "oriental hip" vibe. (Oriental is the term in English that Egyptians use to talk about Middle Eastern food or decor.) No fish for us this time - we ran out of time. But I will be back - particularly because word has it that it rains in Alexandria! I will be checking the weather regularly.

When I returned that night, I decided to stop by my local pharmacy to see what the bespectacled 24-year-old man in the tight purple t-shirt could do for my problems. He took me into the back storage closet of the pint-sized pharmacy, where half-drunk cups of tea and packs of cigarettes were lodged into stacks of various drugs. I was instructed to sit in a desk chair stationed in the closet during the investigation. Sure enough, my tonsils were swollen and I needed antibiotics. I will get the injections, the man told me. My pleas for oral antibiotics were refused -- impossible. He began filling the plastic needles with some liquid I'd never heard of before. Ok, ready, pull down your pants, he told me. Hold up! Reality check: I was in the back closet of an Egyptian pharmacy alone with this needle-wielding man of my own age who was about to jab a giant needle into my backside. Nope, not happening. He said there were no women working that shift, which was obvious, so I called a friend to come. The pharmacist seemed to think this was very strange. I apparently survived, though when I left after the second and final dose the next day, he told me I should come by again. If I'm sick, I told him. No, no -- please come by just to talk, tell me about yourself, said my pharmacist. I think I may be switching pharmacies.

Nevertheless, feeling newly empowered by my antibiotics, I set out the day after my Alex trip for a long-planned day of field research in the governorate of Qalioubiyah. ADEW, the NGO I'm working for, was bringing along some prospective donors to check out the building they had used until recently as a shelter for victims of domestic violence. When the funding ran out, the facility became purely administrative, but the dozen or so apartments, outfitted with bunkbeds and shared bathrooms, are still there waiting for the center to reopen. Now it looks like the money is there and women will, indeed, be able to move back. Those who had lived in the shelter before it closed have by now all returned to their abusive husbands: One of the key problems in this community and many others is, of course, that there is really nowhere for women to go after they have spent time in the shelter (the only one of its kind). Their families mostly will not take them back and they don't want to return to abuse, but there is extreme stigma faced by women who choose to leave such marriages and little possibility for them to move out on their own. The village we were in, Masaken Shala'an, is only about 1.5 hours north of Cairo by car, but is largely agricultural. Unfortunately, as in many poor areas, there is no mechanism for sanitation, so the fields full of crops alternate with fields full of garbage. One of my coworkers from ADEW and I strolled up and down the main street seeking interviews with locals about the status of medical care. ADEW hopes to also open a medical center to supplement the badly underskilled and understaffed clinics in the surrounding area. Medical services?! most of our subjects scoffed, There's nothing like that here! People die before the ambulance comes. Some, perhaps to save face as my colleague suggested, said at first that they had everything they needed, but revealed the depth of the problem when asked more specific questions. The biggest problems are hypertension, diabetes, and kidney disease -- all of which people were extremely open about discussing. I was struck, in fact, by how friendly and unsuspicious our interviewees were toward two obvious outsiders approaching them on the side of the street and probing into their medical histories. The last woman begged us to come in for tea. What's more, we were not harassed a single time during the course of the day -- even though we both stuck out like sore thumbs. (Maybe village life is for me?!) While I learned a lot, I felt somewhat discouraged at the end of the day about what a basic medical center such as non-experts like us could really provide these people. Where will the doctors come from and how will the center sustain itself over the years? We still have to work out these big questions.

The local staff took us in the afternoon for a felucca ride on the calm Nile waters in nearby Kanatir. It's known for a big dam built by Mohammed Ali and the banks surrounding it are lined with what are apparently neat little resort cottages for army generals. Back at the Center, a farm fresh lunch had been prepared, including fat rounds of white cheese and something that was promisingly similar to arugula. As we left to board our van, gaggles of cute children appeared at the windows of the surrounding apartment buildings to wave goodbye.


Finally - or, actually, before either of these trips -- I went to see my first real Egyptian play. This was CASA attending en masse as a listening exercise, which I essentially failed because I didn't understand a solid portion of the dialogue. From the outside, the theater looked very institutional, and had the ministry of culture or some such official body slapped on. Inside, though, the theater held only about sixty audience members, which was strangely more evocative of some hip off-off-Broadway New York theater. I discovered, however, when the director came to meet with our class, that in fact this is because the theater is not very popular these days. Born as a genre in Egypt around the turn of the 20th century, it witnessed a rapid revival during the Nasser era and then promptly faded from public interest. The play, called Hanzala, was originally a Palestinian piece about a man who gets out of jail to find that his wife and job have moved on without him, but he's too kind to do anything about it at first. However, this was a new take on the old play (unbeknownst to all of us), and so we were all thrown for a loop when it began with a pair of cross-dressing clowns, a large woman in a neon muumuu and feather boa, a guy in a pharaoh costume, and an Italian tenor belting songs about macaroni. The director had transformed the play into an over-the-top comedy that further involved a prison guard with rubber duckies attached to his epaulets and a fly swatter for a sword, as well as frequent musical interludes and a sufi mystic with giant red horns. The new scripted mocked everybody, from the deposed Egyptian government to Asians to the Muslim Brotherhood to women to men, and was filled with Egyptian political and cultural references that I mostly didn't know. All these additions, the director Islam Imam told us, made the play interesting to an Egyptian audience that really does not enjoy works in formal Arabic, from other Arab countries, or with too much seriousness. When anything sells in the local theater world, it's rollicking comedy.

On the subject of entertainment, I also had my first Egyptian clubbing experience this month, when I got my boogie on at Cairo White Club to celebrate my friend Ryme's birthday. (Unless we're counting that 16-year-old venture into the TGI Friday's Nile boat 'nightclub' -- when we excited LINC ladies showed up on the dance floor of the famed chain restaurant in our baggy linen pants and dowdy t-shirts.) Like weddings, the few clubs that exist here outside 5-star hotels (and yes, it's really a few) are just about the only places beyond your own home where it's cool to show your shoulders and knees. It's both a self-selecting and a selected set: the minimum charge, which racks up pretty quickly, is 150 LE ($25). A small fortune. The bartenders whip up cocktails like it's Beirut and the DJ pumps out songs like "Gangnam Style" and "I'm Sexy and I Know It" that give me a pang of nostalgia for carefree college weekends on the Tower dance floor. But at the end of the day, the set that frequents these places is small -- and even on a Friday night, there were only a couple of other parties going on in the club. But, when you go and make your own fun, it's liberating to wear a short dress and do a little dance every now and again.