Egypt Time

The Anti-Egypt

2011-11-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

I have arrived in Doha and have begun work. I am the newest member of a growing international team under the umbrella of a French company that specializes in event planning and sports competitions. My coworkers each have vast experience stretching back several Olympic games at least, and they each seem to be the world’s best at the very specific things they do. Qatar is trying to demonstrate it can hold the Olympics and the World Cup, so this tiny Gulf peninsula found the people who ran the last few Olympics to put on the Arab games. This phenomenon encapsulates Qatar--- an unmatched budget to bring in the very best of any and every profession to buy Qatar’s way to the top.

But Qatar is full of contradictions. Our business of assembling the venues and people to put on the games is being conducted like a Western business, but constantly in interaction with the local heads of various venues or federations. I was brought on to bridge the language barrier and the cultural barrier. In the first few meetings I understood the necessity for my own part in this. The meetings begin in English but soon revert to Arabic and go dramatically off course. In a business where people expect results in a specific timeframe, “insha’allah” is a phrase of dread. My coworkers go to meetings looking for answers and solutions to meet deadlines, but find only meandering conversation and many cups of tea. It is a comical clash of civilizations and I am enjoying it immensely.

Aside from these meetings with the heads of various venues or foundations, I’ve met very few Arabic speakers here. Our Indian drivers (there are more Indians in Qatar than Arabs) speak only a little Arabic. I am typing this at one of the restaurants in my hotel and the vastly oversized and underutilized staff is speaking a medley of perhaps 5 languages. Some Tagalog, Pashtu, Hindi, Ordu, and Thai, (maybe?) Romanian, and English between each other. The international clientele use English with the waiters, but the two white-robed Qataris at the table next me order their coffee in Arabic, stumbling up the waitress who doesn’t understand what they are asking for. Strange they cannot order a coffee in Arabic in their own country. Yet, it is strange that they make a point of not saying “coffee”, a word they surely know in English. Regardless, I have never been in such a truly international place.

The architecture is what stands out most on first seeing the city. I will post some pictures later, but there are every possible shape of building, some outfitted already with helipads, and many more still getting bigger. My own building, which is only 50 stories, is new and is still training its staff. Part of the entertainment system in my room had never been plugged in; the full set of stainless cookware still has some bar codes on it. There are still hooks on my wall where a picture frame should hang that remain barren. Perhaps this, too, sums up Doha. The streets are empty. Everyone has a driver. Why not with more workers than residents and 20-cent gasoline? Everything is new. There is no trash anywhere; public gardens are ubiquitous and carefully manicured. Everything seems fake and artificial, like an absurd fantasy world. And it is. The country follows no economic model or rationality or reason. They have huge natural gas and oil reserves on which they prop up everything.

But it is well propped up. Even in the worker’s towns, which I have driven through just once, I was struck that everything looked nice, just on a much smaller scale. Kids were out playing in public parks that still got plenty of water, and families lived in double condos in rows a hundred long, but everything looking well taken care of. Where as employees who could never afford to shop where they work run other Middle Eastern shopping malls like Cairo’s “City Stars”, the mall connected to my hotel (which could fit Natick mall comfortably into one wing) is full (as full as anything here could ever be) at night of shoppers of all nationalities, some still wearing the uniforms of their respective stores, giving the whole country a veneer of egalitarianism.

The most fascinating thing I did here was the ubiquitous “dinner with the Bedouins” tour that every Middle Eastern country seems to offer, to give tourists a chance to go out to the desert and eat under the stars around a fire. The Arab Games team went on one a few days ago; a long drive towards the Inland Sea looking over at Saudi Arabia. But our “Bedouin” guides, though they never explicitly claimed to be, were from Pakistan and Palestine; all were born and raised in Doha but chatted in clear Levantine Arabic, the language of their homeland they hadn’t ever visited. They threw on some scarves and imitated the Bedouins of Southern Arabia, who have all surely ditched the tents and camels of their past and moved into air conditioned in Doha. Talking to the guides, I was surprised to learn that they all held professional jobs during the week but did the tourist thing on the weekends for fun and a little extra money. They felt that Qatar was the place to be, and even if most of the government’s handouts went to Qataris by blood, the money and opportunity left over for the million immigrants was more than would be available in their own countries.

And I understand what they mean. Waiting in line at an exchange office in the mall I am among dozens of immigrants remitting parts of their salaries back to families or relatives from home. A guy in a janitorial outfit was talks on a blackberry and sending several hundred dollars off to Cambodia. I am not trying to glorify or exemplify Qatar or its creation of a huge servant class, but Qatar gives someone the ability to provide for their family while living better than they could ever have dreamed of at home. It is an odd Arab country where one can hardly find an Arab.

A Good Samaritan

2011-10-25T12:33:00.000-07:00

Donkey jokes are big in the Middle East. A donkey is universally understood as the zoological incarnation of stupidity; it’s an insult yelled out taxi windows from Iraq to Egypt to Morocco. So, when I heard from a Palestinian woman that her husband was serving out a fifteen year jail sentence for strapping explosives on a donkey, I thought it was a joke, the punch line of which was buried somewhere deep in the inexorable cultural chasm that separates the native speaker and the foreigner.

As she told me about the explosive donkey the other women in the room all chuckled, but the old matriarch of the family, the prisoner’s mother, looked more solemn. The wife in waiting began to explain. It was at the height of the second intifada, and resistance to the occupation had turned violent. Divided from his farm land by an Israeli checkpoint located deep in the occupied territories, her husband and three others had thought to fight back by detonating explosives near the Israeli soldiers. Rather than run into the checkpoint and blow themselves up, they strapped a donkey with a tank of fuel and explosives set to blow, and herded the unfortunate animal toward the unknowing soldiers. Luckily for everyone (not the animal), the donkey blew up well short of its target and no one was hurt, so the men were given 15 years rather than life. This is one of the many stories I have heard in Palestine of acts of desperate and futile resistance to the Israeli occupation and subjugation of an entire people. As is often said here in Palestine, if the Palestinians had tanks and airplanes and helicopters, they wouldn’t be strapping themselves with explosives.

It has been a while since I have updated this blog. Since the last post came the escalation of the Syrian uprising and my forced premature departure from Aleppo. I returned home to finish my thesis and graduate, and then spent the summer in Tangier, getting a wholly new taste of Middle Eastern and North African culture. I benefited from intensive Modern Standard Arabic classes and feel more comfortable communicating in Arabic than ever before. Morocco was touched by the Arab spring as well, but King Muhammad VI expertly funneled the popular demand for change into a new constitution by referendum. Unions and organizations were forced to back the constitution and it was marketed to the people as a major move toward democracy, though its democratic merits are debatable. Regardless, Moroccans, at least the ones I met, had no desire for an Egyptian style overthrow with all the social and economic turmoil that would cause. They see their King as a modernizer and reformer, balancing tradition with the needs of a prospering Moroccan economy. Moreover, Muhammad VI has religious legitimacy stemming from his family lineage tracing to the Prophet, and as such is a political figure immune from any real criticism. It struck me as an entirely un-Syrian experience to see anti-Constitution protests (mostly college students who didn’t think the Constitution went far enough) being allowed on Morocco’s streets and indeed protected by Moroccan security forces as they peacefully asserted their objections.

After about a month in America I am now in Palestine, translating interviews and research for Nicole’s masters thesis at the American University in Cairo. I flew into Cairo a few weeks ago and we made our way up to the West Bank by land. Cairo itself was not much different, though the city is palpably on edge. People have realized that the Egyptian Army is not the selfless savior that they'd hoped or believed it would be. Rather, it is composed of bureaucrats and politicians with the same interests as the previous regime: corrupt, ineffectual and unresponsive to their people. And alarmingly, sectarian vocabulary has entered the public dialogue sewing in Egypt the very religious strife that Assad continues to warn about in Syria, leasing his Machiavellian bargain of terror with religious minorities who support him out of fear of an oppressive mono-religious mob. And Syrian state media never misses a moment to show the sectarian violence brewing in Egypt, no doubt as a reminder to its many minorities of how much worse things could be without an Alawite at the helm. Though I have my doubts.

After a few days in the city we left Cairo by overnight bus and arrived in the morning to Taba, the last Egyptian town before the Israel border. From this beautiful Red Sea resort town one can look out at Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, each claiming a chunk of the waterfront at the extreme north of the Red Sea. We left the filthy and disorganized bureaucratic disaster of the Egyptian checkpoint to arrive at the almost comical juxtaposition of the Israeli checkpoint. We were greeted by friendly but assiduous (and very well armed) Israeli border guards who had a field day with the array of stamps in our passports from countries with which Israeli has been or still is at war. We were finally let through, and the guards were nice enough to again stamp my passport on a removable page.

We took a short cab to Eilat bus station and took bus immediately to Jerusalem. The ride takes a little more than four hours. On the way are great views of the Dead Sea and, having taken the same bus ride on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, it is easy to follow the somewhat mirrored landscapes, and get an idea for just how small this contentious little piece of land is. We arrived in Jerusalem in the early afternoon and walked through the Christian and Muslim quarters of the old city to get to a bus station that would take us to the West Bank. Jerusalem somewhat juts out into the West Bank and at the gate of the old city were only a long walk away from where we were staying, but the bus is the easiest way through the checkpoint to leave Israel and enter the West Bank. We had contacted a Palestinian named David who rented us a room in his family’s house just above Bethlehem in a village called Beit Jala. We arrived at his house before sunset and woke up the next morning to a beautiful but steep hillside of well-spaced houses surrounded by olive trees and grape vines, leading down into a smaller hill topped with a dozen church steeples, among them the Church of the Nativity- the town of Bethlehem.

Getting back to Jerusalem was simple and the checkpoint went quickly for us and our American passports. From above the city on the biblical Mountain of Olives, it is mindboggling to see this place that has been the focal point of so much bloodshed. It has been ruled by various groups of the three Abrahamic faiths and bears the markings and ruins of each. Bethlehem is the same way. A few minutes from our flat down the hill is the city of Jesus’s birth, full of churches and still largely Christian. From Beit Jala, where we are staying, we can see Jerusalem and Bethlehem below, and from the other side of our hill, the road leads to the hilltop town of Hebron, where the patriarchs of Arbahamic faith are buried. And between here and there, and in all directions, literally every stone has some religious significance. The history and profound impact this place has had on the course of civilization is overwhelming and enchanting. But no sooner does this awe pass that with reflection this grand significance becomes somewhat abhorrent to rationality and morality and basic respect for life and peace.

How many people have suffered or died and continue to suffer or die for the profound religious significance of all this? We are in Beit Jala, just outside Bethlehem, well within the West Bank, yet surrounded on many hilltops by neat rows of condominium-style houses, set on terraced slopes fronted by razor-wire and concrete walls, dotted with the occasional guard tower. The walls themselves are Palestinian space, speckled with graffiti calling for freedom or the enforcement of UN Resolution 194, but perched above them fly the flags of the “One Democracy in the Middle East”, “America’s Greatest Friend”, a testament to the unique breed of intractable insanity that is fervent nationalism mixed with ethno-religious dogmatism.

We are here to interview a variety of Palestinian agriculturalists, from farmers to agronomists and hydrologists, and though our issue is water rights and usage, the overarching dominance of Israeli occupation is the omnipresent theme of our discourse. I had heard of the settlements and the occupation wall before, but had no idea of the extensiveness or perniciousness of the project. To get some context I suggest you Google a map of the territories, and note the internationally recognized “Greenline” which marks the 1967 borders which are, despite what GOP candidates all seem to believe, the universally understood basis of negotiating any “Two State Solution”, and then note how far beyond the wall goes, swooping in to encompass huge swaths of land from the Palestinians. Maps can show the hundreds of settlements and outposts that chop up the territory into many Bantustans, but it was not until I was here that I was able to appreciate the mechanical efficiency of this utter domination. Our host David owns a restaurant in Bethlehem, and when he gives directions to it, he literally says go to the last building before the wall. I didn’t really understand him until I walked toward Jerusalem on a street that used connect Bethlehem and Jerusalem and then hit a concrete block 30 feet high topped with barbed wire, cutting right through the center of town. The other side of it belongs to the settlement now, and to the army for security reasons. And sitting just on the Palestinian side of it is this small but posh little café serving the famous local wines and Italian styled cuisine.

I am not in any diminishing the violence or real security threats endured by Israel. But let us be specific. These are checkpoints and walls and settlements that are not in Israel. They are illegal under international law and they steal the land, water, resources, and agriculture of an occupied people, while Israel illegally moves a civilian population in to change the “facts on the ground”. If Israel is the secular peace-loving democracy I sincerely hope it is, why does it incorporate these illegal land seizures, at once approving and encouraging this instigative crime? If America is the secular and peace-loving democracy I sincerely hope it is, why does it continue to support Israel as it does this? ---- the fanatic settlers which moved into Hebron in the 1967, rented out a hotel downtown, and have refused to leave ever since growing to a population of 500 people protected by several thousand Israeli soldiers, literally splitting up one of Palestine’s biggest towns into “H1” and “H2”, are doing nothing but jeopardizing any hope for real peace. When Brooklyn-born Barauch Goldstein killed 29 Muslim worshippers and wounded 200 in 1994, Hebron’s fanatic settlers built him a memorial tribute to honor his deed, which can still be viewed today. This is much the same as martyred suicide bombers are still honored on the city walls of Nablus and Gaza City. These are the less awe-inspiring aspects of the “Holy Land”.

Perhaps most painfully ironic are the many USAID projects which dot the West Bank in cities and in the country side, everything from schools to agricultural and hydrological development. The signs above these projects read, in English and Arabic, that the project is a “Gift from the American People”. I can think of no greater gift that America could give to those in Palestine and Israel who truly desire peace than to cease making America the greatest obstacle to it. We must demand that American allies obey international law if they hope to receive generous aid budgets and diplomatic support, and that they are as committed to a solution as we profess to be.

I could focus this blog entry on the countless injustices suffered by the Palestinians by the occupation and the ongoing settlement expansion, but my experience here in Palestine has been overwhelmingly positive and I my recounting of it should reflect that. The occupation and the daunting force arrayed against Palestine is never far below the surface in a deep conversation about people’s lives here, but their ability to overcome and adapt, to swallow their pride and do what is necessary to survive, is remarkable. Moreover, I am reminded constantly how wonderfully hospitable this culture is. I cannot imagine any other place where one can walk around looking for farmers to talk to and find so many people willing to help, point in the right direction, provide transportation, advice, their stories, and endless cups of tea (or those little shot glasses of muck they call coffee). As for the farmers, free samples of every crop abound, and I am reminded how much more robust a tomato can taste when it is grown naturally (fertilizers and chemicals are illegal here).

We have been shown incredible hospitality. We are renting a room in a Christian family’s house here in Beit Jala. This continues my unintentional pattern of finding Christian families and friends in every majority Muslim country I frequent. However, it must be said that this area is majority Christian and there are many more churches than there are mosques. Even the Muslim women dress less conservatively than elsewhere, perhaps as the area is more affluent with the constant stream of religious tourists coming to visit the birthplace of Jesus.

Ramallah, the administrative center of Palestine is a more metropolitan area with a cooler breeze, as it is higher above sea level. The central square is marked by a large pillar, and has been recently outfitted with a giant chair straight out of Gulliver’s Travels, representing the chair Palestine hopes to win in the U.N. General Assembly, symbolizing statehood and sovereignty. Tucked some way from the city center we visited the tomb of Yasser Arafat, attended by a Palestinian soldier in full regalia standing at attention.

Ramallah was perhaps most memorable for one man we met smoking Shisha at a streetside café. Women do not smoke in public, or at cafes which are understood to be male only, but I a okay with bringing a girl to one as long as the owner is cool with it; certain allowances are always made for foreigners. We sat down on the street side to people-watch and enjoy the water pipe, and next to us sat the most regal of gentleman, in a crisp black suit, pressed shirt, mahogany cane, and a weathered old face crinkled from a lifetime of smiling. He smoked raw tobacco and coal, not the flavored stuff to which most are accustomed. We spoke for a while, not in a pressured conversation, but in measured exchanges between draws on the pipe providing ample time for contemplation. He was born in what is now Israel, forcefully removed and resettled in Ramallah, where he grew up and married. He fathered 14 children, with one wife to who is still alive he said proudly, and now they have over 100 grandchildren in the West Bank and the United States. “A small army” I said with surprise at the number. “Not so small” he laughed coughing on smoke. He commanded tremendous respect from everyone, and I was impressed to see many 70 year old men walking by who stopped to pay some respect to the Old Man, he still many years their senior. He embodies so much of what I find charming in Arab culture. The layers of respect and adoration between generations and people, the pride, the hospitality, the friendliness, it makes you feel so welcome and at once at home. Our conversation ended when one of his grandsons, a man of 40, pulled up in a Mercedes to help him into the car. He turned around as he was leaving to welcome us again to Palestine, and wish us the blessings of God. And on a street where drivers honk incessantly trying to rush by, his Mercedes double parked in the flow of traffic saw a row of cars waiting patiently and quietly for him to get in and drive away.

Ahabic Religion.

2011-03-04T05:18:00.000-08:00

These past few weeks stand out for me because of some of the unique and fascinating conversations that I have been able to have with Syrians both in the research for my thesis and in the course of my every day curiosities. As my Arabic has improved over these months, my ability to really understand people’s points of views and to communicate my own has made the whole experience of being abroad increasingly enjoyable from the perspective of intercultural interaction. I have met wonderful people here in Syria who I respect for their intelligence and ideas, though between our points of view lies centuries of change, the enlightenment, and the Atlantic Ocean. But if respectful disagreement or conflicting points of view is the rule, there are certainly a few exceptions. However, these exceptions can be revealing and potent examples of the utterly different (and perhaps incompatible) way in which different people view the world.

Primary among these is religion. As my Arabic has improved I have finally grown comfortable disclosing my doubts about religion to those who have none. Religion is everywhere here, it penetrates all parts of daily life; even people’s everyday speech is accented by invocations of God’s praise, damnation, or will. Thus it is not surprising that it comes up incessantly in conversation. I was baptized Catholic and have celebrated Christmas almost every year since I was born, but when people here persist in religious discussion, I have become increasingly forthcoming with my thoughts. The mock impersonation of religiosity, of pretending to be someone I am not, of the veiling in duress my own ideas in the doubt of cultural misunderstanding, makes me feel ever a stranger among people I know well. Honest conversation with my friends and acquaintances here has been both liberating and enlightening.

I had a fascinating talk about religion with Zilal, a 30-year-old Muslim women who is studying for her masters and lives in my dorm. She traveled with our group to Damascus last weekend; on the way back to Aleppo we stopped for a visit in the mountain village of Maloula, a small town carved into a sheer mountain stretching in broken angles to the upper plateau of a great mountain spine, accentuated by several famous monasteries and churches which are carved into holy sites in these crags. It is a holy site for Christians and Muslims alike, and our discussion began as we followed a narrow canyon up to the highest of the churches. The canyon, to my eyes, had been carved by water, with the recognizable marks of kettle holing and smoothed edges indicative of countless years of wear beyond our ability to fathom. Zilal, like many Syrians, believed in the miracle that is supposed to have happened here, that God opened this gap in the mountains so that a maiden, despised by her father for becoming a Christian in the time of polytheism, could retreat into the hills, and escape his wrath. For her, and many Syrians, a literal interpretation of these stories is crucial, and the “pick and choose” form of religion is not religion at all but heresy.

On explaining the story to me (though I’d heard this one before, its famous here) she asked me if I believed it. I said I thought that it was metaphorical, perhaps that it was a fable to extol the virtues of faith in the face of persecution, but she wouldn’t have it. None of our Syrian travel companions would (Muhammad wasn’t around). Thus we descended into questions of religion and faith. She explained to me that all good came from God, and thus that non-believers were incapable of doing good. Everything she did, she continued, was for God and thus all the good in her life was by and for Him. I pointed out that perhaps I was the one really doing good, as when I did something good it wasn’t for the expectation of a posthumous prize-basket from the heavens but simply because I knew it was the right thing to do. It is not good, she replied, unless it is done for God. She said that until I found God I wouldn’t be happy. I said that I had found God, in a way, in my wonder at the mysteries and awesomeness of the universe, and that this wonder for me gave me the same happiness and security that she derived from God. If we both derive the same wonder and amazement from these forces in our lives, perhaps these forces are two manifestations of the same awesome power, or for me, the same fathomless mystery.

This is a string of the conversation I was obliged to continue with my Arabic Literature professor, an accomplished and respected man of impressive learning, formidable presence, and the graceful natural authority of true charisma. In analysis of some Aleppan folktales he grew curious and asked the class if they believed in the Abrahamic God. As proof of God’s existence, the professor went into the traditional argument about the complexity of humans, surely something this complex needed an intelligent and actively involved maker. Then he continued to the complexity of the solar system. He explained how God moves Earth closer to the sun to give us summer and farther from the sun to give us winter; this was solely the diligence of divine master, he explained, as when Earth got close to the sun, God would speed it up so the sun wouldn’t grab it. Likewise, when Earth would get too far away it should keep going but God would stop it and bring it back to the sun for another warm summer. I am not bringing this up to make fun of anyone, much less a charismatic literature professor, but I believe this example is incredibly instructive.

In all his long years of life this man had never been made to wonder why the Northern hemisphere has summer when the Southern has winter. He had never been forced to consider the equator, and realize a tilting of the planet caused the seasons. He had never learned about Newton’s Laws, the three wonderfully simple explanations of so much we see around us, and had never had an opportunity to apply them to the world around him. He had never been made to understand inertia or centripetal force or the very gravity that keeps him on the ground (gravity he prescribed to an active presence of God in keeping things in place). He had no understanding of what made the planets go around the sun, spinning in ellipses as their inertia and the sun’s gravity play the continuous game of tug of war, on the stalemate of which we all depend. For me, the beauty of this world, the God if you want to call it that, is that we are the probable outcome of an improbable equation, that of all the billions of billions of things that had to align for Earth and humanity to work out, they did. I explained my views to the Professor, prefaced by a quick run-through of physics and astronomy, that the mind must be used in all things to discover the true nature of the universe and of God.

How fundamentally different are the mentalities and attitudes of my society and upbringing, and my professor’s? If an educated man can live his life without a basic understanding of the world, are Syrian children growing up using scientific principles to judge their own world? I believe it is utterly devastating to the human desire of wonder and discovery to hand people a one size fits all explanation. Science cannot explain everything, and is in no danger of it coming close anytime soon, and that is the beauty of it. My point is the very nature of that mentality is detrimental to the progression of society. If everything is in God’s hand, what reason does someone have to try to figure it out, unravel it, and make it better? If all good is only for God, what obligation do we have to each other? What obligation do we have to our fragile planet that teeters precariously on the precipice that science and technology have brought it to, and certainly science and technology can only save it from? Truly, this is not a question which people here are asking them selves. I believe they must find a way to move past belief to their common human interests.

This same logic extends to many Syrian’s perceptions towards the other people. I had an interesting conversation this past weekend at Connaitre (a city in the Golan region of Syria which the Israelis destroyed as they retreated) at a “martyrs” graveyard. The program director, an educated man who taught in the States for a number of years, and I were discussing the use of the term martyr and martyrdom. A Syrian Palestinian himself, he, like most Syrians is pro-Palestinian and believes that the Palestinians have been wronged and the world community needed to recognize this.

To that claim I could provide no objection, but I argued that they do themselves a disservice when they use the word martyr so broadly: for the Gazan girl killed in her bedroom by Israeli white-phosphorus, for the stone throwing Palestinian teenager killed in a protest, and the Palestinian terrorist who explodes himself in a crowded public place in Israel to kill civilians. I acknowledged that I understood where the suicide bomber’s rage was coming from, but his frustration and victimization did not excuse his heinous crime. Indeed, terrorists like this are called martyrs and honored as heroes. By this point in the conversation, we had gathered a group of maybe a dozen Syrians, mostly of our party, who were defending this egregious act. I purposefully avoided the use of suicide tactics against military targets, and focused on its most heinous incarnation, its use against civilians. I argued that no matter how many innocent people the Israeli army kills, killing an Israeli civilian is murder, inexcusable and savage, and that until they acknowledged this and renounced it, their plight would be a hard sell to Americans, which we all agreed held most of the cards in this situation.

To this point I was shocked to find the majority of these Syrian, all upper class members of the intellectual elite, did not believe there was such a thing as an Israeli civilian. “Every Israeli where’s a military jacket” said my Professor with alarming conviction, to which the group nodded in affirmation. The Palestinians have to fight with what they can, said another, “they are victims of injustice and oppression,” he said, and the group surged with affirmation. I asked again, for clarity, if an Israeli child leaves his mother’s womb wearing a military uniform. “Every Israeli” they replied. They said it was a situation that I could never understand as I had never been the victim of such oppression.

Of course, neither had they. Ironically, of the group (though it would be unwise for me to point it out there) I was the only one who’d ever been to their beloved Palestine, and in my time in Gaza I got taste, a potent and foul introduction, to the absolute atrocities committed by the Israeli’s in the name of their false security, a lingering taste which sticks in the gut and brings home just how incontrovertible and intractable the chasm is between the ideas and beliefs of the two sides. I think about these Syrians bred for a lifetime with ideals of hate for their neighbors to the south, and at the same time I think of Israel, I think of the pointless desecration of holy places, Israel’s destruction of medical facilities and schools, I think of the tracks left by Israeli tanks in a playground making plain that the tank backed up and made a second pass to flatten both the jungle gym and the swing set. What were IDF soldiers trained to do that their minds and hearts could be so twisted? How could a Syrian consider the murder of civilians anything but a crime? Why do the Israelis? And how can anyone expect to bridge the gap between these two hatreds that have been seeded from youth and redoubled by fear and doubt?

And yet, somehow, even among the greatest ignorance and reckless hate, freed minds and immutable spirits will not be snuffed out. I returned to the bus and a group of the Syrians, like children embarrassed by an alcoholic parent begging society’s forgiveness for a crime that was never theirs, apologized to me and asked me to make sure the other Americans knew that not all Syrians thought this way. They wanted peace, they wanted to move on, and murdering civilians, they said, would make them no better than the Israeli army. I told them that I knew Israelis who felt the same way, outraged by their government’s expansionism and belligerence, and that there are many Americans who understand that we play a key role in allowing Israel to shun making peace in favor of expansion.

Connaitre’s martyrdom graveyard was a somber place, more so in that, in my mind, the death of all these men had only fermented and solidified a lingering hatred. In a way, it was much the same at the October War Panorama Museum in Damascus the next day. In 1973 Syria and Egypt had some success in forcing Israeli armies back. This is, in the shared cultural memory of these societies, a victory ranking with Saladin’s opening of Jerusalem from the Crusaders hundreds of years before. Syria’s North Korean allies donated a beautiful museum with a 360 panorama of the battle like a life-size donut shaped diorama extolling the bravery and courage of the Syrian army in pushing back the Israelis. A few friends and I were there, along with a few classes of 5^th graders. Through fuzzy speakers a recorded announcer narrated the battle and the history of the conflict from a dubious perspective. In truth, Lebanon’s Hezbollah museum takes the cake for expert propaganda, but I was disheartened to watch these innocent children being baptized in the hatreds of their parent’s generation. I am not discounting Syria’s situation. Part of Syria is occupied by a nuclear power that has in the past few years attacked Syrian soil as well as several of Syria’s close allies. From its position in the mountains south of Damascus it looks down on the Syrian capital, and for four decades the Syrians have tried to carry on their lives in the shadow of an enemy that watches them from within their own borders. Nevertheless, these kids were not on a field trip to learn about the complexities of international peacemaking, but to reinforce national sacrifice and the inhumanity of their enemies. Seeing how the IDF left Gaza, graffitiing walls and defecating in people’s beds, I can only imagine what young Israelis are being taught. It cannot be much different. In times like these I question the rationality and reason of our species.

Are we insane or blind? I wonder this often as an American. We punish Syria with a harsh barrage of sanctions until they renounce their ties with Hezbollah and Hamas and so on, and we support Israeli belligerence with our most generous foreign aid package. I am not sure for whom we are doing a favor? It is certainly neither in the interest of Syria nor Israel nor the U.S. It was the impression of the new American Ambassador to Syria that Syria is ready to make a peace, assuming the full return of occupied land to Syria. We met with the new Ambassador Ford in the embassy in Damascus. He was appointed in January as part of the reestablishment of diplomatic ties to Syria after the lull of the Bush years. He spoke to our small group of Americans and was able to speak surprisingly openly and honestly about Syria. He appears an earnest man trying to serve his country and Syria, two nations who need each other, and whose interests really do not need to clash as they often do.

Anyone who doubts that the U.S. needs to work with Syria underestimates the actors over-which they exert strong influence in the region, actors which the United States has a vested interest in engaging diplomatically; among these are Hamas, Hezbollah, and groups in Iraq, not to mention Syria’s own diplomatic engagement with Israel. The U.S. needs to work on its policies here, to deal with this region with an even hand to finally stand for the principles it preaches. As the rest of the Middle East falls apart, the influential political hand of Syria will be crucial in securing peace, cooperation, economic development and stability. This will only be reached by working with a strong political leadership in Damascus that can make unpopular decisions for the achievement of an elusive goal. I am not commenting on what I think this government wants. I am only saying that little in my discussions with most Syrians has made me think that they desire or believe themselves to be ready for political empowerment, or that a democracy would bring a brilliant partner for peace.

Syrians have witnessed the U.S. play its hand here for over half a century. We buttress a uncompromising expansionist theocracy as it exerts its will on its neighbors, we make allies of the most corrupt with no thought of their people, and our experiment in bringing democracy to Iraq is utterly ruinous. What are we doing here?

A Flame in Parched Fields

2011-02-18T15:33:00.000-08:00

I have been now in Aleppo for several weeks. Though in many ways I wish I were closer to the action, Syria is a pretty unique place from which to watch the rest of the neighborhood writhe and tremble.

Put simply, though Syria shares many similar problems to those which plague the rest of the Arab states, stability here has some key assets. First and foremost, people here love the President. Of course, not loving him would be unwise, but for most people here, he is a man trying to lead a country with many problems into a brighter future. For religious minorities, one of which he is a part, he is a savior and the vanguard of secularism and relative liberalism against the more unsavory incarnations of political Islam. For people all over the Arab world, he represents staunch loyalty to the Palestinian cause. Moreover, Syria has never given in to the West. While Egypt and Jordan made themselves puppets to U.S. demands by their dependence on U.S. aid, Syria forged its own path that it has successfully trumpeted as a noble stance against American domination. People recognize that there is a lot of corruption in the government, from the street police which make a good deal of their wages in bribes, right up to the business elite who run the country through party connections. It is true, of course, discontent won’t get much of a stage here, and potential protesters are dealt with decisively. Economic liberalization, though necessary, is a painful process for a lot of Syrians, and the country still has a long way to go. But my impression is that most people don’t want democracy here. They don’t want the chaos of Cairo or Manama, and though it is hard to decipher officially enforced public perception from free thought, as much of that as might be allowed, people have remarkable faith in Syria and unquestioning faith in its leadership. Syria will weather these next months and uncertainty far better than its neighbors.

This is not to say that what is happening next door isn’t on some people’s minds. Most people are disinterested, perhaps consciously distanced from what is going on. People here were happy to see the Egyptian government overthrown, feeling for the plight of a people ruled by a dictatorship that doesn’t have their best interests in mind, suffering from corruption, unemployment, lack of opportunity, and economic stagnation. People detach themselves from this situation by their remarkable faith in their leadership and also in key differences between Syria’s government and Egypt; for them, the government there didn’t represent the people’s collective aspirations, while here people are unified under core opposition to Israeli expansionism, American domination, and wistful remnants of Arab nationalism, and remarkable patriotic loyalty. In this way, people were happy to see Mubarak fall.

At the same time, the Syrian government opened up Facebook, YouTube, and even Blogspot, and many others, in a display of confidence in the people. My Syrian friends rejoiced in gratitude, like a child when his parents let him stay up an extra half-hour past bedtime to finish a movie. My teacher was happy that her government “thought its people were ready for these freedoms”. Though most Syrians my age already had Facebook accounts, it just got much easier to get on. Though some Facebook groups did try to organize protests in Syria, the membership was far higher in the pro-Government anti-protest groups. It is an odd dynamic, but through all this, Syrians seem to be more confident in Syria and in their society. Still, as anyone who has a lot of Syrian Facebook friends will tell you, it is annoying to try to tell people apart at a glance as two thirds of my Syrian friends use a portrait of the President as their Profile Picture, and the other third use some combination of the President and a Syrian flag. The percentages were hardly different before Facebook was legal here.

Public perception and sympathy with the protests extends to most countries. Syrians like their government so it is surprisingly permissible to side with people against dictatorships in other countries. This is not true, however, when it comes to state allies, namely Iran. Discussion of this situation is entirely off the table.

Life here has been carrying on well for these few weeks. The accommodations are comfortable, too comfortable perhaps, and the program does a good job seeing that most of our requests are met. I have four classes, Modern Standard Arabic, Syrian Colloquial, International Relations in the Arab World, and Arab Literature. All four are taught in Arabic, and in that way I am grateful to finally be using Arabic in a class for something other than improving Arabic. Arabic literature is especially fascinating with Arabic’s rich history in poetry; indeed, the language was largely conceived of and developed by poets and passed down in oral traditions of the ancient Arab nomads of the peninsula. Poetry here holds a dignified status, and with good reason. The structure of Arabic allows rhyming and rhythm in ways that would be impossible in English. The language is almost entirely composed of words based on three letter roots, which change into a series of different forms depending on their often related meanings, with a lot of comprehensive grammar rules which give the whole system a mathematical logic completely absent in English. On these words, particularly at their end, poets can play with the short vowels accorded to each word. Thus they can make lines flow not only through their sounds, and by the structure of the sentences, but also by the very structure of the words. Regardless, reading Arabic poetry in translation does not do it any justice, so this class is a great opportunity to have difficult metaphors and antiquated (think Shakespearian language) Arabic explained.

The program has also provided us with language partners, who we are supposed to see a few times a week, who can help us with our Arabic studies. They are all graduate students in Arabic language studies, so their Modern Standard Arabic is good enough that they can answer complex grammar questions (average people have varying degrees of proficiency in MSA). My language partner is named Muhammad. For the amount of time I’ve spent in the Middle East, the amount of close Muslim friends I have is sad. I some how end up in minority religion social groups, and as there is very little mixing between these groups, I often remain in majority Sunni countries with a bunch of Catholic friends. Either way, it is cool to have someone well versed in Islam with whom to discuss the Quran and go to mosque. Muhammad is pious yet liberal and open-minded, with an excellent brain and many ideas that are as beautiful as they are rare in this part of the world. Exploring a Hittite temple outside of Aleppo this week we had a fascinating discussion about religion; his ideas about rationality and God were perfect, why had God given him a brain if he were not expected to use it? He embodies the type of liberalism and rationality, which by his own admittance is incredibly rare here, needed to counter tides of political Islam. Though devout in his own religion, the Sunni Islam of the majority, he lauded his government’s ability to defend everyone’s right to practice their own religion free from persecution and theocratic oppression.

I went back to Damascus last weekend to visit with some friends. By lucky coincidence one of my travel companions agreed to meet for lunch with an acquaintance in town, who turned out to the son of a wealthy and connected businessman and Consul, who took us to a posh restaurant he owned for a lot of amazing food. He and I had a long conversation about the future of this part of the world. We debated at length about the route causes of many of the world’s ills; some he knew all too well, he was in a Pakistani mosque belonging to a small sect of Islam considered by some Sunnis to be a sacrilegious abomination, when it was attacked by suicide bombers, leaving him visibly scarred yet redoubled in secular determination and ironically a profound optimism. He posited that the educated elite of my generation in the U.S. demanded explanations and proof of everything we were told. We are taught to question, to reason arguments against each other, to be skeptical, to demand more information. From my experience, Arab education is largely memorization. No one want students to ask why; they want them to know, as opposed to the body or critical thinking which American education demands. But for his part, he said that this was changing, that this next generation of Syrians would be demanding answers, demanding accountability, demanding change. It is true this was the perspective of someone thoroughly invested in and reliant on the system, but it was refreshing to enjoy the freedom of thought and inquiry accorded to the elite that is all too rare here. He was confident that Syrians would find their own way towards modernization, that liberal democracy here would be foolish and premature, that the realities of this country necessitate a more nuanced approach.

Sitting there enjoying one of the best meals, and certainly the largest, of my life, his iPhone buzzed with the news of Mubaraks flight. It was unreal. We soaked in the surreal fruition of Egypt’s struggle and the innumerable possibilities and challenges facing the Arab world in this new era, contented by the sublime which only a full stomach and a communal intellectual inquiry can afford; two luxuries which I fear may become rarer before they become more common in this area of the world.

2011-02-02T14:00:00.001-08:00

Since I left Damascus a week ago, the Arab world has changed a lot. I heard word from some of my friends in Cairo, but the majority of them are beyond contact as telecommunications networks are snuffed out in Egypt. The wealth of “experts” who write that the whole Arab world is watching the events of the past weeks, yearning for change, certainly have not met the vast majority of Arabs that I’ve met, especially here in Syria. For most people, the Asian Cup is still the story of interest, and even as the heart of the Arab world ruptures, apathy, complacency, and regimented trepidation keep the whole concept conspicuously absent from public discourse, save for whispers in the murk of nebulous ideas ravaged into shadows of their former selves. These, like all shadows, will only endure as long as there is strength left to cast light upon their subjects.

Aleppo is really cool. As a city, I believe I prefer Aleppo to Damascus. From my window in the University of Aleppo dorms I have a fantastic cityscape, punctuated by the Aleppo citadel not two miles distant. The University is large and relatively modern. Our dorms have been fitted with wireless Internet (not working at the minute) and hot water, new pots and pans, and double rooms have been converted into singles, all for the advantage of the foreigners. I will not pretend that I don’t enjoy the special treatment, however embarrassing it general comfort we have to expect in all things. The study abroad program itself seems very well conceived and has more than capable leadership. We have a schedule of excursions, lectures and activities designed to give us a crash course in Syria and the Middle East. We have signed a pledge to use Arabic, even with each other, for the duration of the course, and I am taking an Arabic literature class and International Relations class in Arabic. I have never used Arabic as my language of learning and study, and am excited to see if I am capable. The international relations professor was gracious enough to offer to oversee my Honors College Thesis, and help me to compose it in Arabic (that will take a while), but these plans depend on finding someone at UMass who will approve this methodology and who can read it. It also depends on finding a permissible research topic in this political environment.

I will write more soon, I just thought I should post and let you all know that I am well!

Dinars with Birr and Lira

2011-01-21T15:54:00.000-08:00

I am back in Damascus after over a month on the road and am feeling refreshed and rejuvenated and ready to complete the final leg of my undergraduate career. I had a month of travel with good friends and fascinating new people and have reaffirmed my genuine desire to be forced into early retirement and sail around the world. Until such a time, I have seen a few countries, each of which I am determined to return to explore in depth. A month isn't very long at all.

And now, with internet restrictions removed in this fine country, I can post pictures to my blog with newfound ease! I will update again soon- the Arab world is pretty exciting right now- but I thought I should add pictures to this entry first.

in Cairo for our last delicious dinner at Sequoia, then off!

We began in Ethiopia. Nicole, a capable and delightful travel companion, and I left Cairo and arrived before sunrise in Addis Ababa and were met in the airport by Sophia, my travel-wife from Sudan. We headed to our hotel room in the downtown and got a few hours of sleep. We awoke to a bustling city that reminded me of something between Nairobi and Dar es Salaam; Nairobi in its somewhat developed traffic and industrial infrastructure, yet reminiscent of Dar in its sprawling village feel outside of the small center in which modern urban planning was evident.

Our first morning we headed out to get some injera, the national staple, a bread with the consistency of a moist sponge. Injera is good, not great, and meal after meal without mercy, it grows tiresome, but for the first meal, Ethiopia was impressive. We’d wondered through a small alley down a staircase and into a house that seemed to double as a locals’ restaurant and hangout, and told them we wanted to try it all (it all costs less than a dollar each). It was delicious and spicy, and after we washed it down with some Italian macchiato, one of the many remnants of Italy's colonial enterprise in Ethiopia.

Perhaps, something on Ethiopia itself is necessary before continuing. The land of Ethiopia is among the oldest known sites of human existence, a landlocked chunk of the horn of Africa, bordered on the East and North by Somalia, Djibouti and Eritrea, and borders to its South, Kenya, and to the West, Sudan. Its history of empires and conquest in fascinating and its kingdoms left behind archeological wonders and historical narratives which tie in with Middle Eastern and Abrahamic religious histories. The Ethiopians successfully (to some extent) repelled colonialism from the Italians, who had their colonial enterprises concentrated in the Horn of Africa as Ethiopia struggled for independence; alongside Liberia, Ethiopia is one of the only two African countries not to be divided up as colonial possessions in the Berlin Conference. Traveling around the country, it was easy to see how, though the Italians could hold cities here and there, they could never conquer such a wild and variegated terrain. Though their conquests didn't hold up, Ethiopian society is an amalgamation of amalgamations; Ethiopia is a combination of several major tribal and ethnic groups, with the cultures and languages distinct to each, and with Afro-asiatic cultures evident in a somewhat familiar looking script and a language spotted with recognizable words.

The society was generally religious, and besides a mixing of Christianity and Judaism apparent in some social customs, their Abrahamic faiths also seem to have combined with local beliefs so that Christianity was spiced up with a lot of animist legends and tales that Western Christians and certainly the Middle Eastern ones seem to dismiss as primitive perversions of their faith. I thought many of them were charming editions and parables; it is perhaps problematic for Christians to take issue with animism or exorcism when the foundation of Christian faith is that the son of God was born to a virgin women so that by his death he could absolve the sins of man. I do not mean to demean this belief. Nor am I convinced the rocks have souls. I just don't see any inherent quality that makes one supposition more valid than the other. If one accepts the existence of an all-powerful being, he or she is painfully presumptuous to assume his or her understanding of the nature this deity is any greater than anyone else’s. But here I digress.

After sipping coffee at a cafe we made our way to one of the many tour companies in down town Addis. More than book a tour we were curious just to look at a map and talk with the people there; they were very helpful but, as we suspected, ridiculously overpriced. We left and walked to the bus station and purchased tickets for the 12 hour bus ride the next day to Gonder. The bus ride was long and the roads terrible. Throughout our time in Ethiopia we saw far more than a proportionate amount of traffic accidents, or the remnants of them. We saw the aftermaths of several crashes and rolled trucks, some of which looked so charred by flame that I am quite certain no one made it out. The reason for these accidents was obvious in the design of the winding roads, necessitated by a constantly rising and falling terrain, and the multiple uneven and narrow switchbacks on the road. Fortunately, our driver was competent and we made it safely to Gonder, the old imperial capital of one of the Ethiopian kingdom of Begemder. The ancient city had ruins that we would have time to explore after we'd completed the hiking portion of the journey. The next morning at the bus station while looking for a bus to the Simien Mountains we ran into another foreigner, a solo Canadien traveler named Sean. He turned out to be a great guy and invaluable addition to our group, and we spent 4 days backpacking with him in the Simien Mountains. In the last four-hour bus ride up to Debark, the launching point for hikes into the mountains, Sean recounted his 2 and half years on the road since he quit his job as a Microsoft programmer and set out on a journey around the world that will end later this year in Timbuktu. His story was as impressive as it was inspiring, and his adventures made us all yearn for a longer vacation.

Our bus ride continued the general trend it had from Addis. Winding roads constantly moving uphill towards the Ethiopian plateau, one of the highest areas in Africa. Addis itself is above 7,000 feet and we just continued up from there, so at least we had time to grow accustomed to the altitude, if not to the thin air.

buses in Africa are an experience in themselves

We reached Debark and hired a scout to take us into the mountains. We declined to hire a pack-mule on principle and thought that a guide and cook were overkill, but a scout is obligatory by law for protection against wild animals. A few minutes after paying camping fees and renting tents, sleeping bags, and cook wear, Neggahr showed up at the office carrying nothing but a thin blanket slung over his shoulder and an old British bolt-action rifle that was somehow older than he was. Neggahr was a figure of stoic admiration. He wore two layers of thick clothes during the day in the unforgiving sun straight into the night when the temperatures dropped to near freezing. Neggahr spoke no English whatsoever, but he knew the word for Baboon, which he'd point out whenever we saw them for the next four days. The rest of the time he was contented to speak in Amharic to us as if we could comprehend his meaning, though I feel that by the end he and I had reached some level of mutual understanding.

starting out overburdened

We bought some food and were off up the mountain. When we refused the pack mule we were envisioning lightweight tents and sleeping bags, only to find out we couldn't be farther from the truth. Sean and I both had proper bags for this sort of thing, and this picture illustrates how over-laden we were- but we'd refused their sincere recommendations that we take a mule, so we couldn't backpedal now. Nicole's bag ended up to be somewhere near her own body weight with food but didn't complain at all. Truly, none of us could really complain as Neggahr trudged up mountain with a torn up pair of shoes, far too small for his feet, with at least four of his toes on either foot protruding out. Shoes were, for him, merely a decoration, as most of the other Amhara we passed on the paths wore no shoes at all. Neggahr ate scraps of our food and drank only when we offered, though to him this seemed a luxury. Sophia, a first time hiker, provided a perfect foil to Neggahr's austere stoniness; a fun juxtaposition to be sure, but I would find it more amusing were we not all stuck together for the next week. Needless to say it was a long first day. Soon into the hike, the points of weakness in our company had become plain and Neggahr through a series of nods and gestures that evening had indicated that she'd not make it a second.

no one messes with Neggahr

We ate a dinner of Pasta and tomato paste and went to sleep early, but not too early to witness an impressive celestial sphere of stars wrapping around us and enveloping our view. There were more stars that night than have been seen in Cairo in the past century, combined. We'd come a long way in 3 days.

The next morning I talked to a guide who spoke some English and contracted a mule for our last three days of hiking. In that way we could spread out our weight and have a better shot of proving Neggahr wrong. The chaos that ensued was unpleasant prelude to the scum and villainy of which Ethiopians are capable. I paid 400Birr (24USD) for a mule and mule driver to take our tents, sleeping bags and cooking stuff up to our next camp. The guide I negotiated with had left and as we made to leave the mule-man demanded another 60Birr if he was going to take our stuff. At this time all of the men at the camp, maybe a dozen total, had gathered to tell us we should pay more. Amharic numbers are similar to Arabic numbers, but none of them spoke English, Arabic or French, so we were at a linguistic loss. I asked for our money back (I had a travel-guides useful phrase section which I soon exhausted before it had proved to be of any use whatsoever). We knew we were being screwed over, and even Neggahr, to his great discredit in my eyes, actively participated in extorting a little extra. We didn't have a choice, they wouldn’t give the money back but wouldn't take our stuff without the added price.

I learned later through the translations of a passing guide that the mule driver decided to charge extra for the rope to tie bags on our mule. Such was the way with negotiating with Ethiopians, they gathered around and watched, as if watching the extortion of foreigners was like a circus spectacle; they chuckled at our indignity as one would be charmed at a seal able to balance a ball on its nose. We hadn't seen the last of this cultural trait. Not to worry of course, my wonderfully useful and fully enlightened liberal education has, from grades K-12 right up to the last latte-sipping professor pontificating that no culture is any better or worse than any other, informed me that I must not be a cultural or moral absolutist, and must look at every culture relative to itself, and must appreciate its uniqueness and beauty. I continue to strain to comprehend the cultural worth in, for example, the 70-something percent of Ethiopian women who's vaginas are either hacked or burned in the savage, or rather, culturally unique process of female genital mutilation--- but maybe I am burdened by my Western cultural view, but a society based on engrained dishonesty, where honor is garnered by the chastity of women rather than by the interpersonal dignity, where corruption and deceit are standard and generosity based on tribe and creed rather than by common fellowship on Earth isn't going anywhere fast. Again, I digress.

The next day brought us farther up the Ethiopian plateau and to the first of a long series of astounding views. We reached a plateau and looked out over a landscape of wild carved rocks jutting out at right angles from lower jungles, continuing to the utter end of the horizon in all directions. We shared the road with farmers, herders, villages, and Bleeding-Heart Baboons, a species unique to the Simien Mountains. When startled, the baboons, their young clinging on with visible ease, would leap over the side of the cliffs in what at first appeared to be mass-suicide. A minute later, cautiously, they would claw their way back up from their fortuitous hiding places hanging off the side of the cliff. It was impressive the confidence they had when making their leap that their hands would find sturdy hold on the side of the rocks. Surely, no predator without opposable thumbs would do well to jump after them. The baboons were everywhere for the next few days, but I never got tired of watching them. It is an impressive wonder of nature our evolution from a relation to these wonderful creatures, and clear in their interactions together are our familial ties; for myself, I find quiet comfort in watching the baboon frollic about and remembering that we are in nearly all respects, identical. But which of us has the better end of the deal? I only know that I am paying to go on vacation and hike around for 4 days in the playground where the baboons get to hang out their whole lives, and though I am sure there are downsides to their existence, they spend at least most of their time eating, playing, socializing and mating, and all that doesn't sound too bad.

We carried on, up footpaths and goat-paths that carved their way between the lesser peaks on the way up the spine of the mountains. The views went from amazing to astounding, but this, our longest day, began to take its toll on those fainter of body and spirit in our group, and as they faded, Neggahr expressed his concern to me as to whether or not we'd make it to camp before sunset. As we passed by wild horses (which roamed freely and majestically in these places), he was able to explain that it is possible for us to link up with a horseman, and they could carry us the rest of the way. Fortunately we didn't have to resort to this, but we arrived late at camp, at the tail end of an ice-cold dusk, and crammed some food in our mouths before falling asleep.

The third day we got up early, and fortunately the day's hike was not obligatory, and those who wished to remain could do so. Nicole, Sean and I continued to Imat Gogo, a peak surrounded by two large gorges that trace either side of the spine of the mountain chain all the way back to Debark. From there we had a 360-degree view of the mountains on all sides, the culmination of our hike. By noon we had made it back to the camp from the previous night and the four of us made the hike halfway back to Debark, arriving at good hour to our final night's camp. The camps consisted of flat grasslands above mountain villages, which themselves were built around mountain springs with delicious and potable water bubbling from the rocks. Interestingly, the villages used the water further downstream, and shared it with herds of cattle, sheep and goats; I cannot understand how they did not get sick, as the water a little further downstream from the source ran through algae and dung-ridden pools and rocks. Human waste was not reserved to areas far from water sources, but seemed to fall as soon as the urge hit. Their immune systems here were astounding.

Our last day brought us back to Debark just before sunset, and we stayed in Debark to wait for the morning bus (the road from Debark to Gonder is unpaved and hazardous, and buses will not traverse it after nightfall). The next day back in Gonder we got a some rooms at the hotel, and went to explore the ancient ruins of the castle complex of the emperors who ruled from here a 400 hundred years ago. The castles were an interesting mix of several architectural styles, and were good for a few hours of wondering. That night we had our celebratory dinner to make up for all the eating we hadn't been doing, and even enjoyed a decent pizza and burger and Ethiopian beer.

part of the castle complex at Gonder

more of that same complex

Ethiopian beer is very good. It is possible that I say this as I have been away from good beer in the Middle East for too long and thus my ability to judge is wasted, but I think it tasted great. On our first full night in Addis we enjoyed Ethiopia's most famous alcohol product, tejj, or honey-wine. Tejj looks a lot like orange juice but tasted something like sweet honey flavored juice with a kick. Local men gather in tejj houses (barren rooms with long wooden benches where the tejj is sloshed out of huge vats into vase-shaped flasks) to socialize and imbibe on the plentiful and cheap honey wine. Our night in the tejj house was interesting; being with two girls in a room fool of drunken Ethiopians was uncomfortable. Still, Ethiopian tejj and beer are both highly enjoyable.

After our great feast in Gonder we headed back to the hotel, only to find bed bugs hopping around our beds as if on trampolines. The owner refused to refund our money, and we had no leverage, but we convinced him that his proposed solution, to change the sheets and spray the bed with bug spray was insufficient, we were forced to settle for a different room which looked alright. Hoping to catch an early bus in the morning, we bid Sean farewell and got a few hours of sleep. By six we were on our way to Bahir Dar, a city on the way back to Addis.

Arriving at the bus station was another one of those charming cultural experiences. We got out of our tuktuk to a swarm of Ethiopians all grabbing at us yelling at us to use their mini bus. They fought with each other over who'd get our fare, but at least agreed with each other on the inflated price they'd cite us. They grabbed and pulled and I had to shove several of them back just to stay on my feat. One would grab our bag and start carrying it off to his preferred minibus and try to shove us in there, then the next would grab our hand or shirt. Without Sean, it was just two light-haired light-skinned American girls, and I, and they both appreciated their manhandling even less than I did. We made it to a minibus and got in, more seeking refuge than making a selection, and then allowed the drivers to start fighting over us, while the touts tried to claim a portion of the commission for bringing us there.

It reminded me of when Matt and I were in Kisitown, Kenya, trying to find transport to Uganda; he was suffering from heatstroke and we were surrounded by a group of locals half harassing and half mugging us, but not in a full effort, rather in perverse half-measures, like savannah wolves working in tandem, each nipping slightly at an creature to finally bring it down, none going all the way, each just making small motions more than the last, but hesitant to make the kill without full commitment of the group. We were frazzled, but we still hadn't seen the last of this portion of the Ethiopian hospitality regime.

We got to Bahir Dar which was in my opinion the most beautiful city we'd seen in Ethiopia. It is built on Lake Tana, Ethiopia's largest lake and the headwaters of the Blue Nile, the largest tributary to the great river. We arrived and arranged a tuktuk to take us to Blue Nile Falls, the waterfalls at the downsteam end of the lake. Off we went, and an hour later (tuktuks, or "Indian taxis", like a motorized tricycle taxi, are painfully slow). We arrived to the town built around the waterfall, and hiked in to the spot. It was exhilarating to see where this part of the Nile is born (I got to kayak in Jinja, Uganda, where the other branch is born). We hiked down off the trail until we sat below the falls, blanketed by its rejuvenating mist, and there enjoyed Twix bars and a refreshing rest. No matter where I go in the world, a Twix is always delicious; but this was an especially enjoyable spot for a Twix.

Blue Nile Falls

unfortunately a weakened flow from the hydroelectric projects upstream

We followed up a lesser branch of the river that met with the main artery just below the falls, eventually coming to a place where it could be crossed by taking off shoes and rolling up pant legs. From there the path wound back around, but continued on to wonder through beautiful fields of rich farm land which the Nile had made rich and green. Ethiopia was truly beautiful land.

here a herd crosses this lesser tributary to the Nile

We arrived bath in Bahir Dar, and the next day wondered a little around the lake and the city, and around 2 o’clock, made our way to the bus station to be sure we'd get back in time for our flight at four AM the next morning. We'd asked about buses back when we were at the hotel, and the guy at the hotel had told us we should take his inflated-priced minibus. Unfortunately, we'd told him our time schedule based on our flight, and thus he knew we needed to get back to Addis. We didn't want his overpriced share-bus, so we went to the bus station. We showed up there and the touts were on us in a second. The guy knew what hotel we'd come from; they'd already all be in contact. They told us there was no public transport that would get us there in time. We'd go to ask other locals, and they'd begin to answer, before the guys (who were now following us incessantly) would discuss the situation with them, at which point they'd agree that we'd have to hire one of their special buses, that is, to buy all the seats of the bus at full price (they actually started at a higher than full price until they learned we knew what it should be per seat) for the entirety of the distance to Addis. We couldn't lose the guys following us, and on our walk back to the hotel we had 5 or 6 total followers, each wanting their payout for our extortion. The guy at the hotel told us we should have taken his special bus, we'd now have to rent one ourselves. I asked another driver, but they followed and yelled to him in Amharic and he simply said that no one would go to Addis save for our group of ravenous touts. Their price went up, but they lowered it back down to the previously stated price if we'd agree to allow them 5 passengers they could pick up or drop off to make the whole thing more profitable. We had no choice, and by now had realized we were absolutely powerless to do anything but bight the bullet and take it.

We watched them dole out payments to each of the fetid parasites, each of them fighting over us like hyenas over a carcass, but then they dropped us off with another driver who, it would turn out, had no idea of any of these agreements, and had been paid only a portion of our total sum. The rest was dispersed amongst the crowd for their complicity. Our driver proceeded to drive us as if it were an ordinary minibus, picking up and discharging passengers as we went, despite the fact we'd paid for the whole thing. We pre-paid half, and when we arrived in Addis 9 hours later, refused to pay the other half. I don't think the driver knew everything that had happened, he seemed like a decent enough guy, but he'd not been paid what was promised him, and he wanted it made up for by us, having been screwed over by the guy at the hotel. As no one but the guy at the hotel could speak English, we couldn't explain to him what happened, and when the police came over, they provided impartial (ha) judgment and decided we owed the full amount. I argued for over a half an hour, we tried to leave but they wouldn't let us walk away; I demanded they call the tourist police, the officers said that there weren't any (though they didn't speak English either), and were laughing and chuckling and the whole thing. I am not sure what each did with their cut of the loot, but I know there was plenty to go around.

It is amazing how much dishonesty and treachery can sour even the finest of vacations. I am vexed that my first thought when people ask me about Ethiopia is so utterly negative even though the vast majority of time there was positive, but I left the country more disheartened by a place than I have been since I left Lusaka. Nicole and bid farewell to Sophia and boarded a plane and were happy to see the country disappear behind the clouds as we took off.

Fortunately, our next destination could not disappoint. We had a painless layover in Cairo, and by nighttime, were eating a schwarma-chicken sandwich walking between the Aya Sophia and Blue Mosque in downtown Istanbul. Life was good. In the morning, we enjoyed an absurdly cheap (comparable to the price of the equidistant bus) flight to Diyarbakir, a town in the heart of Kurdish Anatolia (the Turkish landmass in Asia). From the plane window we saw spine after spine of rugged and foreboding snow-covered mountains. It is hard to imagine that Alexander the Great had to cross all of this to face off against Darius at the height of Persian glory and was still victorious. We covered his long march by Airbus in less than 2 hours and arrived in South-East Anatolia, exploring what was once a great walled city. Diyarbakir has the second longest contiguous wall in the world built and rebuilt over thousands of years, leaving it the most impressive of the ruins in town.

Kurds are an ethnic group from Eurasia that has lived in this area as long as anyone else. They have a unique culture and language (from the Persian language family) yet have no country of their own (a sore subject for them). There are large Turkish populations in Iraq (semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan), Syria, Turkey and Iran, concentrated in an area resembling a country that does not exist, but which many Kurds wish did. The subject of Kurdish independence is somewhat awkward in their host countries for obvious reasons, and many Syrians are skeptical of the Kurds for their nationalist aspirations that undermine Syrian unity. The same seemed true of Turkey and certainly was true of Iraq. Most people know the Kurds foremost for their systematic persecution and slaughter by Sadam Hussein; indeed, Coalition forces found ready-made allies in the Kurds when they entered Iraq. I had heard that the Kurdish region of Iraq was in these short years after the war a remarkable success story at least in the aspects of security and development, so we went to explore for ourselves.

A few hours wandering the ruins of Diyarbakir and we bused to Siloki, a border town to Iraq, where we found a Turkish taxi who'd take us into Kurdistan, taking care of all the paperwork, for 50 dollars, the going rate. The closer we got to Iraq, the more pervasive Arabic was, and thus the easier it was for us to get around. We could usually find someone to translate into Turkish or Kurdish from Arabic, and so we felt much more in control.

Kurdistan was an experience. I don't really know where to begin, so I guess I will just start with showing up there. After the Turkish border posts we arrived at a post crowned by Kurdistan's, not Iraq's, flag. Signs were in Kurdish first (written in a Arabic script with some adjustments), then in Arabic, then in English. We entered the passport control office. It was warm and had several rows of sharp looking couches and chairs with glass tables, arranged around several large flat-screen TVs playing various soccer matches. We walked to the window and handed in our passports. The man smiled at us, "American? Welcome!!! Please sit down, it will be just a minute". We sat on nearby couch, and a man brought us each a cup of strong tea. We thanked him in Kurdish, which he replied to with a big grin.

We hadn’t finished our tea and they called us to the desk. They asked what we were doing in Kurdistan, but more out of curiosity than protocol. “Tourism” we said. Each officer welcomed us with genuine smiles and then they gave us our free Kurdish tourist visas. They said we’d have to pay if we wanted to stay more than 10 days. We said we didn’t have that long. “Have a nice visit, then”. And off we were into Iraq.

There are no public buses around Kurdistan; a fleet of taxis operates it all with fixed prices per seat to go places. Fixed prices were really the oddest thing here, we weren’t once given an inflated price and ripping people off wasn’t a cultural necessity as it is in Arab countries. We got a hotel the first night in Dohuk, and the next day explored the small city. It was unremarkable save for the colors of the buildings. Arranged on the steep hillsides that resembled Sinai foothills, the houses were painted in bright pastels, like little square Easter eggs spilling down into the valleys from the upper reaches where the mountains became to sheer, arranged in no particular order but taken together making a delightful colored specticle. People were exceedingly friendly and we began to realize that this was a pretty great place to be an American. It was odd, though, people spoke much less Arabic than you’d expect for people living in a nominally Arabic speaking country. We could always find someone to translate from Arabic to Kurdish if we asked around, but truly these people had much more in common with the Kurds in Diyarbakir than with their Arab countrymen (though I am in no way fomenting the secession of Kurds from their respective countries nor the creation of a Kurdish state). The other thing that we immediately noticed was odd was that an American speaking Arabic was not a novelty. They were completely comfortable with the notion and when we’d begin in Arabic with people, they’d rarely ask how we came to speak the language. I cannot draw any conclusions as to what this meant, but it was fascinating; they were accustomed to working with Americans, and maybe enough of our people there spoke Arabic so as to make such a thing commonplace.

not a very good picture, but the Kurds love colorful houses

People’s attitudes towards Americans and U.S. foreign policy were also in stark contrast to the prevailing beliefs in every place I have ever been. They certainly loved the U.S. for what it did for their people, and how it helped them. Moreover, Bush was better than Obama (Nicole and I did a double-take when we heard that one the first time). However, these were not mindless partisans of American policy. They had nuanced views of the good and negative of our actions; necessitated as the fate of the few million Kurds here rest in the balance of sweeping U.S. policy decisions. Though I spoke to multiple people at some length about these issues, I will, at risk of oversimplification, amalgamate these views in a generalized Kurdish view, as best as I can understand it from my short time there.

First of all, and perhaps most important, they recognize that the U.S. does not and did not come to Iraq just to liberate them from Hussein; they are not idiots. They understand how unrealistic that is and that is not how U.S. foreign policy functions. At the same time, it seemed to be universally felt that Americans were good people, and the Americans working in Iraq confirmed that for them in word and deed. They thought that once we were there we genuinely had the best intentions for the Kurds and Iraqis in general, and that our incompetence in many fields was only that, incompetence, not malice. Many we had a chance to speak to were collaborators in one form or another, on Coalition payroll for at least a little while (to some extent this trend is because we spoke to people in English or Arabic, the two languages the coalition forces would find useful in Kurdish residents). Some felt like the U.S. used everyone around to get their own goals accomplished, and often had little regard for the people who risked their lives and families to help out. But their experience with individual Americans often seemed to counter this attitude, and they attribute our reckless abandon which has cost many Kurdish and Iraqi lives and trust as an error of the size, bureaucracy, and complexity of our enterprises, not the moral depravity of our people.

The Kurds admired America and the West in greater depth than the Arabs I’ve met. The Arabs begrudgingly imitate western consumerist culture while criticizing its moral depravity; consider an old Egyptian man I once met who, between sips of his Coke, grumbled about how America brought the world nothing but woe and suffering. For the Arabs, it’s all about embracing Western culture while claiming victimhood under its overwhelming yoke. The Kurds defined themselves as not being Arabs, and made a point of being different. Moreover they were overwhelmingly secular. It is strange, and certainly has been fortuitous for the U.S. in the past, that people have only so much capacity for fanaticism, and that many fanaticisms run counter to each other; one must in some ways chose their preferred brand of crazy. The Kurds’ choice “ism” was nationalism, and they were all about it. Religiosity took a back seat. Kurdish Christian and Muslim communities were Kurds first, and seemed in relative harmony. Non-Kurdish Christians were migrating from the rest of Iraq to Kurdistan as here, sectarianism wasn’t causing any bloodshed. Mosul seemed an exception, and people didn’t seem to know why a city so close but was still having so many problems. The Kurds were defining themselves as non-Arab, non-Iraqi, and so the problems that haunted the rest of the country were things the Kurds prided themselves in not doing. Conveniently, this extended from everything from ripping people off on prices to enforcing religiosity on people. However, interestingly enough, they recognized how incredibly secular Sadam’s regime was, and that there has been a universal rise in religiosity in the wake of his imposed secular austerity. Whatever the reason, the Kurdish nationalist aspirations were perfectly suited for U.S. aspirations in the area, and we were, for the first time in my experience, welcomed as liberators rather than occupiers.

The night of our first day we left by taxi from Dohuk to Erbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. The roads are dotted by security checkpoints, and our car got more attention than most, more for curiosity than security. On seeing our faces they'd ask for our passports and usually try out a few English words, and wish us good travels. Also in our car was a geology professor from a university in Erbil who invited us to his house for dinner. We accepted his hospitality, as his Arabic was fluent so we could communicate; Dr. Ali turned out to be the coolest guy in Kurdistan, self-dubbed our “Kurdish father”. He had his son pick us up at the city limits in a beautiful new Ford Mustang. I never fully appreciated American muscle cars with our stringent traffic laws with reasonable speed limits and rules, but if I ever move to the Iraq, getting one will be first on my list. We got home in good time and met Dr. Ali’s family while his Nepalese servant girl (who spoke Arabic from her last posting in Oman) prepared us Kurdish cuisine. Kurdish food was wonderful, and though filled to the brim, we headed out that night with Dr. Ali to see the town.

an ancient minaret, impressive even at half its original height

The parks and fountains were impressive, with well-lit and clean boulevards and shopping malls. It certainly wasn’ what one expects to find in Iraq.

fountains in front of the citadel. yes, this is what Iraq looks like

Nicole and I stayed with Dr. Ali in a spare room and in the morning headed out to walk around the town. Saladin, the famous Arab conqueror who was actually Kurdish himself, was from this area, and many things bore his name. There was also a ruler-philosopher commemorated by statue at the citidel overlooking the central square of the city. The citadel stood on top of a hill in the absolute center and was the highest thing around. Inside was in the middle of a restoration project, but we ended up getting a tour of it all by the project manager. Using UN money they were creating a digital model of the place to shore up the walls and structures as a cultural heritage cite. It wasn’t, in its current state, very impressive, but it will be interesting to see when they are finished. The rest of the city felt like other Arab cities with winding market streets and souks. We ate dinner again with Dr. Ali and finally met his wife, a professor as well and a former Kurdish parliamentarian, back from a meeting in the south. She spoke Arabic as well and had fascinating anecdotes and stories about her term in Baghdad, trying to reassemble Iraq from inside of the Green Zone. She was tired from her travels and we didn’t want to overstay our welcome, so Dr. Ali drove us to a hotel owned by a friend of his, not letting us pay of course as our self-appointed caretaker. We spent that last night in Iraq eating Lebanese takeout and watching the Sister Act (there really wasn’t much on), the whole surreal experience not really setting in. In the morning we awoke to make our way back towards Turkey.

mosques here were far more eastern looking

Getting back into Turkey isn’t as simple as getting out. Crossing the border took well over 2 hours, and it was not without its quirks.

Turkish border

Cigarettes are cheaper in Kurdistan than in Turkey, and there is a six box (each with a bunch of cartons) limit to how many a person can bring into Turkey. The Kurdish-Turkish drivers who will take people back across have a set price, but that price rests on the assumption that you will aid them in their cigarette smuggling enterprise. We didn’t have want to use our allocation on our own of course, and our driver (through a translator with limited Arabic) told us that we’d have to pretend six boxes were ours for him to take us. I refused on instinct but everyone there said that we’d not find a driver willing to take us without paying much more or subsidizing by bringing cigarettes. Indeed, everyone else was taking his or her share over from the conveniently located cigarette store on the border. I said we’d take six boxes between the two of us, but we weren’t hiding anything in our bag (he wanted to shove more in there). I figured if we were declaring them and not hiding them it wasn’t so bad. He grudgingly agreed, and we made our way through checkpoint after checkpoint, each more in depth than the next. Our driver had some pretty nifty Millennium Falcon style smuggling compartments, and Nicole crossed the border on a hollow seat cushion full of cigarettes. The other passengers loaded their jacket pockets and about everywhere else, and everyone had their six legal boxes. I looked around while our cars stood idle in line, and every driver and passenger in the long line of cars was doing the same. The Turkish authorities were scouring everything, and there were several trash bags of cigarette boxes that didn’t make the journey undetected, caught in cigarette-purgatory on the sides of the checkpoints. Turkish police tore our car apart but didn’t find any. The man went through each bag, but on seeing where we were from he didn’t open ours. The driver looked wistfully at my large backpacking bag , half empty, completely un-scrutinized; I am sure he was imagining how many boxes he could have Tetris-packed in there. Our scrutiny came at one of the security posts when we were questioned on the reasons for our travel in Kurdistan. I am not really sure what these officials were getting at, I think they just didn’t want journalists sympathetic to pan-Kurdish nationalism, but they proved quite friendly and gave us recommendations on what to do while still in Eastern Turkey. We finally made in back to Siloki and waited for a bus to Diyarbakir.

This bus ride was two hours longer than scheduled because of an excessively thorough security check en route. I don’t know what prompted it, but every bag was taken off the bus, every man patted down and every inch of the bus scoured. Outside the window we saw they had found three handguns and a few trash bags of cigarettes. They looked at my large bag that Nicole and I were sharing but which sat in front of her, and didn’t ask to open it. Though they went up and down the bus even looking in women’s purses and people’s jacket pockets, the official didn’t even peer at ours. I was in disbelief. We could have fit an RPG, and enough small arms to start a small war in there, but being a foreigner has its perks. The next morning we were on a flight back in Diyarbakir, and that afternoon, were enjoying a real Chinese buffet in downtown Istanbul (yes, life is great).

one of the bridges across the strait

looking from the European to the Asian side of the Bosporus

just another one of the city's grand mosques

We spent the rest of our time in the Istanbul, ancient Constantinople, the city straddling Europe on the Western bank and Asia on the Eastern bank of the Bosporus Strait. The archeological wonders are astounding. Justinian’s Aya Sophia, famous for its revolutionary hollow-brick dome which is supported by no column but rather by a series of lower semi-domes-making it a gigantic completely open space- was at one point the largest church in the world. At the conquest of Constantinople by Suleiman the Magnificent the Aya Sophia was converted to a mosque by the addition of minarets and some traditional Islamic bling, but the original Christian motifs remained, making it a fascinating relic of the two religions. The Blue Mosque was an imposing and impressive structure as well, on the opposite side of some beautiful parks and fountains between the great structures.

inside the Aya Sophia

pictures cannot capture the immensity of this place

Nearby, ancient cisterns of the palaces of Constantinople have been reopened as museums after they were forgotten for hundreds of years. They were vast and majestic, like a Tolkien underground dwarf city, even though they were only intended as freshwater storage. Unfortunately we did have time to visit Topkapi Palace complex, where the Sultans of the Ottoman dynasties wasted away in total seclusion from their societies, enjoying unimaginable wealth and splendor, and of course, their harems, while their empire deteriorated. Having lived and traveled all around the Middle East, I have seen the Ottoman cultural and archeological heritage that was spread throughout the lands of their dominion. Ottoman mosques, citadels, and public works are commonly among the most impressive in their respective cities. Despite this, I can safely say that the sum of their colonial relics do match the total wonder and grandeur of what they were created in their imperial capital.

Justinian's cisterns

Our travels ended well, enjoying a delicious dinner on a balcony over looking two of the world’s most famous structures, and beyond the Bosporus and the storied hillsides, which stretch out towards Asia. Istanbul, and the rest of Turkey, are now, more than ever, on my list of places to visit. We only scratched the surface for lack of time; I have never been to a city that appeared to have so much to offer, and such interesting blends of culture. The infrastructure, society, and atmosphere were palpably European in the city, or at least we found them that way in the sharp contrast to our countries of residence. I will travel back to Istanbul.

Aya Sophia at night

I wandered the city solo for the day Nicole returned to Cairo, and that night caught a bus back to Damascus. The bus ride dragged on, but it was amazing to watch the geography change as we cut Southward across Anatolia, then along the coast as the snowcapped peaks fell away to flatlands and eventually grew more arid, becoming suddenly bleaker and rockier as the border approached. As if matching the geography, the Turkish hospitality gave away to Syrian border officials. Not to worry, a month of travel renews the sprit and even the Syrian border welcoming committee couldn’t get me down.

The following night I was home with my family in Damascus, and friends had all gathered for our Thursday night partying tradition. It was good to be back with Arabs, I had missed being able to understand what conversations were going on around me. I had missed my friends and my family here in Damascus; it always astounds me how good they are to me. Since I’ve returned I’ve hardly been alone long enough to write this--- but I wanted to get it down when it was fresh. All in all, an amazing trip to a fascinating and variegated roster of places with some incredible people, both as companions and those we met on the road.

Despite some low points in people and in places I have seen in all of my traveling, the societies I’ve explored and the common humanity of people give me the greatest degree of faith in the wonderful and universal decency of people everywhere, and equal wonder at the impossible majesty that is Earth, our little speck in the universe.

Some Pictures, now that I have Internet

2010-12-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

This is the sunset on Christmas Day from Wadi Degla, a valley nature preserve, outside Cairo.

This little picnic with roommates and friends broke up a series of parties and celebrations, with lights, trees, and music, the delightfully fruitful attempts of expats and wealthier Egyptian Christians to recreate a western-style Christmas in the heart of the Middle East. We even got to see the Nutcracker performed by the Cairo Symphony Orchestra and Cairo Ballet and the Opera House, which was excellent. The Egyptians did it justice and added more of a Arabian flare to an otherwise un-Arabian performance.

As for what I have been doing these past few months, I now have Internet enough to upload a few photos. Here they are.

This is our group in Lebanon, backpacking up in the mountains. Great people.

Snow in Damascus!

A mosque in Aleppo, I think.

The view from the balcony of my houseboat. How could you have a bad day when you drink your coffee there?

My Houseboat in Cairo, an old photo, but one that I just found. Yes, that is our private mango tree out in front.

One of several large souqs in the Damascus old city. The bullet holes in the roof are from French planes during WWI.

The opening of the Souq to roman arches and in back the Omayyad Mosque.

More Damascus Old City

I caught my bus there every morning.

Aleppo from a bastion of the Citadel

Pigeon Rocks, Beirut. A great place to swim.

Hamas bunker overlooking Israeli positions from the 2006 war.

The Hezbollah Museum, with ruined Israeli war machines scattered throughout, surrounded by propagandized publications. But the most eerie exibit were the vistors, the families, the young boys and girls worshiping martyrdom and the ultimate sacrifice against Israel, grabbing their place on the next war's UN casuality report.

Light doesn't make it to street level on most streets in Shatilla camp.

Shatila camp refugees mourning at dawn on the Eid at the martyrs graveyard. These stones are for martyrs, for a child hit by a stray Israeli round and yet at the same time for a murderer who dies killing civilians; they, and Allah as they see him, do not distinguish between these two sacrifices.

Bashari, Lebanon. Amazing views which no camera could do justice.

Bashari is almost entirely Christian, and they make sure to decorate it as such.

Golan Heights, the new Syrian border, the post behind in the distance is Israel. The whole area is U.N. patrolled.

The theater at Bosra, an old roman city a few ours outside Damascus. The picture doesn't capture how magnificent this place is.

A minaret of the Umayyad Mosque in the Damascus old city. A magnificent pagan temple turned church turned mosque.

Snow in Damascus

2010-12-19T13:37:00.000-08:00

I am back in Cairo. I took (and passed!) the final, and after stopping home and saying goodbye to my wonderful Syrian family, Shady drove my friend and I to the airport. I am here now with decent internet for the first time in while, so I figured I'd try to write a little.

My last few weeks in Damascus went by quickly, too quickly really. The more I got to see of Damascus the more I realized how large the areas were that I had never explored. I grew to really love my Syrian hosts and friends, and am touched by their kindness and generosity in really making me part of their family.

My family is Horani, referring to an area near Golan. Like much of the population of Damascus, my family and most of my friends' families are urban migrants who came to the city in the last few decades in search of increased opportunity. Many of these urban migrant communities arrange by village or area, and certainly by religion, when they reach Damascus. In this way, my neighborhood was mostly Horani, and entirely Christian, and many of the local residents and shop owners are cousins or relations of my host family, often through relations and several marriages. My host parents are second cousins as well as cousins in law from another sibling, but my Syrian Mom passed up several proposals by first cousins before accepting Abu Bashar's proposal when she was 18 and he was 27 (first cousin marriage is still common in Syria, and it would be a village society faux pas for a villager to not propose to an appropriately aged cousin before moving farther away in relations). I had heard a lot about their village while living with my family and I was excited to finally get to visit it with them and a few of my friends from the institute.

We arrived in Tubna and immediately barbecued chicken and vegetables with the help of Dea2's grandparents. Like all men in the small village, Grandpa, an ancient and proud man, wore a suit jacket and a red and white checkered Kafeya, and like many older Christian Syrian women, Grandma wore an outfit that at first glance appeared indistinguishable from Muslim woman's burqa. They were welcoming and generous, and they slaved away tirelessly to make sure we were comfortable. Talking to them was fascinating, especially given the candor and honesty that leaves elderly people with no inhibitions about what they say. Grandpa hated America, as he told me without any qualms. On reflection he agreed that the American people might be alright, as I tried to persuade him, but what they did abroad was so un-Christian, could they really be good at heart? Grandma didn't like Americans, but a lot of that was because of their unholy alliances with Muslims. I made the mistake of arguing that perhaps the problems were not just with Muslims, but she berated me for my naivete and explained in nuance why Muslims were all but inherently evil. Fortunately, we were safe from them in the village; the land was holy, watched over, as she hoped we would all be, by Jesus and the virgin Mary. She continued to explain that we needed to put our faith in God to protect us as the Muslims were multiplying having 12 kids each and Christians had a maximum of three, as they value nurturing and educating them more. The "love thy neighbor" part of Christianity is under-emphasized with Syrian Christians, and these people lived in irrational xenophobic fear of just about everyone else, all of this fed by the same radical, provocative and dangerous disinformation which one grows alarmingly accustomed to in Syria.

In the morning we awoke to a beautiful village, huge swathes of olive groves dotted with houses. The center of the village was a small hamlet on a hill with several churches, the outer houses on the bottom rim of the hill arranged defensively in what appeared to have once been a fortress. A road led into it from 4 sides and met in the middle on top of the hill at the grandest of the churches, where Dea2's family had owned property for hundreds of years. Judging by their family's mausoleum in the graveyard, the largest and most ornate in town, and the large plots of olive trees, one could easily see that the Qa'id family was of great importance here.

The family's olive trees were my favorite part. I have had the best olive oil of my life living here in Syria, largely because my family makes it themselves from the Horani olives, which they insist are the finest in the world. I help when I can in the making, but the process is just a lot of waiting, moving huge tubs of olives into the sun, stirring, and returning them inside. They make a year's worth at once, and though I missed the olive harvest when I went to Lebanon, every free space in the kitchen has for weeks had olives draining their precious oil. The oil is delicious and has a rich and powerful taste. They use it generously with every meal in multiple capacities; they fry with it, they dip bread with zatar (a mix of thyme and other spices) into it, they put it onto their Arab yogurt, all of cooking, their salads, their hummus and tabouli, and about everything else that they eat. In the early morning Dea2's grandfather walked through the groves, checking his olive trees, with the same love and care of a father checking on his children. We sat and ate an Arab breakfast with strong coffee and homemade cheese, yogurt, fresh bread, and of course, lots of olives, shaded from the intense Syrian sun by an unkempt grape vine strangling an ancient trellis. Tubna was wonderful, and a welcomed break from the capital.

The last few weeks in Damascus were incredibly busy, but I needed to find time to make it back to the immigration office downtown to be sure I could leave the country the day of my flight. My friend and I headed to the office for what would turn out to be a relatively painless process, but one very representative of Syrian bureaucracy in general. How long our visas were valid was still a point of disagreement among the officers and they deemed it best to just extend them for a few weeks to make sure we'd be allowed out. Down we went to buy the application form. We filled it out, understanding enough of the French and Arabic to do it without the translators you can hire to help you for a dollar or so, not that what we wrote really mattered as no one ever read it. On the corner there waited a bearded homeless looking man who sells stamps for about 30 cents each, required for the Visa extension. Then to the copy shop to make copies of everything. Then back to the first office.

We then waited in line to be helped. I view this office and the process there as a microcosm of Syria, all summed up in one building, and the process of getting a visa is a complementary reminder from the bureaucracy of why we wanted to be able to leave in the first place.

Imagine a musty, dirty, dank and smoky RMV office, cluttered with visa applications and a dozens of other forms I couldn't identify, every stack crowned with ashtrays and half finished cups of tea. There are maybe a dozen officers in the first room, each of them drinking tea and putting an endless array of stamps on various documents and chatting with each other, but showing absolute indifference to us and the others non-Syrians who for one reason or another were compelled to remain in this country. Once you get to the first guy, guy 1, he enters the stuff into a 1800s style logbook, then grunts in the direction of guy 2 at the computer. Guy 2 enters names into the computer, but mistakes middle names for last as and butchers the arabization of it all, then grunts back to guy one. Guy 1 by this time is off to something else, but after a while we convince him to see our applications again. He grabs a blank paper, and scribbles out what we want. Then back to guy 2. Then back to guy 1. Stamped!!!--- but not so fast, only on the application page. "Go to General" says guy 1 without looking up. The general's office has a long line of waiting foreigners, mostly other Arabs, and we wait with them. Every so often an officer comes in with a special document that needs a signature and cuts right to the front, but eventually we are in sight of him and see a man on the phone with his daughter, disinterestedly scribbling on document after document his approval of one thing or another. We get there, and without reading anything he scribbles on top of the stamp a loop and a line, his signature I assume, and we were back to the first office. Guy 1, guy 2, 15 minutes later back to a different General, this one's attention divided between tea, cigarette and conversation with a few other officers, who also couldn't be bothered to read the documents, but signed them just the same, and we were legal for a few more weeks. The only efficient part of the process was the homeless man who sells stamps, the copy stores feeding the a ravenous bureaucracy of paperwork, and the lurking translators for hire outside, all of it proving that capitalism works!

My other pass time these last few weeks has been trying to stay warm. Damascus gets much colder than I would have imagined, but this wouldn't be so bad were it not for the design of the houses. Houses are uninsulated, and the centeral rooms are usually open air, as is my house. My room has no heating, and without hot water, there's nothing to really keep me warm. This was manageable until Damascus was hit by its snow storm about two weeks ago. The snow was preceded by rain which caused flooding all over the city, especially in poorer neighborhoods like mine. The rain was a welcomed relief from the drought, and though the streets were flooded and some schools were closed down, people everywhere were excited and relieved by the rain. "God loves and protects Syria" they said, pointing to rain as a sign of divine intervention on their behalf. God, however, in his zeal to save Syria forgot to teach them to build their drainage grates lower than the water, and raging torrents swept down the main streets parting on either side of the drains which had been erected several inches above street level, forcing both cars and pedestrians onto narrow sidewalks. Eventually, the rain turned to snow which was majestic as I got to see snowy palm trees and the mountains above Damascus, framing the Arab skyline was remarkable.

This weather also had the unique advantage that it forces people into one room where there is an oil stove. In my house, there was one room with heat, and the whole family congregated there most of the day after sundown; hours on end we chatted, ate, drank tea, smoked Shisha, and drank more tea. On the street, men huddled around fires and stoves, and all over Damascus, cold weather became a social experience bringing people together. It makes me wonder if Westerners lose something important in the complacent comfort of their privileged lifestyles.

Eventually we reached the end of the semester and now I am in Egypt with Mike, an American friend from Damascus, and Nicole, the friend I crashed with last time I was in Cairo. We will head up to Dahab after Christmas and then Nicole and I will fly to Addis Ababa on January 2nd, where we'll meet Sophia, my travel-wife from Sudan, who now lives in Somaliland, and the three of us will wander around Ethiopia for 10 days. Then Nicole and I will fly to Istanbul and find some stuff to do up there before I grab a bus back to Syria and begin my semester in Aleppo. I have more to blog about and a ton of pictures to upload, but this is a start.

Ouds and Wikileaks

2010-12-07T21:40:00.000-08:00

I have not been updating my blog often enough and I fear I am forgetting things that I want to remember or write about, so I will make a short entry now. The semester is moving quickly and my days are full. Damascus has gotten colder than I’d imagined it would. Syria is hurting for rain, and aside from a little sprinkle a few mornings ago; the last month has been dry, which is devastating agriculture and the water supply of Damascus. The drought is on everyone’s mind.

Also on everyone’s mind is the Wikileaks business. The reporting on it from Arab news sources is selective, to say the least. For example, the willingness of Arab leaders to see U.S. action against Iran (Syria’s ally) is somewhat under reported. However, Wikileaks lends itself beautifully to the Arab propensity for elaborate and creative conspiracy theories. Arabs I have met cannot get enough of secret meetings and alliances with the CIA and especially Mossad. It is common knowledge here that Mossad killed Kennedy, staged 9/11, and, according to an Egyptian governor, was even responsible for the recent shark attacks in Sharm El Sheik. Theories about the U.S. are equally as imaginative and entertaining, as are some commonly held perceptions about their own governments; for example, they have secret oil, mineral and especially military assets that, buried in the ground, are kept from the world’s eyes. However, as Wikileaks revealed (not that it was a mystery before) Syria’s involvement with Hezbollah is making the U.S. and Israel uncomfortable.

I have been able to explore more Damascus, and of Syria, but it is a large and fascinating country and it has a lot to offer. Some friends and I went up to explore Aleppo for a weekend by the old train from Damascus. I will be spending my spring semester in Aleppo studying at Aleppo University, but I wanted to get a look before then.

My first impressions of the city were positive. The architecture reminded me of Alexandria, turn of the century European buildings and city planning with parks and wide boulevards. By far the most impressive part of the city was also the most impressive ruins in Syria, rivaled only by Krac de Chevaliers, the crusader castle near Homs. The Aleppo citadel is in the middle of the city on a small but abrupt hill with a moat dug around it. Visitors, and ancient invaders, enter the citadel by a large causeway and staircase under a bastion leading up to multiple right angle turns hundreds of feet below the battlements of the ancient fortress, and overlooked by archer’s perches and holes through which hot oil and rocks could be dropped from unexposed positions of safety. It was plain to see why the castle was never taken. Outside of Aleppo is a series of ruins, though we didn’t have time to explore them all. We went to a monastery complex that had been fortified when Byzantine Christians were put on the defensive in this region. The architecture was amazing, but what was truly extraordinary was the view from atop the hill looking down at the rolling hills and small mountains of the northern Syrian countryside.

Aleppo’s people were as friendly as their Damascus counterparts, but noticeably more conservative. Many of the women were fully covered, without even their eyesshowing. I have noticed that conservative cities and areas hold more harassment for western women, but this didn’t hold true of Aleppo, and I noticed no difference in the treatment of my western female friends.

Life in Damascus continues on as it has, a grueling routine of Arabic classes and then trying to find time learn about Syria and its culture when not in class. Three friends and I have started taking oud lessons (think chubby guitar without frets) with an eccentric and senile oud teacher who uses a combination of English, French and Arabic, along with charming anecdotes about his decorated service in 1973. We also have oud practices with Zaher, the oud maker and performer who made all of our ouds. When looking for a good oud shop I stumbled across Zaher sitting making ouds with his aging father in a workshop beneath their house. Zaher is blind and couldn't see me, so we carried on in Arabic until he asked me where I was from. I told him I was American, and to my total surprise he switched into a Californian surfer accent of English and explained that he had moved to California ten years ago, married, and had a child, but had returned here when he lost his sight to help his father with the family business.

My friends and I have been heading to Zaher's house, only 5 minutes walk into the downtrodden back alleys of Dweilla from my house, where we sit and drink and play oud and talk. Blindness, and many disabilities, are obviously not served here as they are back home, and a blind or disabled son is a black mark on the family honor. The unspoken rule seems to be that they should resign themselves to prayer and put faith in God, rather than getting anything fruitful out of this life. Zaher cannot wait to return to the U.S., and plans to soon, once his father has completed the backup of dozens of ouds and bizuks laying around the workshop.

Zaher's take on the two cultures is unique and fascinating given his life experiences. Sitting their talking, highlighting his words with Arab cords and rhythms that he constructed as he sat there, Zaher explained that we were sitting in the cradle of civilization.

"This is where people found God, the holly land where the monotheistic religions and civilization were born and developed." "Here," he explained, "people have it figured out, they have life figured out, they have God figured out, and they think the rest of the world doesn't. Yet, back in the States 50 years ago, people were trying to figure out how to walk on the moon. They were trying to figure out how to build bridges over oceans and the world with technology, trying to cure diseases and make people's lives better."

He decorated his story with another interpretive Arabic scale. "Here...", he then paused his monologue and the sound of the muezzin's prayer from a nearby mosque pass through the window, "Here, people are still looking for answers from theirs books and their prayers, and have forgotten to use the gifts God gave them for this life, the freedom to think and to do, and, yet, they call this civilization".

I include my best recollection of Zaher's monologue as I have cannot say it any better myself.

Conaitra and Shatila

2010-11-18T07:04:00.000-08:00

This first part was written a few weeks ago, but it never posted.

I celebrated my birthday in style. Some friends and I hired a car to take us to the former city of Conaitra. I say former city as it was occupied by Israel in 1967 and then demolished by Israel as they pulled out in 1973. The Syrians decided to rebuild Conaitra nearby and leave the old city as a national museum dedicated to the destructive power of Zionism. I have to say I recognized the work from my time in Gaza. When it comes to pointless acts of destruction, it’s all in the details. In Gaza the attention to details was impressive- what first comes to mind is the playground that had been run over by Israeli tanks, but on further inspection I saw that the tanks had taken the time to back up a few times to make sure they got every last swing set, just in case the kids might have something fun to distract them from the dismal imprisonment of besieged Gazan life. Conaitra had that same impressive attention to details, and with more limited weaponry. The Israelis had set explosives on the structural components of most of the buildings of the town, and then demolished them en masse. Not that I don’t appreciate the commitment (or blind hatred) it must have taken to destroy a small city without strategic gain, but it didn’t seem like the best move when it comes to Israeli long-term relations with their neighbors.

Every Syrian knows about Conaitra, and uses it to support their ingrained views about the nature of Israelis and, alarmingly, often about Jews in general. Most Syrians have the good sense to at least denounce racism, before they explain how Israelis are innately evil. My brighter Syrian friends have made the distinction between Jews and Zionism, which is refreshing, but I fear they are the minority. This leaves a host of convoluted and troubling views that often jumble Zionism, Judaism, Israel, and Jews all together.

Syrians are generally quick to point out that a century ago Jews lived peacefully and prosperously in the Middle East (200,000 in Morocco, 60,000 in Egypt, and so on across the Arab World, including many in Syria). In a time when anti-Semitism was rampant in Europe, as Arabs point out, they got along relatively well with Jews in Arab lands. They generally point out that they have no problem with Jews in Palestine, as there was a good Jewish population there for a long time, their problem is with Jewish immigration from Europe and the U.S. forcing a conflict which ended up in the Naqba and Arab dispossession and the Palestinian Diaspora. But that is generally where the rational discussion ends and publically promoted stereotypes; paranoia and some rather imaginative theories take over. “Did you know that no Jews came to work in the Trade Centers on 9/11” or “Israel really did it” and so on and so forth.

I know anti-Semitism is not unique to this area, but with an undereducated populace susceptible to a state run media apparatus, these ideas are dangerous. This is obvious. I am bringing this up only to say that Israel must put a little work into PR here (maybe use a fraction of the resources they use for it in the U.S., as they got the us pretty wrapped up). Israel is bordered by nations with populations that see what Israel does daily to Palestinians. I can not overemphasize the amount of coverage which Arab news channels give to every time an Arab family loses its house or livelihood or life because Israel wants to get a little bit bigger, take a little bit more land, make East Jerusalem a little more demographically Jewish, make Jewish settlements a little more accessible by cutting a Palestinian town in half, and so on. Israel has its own self-made public image crisis with every single one of its neighbors, and a growing portion of the world. Certainly Israel is a greater power than its neighbors, but it will not be truly secure until it takes away the reasons that people dislike it. It is insane to me that Israel would continue to expand settlements in violation of International Law and Israeli national interest. The Arab world watches this in bewilderment. “How could people who treat humans as animals (see Gaza) possibly be like us? They must be different.” All of a sudden, absurd racial theories find an eager audience in the confused, bewildered and discouraged Arab populations, the very populations with which Israel must make peace for its own long term security.

Enough about that. After we got home from Conaitra some friends threw an actually surprising surprise party on the roof of Shadi’s house. It was great to see my foreign and Arab friends working together to throw a great party, with gigantic speakers and more alcohol than was good for us (who had class the next day). The night was great, and I received some wonderful gifts. First, I have a Syrian flag to fly from the Yalla Moza this coming summer, as the Egyptian one will be retired to the General’s room. I have a large sticker for the back windshield of the Batmobile with the silhouette of the Syrian Commander in Chief sporting his finest shades; his face is everywhere in Syria and many cars have like stickers, big brother staring from the back of their windshields; I think I will have the only one in Mendon, but it might catch on. I also received some of my favorite homemade treats and a collection of Oud music CDs for inspiration’s sake. I mean inspiration as I bought an Oud and will begin lessons with a friend after break in Lebanon, but as I type this I am listening to one of my new CDs and am getting excited.

Off to Lebanon!

Should have posted that before I left. But now as for Lebanon. The day classes ended, 6 of us headed on the public bus to the Lebanese border. We had all been to the immensely bureaucratic (think of the Mugama in Tahrir) immigration office within the last few weeks to make sure that our visas were still valid. All of our Visas say 15 days, but the office will tell you that that really means 45 days. If you try to extend it before 30 days, they will tell you to come back after 30 but before 45. We were in the late 30s or early 40s, and the one among us who was over 45 had gotten an extension for 6 dollars for an extra 15 days, so that she could legally leave the country. We arrived at the border and 5 of us got stamped out of Syria without much hassle, after one of the officers informed another that 15 really meant 45 days, and we were truly legal. Don’t ask me how they don’t know or why they won’t just write 45 days, but this is just how it is. There was an issue with one friend’s Visa, the one who had gotten the Visa extension, but apparently not entirely, as the actual extension stamp was absent from her passport. So it was into the General’s office for her, and me, as translator. I explained her situation but apparently she had done some part of the extension process wrong. She paid and got her passport back at the immigration office, so she had assumed it was all set. No matter how much we pleaded, and even with some skillfully placed tears by her, she wasn’t leaving Syria that night. “Go back to the Office of Immigration and Residency in Damascus and try again tomorrow” they said. I was already officially outside of Syria and she was alone stuck on the other side, and the General, who seemed like a decent guy who felt pretty bad but was tied up by an absurd system, told me she couldn’t go back from the border alone at that time of night. He said he’d see to it that I got back into Syria without a problem, so I could go with her. “Without a problem” is relative, but a half hour of bureaucracy at an empty border crossing later I had re-entered Syria and the border guards told us to wait with them and just hop into a car with empty seats on its way from Lebanon to Damascus. The first family who came by was happy to make room but they already had 4 people and a bucket of kids in the back seat and I thought they were joking. The next guys to come by were pretty cool, Lebanese tomato farmers on their way to visit friends in Damascus, and not far from my neighborhood in Damascus either. Off we were back to Damascus to try again in the morning.

Fortunately, the other half our group was going the next day, and had booked a minibus from the old city straight to the mountains. They had room for two more. Our group included people from all over, myself and one other full on American, several Brits, Scotts or Welsh, a few of which went to school in the States, an Australian, a Dutchman, a Swiss girl, and a few Germans. Back at the immigration office the officer on duty seemed to recognize her, and within 15 minutes and after being tossed between windows only a few times, we were on our way out with the guarantee of the general that we were all set to go. Our driver had perhaps the most epic Arab mullet of all time, Arab in the thick gel on top giving way to mullet behind. So off we went to the border. There were now 10 of us, on Lebanon was just on the other side of the border. I went first, as I usually do, having become something of the translator for the group. I had only been in the country for a few hours, so I was out without a problem. Vanessa was good to go, too. Camille, our Swiss friend, was next. Their English was limited to “No”, and then a gesture which said, go back to Damascus. We talked through what was wrong, and they said that she was over 15 days. “Yes, of course, it is 45 days”. “45 Days? It is 15, look at the Visa, it says 15 days”. “Yes, but 15 means 45, the officer at your office of immigration specifically said so”. We argued for maybe 20 minutes, and all told 8 of our passports had to go back to the office of immigration. They said we could not leave and had to go back to Damascus.

I argued that if we went back there they would just send us back to the border, which is true. It made no sense if 8 of us were illegally in Syria to send us back to Damascus, and it made no sense you could not purchase an extension to the Visa from the border, and it made even less sense that a 15 day visa really meant 45 but that only some guy in an office in Damascus knew it. The officers tried to herd us back to our minibus and told him to take us to the immigration office, that if we hurried we might be able to leave later that day. I asked to speak to the general, hoping to get the one from last night. No such luck. “Call and ask him”, I suggested, knowing that he was at least aware of the whole 45 days thing. No one knew his number? Then let me speak to the officer on duty now. They finally agreed and I told the group not to leave the office, I’d be right back.

The right back part was certainly false. They took me to the other side of the border crossing, arrivals, where the officers were drinking tea. The officer, not of any significant rank, I was with stood at attention until they finished then said what was wrong. They did not hurry along on our account, and with me standing outside for 20 minutes, they carried on, until one looked up, annoyed that we were there, and asked what was up. The officer who had apparently been assigned to me explained what was wrong. The bigger officer looked at a few of the passports and said, after laboriously concluding that early October was more than 15 days ago, said we were late and had to go back. He then sat back down and went for more tea, his third since I had been there. The officer I was with shrugged to me with a face that said “I tried”. At that point I broke protocol and spoke to the officer, and the others in the room ceased their conversations, somewhat surprised that I was explaining the case in Arabic. After going through the whole thing they weren’t convinced, but a larger officer had overheard and, after hearing what I had to say, he said he understood, but we had to ask the Station President. If you are counting, this is Super-Big-Officer number three. They told my original not so important officer to take me to his office, where I waited on a chair outside while he chewed out five immigration officers for some offense I couldn’t understand. They left the office visibly shaken. I finally went in, and some other officers from my great journey were in there, all chatting about my issue, and the Station President listened to my case. He thought for a minute, nodded his head, and then a lower Super-Big-Officer translated this to mean that we could leave Syria. “All of us?” I asked. “Of course” he replied with a smile as if the last hour of nightmare had been a figment of my imagination. “But when you re-enter Syria, you have 15 days”.

After an hour and a half, we were across the Syrian border, and another few minutes at the duty free in no man’s land, and a few minutes at the far more efficient Lebanese crossing, we were in Lebanon cruising towards Beirut with our duty free booze and chocolate. We went to Beirut trusting that our driver knew the best way, but he turned out bringing us hours out of the way and through Beirut traffic when we could have just headed north and then over the mountains to our first stop, the Quadisha Valley, and the mountain town of Bsharri.

This is a large gorge that extends deep into the Lebanese mountains and opens up on the sea just south of Tripoli. Bsharri was home to the famous Lebanese writer and artist Khalil Gibran, and we visited his museum, and ancient cavern used by monks turned into a memorial for his life’s work, constructed into a cliff at the very head of the gorge. The views are stunning and the hiking spectacular. We hiked up through the highest town in Lebanon and saw the famous Lebanese cedars on the high plateaus above the gorge. Houses and terraced farms dot the steep cliffs from top to the bottom of the gorge and the next day we hiked down to the valley floor where we could look at the huge mountains looming above us. We saw monasteries and caves and waterfalls. The architecture and lifestyles of the people here were unique, everything oriented vertically up the cliff sides. They were incredibly friendly as we walked along, grazing mountain goats or tending their farms, many of which would take only one wrong step to fall away from to the very floor of the gorge hundreds or thousands of feet below. The people were fervently Christian and the places they chose to construct buildings of worship spoke to their devotion. I can imagine finding the concept of a higher being omnipresent in the nature beauty which surrounds them all the time in this valley.

We continued on taking a bus from Bsharri to Beirut. We went out that night and I was reminded how remarkably Western and expensive the city is. We enjoyed Chinese food and Ice-cream sundaes and of course, Dunkin Donuts. Then we stumbled upon a unique opportunity. Two of my traveling companions, twins, have parents who are well known academics in Middle Eastern studies, my field. They were doing some research in Beirut and contacted a family friend who ran a youth center in Shatila, the Palestinian camp of 1982 fame. Abu Mujahid, who used this name as his real name, Mahmoud Abbas, carried with it certain political overtones with which he disagreed, was a kindly and well-educated Palestinian man who had lived in the camp since it existed. When we showed up he introduced us to the camp, and after a quick recap of what makes Shatilla so famous, he started in on what he perceived to be the main causes of the suffering of his people. He was not one the many Palestinians with their heads in the sand, not willing to accept responsibility for their actions and move on, his views were pragmatic well educated and generally well thought out.

To summarize his argument, American was and is the problem, as we allow Israel to do what it does and avoid real international consequences. Regardless, it is a matter of historical record that Israel bore direct or indirect responsibility for the massacre of the innocents inside the camp, direct according to an international investigation and indirect according to the Israeli investigation. Both agreed that Ariel Sharon was personally responsible and had allowed the slaughter to happen. For these war crimes, he resigned as defense minister only to become Prime Minister of Israel a few years later. Though there were supposedly 2000 Palestinian fighters in the camp, the 150 Phalangists, radical Lebanese Christian militiamen who were allied to the Israelis on the understanding they would run Lebanon upon an Israeli victory, sustained only 2 causalities as they massacred over 1000 unarmed Palestinians. The Israelis provided both the bulldozers to bury the bodies, and the flares to light up the night sky so that the slaughter wouldn’t have be limited by the setting sun; it lasted a full 36 hours, and the personal accounts of the survivors paint a picture of gruesome and unspeakable horrors. How wonderful it is to see Arabs and Israelis working together.

Today, Shatila is packed. One must understand that UNWRA camps are not necessarily still camps in the traditional sense. Shatila is built up, with most buildings reaching 5 floors, with a sixth floor tenuously constructed from sticks and scraps on top to house more people. The narrow alleys between buildings are crisscrossed by tangles of electrical wiring and pipes and laundry and posters. The tap water here was salt water from the Mediterranean, which had contaminated whatever underground water source, they were using. Families were huge and space was incredibly limited. I have not been in such a crowded place since some markets in Cairo.

In here, the PLO was technically in charge. Their corruption was something of a local joke, and no one had anything good to say about them. Moreover, a good portion of the population was not Palestinian at all, but rather immigrants of all sorts of nationalities who had come to Shatila for cheap housing. Still, it was very different from the rich shopping districts of Beirut. It always strikes me how people who grow up around violence are so desensitized to it. All the young children of Shatila were playing with plastic air soft guns, like BB guns, and shooting each other (and at times us) as we walked by. I borrowed one to shoot one of our group, my fellow American, and a guy about our age waiting for a sandwich from the same stand offered him a real sidearm he had tucked away in the back of his pants for retaliation. Welcome to Shatila.

After two days in Shatila we convinced some friends we had met there to come with us to see the Hezbollah Museum. We had heard good things, and were interested to see how a “Terrorist Organization” does a museum. We took three cars. By this time my group was only 6 as the rest of my friends had headed home, and we were with guys we knew from Sabra, Shatila, and the surrounding areas. Most were Palestinian, but a few were Lebanese. We took their cars up into the mountains to Mleeta, a town where in 2006 Hezbollah turned back the Israeli army, and where Hezbollah has built its famed museum. My first impression was “wow”. A Hezbollah fighter in full regalia admitted us for a little more than a dollar. Up the hill he went where we enjoyed clean and modern bathrooms and could pick up our complimentary tour books, which they usually have in English but had run out of. We started with “The Abyss”, an artistic diorama of Israeli defeat featuring Israeli weapons of war, and a tank with a tied up gun. A guide explained the significance of it all in perfect English. Everything was well done, and most all the English language plaques were spelled properly, something unheard of in Arab museums. There was no trash anywhere, either, which was just odd. We headed over the hill to the tunnel system where the Hezbollah fighters stayed and resisted the Isralis, and we posed for pictures in the Hezbollah machine gun nest overlooking the nearby mountaintops. Inside one building we saw what appeared to be 50 years of Israeli army technology, all laid out with descriptions of how they used it.

This building was also particularly interesting in its focus not on Hezbollah victory but on Israel. A large map of Israel, labeled Palestine of course, had the exact coordinates of perhaps a dozen key targets in Israel, industrial, military, and civilian. It bragged that any attack on Lebanon would be reciprocated by a like attack against a comparable target within Israel, with the long range rocket technology Hezbollah leadership has claimed to possess. These threats were reiterated in the video we watched at the last building that explained in pictures and videos what Zionism did to Lebanon and what Hezbollah would do if ever attacked again. Finally, above the museum on the very top of the mountain was a garden with commemorative plaques and stunning views.

The whole place was rather impressive yet disturbing. It idealized violent resistance, not just defensive action, but also suicide attacks and wars of attrition. Not knowing any history, a young Lebanese man could easily show up there, walk around, and come away firmly believing that Israel was on the verge of collapse at Hezbollah’s feet, and that the greatest glory of this life could be to sign up to fight them. The propaganda there was absurd but expertly marketed, and it was alarming to look around at the young Lebanese children out on a family holiday, reading the martyrs’ plaques and glorifying war with Israel. Hezbollah is furnishing itself with an upcoming generation of ready and willing cannon fodder. Or, as was written on one of the plaques, the fighters “transformed the resistance into a metallic fireball to be embraced by the people and burn the enemy’s mightiness.” This next one will be a painful war.

After the Hezbollah Museum we headed back to Beirut and had our last day in the city, downtown, to properly relax. We had proper sushi and chocolate and swam in the Mediterranean around Pigeon Rocks, a rock formation off of Beirut where the water has formed a series of natural tunnels. This was a great way to end our trip. We went out for some final Chinese food then made our way back to Syria for the most painless border crossing of all time. Welcoming us to Syria was a large waving president. In a way, I was glad to be home.

Canadian Bacon

2010-11-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

My host family has been eager since I’ve gotten here to throw a party with Syrians and foreigners, and last weekend we made it happen in style. Dea2 borrowed a set of professional speakers his friend uses to DJ major events, with everything including strobe lights. Syrian-Mom made homemade potato chips and Bashar got 4 Shishas going. The foreigners there resembled the U.N. with everywhere from Australia to Afghanistan represented. It was also certainly the first time this many foreigners had ever been seen in my neighborhood, and the whole place was hopping until 3 AM, which isn’t that late as many people were still up, it being a Thursday night and all.

We were going to have the party the previous weekend but someone well respected on my street passed away. This unfortunate event illustrated one of the most beautiful aspects of this society. The entire street entered into mourning over the loss. It was beautiful if not somewhat depressing. The men of the area, several dozen at all times for the first day, lined chairs along the narrow street (not wide enough for most cars). On either side of the street, the men sat silently, only stirring to greet others who pass by and give condolences to family and friends who came to mourn. It was somewhat awkward when I passed as I was known to be new on the block and did not have any relation to the deceased, but they all still rose as I passed and shook my hand and wished me peace. This was also one of the first times that religious divisions got discarded in favor of unity. Though the Christians here never miss a moment to blame something on the Muslims (unless of course it can easily be blamed on Jews), the men on the street seemed to be about half Muslim and half Christian, as the deceased seemed to have business relations across Duweila. Their religions were obvious as each of them proudly displayed their team banners, whether it was their rosary or Islamic prayer beads. It was nice to see everyone getting along.

My relationship with my host family has been developing and I couldn’t be happier living here. The other guys here are cool and I always have plenty to do, and it is always Arabic practice. Though some things have not gone so well. Bashar, my older brother, is a relatively successful women’s hairstylist who at 25 owns his own little shop and has a good business. His older sister, who I have never met as she lives in Canada married toa Canadian-Lebanese man, wants her brother Bashar to come visit. Bashar has never left Syria and has been saving his money his whole life. Last month he told me that he wanted to visit her in Canada during Christmas; he just needed a visa. I said I’d help him with the Visa Application, as I had heard the application was long and complicated. Long and complicated is an understatement. Still, I made sure everything was worded well and not misspelled, and I made sure that all his required paperwork was matched up good to go. I figured it would be easy, I read that Canada just wanted to confirm he was not a danger to their people and was planning on leaving when his trip was over. I knew he was neither dangerous nor eager to immigrate, and the paperwork more than backed that up, but it didn’t matter. 75 Dollars and hours of paperwork later, Bashar was rejected for the visa in a long and convoluted statement from the consul saying that they were not convinced that he was not planning on illegally immigrating based on his work status (he has a job) and that he didn’t have enough funds to stay in Canada for a month (false again as he included a bank statement with more than enough to live in Canada for a year, never mind staying a month with a relative). It was all a charade; Bashar is an unmarried 20-something year old from an economic backwater, he must be trying to illegally immigrate. The whole experience with Visa was humbling. I know Bashar dreams of living in the West, of wealth and freedom and security, and all those clichés that we really do take for granted, but he has a family here that relies on his paycheck and wasn’t planning on leaving. In Syria more than anywhere else I have been asked why I would come here when everyone here just wants to get out.

But most people also hold a very different sentiment. Syrians have to be some of the most patriotic people I have ever met. They love Syria. They love their president. They are proud of their country, their history, and their culture. They aren’t fans of U.S., foreign policy in general; remember the whole Syria being part of the “Axis of Evil” thing, or when the U.S. Army slipped up and accidentally killed some Syrians without so much as a “my bad”? The Syrians also look down on the other Arabs that have just succumbed to the West, the Egyptians or Gulf Arab States being prime examples. Syrians want Syria to progress in its own way, to develop independent of Western meddling. They view the belligerent to their South as just another manifestation of Western meddling.

Of course, their apartheid neighbor comes up in discussion a lot here. I am American, and they, like all Arabs, know what U.S. policy is towards their perceived greatest enemy. Near by neighborhood is a large Palestinian refugee camp, which has now been built up to look like any lower class neighborhood, but the number of Palestinian flags there is even greater than around Damascus. And Damascus, of course, is littered with Palestinian flags, one to match every Syrian flag on every government or army building, which is a lot of buildings, and a ton of flags. I am sure the Palestinians appreciate the pervasiveness of their flag in Syria, but they might prefer tangible help. The Palestine issue is here, as in many Arab countries, more of a talking point to unite people against external threats rather than internal incompetency. The logic goes that if countries like Syria or Lebanon were to recognize Palestinian refugees as full citizens, it would be like ceding something to Israel. The Palestinian refugees would lose their right to return, or so the logic goes. Of course, this is nothing but a cruel joke. Any Russian Jew has the “right to return” to a Jewish settlement in Palestine, and the Palestinian who was born there but has been in exile for 60 years has no right go back; and of course, no citizenship in the place where he has been squatting for 60 years. Can any meaningful peace can be established without addressing these fundamental injustices?

So classes will soon break for a week, and I have to leave the country to renew my Visa. It is easier to reenter Syria every 45 days than to try to get a residency. No worries though, Syria borders a lot of interesting places, and next week will be a personal favorite. I am off to Lebanon with 9ish other friends. I do love Lebanon.

Lovin it, but it's no Cairo

2010-10-22T03:09:00.000-07:00

Damascus is no Cairo.

Not by a long shot. The streets here are relatively clean. The drivers obey lights, more or less, and there are speed limits. At night, there are stars. During the day, there isn't much smog. The moon and sun are distinct orbs in the sky, not bright patches in a thick soup of pollution. Syrians heckle women in the street, but not too much. There is no dark polluted river running through the center of this city. At midnight the shops in my neighborhood are closed or closing- people are asleep. At 7 AM people are going to work, instead of Cairo's leisurely 10-1:30 (minus cigarette and tea breaks) work schedule. The buses stop to pick people up, there is no running to jump on. People wait to cross the street. There are billboards which show people throwing trash in trash cans, talking about keeping Damascus clean (about as un-Egypt as one can get). At 3 AM, the city is dead. No one is up. Damascus sleeps. Cairo never sleeps, never dies, is never boring, is 7 times the size of Damascus, with and urban sprawl that extends to the horizon in all directions, if there were ever a time at which its smoggy soup would permit one to see that far.

From Jabal Kasion (Mount Kasion) above Damascus one can see the clearly defined lines of the city giving way to agricultural villages crisscrossed by highways on the horizon. Last night, and this past weekend, my new friends from the University and I hired a taxi to a panoramic overlook on the mountain to drink Arak, the local 120 proof Alcohol which is mixed with ice and water to produce a refreshing if overwhelming beverage. My group consists of foreigners of every variety, but the general language of communication continues to be English, which is a nice break from Syrian friends and my constant struggle to understand everything that is going on.

We also have been doing more exploration of the city. Damascus's old city continues to amaze me. So much ancient and wonderful architecture in one place. I had been to he Umayyad Mosque last time I was in Syria, but its size and wonder are enthralling. It is a fantastic building, a combination of architectural influences, built into the Church that was once their, which was built into the Pagan temple which preceded it. People have come to pray in that spot for the vast majority of recorded history.

The rest of the old city is equally fantastic. I catch the bus every day at the Eastern Gate of the old city, part of the now semi-contiguous wall which surrounded the old city for thousands of years. After class I usually walk back with friends through the ancient winding streets and find some amazing nook in the old city with tiny twisting staircases and undersized doors that is some combination of Aladdin's Souq and Hogwarts. There are multiple souqs in the old city, some of them aimed more at tourists, others at locals. In one of the most famous souqs which leads rights up to the Umayyad Mosque, thousands of shoppers daily trudge over what is likely the one officially sanctioned Israeli flag in Syria. Syrians childishly change their gait to give a proper stomp on the large Israeli flag the government provides them with to take out their frustration (Israel continues to occupy a portion of Syria).

I am enjoying my time here. Classes are a lot of work, but I am learning a lot. My daily routine involves getting up around 7:30, getting to the Eastern Gate by 8:15 allowing time for the inefficient bus system to arrive at the University for class at 9:00. I get out by 1:00 then usually friends and I go out and do something. I now have a membership at a nearby hole-in-the-wall gym, and some friends figured out that the national stadium has a track around it where someone can move around. It is easy to become complacent and lazy living in a society which places little value on personal health. At night we often get together at cafes or at my house where my Bashar and Dea2, my Syrian brothers, and their friends, and some of my foreign friends, smoke shisha and drink tea. Me and a few others often play the role as translator, but all parties involved are equally interested in learning each others' languages.

Life is good, but it still isn't Cairo.

Damascus

2010-10-09T09:14:00.000-07:00

So here I am in Damascus. Getting here took a little longer than expected.

Syrians are protected from such websites as Facebook and Blogspot by the government, so I will email my blog entries to a friend to have them posted, so as not to violate any local laws.

Getting to Syria went on without a hitch this time. A friend of a Syrian friend from UMass met me at the airport. Shady, a 24-year-old Coca Cola employee, drove me to his flat in the area of Jermana, a suburb of Damascus. He lives here with his father and brother. He and his brother’s group of friends has become my group of friends.

Shady is Christian and thus all his friends and family are Christian, and therefore everyone I know here is a Christian. The day I arrived we went to a church in the old city, and to a meeting of an older-than-18 church youth who meet weekly to discuss various religion related issues in their lives. This first meeting was about the issue of pre-marital sex. Of course, the United States is used as the personification of sexual immorality, based largely on Hollywood depictions of base morality. Arabs in general are in blissful denial that the societal constrictions tradition places on cross-gender interactions creates such a sexual curiosity and deprivation that sexuality here is more depraved than any Hollywood depiction of general western society. I cannot go any further on this subject without offending my Grandmother who may be reading this, so I wont. Still, it is reassuring to know that my and your culture is, for many in this part of the world, a recognizable symbol of sexual immorality.

Anyway, the Church youth have become my friends here. We went after church for shisha and tea, and I was awakened to the fact that Damascus would not be quite as cheap as Cairo. This was somewhat hard to figure out at first as my gracious hosts refused to let me pay my bill, as they did for everything for my first few days here, and still would unless I had figured out how to be more crafty in slipping my money in early. I know I have said it before, but Arab hospitality is something extraordinary. In my first 5 days in this city I was a guest with Shady’s family and they treated me like royalty. Their generosity was humbling. Last night, Shady drove me to my new flat, a room in a Arab-style (open air) house in a Christian neighborhood in the area called Dweilla.

But in my first days in Syria I got to see and do a lot. I was always with either Shady or his brother, Iskander, whichever wasn’t working at the time. We went out with friends from Church groups and drove around the city. Later on, when girls had to go home for their curfews, the guys would go to shisha cafés to discuss them. One night we drove up into the mountains, on a road on the on a cliffside overlooking the city and enjoyed the panoramic view. Like Egypt, traffic laws here are mere suggestions and the one lane road on the cliff with no guardrails had a healthy flow of two way traffic. The next night I went to Shady’s cousin’s birthday and met his family. Yesterday, I was a guest at Shady’s family reunion, where we met in Saydaneia, a Christian area 30 minutes into the mountains. Here I witnessed my first rain since I left Scotland, as well as the first large bits of green. The mountains in Syria are beautiful, and the spot the family met was a leafy terrace where the hosts provide tables, chairs, grills, and shisha, and we bring everything else. I helped working the grill with some of the younger guys, while the elders sat simultaneously smoking and forming kofta and kebab, or making tabouleh and hummus. Then we ate, and we ate, and then we ate more. How, I don’t know, but after eating and drinking tea, they had the energy to dance. So they danced to all the popular Syrian or Lebanese songs being blasted from nearby speakers. I was pulled into a few dances which I found difficult to follow the steps to, especially when instructions are being barked at me in Arabic, muddled by laughter, and drowned out by the roar of the speakers. An amazing time.

These few days have been great for my Arabic. I speak no English to Syrians. Shady knows a few words, as does everyone, but few that are practical to everyday conversation. Arabic is the only way to go, and the Egyptian stuff doesn’t cut it. They get a kick out of all my Egyptian words, and though they often understand them, I do not know their Syrian equivalents. Thus it has been a steep learning curve.

I found my first refreshing bit of English with a group of Italians I met at the Aids Center- foreigners wishing to study in Syria must get tested for Aids to be enrolled here. They have become my closest English-speaking friends here, and though they came here to study Arabic, their knowledge of the language is very limited. Hanging out with Italians really makes one want to learn to speak Italian; they look like they are having so much fun when they speak it.

I will, however, be occupied for the next big chunk of my life with the grueling study or formal Arabic, and will have no time for Italian. I improve quickly in spoken Arabic, especially in situations like this one when I am forced to use it constantly, but formal Arabic is an elaborate system of rules and impractical phrasing and vocabulary with which no one communicates. For these last few days before class begins, I will be enjoying making conversation with locals and learning by these conversations. A lot of this I do with context and by asking people to restate something with different words to double my chances of figuring it out. This has worked out remarkably well here and I understand more than I expected. However, I have realized that I can predict the initial few minutes of conversation I have with a local.

It begins with polite greeting and a statement of what I looking to buy or where I need to go and so on, and by that time they have certainly figured out I am not Syrian, so my nationality comes up. Then they ask how I like Syria.
“Great” I say.
“Syrians are friendly?”
“Yes, very friendly, and welcoming, and so on.”
“Americans think we are all terrorists. See, we aren’t terrorists. Why do you think we are terrorists? We are a great people.”

This is a pretty standard introductory conversation with someone. They are not hostile about it, but rather genuinely concerned that they have been cast in a very negative light in our media. No doubt that they have, I only try to assure them that not all Americans see them in that light. We usually end up agreeing that the differences between our nations are political and that the people from our two cultures have nothing against each other. Time will tell.

My flat is in a middleclass neighborhood, but the house itself is well maintained. The owners are parent’s of one of Shady’s friends named Dea2 (guttural stop). Dea2’s mom has insisted that I should think of her as my Syrian mother, just as Shady’s father insisted that I could call on him at any time as if he were my own father. That is just how they do it here. So in my first day here my Syrian mom cooked me breakfast and made me tea and insisted on heating water for my shower. There is no heater for the showers downstairs where I live, but the shower upstairs has a furnace to heat shower water, which took about half an hour to get going, but was very refreshing. I feel like royalty as she insists on feeding me constantly and seems to think I cannot handle the cold showers that most people here take. It is still pretty warm out, so the cold showers are really not a problem. I hope she doesn’t lose her zeal for my comfort when January rolls around.

All of my friends here are incredibly protective of me. Despite my time in Cairo, they are very concerned that I will fall victim to the many "evils" of Islam. I am not a stranger to the self-ingrained bigotry that a minority employs for its own perceived protection; Egyptian Christians have their own host of hilarious delusions and generalizations they cling to about all Muslims. However, Christians here give Egyptian Christians or even Glen Beck viewers a run for their money. When I interject with statements like “there are good Muslims and bad Muslims, just as there are good Christians and bad Christians”, I am dismissed as naïve. The parts of Christ’s teachings pertaining to forgiveness and loving one-another (the vast majority of his teachings) seem to have been disregarded, except for other Christians. This really doesn’t seem to be what Christ had in mind.

Wet Parsley and the Sinai

2010-09-29T03:25:00.000-07:00

That is our campsite down below there.

Erik, the panorama mode works great. Merci!

Teaching Frisbee to the army

I am still in a limbo between programs, lingering aimlessly in Cairo waiting for my semester to get under way. Having said that, Cairo is my favorite place to linger, and I have been enjoying myself immensely, and have been taking advantage of this time to brush up on my Arabic and to relax with friends.

I have in this small time been able to do some things that I never did last time I was in Egypt, and have seen some things which have changed since I wast last here.

I took three American students fresh off the plane to see real Cairo in one of my favorite areas, Mencheat Nasr- El Zebelina-Garbage City. This is the area where Coptic Christians sift through Cairo's waste in an efficient but dehumanizing recycling system. An area so impoverished would not be a place one would expect great change but for Egyptian policy against swine flu. Muslims do not eat pig and Islam views pigs as dirty animals. The Egyptian Christians are the only ones who can eat or even touch these animals. Garbage city used to employ thousands of pigs in sifting through and digesting Cairo's waste. When swine flu was discovered to have first come from a pig, the Egyptian government irrationally culled all the pigs in Garbage City, destroying an already impoverished people's livelihoods, in a move that Christians here largely interpret to be an act thinly veiled persecution. Garbage city was wildly different without pigs, but the holy structures there were as majestic as ever, and the people as welcoming and accommodating as I fondly remember. Still, it pains me that these people's lots in life have only gotten worse since I was last there.

Outside of this change, the greatest change I noticed is in the makeup of traffic flow. When I was first here, Egypt had just begun switching their variegated fleet of taxi cabs into the new "White Taxi" which is modern with a working meter, A.C., seat-belts, less shag carpeting, and less gaudy bling. Now, half the cabs are these new and less interesting variety. Moreover, the Egyptian traffic authority has done an amazing job getting people to follow some incredibly rudimentary traffic rules, like red lights. I remember seeing traffic lights before, but they were a joke, and unless they had a traffic cop standing in the middle of the flow of traffic stopping it, no one even paid attention to them (like the signs which say no beeping). A cab driver explained to me that there are huge fines, too great for an average Egyptian to pay, for disobeying these new traffic signals, and that cameras were everywhere. And for the first time, I witnessed someone pulled over in Cairo for disobeying a traffic rule. My friend was driving against the flow of traffic on a divided boulevard when traffic was light (what I would have considered common practice) and he was pulled over and fined 200 USD (absurd for an average Egyptian). Egypt is modernizing, which I suppose is a good thing, but part of me mourns it, just as one regrets the loss of a young child's adorable pronunciation of a word in favor of the correct one.

I also have seen some parts of Egypt which I had never seen before. For example, I had never been to an Egyptian funeral. My good friend Maggie, who used to translate to me at church, lost her dad last week to cancer. Later that day, I attended the funeral (the funeral was only hours after he passed away). It was similar at first to an American funeral, but the eulogizing set it apart. There was no eulogy for the deceased, and most of the sermonizing was about Jesus, and had (from what I could understand) very little to do with the deceased. It was a church sermon on death, primarily the death of Jesus for our sins. I did not attend the reception afterward, but the funeral left out what I had always considered the beautiful part of funerals, where the accomplishments of this loving father and successful businessman would be celebrated by those around him.

This all came three days later, when, as is prescribed in the bible, the family gathers to eat fish and lay the soul of the deceased to rest. Family and close friends gathered in their small flat with a priest to say goodbye to his soul. This ceremony was performed using parsley (or an herb which looked a lot like it), some spices, bread, and holy water. Using the parsley the priest blessed the room in which he passed away, allowing his soul to leave, and then other rooms in the house, then flung water from the parsley at all of us, blessing us with holy water. Everyone then took a sip from the holy water and were blessed. Then, after some prayers, the priest declared the mourning was over and that memories of the deceased should be positive only. It was at this time that Maggie's dad was eulogized by those around him, his life and accomplishments praised, and his memory truly honored. After this, the family chatted while a feast was prepared and everyone ate a smorgasbord of fish, shrimp, calamari, rice, tahini, salad. It was a beautiful ceremony, mourning of his death turned into a celebration of his life and the vivacity of his family.

Unfortunately, I had to excuse myself before desert and get home to take a bus to Ras Sadr, a small tourist town in the Sinai, with two of my roommates and two other friends. We arrived in Ras Sadr around 11 at night, and then hired a Bedouin guy with a truck to drive us another hour to meet two other friends at an obscure location on the peninsula. In the back of his truck we broke out a fine bottle of imported rum and my portable speakers, and sat back and let the clean non-Cairo air ventilate out lungs. Racing down the empty highway, blasting music and being whipped in the face by the salty air of the sea, which we could barely perceive in the moonlight- framed by looming mountains and bluffs, we were kings of the world. We met our roommate, Evi, whose birthday we were in Sinai to celebrate, and her boyfriend, Alex, the delightful owner of a popular Cairo club, and went in their truck into the desert to an isolated camping spot overlooking the Red Sea and backed by the Sinai mountains. Owning a club in Cairo has its benefits, the greatest of which is in my mind an unparalleled access to imported alcohol. One can only really value this fact if they have been subjected to Egyptian beer or worse, Egyptian hard liquor which is reputed to cause blindness.

We stayed there two nights but I could have stayed a dozen more. We were a minute's walk from the water, and behind us were cliffs and rocks to climb and explore. The only structures around were military, and we found traces of abandoned outposts on several of the bluffs above, with small machine-gun placements, barbed wire and shell casings. After the peace, the military is here now just to protect Egypt's long and sparsely populated coastline. We played frisbee on the beach and swam, even briefly including a few soldiers in our game. It was strange to watch a guy running for a frisbee with his AK-47 swinging haphazardly from his shoulder, as I guess the soldiers were forbidden to take them off at any point.

I was sorry to leave, but my roommates had to get back to their obligations in Cairo. On the ride back to the bus station at Ras Sadr, Alex knew of a very off-the-map hot spring which was created when a Sinai oil company hit an underwater sulfur vent. The result was a small but beautiful hot spring with exfoliating minerals. Where the water bubbled from the surface it was boiling, but at the far end it was comfortable to sit in. We relaxed there and watched the sun set. That night we drove back to Cairo and ordered Syrian schwarma sandwiches to be delivered to us at our flat (you can get anything in Cairo delivered by moped within an hour). It was a great trip.

Other than that, I have been keeping busy on Nile sails and outings with my Egyptian friends to practice Arabic. I am far from bored, but I do want to get my semester going. However, I am in no rush. As I write these lines, I received a text that my roommate, who is deeply involved in the Cairo music scene, scored us tickets to "Chopin at the Pyramids" concert tonight- wish you could be see this one mum and dad, I know you're big fans. Life is good.

Everyone but Alex in Alex's truck

Hot Spring

Back in Egypt!

2010-09-16T01:37:00.000-07:00

It's been over a year since I've posted. I am back in Cairo, and have been for the past week or so.

Why am I here? I did not intend to be, but an extra month in my beloved Egypt is a treat. Last time I went to Syria I obtained the Visa in a few hours on the border. This time, I applied for it at the Syrian embassy in London, which ended up taking two weeks to actually have it ready to give to me. I had already bought a ticket from London to Damascus, so I had no choice but to go for it. The embassy said I was in the system by that time and that I should be able to get in. Unfortunately, I was not so lucky.

After a night spent in Damascus Airport in the graces of the Syrian border officials, whose fine company I had last enjoyed when arrested driving a Taxi in Damascus, I flew to Amman. The Syrian embassy in Amman told me that I could not get the Visa there, and had best apply in the States to get it fastest. Tired and bewildered I took a bus from Amman to Aqaba, a ferry from Aqaba to Nuweiba, Egypt, and a minibus from there to Dahab.

When I arrived I met up with Ayman, my dive instructor, who took me to the Egypt Post office. I used priority post to send my passport to the states to get the visa. Thanks to some wonderful coordination on the ground in the States by Carol Sardonini, I received my passport and visa back here in Egypt in record time, and but for the incompetence of Egyptian postal systems, I'd be in Syria now. No matter, though, I headed back to Cairo and was taken in by a friend who I studied with last time I was in Egypt. Nicole and her roommates, two Polish-American graduate students gave me the back room in a flat in Dokki, a 30 minute walk from my old houseboat in Imbaba. I am still living there, and was intending on staying for the year and continuing my studies in Cairo. However, last minute, UMass informed me that they would not support me studying here and wanted me to go to Syria.

So now I am just waiting to leave Cairo to begin classes on October 13th at the University of Damascus, where I will be studying only Arabic language. Second semester I will spend in Aleppo, in a program which will include area study classes and language classes; thus I will be able to petition these classes to count for my honors college thesis.

Until October I will stay here in Cairo and enjoy life. My dearest parents have been diligent in keeping me financially viable here until I have scholarship, and so for now I will just relax. After all, there are few places one can not only survive, but live it up, as cheaply as Cairo. Last night, we threw together a picnic and headed out for a nighttime sail on the Nile. The Nile at night--- the calm of the wide, black river, enveloped by the vivid life and vivacious energy of Cairo is memorizing. I really love this city.

For now I will try to productive and work on my thesis and practice my Arabic, though I will soon be forced to switch to a Syrian dialect. My time in Syria will start soon, but I am in no rush to leave this place.

Gaza

2009-07-22T19:22:00.000-07:00

Gaza during Sunset

“Gaza Strip” is a 139 sq mile piece of land wedged between the Mediterranean to the West, Egypt to the South, and Israel to the North and East. It is about 25 miles long and between 4 and 7.5 miles wide. It is home to over 1.4 million people. Under siege for almost three years, it is the largest prison in the world.

Gaza, its complicated situation and its fate are controversial subjects so I will start with the facts. However, if this at all interests you, I encourage you to read about the history and significance of this conflict, as it is intrinsically tied to you as an American citizen.

In the years following the end of World War II and the Holocaust, Jewish settlers defeated joint Arab armies and created the state of Israel on the 15th of May, 1948. As a result of this war, 75,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homeland. They and their descendents are waiting for the right of return to their homes today. Many of these refugees (refugees by definition under international law) live along side native Gazans in the Gaza Strip. There are many Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and elsewhere, but this will focus on Gaza.

Along with the refugees in Gaza who fled the war are the native Gazans, those who lived in Gaza before the creation of Israel. Both of these groups, and those living in the West Bank, consider themselves to be nationalistically Palestinian, just as you consider yourself American.

The follies and failures of the 60 years of attempts at peace are well known. Israeli citizens have been victims of Palestinian terrorism, which many Palestinians consider not to be terrorism but a justified aspect of their nationalist struggle. And in these 60 years, all Palestinians have been victims of Israeli persecution, which many Israelis consider not illegal persecution but justified defense of their homeland and the safety of their citizens.

And more recently, some 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the 22-day Israeli offensive between 27 December 2008 and 17 January 2009 according to Amnesty International. More than 900 of these were civilians, including 300 children and 115 women, it says. In the same period 13 Israelis died. It is true that Gazan rockets lobbed into Israel are illegal under International Law. However, the international community is questioning the legitimacy of Israeli actions in Gaza. Israel questions the claims and statistics provided by organizations like Amnesty International, though the situation on the ground speaks for itself. Independent reports cite Israeli use of white phosphorus on civilian areas, "frequently obstructing medical care", shooting non-threatening civilians such as women and children at close range, wanton property destruction, among other "war crimes". Israel admitted to some civilian deaths calling them "professional mistakes", but denies wider claims made by a variety of independent investigations, including those by Amnesty International and U.N. groups. However, since the attack, Israel soldiers have been breaking rank and admitting to some of the wrongdoing they witnessed in Gaza. Their stories include reckless aggression towards Civilians, using Palestinians as human shields, and no regard for protecting civilian life and property.

The Hamas government in Gaza is unrecognized by the international community as it does not recognize the right of Israel to exist. The Fattah government is corrupt and unwieldy and spends most of its time trying to vie for power with Hamas. Israel, the United States and Middle Eastern countries, especially Egypt, meddle in the affairs of Palestinian politics seeking what their governments might consider favorable results. For Israel, continued settlement expansion is much easier with no viable government in Palestine to object; the government in Israel considers unified Palestine as a natural enemy. For the United States, a moderate and pro-Western government that recognizes Israel is key. For Egypt, which fears Hamas’s ties to extremist groups like its own Muslim Brotherhood, having places like Gaza locked up is simply a matter of Egyptian national security. And for many other Arab or Muslim countries, the suffering of Arabs in Palestine is an open wound in their national consciences.

And, as happens far too often in international political struggles, the average Palestinian and the average Israeli are completely forgotten, their best interests far from consideration on the bargaining tables. These are the voices that must be heard. I would argue from my own experience, and polling strongly supports the notion that, were the average Israeli or the average Palestinian given a choice they would be far more willing to compromise than their governments are. Having been imprisoned since 2007, the average Gazan’s voice is completely unheard, their story completely untold. Still, the common perception in the West seems to be that Gazans are by nature and practice a militant group of Islamic fundamentalists that unanimously calls for nothing short of the destruction of Israel.

The notion that Gazans are rabble of terrorists incapable of participation in the world community did not make much sense to me. Gaza has the greatest percentage of a population with college degrees of any place the Arab world. For years it was an exporter of everything from food to software technology. How could 1.4 million people be converted from an educated, comparatively progressive population to an ignorant and radicalized militant militia bent on the destruction of Israel and the West in less than a generation? I had the opportunity to go there and find out.

I went with a student delegation for a week long trip to Gaza. It is under a siege and travel there is forbidden by Israel. Its small border with Egypt is closed except to UN delegations that have been cleared by the Egyptian bureaucracy before heading up the Sinai. Our delegation was a new creation, though we facilitated contacts from a variety of groups. We were under the umbrella of the organization Code Pink, a woman’s human rights group that has been very active in bringing attention to innocent people suffering in Gaza.

A friend and I went up to Al Areesh, 30 minutes from the Rafah border crossing to Gaza, to make sure our group’s affairs were in order. Everything seemed good to go, we had been cleared by ministers high up in the Egyptian government and the secret police. In Al Areesh, the night before our group’s arrival we met a Canadian Code Pink delegation that had been stuck on the border for three days. They were optimistic but frustrated. It is people like those in this delegation and others we would encounter that I found the greatest thread of hope for Gaza.

Getting to know people from other delegations was great. About half of the group members were concerned college students, and the other half of them were Jewish peace activists, many held Israeli passports and were disgusted by the crimes against humanity that their country had committed. A few days into our Gaza trip, a group of elderly Jewish women from New York arrived, women who with long years and memories that stretched back to the holocaust could not sit back and ignore the eerie similarities that have begun to pop up.

They complained that when they would compare the persecution of the Palestinians to the holocaust, the common defense was that 6 million Jews died in the holocaust and nowhere near that number of Palestinians have been affected. Indeed, Obama was criticized for his perceived placing of Jewish suffering on the same plane as Palestinian suffering during his June 4th address to Cairo University. One elderly Jewish women from New York remarked sadly that people seem to miss the point that what is wrong is wrong, always, regardless of comparative severity or past suffering.

Our group gathered in Al Areesh, and we made our way to the border gate for our first day. The Egyptian government gave us the runaround as was expected. We whipped out the signboards, cameras, reporters, and a guitar and sang songs and played with the little children that had come from all around to see so many foreigners. Inside the first gate was a convoy of dozens of medical vehicles, and some 90 people, mostly British, who had been given the go ahead and then been turned back at the final level of Egyptian security. They refused to go back and thus were camping out in the limbo between the two borders. Finally the Egyptian police made a deal with them in which their medical equipment and 20 members of their delegation could enter.

Our groups, still outside the gate, had tents and sleeping bags, and intended to pick out a nice place near the gate and camp out until we were admitted entrance. The police told us they'd kick us out by force if we didn’t go. We decided to oblige, no reason to make enemies until we had exhausted our other options.

We spent another night in Al Areesh, splitting the 30 of us between 3 little hotel rooms. That night the Egyptian secret police paid a visit. They told us not to attempt to get to the border tomorrow. The Canadian delegation had two Canadians of Arab decent, who were compelled to turn back to Cairo lest the safety of the families they had come to visit be put in jeopardy. We drove to the border but were stopped about half way. The police told us they were running a military exercise and we couldn’t go that way. We saw other cars passing and new they were full of it. Still, went back to Al Areesh once more.

Meanwhile, our leaders had arranged a meeting with the head of Internal Security in Cairo; through this meeting, we were given passage up to the border a few hours later. Once there, it was several hours passing through Egyptian security measures and paying Egyptian taxes.

Inside the first layer of security we met the last 4 of the British delegation who were holding out between the two borders, ignoring orders to leave. They felt betrayed by their leadership. They had driven thousands of miles to deliver equipment and were not about to be turned back easily. The Egyptians were sort of starving them out, but their spirits remained relatively high. Three of the four were of Arab decent, but they were in no way radical. They were simply trying to draw international attention to the siege, the imprisoned and suffering innocent.

We gave them what food we could spare and continued on, as our mandate to pass was only for us, and not even for all of us. We had a Gazan girl with us who had been studying abroad but hadn’t seen her family in years due to Israeli restrictions on travel. In order for us to enter, the Egyptians insisted she turn back. She went back to Cairo, and we headed North through the border.

So we left the last Egyptian checkpoint. While in the process of crossing the border, an Israeli rocket hit a nearby tunnel between Egypt and Gaza. We looked up, shocked by the sound and explosion. Smoke plumed up and was caught almost immediately in the desert wind, the black cloud elongating and rising into the clear blue sky. The tunnels between Egypt and Gaza are many and deep. Israel does not allow things like shampoo, cement, coke, clothes, textbooks, and car parts, into Gaza Strip. To meet the demand, Gazans and Egyptians dig tunnels between their borders to smuggle all these things in. The tunnels are highly profitable, but highly hazardous. We watched the plume of dust and smoke disperse into the breeze and wondered if the tunnel had just collapsed on some guy smuggling light-bulbs into Gaza in order to feed his family. The Canadians spared no time in pointing out that that rocket had likely been manufactured and definitely been financed largely by the United States, by me, by you. This would not be the last time I would hear this in the coming week.

We were stamped into Gaza and were met at the border by the student group responsible for our delegation. They were the wealthiest and best educated of the youth of Gaza. International organizations under the umbrella of the UN were organizing this youth conference to facilitate cultural bridges. They were incredibly happy and grateful to see us- student groups are not a common sight in Gaza.

__________________

We headed north towards Gaza City. For most of us, this was our first time in a recent war zone. Whole neighborhoods were leveled. Every building along the border seemed to be dotted with bullet holes. Everywhere was destruction. It seemed so thorough at times, and then elsewhere you would think you were in any normal Arab neighborhood. The ride was short, less than 30 minutes to one of the nicest hotels in the heart of Gaza City, towards the north of the Strip. We had seen very little so far, but we were already in shock.

We were provided with host families. Mine was well off by Gazan standards, and owned a large flat in a neighborhood that had suffered little during the siege. Ali, their son, was my age and spoke decent English. The mother was a nurse who had been trained in an American Christian medical school that has since closed in Gaza. Her English was excellent, and she was incredibly excited to see an American after many years without using her English. The father was a nice guy, but a product of his life. His family was once wealthy and used to own a large olive orchard in what is now Western Israel. They fled fighting to Gaza, and were unable to return to their homes. His father ended up working for the Jewish Israeli family that moved into his childhood home, what was once his family’s house. He worked on that property for the new owner, maintaining it in hopes that the UN would rule in favor of the refugees and he would be given back his home. The UN never did, and he eventually died a poor refugee, leaving his sons, one of whom was Ali’s father, with similar aspirations. Ali’s dad himself worked in Israel until the siege began, at which time he joined the large ranks of Gazan unemployed. A bunch of other host families lived close by to Ali’s, and we usually hung out together, often sleeping over different people’s houses each night. In this way, I was able to meet many different people.

For obvious reasons, the kids who had volunteered their families for this program were the richest of the rich, the only ones who could afford to go to College. It was not until we wandered the streets, depressed neighborhoods, and refugee camps that we were able to see a more complete picture of Gaza.

Our stay was a combination of presentations by speakers, discussions and touring. We met with people of all walks of life, from representatives of Hamas, to victims of the war to teachers of children with disabilities to the head of UNWRA in Gaza. Many of the meetings were educational, others were propagandized, others rather pointless. We met with a society of former female prisoners to Israel during the war. Their crimes were various, some resisting building demolition, others with family members that had been fighters, others who were fighters or worked in the resistance themselves. If you were to hear a report about them on TV you would surely hear them labeled terrorists.

However, their reasons for resistance sounded more like my grandfather telling me about the Boston Tea Party than that of Wahabi extremists. Their families had been robbed of their home, their rights, their livelihood, a loved one, often in conjunction, and they wanted to fight to live in a sovereign nation where they and their families would be safe. When a foreign invading force came destroying their country and homes, they fought back. These “terrorists” were captured and brought to prison, to be tortured to reveal accomplices and to betray their countrymen. I kept in mind that it is prudent to be skeptical of the veracity of the story of someone who is caught up in emotion and rage like these women, and though many of the stories of these women have yet to be verified by outside sources, many have been. The testimonies from these women were among the most horrible things that I have ever heard.

When we weren’t meeting with people in a forum setting, we were meeting with people in the streets, in their homes, in their places of work, or, more often, in whatever was left of these places. Everything was damaged. Whole neighborhoods were ruins, dotted by craters 12 meters across and 5 meters deep if the bomb missed its mark. The munitions dropped by the Israeli air force for the purpose of destroying buildings weighed about a ton and had more explosive power packed into one than the sum of the hundreds of inaccurate and largely ineffectual rockets lobbed into Israel by Gazans that are cited as the cause of the war.

Wandering around, we were able to hear stories, have discussions, and take pictures.

a makeshift house on the site of their old house

she was so proud to show off what was left of her house.

describing the last time she saw her grandson alive, as he went up to the roof to get water from the water tank. Testimonies of Israeli soldiers and international investigations both show that highly accurate Israeli missiles found their way to civilians alarmingly often

their father was crushed by the collapse of their house when it was bombed out

The border with Israel was where the damage was worst. A zone of no buildings, orchards or life extended about half a kilometer from the Israeli border. If Gazans went here, they risked death, and if they built there, they guaranteed a quick destruction of their home. Tank tracks and bulldozer marks crisscrossed this area. Olive trees and farms were uprooted or burnt out, even the smallest shack reduced to a crater. And half a kilometer is a lot when you consider that Gaza is never more than a dozen kilometers wide. At any point in Gaza, the sea and its blockading fleet, or the border, dotted by observation points and defensive (offensive) positions, are plainly visible. Often, you could see both. When a rocket would explode in Rafah, in the far South of Gaza, we could hear it and see its pluming smoke from the very North. These were the boundaries of their world. Into these locked gates Israel allows an allocation of food and, what they deemed as necessary medical supplies, and some fuel. Nothing is allowed out.

Now, many people have been forced to move into one of the many U.N. refugee camps throughout the territory. With their homes and livelihoods destroyed, they are completely dependent on foreign aid. We visited some of these camps. To this camp we brought some soccer balls, and spent an evening playing and sharing cultures between us and these kids. The children were wonderful, like children anywhere, and the parents, though robbed of everything, were grateful and gracious hosts.

All this, of course, begs the question, why? If Israel wants to isolate extremists and make Gazans live along side the Jewish state without attacking it, why would they reduce the people, their society, and their livelihoods, in such a way? A basic tenant of terrorist recruitment is finding those without hope. What better system to destroy the hope, aspirations and dreams of a society that to isolate it from the world? What better way to destroy the healthy desires of a population, the majority of which is under the age of 25 and thus ripe for indoctrination, than by robbing them of their dignity and the feasibility to carry on a normal life? This question recurred in our time in Gaza. Everywhere we went, everything we saw, this question reared its head.

Gazan fisheries were once thriving businesses. The reason is obvious. It is a tiny piece of land, densely populated, with stretch of Mediterranean shoreline. We visited the docks to talk to the fishermen. I should preface that the night prior to our visit to the docks I had watched from a hotel balcony as the Israeli navy lit up the night sky with their deck-guns to dissuade the fisherman from approaching their fishing-traps. It was strangely spectacular sight; though I have a feeling the fisherman enjoyed it less. I speculated with my American friends whether or not they were actually shooting at them, or just firing warning shots. It seemed some of the shots were going high, off the water. In the morning, when we arrived to the dock, we saw many of the ships had large and poorly repaired bullet holes dotting their sides, and heard the fisherman describe the difficulty of fishing their traditional waters six miles of shore when, as they described them, the trigger happy Israeli navy would begin to use them as target practice after two and a half miles. The Gazan fishermen’s union had applied many times for the besieging military to allow fisherman to make their daily wage by accessing the better waters a little further off shore, to no avail.

Gaza from the harbor

The times in Gaza that burned into my memory are also the ones that are hardest to give any justice to in a blog entry. It is literally nauseating to see what our weapons do to people. I saw children missing parts of their bodies because they were playing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others were torn apart by shrapnel because the IDF determined their apartment building to be hostile. There were others who will never speak again as white phosphorous, which was “never used in Gaza” had seared their vocal chords; of course, their mothers and fathers were not spared any of this. And these are the ones who survived. The dead ones leave eerie reminders everywhere. They are honored with small memorials, usually photographs on the walls, calling them martyrs.

One family's martyrs...

A child demonstrates how the Israelis would use this whole they made to shoot from

This killed a child. Recognize it? You should, it is your's.

A father shows his son's wound.

A memorial to this girl, and her charred end.

The bullet through the windshield is the only life this kid has ever known

Hamas propaganda showing the return to Jerusalem

I could go on and on with graphic details and horrific anecdotes, and perhaps I should, but I won't. War is horrific, we all know that, and I don’t want this to be another sob story about the innocent victims of political conflict that we all wish we would do more about but never do. This is a conflict that you do unquestionably do something about.

Every day you work, every penny you give to the United States government, you participate in this conflict. And if you could see what I saw, the American missile casing not far from the memorial to its 3 year old victim, held by the warped and deformed arm of her older brother, now a homeless orphan, you would question why you are financing it so generously.

Some argue that the dead are simply the casualties of war, collateral damage unavoidable in destroying the extremists who fire rockets into Israel. This is false. I can think of no way to swell the ranks of terrorists hell-bent on destroying Israel and the United States than to destroy people’s entire ways of life, their dignity, and their hope, as Israel and the US have done.

The IDF for some reason decided to destroy or damage every mosque in Gaza that I saw. Many were ornate piles of rubble. Others seemed to have their minarets used for tank target practice. For a defense action meant to destroy extremists, it seems strange to me that the IDF would chose to enrage extremists by desecrating their holy places. The IDF claimed that mosques were sometimes used to store arms, but this excuse does not hold up to scrutiny or to the international investigation that is going on now in the territory.

This is a mosque.

This was a mosque.

You don’t need to be an expert to see that there was nothing strategic (if your strategy is isolating and eliminating extremism) about a lot of this past winter’s war in Gaza. A common theme among people whose houses had been used to house Israeli soldiers was that they would leave horrible graffiti insulting and inciting Arabs. I will include some here. The Israelis seemed to think it was amusing to defecate in the Arabs beds as they were leaving the house. And this was what they did for things they left standing.

Israeli Artwork

Left in people's houses

The IDF also chose to destroy community centers and hospitals. They claimed that there were shooters from the roof of Gaza’s largest community center, which included a theatre where youth used to rehearse Shakespeare. However, after visiting the large building that was pounded to oblivion by US munitions, it is plainly obvious that the intent was to raise the building, not kill a sniper on the roof...

Community Center's theatre

Hospital

What is left of their appartment building

Schools and Universities were also an interesting thing for the IDF to attack. These, largely Western owned and operated institutions of learning were the front line against extremism. A good example is the completely destroyed American School in Gaza, where, in sifting amongst the rubble, I was able to find the same French book I used in Mme. Miller’s French class at Nipmuc. Why would anyone who wanted to uproot extremism destroy the very institutions that keep kids off the streets, away from extremist Islam, keep them learning about the world, connecting to the Internet, seeing the other side, and increasing mutual understanding? And in the case of the American School In Gaza, the Israeli army used it as a base to attack Gaza City from, before, at the end of the war, they retreated back to Israel proper and destroyed it with F-16s.

Your money built and destroyed this

I don't think Nour's quiz on "The Earth's Atmosphere and Climates" had much to do with terrorism. We looked it over, 100%, Great Job Nour.

A terrorist jungle gym

Wouldn't Hussein be less of a threat in school studying a Western curriculum?

A child's drawing of what they dreamed of.

A child's drawing of what they saw.

Seeing all this, it was clear that on some level the goals of the IDF’s campain in Gaza was not to destroy Gazan extremism, but to destroy Gaza itself, its way of life, its vitality and its ability to function as a sovereign entity. This is certainly how the Gazans feel. I had an opportunity to speak to many of the most educated Gazans, doctors, lawyers and businessmen; these were the types of people we want in the Middle East, people who spoke English with a slight accent, liked Baseball, people who remarked on how good Chicago style pizza is, who liked to discuss what was happening in ABC’s series “Lost”. They were educated in the West, most of them in America, and had returned home to build a home for their families and their people. They had worked for years building a moderate society, and had largely been succeeding, with liberal schools and western thought permeating all levels of Gaza. These were the men and women who stood against extremism. And with our weapons and our undying support, they were stifled and crushed, their businesses destroyed by a total siege, their schools destroyed, their offices burned, their houses bulldozed, and their population fanaticized by senseless killings. As they solemnly pointed out, with a war and a siege Israel revitalized the mentality of endless violence. “With the War, the terrorists and extremists had all of their prayers answered”.

These Gazans in turn deduced, logically, that Israel did not intend to put an end to extremism, to destroy the men and mentality that lob rockets at innocent Israeli civilians, but to invigorate that very mentality. It was clear to them, as it is increasingly becoming clear to the world, that though a majority of Israeli citizens desire peace, the hawkish and uncompromising Israeli government hopes to continue conflict by arms and settlement expansion, to continue the growth of the Israeli state at the expense of lives on both sides, and to prolong the detachment of Palestinians from their native homes until their claims are forgotten.

You don’t have to take their word for it. Listen to Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech in which he outlined his vision for a “Palestinian State”. Although mindless reporters hailed his speech as a concession, he painted a picture of a Palestinian state without sovereignty, without its historic capital, without a right of return of Palestinians to their homes, and without the 40 percent of Palestinian land that is chopped up by access points, checkpoints and Israeli settlements. He conceded less in that speech than had been conceded by Oslo’s “Roadmap to Peace” years earlier, and he is still hailed by American news media as a peacemaker. And all the while Palestinians are watching in disbelief from their besieged homes in temporary tent sites overlooking a blockaded seaport and a blockaded border. I am in no way condoning this brutal action, but is it so hard to imagine why people feel helpless enough to strap on a bomb and run into a crowd? This is not working; the status quo of American policy in this conflict is not working for us, for the majority of Israelis, and certainly not for the Arabs.

However distraught the wealthiest and most educated of Gaza were, the sadder story is with the poor. These people were barely making it by before the siege began two years ago, and just scraping by before the war in December. Now they are helpless, depending upon UN and foreign aid. Imagine a devastating invasion in which infrastructure on every level was targeted. Now imagine if that area was still under siege, so no bag of cement, no nail, no window glass, no iron girder, no building material of any sort was allowed in. Imagine what it would look like, and you still wont touch upon the sad truth. Sewage runs in the streets because it is impossible to repair sewage lines damaged by missile attack without supplies. Schools lay much as they did the day they fell, without any supplies to build new ones or repair old ones. Houses that still stand, however damaged, are propped up haphazardly in whatever way possible. A round from a tank leaves a sort of Hobbit-hole in a house that doesn’t look too bad until the owner informs you that his family was sitting somewhere behind the wall when it hit. And everywhere, throughout entire neighborhoods, down entire streets, bullet holes dot the plaster walls of each building.

“Why?” was of course the question that we were compelled to ask? “Were you shooting at them?” “Was your dad a fighter?” “What did you do?”

Sometimes they would answer that their uncle was a Hamas militant. Other times, that the house next door had a shooter and the IDF destroyed the whole block. Others would admit to fighting back. One man I met had an interesting question that he asked me to repeat to my fellow Americans. Sami, a farmer whose house once stood within sight of the Israeli border was a regular looking guy, except that his chest, arms and face were mosaic of skin sewed together by an apparently untrained physician after pulling out dozens of shrapnel shards; he was hit in a bombing of a supposed terrorist stronghold that he happened to be walking by on his way home. His question to you was this (to the best of my understanding).

What would you do? Think of yourselves like me. I had a home with my parents and brothers and sisters and all this land (he waved his arm towards what was maybe a couple of acres of land). My brothers and I were going to school, my dad was a farmer, and we were not terrorists. We don’t like Hamas. We just hated Fatah and wanted a change, so we supported Hamas. We made democracy like the US wanted and the US abandoned us to this (he points to his house and the memorials for some of his extended family). And then the IDF kills us and you ignore us. If you were I, what would you do? If the tanks and men come to destroy your home, kill your friends (he lost a friend in the attack that maimed him), and kill everything you have made (they wiped out all his farmed land) what would you do? If I shoot an attacker, am I a terrorist or am I a patriot, a good brother, a good son, a good man?

I had no answer for him then and I am not sure that I do now. But I promised to relate it to you, so I have.

Sparse as it was, there were signs of hope in Gaza. We visited a school for the deaf, one that charged no extra fees that would prohibit poor kids from attending, something unheard of in the developing world. We visited other schools, institutes and centers that suffered only mildly in the recent attacks, and even two years into the siege were functioning well. Most of these institutions are run and largely funded by foreigners, mostly Europeans; affluent philanthropic Gazans paid for others. But this is not how the people want to live. Gazans, for the most part, want a chance to earn a living and live.

Perhaps the perception I had to fight the hardest in Gaza was that Americans are generally aware of what they do. The Gazans assume that at some level, you are all aware that your government finances their suffering. I was always trying to tell them that most Americans could not find Gaza on a map and haven't got a clue what our government does. This, of course, is not something I am proud of, but I suppose in their eyes ignorant and apathetic is preferable to informed and malicious. But most who I talked to for any length of time, asked me why we did this to them. Why we still do this to them. Why we refuse to use our unmatched influence with Israel to so much as request that Internatnional Human Rights Law be followed.

Gaza City Graffiti

__________________

Overall, my experience in Gaza was overwhelming. The people of Gaza were, for the most part, ordinary people put in an extraordinary situation. They were fathers, who in a heavily patriarchal society, had been robbed of the ability to make a living wage for their families. They were mothers who couldn’t raise their children with hope, dignity, or safety. They were public servants with no allegiance to Hamas’s radical views but only a sense of duty to serve the Palestinian people. They were businessmen who don’t want any handouts, simply the same chance that a businessman in any other country has to trade. And they were children who have seen atrocities their whole lives for which they have no responsibility, who have seen their friends and family injured and killed, who play in the rivers of sewage that are now the streets of Gaza, and who now associate the word “Jew” with only suffering and evil. With no hope, no prospect for betterment, no education, no reason to dream, these children will soon be old enough to hold Ak-47s; and they will.

Gershwin or Grieg

2009-05-17T08:06:00.000-07:00

Classes are now over. People are leaving. Every night is another goodbye to someone I have come to know well in a few months, who, in all likelihood, I will never meet again.

As our time here closes, I have moments where the whole experience is made completely surreal. I took a friend to one of the markets near my house a few days back; truly, a market is a good place to overload one's senses with Cairo, everything that makes this city dynamic and wonderful. As we push through the crowded streets all we can hear is the merchants and salesmen yelling prices, the children running, the livestock howling, the rickshaws and motorbikes honking; are nostrils are intoxicated by the smell of shisha smoke, incense smoke and the aroma of meat turning by spit over a hot fire covered in Arabian spices that nearly masks the greater stench of decay in these cramped spaces; all we can see is a polluted haze covering the setting sun, a swirling dust from the magnitudes of life in this place, the piles of trash and ruin that constitute the back alley markets of Cairo, the inquisitive looks of the people whose lives have started and will end in this same neighborhood, whose years' have worn double their age into their faces, who look cautiously but welcomingly upon the obvious outsiders in their world. In these moments, it is strange to think that in a few weeks, I will do my shopping at Shaws.

It is difficult to describe to people why I love Cairo so much. It is a filthy, overpopulated, and overcrowded city in a country struggling with poverty, ignorance, religious animosities and socioeconomic tensions an a scale unparalleled in the west. I do not deny some things seem strange to a westerner, others illogical, others absurd, others offensive to reason; but this is not the whole story. It is a vibrant, living dynamic creature of immense size and complexity, contradictory beyond all measure, that though not moving in a particular direction, continues to lurch forward into its uncertain future. I think if Cairo were music it would perhaps be an eternal crescendo at the end of the 3rd movement, tipanies roaring, strings screeching in their highest octaves, every member of the orchestra awaiting a conductor who stepped out long ago.

After I finish things here, I am off on my final journey before I head home. I will be heading in a group to Gaza in an attempt to heighten western understanding and knowledge of the facts on the ground there. Having lived in Egypt for these months, I have been perpetually immersed in discussions, arguments and writings surrounding every aspect of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Though I was further south when the most recent Israeli offensive broke out, one can hardly go a day without somehow feeling the effects that this outsanding failure to achieve peace causes here. My American citizenship does not permit me the right to pretend that I am not intrisically involved in this conflict. I do not know what to expect when I go there, but I feel it is something I must do to gain a necessary understanding. I will do what I can to help, do my best to keep an open mind and relate the reality there to the people who must understand it.

I should be back to Egypt the first of second of June. After that, I will gather my things, say my final goodbyes, and fly home on the morning of the 5th. I feel that I have been here long enough. I hope to return soon, as I cannot imagine my life without Cairo. But I can wait. For now I am sitting back on my deck being cooled by a Nile breeze. There is even a star in the sky, poking through in spite of the city's veil. Everything is just as it should be. Life is good (and will continue to be, assuming I get bumped up to Business Class for my return flight---insha'allah).

Nile

2009-05-08T08:33:00.000-07:00

My parents and brothers came to Cairo the week before last. They did the tourist thing while I attended classes and then we traveled up the Sinai together. As always it is priceless to see someone’s reaction on his or her first time snorkeling a thriving Red Sea Reef. After our time on the Red Sea the family and I took a ferry across a thin strip of sea to Aqaba, Jordan. We went from there by taxi to Petra.

Petra, of all ruins I have visited on three continents, is the most awe inspiring of them all (Meroetic ruins in Sudan and Crac de Chevaliers in Syria are a close second and third). The hording crowds and fierce souvenir touts steal a lot of the charm away from Petra. Fortunately, though, Petra is so big that is possible to find extraordinary beauty and majesty away from the crowds. We just had to walk a little while (which Mum handled like a champ). We followed the main road in and then made our way down a canal that was built to handle the diverted flood during a rainstorm. However, by the looks of the place, rain seemed pretty rare. The ancient city was built by the Nabatean culture and then added to under the rule of the Romans.

Beautiful temples, burial chambers and meeting places were built into sheer cliffs with intricate detail and decoration, and monumental size (see “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”). In the center of the city was a roman amphitheatre and gigantic temple. Perhaps what was most wonderful about these ruins was that one can truly feel the majesty of ancient city due to the pure size and intricacy of the structures, but also due to their unmatched condition in preservation. In the narrow canyons of the mountains, the rockwalls were shielded from most of the elements.

After Petra I departed back to Aquaba to head back to Egypt. Logistically the land journey sounded like it made more sense. However this would involve crossing through a few mile section of Israeli territory. It turned out to be a lot more trouble than it was worth. The cab dumped me at the Jordanian border checkpoint. After stamping out, I walked through the thin strip of border territory to the Israeli border checkpoint. With my American passport and small backpack I easily made it through to the last checkpoint in line, the Passport Control. There was no one else there, how long could it take?

I handed my passport to the girl at the desk. Israeli borders are notorious for being staffed by college aged Israeli girls filling their compulsory service requirement, so aside from a few dudes with guns, I was one of the only guys there. This might not seem like a big deal to you but if you live in a Muslim country for ten months the very situation seemed at first a little absurd. To say the least, a woman could not become a border guard in Muslim culture (or even cross the border unaccompanied in some countries). Arab border crossings are stocked by a bureaucratic group of officers drinking tea and complaining about the world and enjoying the tiny bit of powers their inefficient system bestows upon them to justify their existence. Still, by the end of my time at the border, I wanted my grumpy, suspicious of the west, old Arab officer back, preferable to the staffing of gorgeous border guards. My problem started when they broke open my passport. I knew it was going to take a while when they couldn’t get past the first page.

Guard: “Bubia, where is that?”

Me: “Uganda. It’s the name of the border town in Uganda.”

Guard: “It is not Uganda. It doesn’t say Uganda. Where is Busia?”

Me: “No, it says it right there. Just a little faded out.”

Guard: “Okay, we'll check. But where is Khartoum?”

My interrogation continued on sporadically, questions about my business in places, then sitting and waiting, then questions about my family, then on the bench some more. Sit and wait. And wait. ...

In Syria, they will sit and pretend to be checking on your passport, while really just sitting there and punishing you for your nationality. These guards seemed to think that I had been radicalized in under a week by extremists in Sudan, or in my 3 days in Syria perhaps. It took half an hour just to prove that I was in Syria for three days, as the dates were written in Arabic and, though they seemed to know how to read it, they misread it and had decided I was hiding something.

The bright side of the story is that, by the end, after watching a trickling dozen of people pass the border before me, I was ordained the privilege to enter Israel and take a cab to the Egyptian border, 20 minutes away. And taking pity on me, one of the guards told me she’d stamp my passport on a separate page, something many are denied upon request. I’ll count myself as lucky to still not have any travel restrictions on my passport.

Eilat, Israel, was cool, and then I hit the Egyptian border. It was relatively empty, and I had about an hour before the bus, so I hung out with the Egyptian border guards, drank some tea, talked about life. One of them was studying English in some sort of class and we worked on his homework together. As Israeli tourists filed through the line, the large group of loafing border guards, secure in their cushy low-paying completely useless jobs, commented on and objectified the female tourists in their skimpy clothes on their way to the beaches of the Sinai. I sipped my tea relishing in the juxtaposition of the two borders. My bus came, and I was off to Cairo.

Now I am home again, and things are moving fast. It looks like I’ll be wrapping up my last month here and then flying home. Our neighbors (two Egyptian girls that were the personal prostitutes of a rich businessman who owned the flat) have moved out, which has had a detrimental effect on the gossip wheels in our little community. Mine is one of about a dozen houseboats on our little strip of the Nile, wedged between a bridge and commercial establishments. The same fisherman guard the houses, the same wives gather, the same laborers labor on all the properties. The owners are all acquaintances. There is intrigue and drama worse than any soap opera I have seen. The fisherman’s wife will row by in the morning, if she sees anything odd it will go to her husband, and from him to my guard, Foolie, to our gardener, to the police outside, and they will all discuss it over tea.

Foolie is a funny guy, as his name would suggest. He lived with his wife, about half his age, in a small green shack on my patio. When we first arrived good old Foolie would smile and nudge us whenever we would have girls over. He’d get the gossip wheels going and then be outside to ask about what happened as soon as they’d leave. Eventually, so many foreigners were in and out of our boat he decided that sex wasn’t involved every time, but he still asks just to make sure.

His wife is trouble. She seems to flirt with every guy around, driving Foolie insane and paranoid. The fisherman is jealous of her as he is younger than Foolie but has a much older wife; he wants to ruin Foolie in her eyes. Our gardener seems to think the whole thing is nonsense. My other neighbor, an Algerian doctor, loves the drama and plays each side.

The drunkard British guy on the boat next door is another regular article of discussion. I don’t know why he is here or anything about him, aside from his alcoholism. A few weeks ago he showed up in the mid-afternoon, still completely schwasty-faced from the previous night, judging by his look. He had no shirt, was sweating profusely and looked very sick. If this wasn’t bad enough he had two policemen kicking his ass. They seemed to not realize that he was a Brit.

The spectacle had gathered a few police officers, and a few dozen spectators snapping off photos with their phones and yelling. It was actually this ruckus that brought me out of my boat. I came running to see them hitting him with their batons to force him into submission. I ran up and told them to stop, that he was a Brit, that if they hurt him it’d be a big problem for them. They stopped, asked if he was my friend. I told them he wasn’t, that he was British, crazy, drunk and a huge problem, not my friend. It didn’t matter, the crowd had already decided he was an American, and the police were dispersing them. I didn’t understand what the big deal was, he just seemed to be an obnoxious drunk, but I didn't know the whole story.

The elders of our little community were all there, discussing it; they had already sent for tea. I learned from them that my British friend had not just been drunk. He had taken a cab with no money, and then punched the cabby and broken the window to his car. When subdued by the police and taunted by an outraged crowd, he responded by making fun of the prophet Mohamed, infuriating the crowd. At that point the police went from subduing him to protecting him and bringing him within the gate to keep the crowd out.

As peopled gathered to reviw what had happened, I tried to participate in these discussions, but I found myself defending this British guy, who I, needless to say, think is a complete idiot. In the days that followed, the elders seemed to have decided that “they” (us) don’t understand Islam, Egypt, the world. They decided that we are imperialist orientalists. It is disheartening how much one guy, one small act, can do to destroy our image in the world.

The newest scandal is my newest neighbor, an American who took the really crappy apartment above us and made it amazing. She put 2000 USD into it and it looks like it’s not even the same place, absolutely gorgeous (that money goes really far here). At some point during her move from Zamalek some of her belongings were stolen. This new scandal, which could hold jail time, is tearing the community apart, and they are relishing in it. I live in an Seinfeld episode, Nile style.

the Concert on the Mount

2009-04-18T04:45:00.000-07:00

Cairo is perfect today. After a brief hot spell, we have perfect weather again. Party boats and fishermen cruise by my balcony, most of them used to the sight of us by now. Our gatekeeper works tirelessly to fix the sailboat which has been tempting me, moored to the side of our balcony. His wife is off visiting her mother, as she does once a week. The market is buzzing with people getting their shopping done on their day off. People cook and prepare every sort of food imaginable in the street. While I was out and doing my shopping this morning I grabbed a cup of of orange mango juice; the mangoes came in a truck and the oranges on a donkey-cart from the farmland somewhere outside the city; and then each is sqeezed to Juice as I stand there. Vendors shouted out the prices for their vegetables and fruits. Incense, shisha smoke, and the smell of roasting meat filled the air with a smoky perfume, that when combined with the dust and intense sun, and the endless noise and rush of life, it was very Cairo.

My market is a Muslim neighborhood, but in the Christian neighborhoods people are out and about in the week long celebration of Easter (eastern Easter is a week after ours). I have spent more time in Church this week than I can handle. For me, Church in Egypt is a constant and tiring struggle to understand the sermon, hymn, or biblical passage. Usually I get hung up on the meaning of some complex metaphor, word, or phrasing which, by the time I figure out the meaning, I have lost the gist of what I am trying to understand. And Arabic language isn't as bad as it can be. A friend invited me to see the an Easter week service at an Orthodox Coptic church.

Copts pray in the Coptic language, like Catholics sometimes do in Latin. Most Copts seem to have a vague understanding of the language, but the lines of prayer are sung in slow, nostalgic and dogmatic verses of song. It sounds something like old Hebrew prayers at an orthodox Synagogue. In this way, a biblical passage takes about a minute to read out. Looking around after three hours (into a 5 hour service) I saw a sleepy crowd. The guy to my right had long passed out, the guy in front playing on his cellphone, the guy to his left nodding off and then jerking his head back up suddenly.

The Church I frequent celebrated the holiday a little differently. They project scenes from Mel Gibson's "the Passion of the Christ" onto large screens while playing inspirational music. The Church youth put on a performance of song and dance on the Messiah. Then then preachers and pastors explain various verses from the Bible. The senior pastor got up and did a fire and brimstone anti-Satan speech which seemed straight out of one Edward's sermons from the First Great Awakening. Each service featured at least a good 15 minutes of Jesus's torture, nailing, etc, to ensure maximum effect. It is saddening how little Easter seems to have to do with Jesus's message (which I would suspect he wanted us to pay attention to) but rather just that he was crucified and died to absolve us.

In some happy news, last week the Beethoven Concert put on by the Cairo Symphony Orchestra at the famous Cairo Opera House sold out. I say this is good news as Daniel Barenboim, the famous Israeli musician and conductor was performing for the first time in Egypt, indeed the first time in the Arab World. And he was received with a sold out concert and a host of government ministers in attendance. The average Egyptian has no clue about this, but in an illiberal and undemocratic country, the sentiments of the populous matter far less than the sentiments of the rich and powerful, who move the politics of Egypt.

Its not that there wasn't heated opposition to Barenboim's performance in Egypt. Some Israeli government officials rebuked him and some Arab government officials refused to attend. But it is step. Barenboim himself is a champion of Palestinian rights and critic of Israeli actions. He worked with Palestinian writer Edward Said (Said's work "Orientalism" is a pillar in the study of the Middle East) to create a joint Israeli-Arab performing orchestral group. It is interesting to see intellectuals and artists bridging cultural and national divides before bickering politicians can bring themselves to.

Also in happy news, my parents and brothers will be making an unexpected trip to Egypt in a few days. They will visit the western desert and all the sights, and then we will travel up the Sinai to Dahab and then to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan for a few days. Should be a blast.

The Shire and Mordor

2009-04-07T13:26:00.003-07:00

So I have returned once more to Cairo. My passport has only a few blank pages left, with 4 pages devoted to Egypt alone, entries, exits, and student visas. The other pages are covered with smeared ink, stickers, and scribbled Arabic, English, and French. Together, my passport and I have seen a good amount of this part of the globe. Each place is unique and fascinating in its own special way. But among all the places I have seen, Lebanon is in its own category. I will try to explain why.

The day American bombs stopped dropping on Beirut less than three years ago, people left their homes to hit the beach. By nighttime, the famous bars and nightclubs of downtown were open and packed. The next day kids were back in school. Life returned to normal; Lebanon did not miss a beat.

Last week, we parked our car in front of a small Roman ruin under the shadow of one of Islam’s greatest mosques in downtown Beirut. Already, we could hear the pounding beat of the nearest club. Mercedes after Mercedes, the occasional BMW, Porsche, or Ferrari pulled up to the valet service across the street from the last remnants of the old Roman city. We walked, and the music got louder, the great mosque omnipresent above us, and the skyline to the other side full of church steeples of a variety of Christian sects.

We made our way past an abandoned apartment building, riddled with machine gun fire; this building was one of many like it, a relic of Lebanon’s long and bloody civil war. Like a scene out of Chechnya or Kosovo the building stood, and still pretty girls in heels, and guys in European fashion walked by beneath the blown out building. In a moment of nostalgia, I could see where a sniper must have been perched before a rocket-propelled grenade ended his party and blew out a few meters of wall. With the proper reservation or the right companions, you can enter a club and head to the roof where the party is at. That means booming music, dancing, and alcohol. A who’s who of government ministers, officials, businessmen, lawyers, and the various rich, are drinking and smoking cigars looking out over the glorious city and the sea. Their wives, mistresses and prostitutes accompany them. Everyone knows everyone. The band is playing a tasteful selection of American hits, and the place is alive with energy and inebriation. Hezbollah, pro-American, anti-American, Rich, Richer, Shiite, Sunni, Maronite, Catholic and Presbyterians, partying away until sunrise in absolute style. The city below is visible, every blown out building from their civil war, every mosque, every church, every tank and patrol, every piece of Hezbollah propaganda, somehow irrelevant.

This great contradiction is the best way I can describe Lebanon.

I traveled to Lebanon and Syria with 4 friends. Tia (Oregon), Tianna (Norway), Mariel (North Dakota), and Merryl (Netherlands) are all Arabic students with me in Cairo; and they are all blonde. Their hair color means that, even in relatively fair-skinned Lebanon and Syria, there would be no blending in. It also meant that in many situations, we would get exactly what we would want. Tia had befriended a Lebanese businessman when out clubbing in Cairo, and his friend Aboudi picked us up from the Airport in Beirut. Aboudi was a high-up UN worker for Lebanon, and as such, everyone in Beirut’s upper class was either a relative or friend. Family is of utmost importance in Lebanon. If you have a good job, you can be sure you will be expected to get your relatives a good job too, or else they have the right to move in with you. In this nepotistic society, it paid to know someone up there. And Aboudi was high enough. His family owned a few of the clubs, but we went to the nicest places in town and had the chance to meet everyone who was anyone.

In discussing Lebanon people will immediately show how proud they are of their country. It has really been through hell. Everyone of clubbing age spent a good portion of his or her lives living through a war, whether it is civil war or international. They are keenly aware that strife in their politics is partly caused by meddling from other nations like Syria, Israel, or the US. Each has contributed to continued instability of their country in favor of each party’s personal interest. The result is a fascinating national ethic that makes the Lebanese unlike other people I have met. On top of this, of course, is the fact that there are 18 national religions and the constitution reserves certain slots for certain religions (P.M. must be Sunni, President Maroninte, etc…). Add to this the Lebanese Diaspora, the fact that for every Lebanese in Lebanon there are 4 outside of Lebanon, living in every country in the planet, and often contributing financially back to their families in Lebanon. It creates a national dynamic that is uniquely Lebanese.

And then there is Hezbollah. When Israel invaded in 2006, it was Hezbollah, not the standing Lebanese government that stopped them in their tracks. Hezbollah provides social services and security in huge swathes of the Lebanese countryside. Though many Lebanese do not align religiously, politically or ideologically with Hezbollah, they each hold it in some sort of special esteem. They will not bad mouth the force that is spilling blood to defend their beloved homeland, regardless of how distasteful they may Hezbollah’s ideology.

When we weren’t clubbing (during the day) we rented a car and explored Lebanon. Above Beirut are a bunch of snow-covered peaks and terraced vineyards. I cannot describe how pretty it is and pictures do not begin to do justice. We went by car to the east side of the great spine of mountains the runs through the Levant to see the ruins of Baalbek. These are the greatest Roman ruins in the Middle East, and the most well preserved Roman temple in the world. They were amazing. We hired a guide and wandered for a few hours. Like all of Lebanon, Baalbeck was a contradiction. Visible from the great ruins of temples to the pagan gods of Rome, this one was to the God of wine, were the widespread posters to the various leaders of Hezbollah. The area around Baalbeck was a Hezbollah stronghold and that seemed to be the prevailing mentality out here. It was fascinating to discuss the mentality of that organization with its members, who were everywhere, but I will get to that later. We also drove out to see Tripoli, one of the oldest cities in the planet, and Byblos, where the Phoenicians conceived of the letters you are reading right now (hence the name Byblos). Byblos had a large castle overlooking its port, where we took dinner and watched the Mediterranean sunset. I will not attempt to convey how remarkable it all was.

It was also in Lebanon that I was reunited with my love. I saw her, soon after we arrived. She was standing still and bright on a street corner downtown, glistening through a drizzling cold rain. I saw her and my heart sang. She was more beautiful than ever, more beautiful than I remembered. It seemed impossible she’d be there, but she was, nonetheless. Dunkin Donuts was in Beirut. That night, and every day after, I drank copious amounts of freshly ground fair trade coffee, the first I’d had since that day I bid beloved Dunkin goodbye in August.

Next was to Syria. Syria isn’t too much of a fan of the US. You may or may not recall that we violated Syrian airspace and killed 8 Syrian civilians a few months ago while chasing a dude out of Iraq; subsequently we forgot to even apologize. While we as Americans easily forget things like this, Syria does not. Every nationality but ours (or anyone who has ever been to Israel) can pass into Syria without any issue but Americans must request permission from Damascus. The blondes came in handy to expedite the process, and we were in only 2 hours, which is really good for Americans on the Syrian border.

Damascus felt a lot like Cairo, but not as much like home. People there were not as friendly as they are here in Egypt. I have gone to a ridiculous amount of mosques here in Cairo and have been welcomed into each and every one of them. If you’re a guy, you basically just walk in and say hey to someone who looks like they are of religious authority (Islam doesn’t have a direct equivalent to a priest or pastor). You say, “Hey, what’s up, I am Christian but is it alright if I check this place out?” They will usually be like “For sure, bro, want some tea?” or maybe “Where are you from?” or sometimes “Did you know Islam is the correct religion?” Regardless the response of nearly everyone in a mosque in Egypt or Sudan is warm and welcoming. Not so in Syria.

The famous Umayyad Mosque takes up a few blocks of downtown Damascus and houses, among other things, the mausoleum of the greatest Muslim conqueror, Saladin. It was one of the most impressive mosques I have ever seen (mosques have a tendency of being the most impressive buildings in their respective cities) and I have seen a lot of mosques. I am fine with paying a tourist fee to enter a mosque, if it is a tourist attraction, not a place of prayer, and everyone has to pay. Islam, being as it is a religion of absolute (male) equality, should in my opinion prohibit charging a fee to enter Allah’s house. The mosque collected a dollar fee to enter the great mosque from every foreigner, everyone who they didn’t think was Muslim. If someone wasn’t clearly Arabic, they asked him or her if they were (in Arabic). To this question, I answered that I lived in Egypt. He responded by asking if I was Muslim. I answered that I was a student of all faiths, of the one God, his God, my God. He told me I had to pay if I wasn’t Muslim. I got peeved, and it wasn’t about the dollar, so I tried my best to argue the case, though eloquent Arabic is far beyond my skill.

I asked, “Where in the holy Quran, the words of God revealed to the prophet Mohamed, peace be upon him, (you’re supposed to say this after you say his name) does it say that a white guy must pay to enter place of god?

He was being persistent, and he decided the matter should be settled in the Arab way. That is, of course, by a makeshift public tribunal. I’ll explain by example; when a car accident happens in Cairo (all the time), the parties involved will argue on the street, and all the nearby men will be magnetically drawn to the conflict and will form a circle. Each party will give its argument or version of the events that transpired, and then some of the onlookers will offer their views, and then will make an impromptu plebiscite to make a final decision. Usually the decisions on car accidents factor in damage done, and it is not uncommon for them to agree on a fine for one party, or for them to decide some way to the victim might be reimbursed for damages done. In one case, when the driver at fault debated beyond the decision, it was deemed acceptable for the victim to smash his window, to rectify the situation. A little rustic, but these street tribunals happen all the time and get things decided much faster than a bureaucratic court system.

Anyways, back in Damascus, it must have been a spectacle hearing me arguing the finer points of the Quran with a Muslim who works at a Mosque, so the tribunal was already assembled. The guy realized he could run circles around me with his Arabic, and so he spoke quickly and complexly but I understood enough to know he had completely distorted my argument. To the best of my understanding, he said “This egg (white guy) does not want to pay… doesn’t like Muslims...”. I have no idea what else he said, but by the end of his tirade I could tell by their faces I was not popular.

I was out of my element, stumbling over my words. I re-explained my case, saying that I was raised Christian (Unitarian counts!) but I was a student of Islam. I had read the Quran, and nowhere in it did God differentiate between his believers. In Islam, I argued, we were all equal under God, with the same God. This is a mosque, owned only by God and his believers and not by any authority or caretaker or government. I finished my case, and my opponent was silent and the tribunal was chattering. A few were chuckling, but most had a sort of stoic severity, like I was challenging their being, trying to emasculate them and denigrate their beliefs.

After a short time they looked to an old man in prayer garb who was, I would guess, someone of religious and community authority, and he was looking at me quite sternly. He seemed to be the de facto leader, a guy with a lot of presence who didn’t need to speak up to be heard. He was thinking the whole thing through. This was the first time through this episode that I considered my situation. If this guy feels like I have insulted Islam in any way, Islamic law has only one way to deal with me, and the crowd looked more than ready to oblige. I guess it was only a few seconds to await the verdict, but it seemed a lot longer.

Through his thick eyebrows and Gandalf beard a smile slowly appeared. In a barely audible voice I heard “welcome, brother”. He lifted his arm and the crowd parted, and I made my way into the courtyard, thanking him with a nod on the way by. Welcome to Syria I guess.

The mosque itself was amazing. I explored it all, saw where Saladin was buried, and left from the exit on the other side, to avoid anyone who might have secretly disagreed with the verdict. I was already sensing a less welcoming place than Cairo

People on the street were not like they are in Egypt. In Cairo, were I walking with my four companions, they would get catcalls and maybe a few grabs, but everything would be in a sort of fun tone. Most Egyptians would put on a ridiculous smile and whistle or mutter some English phrase they had picked up, hoping it would charm the girls. It would be out of a sort of ignorant chauvinism, not contempt. The same cannot be said of Syria. I would say that the stares were less curious and more judgmental. It just didn’t feel right.

The next mosque, where other famous Muslims are buried, was smaller but very ornately decorated. This one did not admit tourists of any sort but I figured I would just walk in like I belonged there. I got inside and was amazed. It was so beautiful. The ancient gold leaf glistened in the lights and everyone was praying. A sort of religious police were going around making sure women’s hair was completely hidden. Men (women not allowed in special rooms) gathered around the casket of some ancient holy figure, touching the walls of its shrine while they prayed. Fathers held their infants against it, and told their sons of the significance of this great place, as significance that I wasn’t able to put together from their stories. It was magical, but I was pushing my luck and the religious policeman was looking at me funny. I grabbed my shoes and headed for the exit.

Damascus is the oldest still-inhabited city in the planet. That’s pretty old. Outside of its old souk, Syria has a lot of ruins to offer. The great roman ruins of Palmyra stretch out over a vast tract of land in Syria. Above them is an Arab Castle from which you can look out over the lands of Syria, and, over the Euphrates, to Iraq. It is cool to see street signs that point the way to Baghdad. The other great ruin is that of what is arguably the best-preserved and most impressive crusader castle in the world. The Kraks de Chevalier is huge beyond belief, standing tall atop a mountain looking down at the valley of Syria and the border of Lebanon and the coast. This area of Syria, to the north, is as green and vibrant as Lebanon is. The people also seemed more welcoming up here in the North, but I was not there long enough to judge. Tia and I hired a cab to go the 2 hours from Damascus to see Homs and the great fortress.

Our driver was named Waleed, a Syrian from the region we know as the Golan Heights. When Waleed was young, Israel invaded Golan, and has occupied his homeland ever since. He, like every Arab, is acutely aware that the bomb which killed his dad during that war was paid for by the US, if not made in the US itself. But his greatest gripe was not with the US. He thought that Israeli interests were just manipulating the US to do things we would not normally do. I could see how he might get that idea, but from here his argument degraded from valid theory to a racist lunacy that is all too common in uneducated Arabs.

If you ask the average Egyptian what they think of Israel they will say something like “I like Jews, but the Israeli government kills Arabs”. The initial disclaimer in this statement, whether genuine or manufactured, is a crucial differentiation between race, religion, and politics. In my experience, this is the first step to humanizing your political enemy. The Syrians and many of the Lebanese I discussed politics with, and that means a lot of people from a lot of different places and classes, all seemed to skip the step of differentiation in their arguments. Waleed, having grown up evicted from his home by an occupying power, having lost his dad in that war, hated Jewish people, not just Israel, with a disturbing passion.

I tried to get him acknowledge the obvious flaw in his logic, but his racism was something ingrained and immovable. Look at his environment. Every day he hears that Israel is killing more Arabs, more Muslims, and prospering all the while. Of course, media in Syria is bogusly one-sided, but having never left this little area of the world, how are most Syrians to know. They dwell ever in the shadow and disgrace of an occupying power that took from them blood and dignity. Their leaders milk this contempt coercing the populace to give up freedoms; indeed you cannot access Facebook, Youtube, or many foreign newspapers from Syrian Internet. Free speech is a joke. The government draws its power and legitimacy from perpetuating a standoff with its neighbor. The Syrian regime is idolized everywhere, literally thousands of pictures of president al-Assad are on everything from posters to street signs to car windows to tee shirts. Everywhere, plaques and monuments commemorate the glory of the Syrian army (which in modern times has never won anything) and its glorious defeats of the Israelis (which obviously never happened). Waleed is not the exception but rather the norm in the uneducated populace of illiberal regimes.

By the time we had seen the whole castle Waleed was tired from a night shift and was complaining bitterly we were taking so long. Half jokingly, I told him I’d drive back to Damascus. He agreed and hopped into the passenger seat and passed out. The road signs were clear enough and the drivers quite tame compared to Egypt. I looked Syrian enough to make it through the countless military checkpoints, and as long as I could just nod my way through, no one seemed to care. Tia was lying down in the back seat so no blond hair would attract anyone’s attention.

We got back to Damascus, so Tia sat up and an officer noticed our car. He asked me if I was Syrian, and I told him I was not. He demanded identification, and upon learning my nationality, questioned the legality of my presence in Syria. He was quite upset, and told me that I was going to jail, along with Tia and Waleed. Of course, this is not the first time I have accidentally found myself staring down the barrel of an AK-47, but computer games cannot do it justice. It is rather intimidating, and the hint of crazy in the officer’s face was not reassuring. I explained who I was, a student in Cairo, on vacation with my wife Tia, I had a license, the driver was right here, everything was all right, don’t worry, etc. He accused me of working for the CIA or for Israel. I reassured him I wasn’t. My words weren’t quite enough to reassure him so I reached out to shake his hand with 100 Syrian Pounds in my hand (a little less than 2 USD). He then lowered his weapon, gave back my license and our passports, and welcomed my wife and I to Syria. I thanked him and relinquished the driver’s seat.

That night, having seen most of what we wanted to see, and far more impressed with Lebanon than Syria, we headed back to Beirut. We re-rented a car and saw the famed Lebanese cedar forests, which make an appearance on the Lebanese flag and in the Bible, among other places, is little more than a shadow of its former self having been logged and battered by war nearly to oblivion. The drive out there was completely worth it, though, and we were able to see more of the absolutely wonderful countryside. The girls completed some shopping in the wholly Europeanized shopping districts downtown. We finished up content with wonderful Lebanon.

I cannot describe what a paradise Beirut is. People call it the Paris of the Middle East, which makes me want to see what Paris is like more than anything. However, all of us, by the end of our trip, longed for Cairo. This place is infectious, and I am not sure I will ever be whole again without it.

it's been a while

2009-03-21T03:57:00.000-07:00

I've had a pretty eventful month off. And my fun isn't over yet. Mr. and Mrs. Sardonini, and my old friend Kelley, came to Egypt a few weeks ago. We did some traveling together. I'd tried to give them a crash course in what real Egypt is about, the sides of Egypt that they wouldn't get to see on the tours, which are in my opinion the more fascinating aspects of the culture. It is lamentable that most people that visit Egypt are content to see ruins and tourist destinations and never get to see how truly warm Egyptian culture can be.

After this, we went out to Dahab for a relaxed few days of diving and lounging on the beach. By the end of our time there on the Red Sea, Kelley was SCUBA certified like the rest of us, and we were all able to dive together. To add to the fun, Mr. Sardonini had recently acquired a high-quality underwater digital camera, on which we took many great pictures and movies.

On our last night together, we climbed Mt. Sinai, where Moses is said to have met God (in Judaism, Christianity and Islam). We made it to the top well before sunrise and waited in the cold huddled in blankets until the sun finally made its appearance. People were there from world over, some strictly as tourists, others for a spiritual experience. Afterwards, we visited St. Catherine's monastery, nestled in the folds of the mountain below, famed as the oldest still-in-use monastery in the world.

The next night the Sardoninis flew home an Kelley and I explored Cairo and did the tourist thing. It is nice that both the pyramids and the museum are less than a dollar to reach via public transportation, and each within a half hour. We then went north to Alexandria, the de facto capital of Alexander the Great's enormous empire. Since that time the city had been abandoned, sunken, rebuilt, and destroyed again, leaving the legacy of Alexander's empire somewhat hidden from sight. But it is not lost, only submerged. Beneath a few meters of water the watchtower of Alexandria lies in ruins. Once one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and the symbol of the majesty of one of the largest empires in the history of mankind, it is now covered in crustaceans, fish, and has lost much of its prestige.

It is, yet, absolutely remarkable. The columns are huge, with combinations of Greek and Egyptian style. Egyptian sphinxes that would have guarded the tower still lay at the bottom, now headless from the tug of the tide. Another site in the harbor, a little shallower, is home to what was Cleopatra's palace (where she and Mark Anthony suposedly did their whole thing), now just a rubble of pillars, pots, wine-presses, bricks and her great pink granite table, which is still polished smooth. And in a relatively recent addition to the site, a British plane from WWII that was defending Alexandria from the Germans was shot down to rest on the ruins of Cleopatra's palace. Its guns were still intact, and still had spare ammunition in them. An oxygen masks remains in the cockpit where many of the controls and gauges are still there.

After diving both sites, we explored the Roman catacombs of Alexandria. Though used primarily for burial, this vast complex of tombs was elaborately decorated. The lower levels were partly flooded, but the quality of the architecture and the craftsmanship was impressive.

After a few more days in Cairo, Kelley left for the states, bringing a good portion of my belongings home with her so that I will be more mobile in my travels from here on out. It was a joy to have her and the Sardoninis here, and also somewhat strange, as they were the first really familiar people I have seen since I'd left.

Now I am actually back in Dahab, with my feet up and sunglasses on at the Yalla Cafe, a few meters from a reef, with an all day happy hour and free WiFi. With me is my good friend Maddie, her sister, and her sister's fiance. Life isn't too bad. I've enjoyed the first few weeks of my vacation immensely. I'll head back to Cairo sometime this week, and on the 27th am flying to Beirut with some friends. If all goes as planned, we will then head by bus to Syria to visit Damascus, Aleppo, and Palmyra, before our last few nights back in Beirut. I will return to Cairo on the 5th of April in time for the start of classes on the 6th.

more death

2009-02-22T13:32:00.000-08:00

For those who worried about me after hearing about the bombing today in Cairo, I am fine. I was not very near by and reports indicate that the second device was defused. My thoughts are with the loved ones of the one dead and 17 wounded victims of the attack. Though no official report has been released, the average Egyptian sipping tea and gossiping on the street has already concluded with certainty that this is the work of angry non-Egyptian Arabs who are upset with Egypt's unwillingness to stand against Israel and the US on the issue of Gaza. Time will tell if these widely held initial suspicions will hold up. Regardless, it is clear that the instantaneous damage of this attack is only the beginning.

Pondering on the Nile

2009-02-21T10:42:00.001-08:00

The sounds of Cairo surround and envelope me, but they are somewhat muted by the breeze of the river. I sit on the balcony of my houseboat, rocking gently in the current, listening the last call to prayer echo off the skyscrapers and rush in a surge of sound from a thousand mosques down the channel towards my ears. The prayer ends and the distant car horns and engines sounds are revealed once more. This is my life now on the river, and I could not be happier.

Our apartment is still at an angle, still looks as if it is falling into the current. The Nile is still textured by various items of trash as they make their long journey to the Mediterranean. The air is still think with smog and dust and soot and grime. And I still love this place. I wonder how I got so lucky as to end up here, in Cairo, with friends, sipping tea and pondering life over the Nile.

My houseboat is permanently moored to the shore across from Kit Kat Square, named not for the candy bar but for the French slang for prostitute, as this square was the choice spot for French soldiers to pick up call girls when this country was ruled by Napoleon. A large mosque stands on one side of the square, and Nile St. and Sudan St., two famous Cairo streets, come together basically in front of my gate. Within a few blocks of where I live I can buy anything I want for virtually nothing. My vegetable lady sells potatoes for 1 pound (18 cents) per kilo (2.2lbs). Strawberries are 3 pounds per kilo. Bananas, Oranges, and Lemons are negligible in cost, and all extremely fresh. I make my own lemonade which is great to sip while snacking on the variety of nuts and beans that are also available for less than a dollar a kilo.

Asside from the great area I live in, I have been imersed in an intellectual atmosphere that has become one of my favorite features of life here in Egypt. The people that I study with are for the most part well read, well traveled, multilingual, multicultural, intelligent, educated and very political western Europeans. My peers at ILI are mostly in their 30s coming to Cairo to improve their Arabic for whatever government job or business they are in. I appreciate so much how multidimensional a perspective they offer.

So life in Egypt continues on. We watch as our neighbor to the north (not the Mediteranean Sea) elects a coalition government that is so far to the right it'd make Dick Cheney blush. We watch as prospects of peace on the border remain dismal, while innocent people on both sides continue to die. We are, of course, also aware that the numbers are slightly lopsided, as one side looses less than 1 person for every 100 people the other looses. And of course, everyone in Egypt waits in anticipation to see if Obama is really the answer to all the world's problems.

One thing that caught my eye in reading news online is that it is that we recently passed by the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. While it seems like a variety of Darwin related films and biographies are being created to commemorate his research, I would hope that the world would take more notice of this occasion. How can humanity profess any level of enlightenment or advancement when, 150 years after the publishing of his revolutionary book, and after 150 years of thousands of scientists in dozens of fields testing and elaborating on this theory in every way known to man, a large portion of the world still believes that a few thousand years ago, our species started from the imbreding of one man and one woman. I can only imagine Darwin would be ashamed of his species, our species, for our unique ability to absolutely disregard the logic and reason God gave us for the safety and security of dogma. If God gave us these faculties of thought, did He not give them to us so that they might be used or stifled? It seems like our world has chosen to honor their deity by disregarding one of his greatest gifts to them.

Soccer and Houseboats

2009-02-14T00:12:00.000-08:00

I settled comfortably back into Cairo life. I really love Cairo. I love Egypt. I love life in this city. However, of course, it is not without its challenges. I went with a large group of Americans to a soccer game, and was reminded of this fact.

The Americans we went with were all new to Cairo. In their first few weeks, everything was still novel and exciting. I guess it was as good a time as any to break them into the harsher realities of the culture. Unfortunately, this can be an unsettling experience. Soccer in Egypt is as popular as baseball, basketball and football in the States combined. Drunken Boston fans after the World Series, or even the rioting UMASS students after the Super Bowl, cannot compare to the rowdiness of the (completely sober) Egyptian soccer fans.

We hired two minibuses to bring about two dozen Americans, over half of them girls, and a half of those girls blondes to the district of Heliopolis, where the gigantic Cairo Stadium sits among the high-rise apartments which stretch into the suburbs of Cairo. We had purchased our tickets beforehand, and we made our way into the line, which was already several thousand long. It was a big game, Egypt’s favorite team, Al Ahly, vs. the Tunisian National Team. The line was kept in check by a portable barricade backed by police armed in riot gear, shoulder to shoulder, shield to shield, pressing their weight against the crowd up the length of the barricade to keep the street clear. Certain VIPs and people who could pay the proper price walked along the street, behind the police barricade, avoiding hours of lines. The tens of thousands of people in line were, with a few rare exceptions, all guys. It is rare for Egyptian women to attend games for cultural reasons. Nevertheless, there we were with over a dozen young and pretty Americans face to face with thousands of sexually deprived twenty-something year old, poor, likely illiterate, already exited guys whose only knowledge of American culture comes only from movies where American women are easy and sexual acts are frivolous.

A nearby officer recognized the situation immediately. Generally speaking, the cops are the first to hiss and more at the American girls, but in this circumstance it was fascinating to see them transform themselves into the womens’ protectors. A special detachment was assigned to us, and they instructed the American guys to surround the girls to protect them, and then around us they formed second ring. We were off. We had to weave in and out of the line to get through the maze of crowd control. The guys were yelling and hissing by the hundreds, and at a few points the solid wall of shields broke and a few young guys would charge at us with hundreds behind them pushing them forward. I’m not really sure what their intentions were, but they gave them up when they were beat back by cops with nightsticks. I thought it was interesting to see that the front line of cops don’t have guns, only the guys in the back, I would suppose to prevent a panicked cop from starting a massacre. So in this way, our good protectors beat back the crowd indiscriminately as they pressed us to move faster and keep between the girls and the reaching hands. I could see fathers in line holding young children, pushing in utter futility away from the edge of the riot, trying to protect their kids but getting shoved into the angry blows of the cops.

I guess it was the blonde girls who drove them crazy. Most of us were very pale Wisconsin college kids, and they must have looked like something completely out of this world for many guys in line. Regardless, the girls arrived at the stadium shaken beyond belief, and I cannot blame them.

We headed to our seats. We were up on the balcony, as the seats closer to the action are often violent riots that we didn’t want to deal with. Shoulder to shoulder, like the cops from earlier, a solid line of riot-geared police with shields and nightsticks ringed the entirety of the stadium, and were placed in bulk throughout the stands. I at first thought it was just unnecessary job creation, until I began to see the place fill up and go nuts.

A solid crowd of people surrounded us before any other seats filled up, as we were as much entertainment as the game would be. We put the girls towards the middle and the guys at the outside and a group of officers stood at the top of our level keeping an eye on us.

The game started and stayed close until the second half. By that time we had learned some of the more popular chants, the translations of which are hilarious. Egypt was up 1-nothing when Tunisia scored and the crowd went crazy with rage! The Tunisian section was obvious in the stands. It was maybe 1000 people surrounded on the front and back by two rows of police, and on the sides by three rows, with armed guards several paces off. This, I guess, was to protect the Tunisians from the Egyptians if the riots broke. But on that first goal, Ahly flags and a large flare were lit up in the stands. The flare was thrown down to a guy who tried to run out onto the field. With a surge of the Tunisian crowd they overcame the first two rows of cops and were almost onto the field when the man with the flare was seized by the last row of Egyptian police, so close to being home free. He was on the ground in a second and surrounded by cops with nightsticks beating him into submission. They played the whole occurrence out on the screens that usually show the score or advertisements, and the Egyptians cheered. When the cops stopped a few dragged his bloodied unconscious body from the field. There was more cheering and celebration, and then the game was back on!

Multiple flag burnings in the Egyptian stands (of the Tunisian team’s flag) resulted in similar actions, though not celebrated by the crowds. The game ended at 2-1 Ahly and then the real party began. We made a break for it, trying to beat the crowds out of the stadium. On the walk out people brought out drums and flags and torches and began dancing and celebrating the win. They wore the Ahly flags and danced in circles in the most jovial and carefree manner. It didn’t matter whether or not you knew anyone; if you were wearing red (Ahly’s color) you were in the club. Of course, we were all wearing our proper Ahly gear, and I would have joined in if I were occupied by more important concerns. The same crowds that mobbed us earlier before their blood was boiled by an exciting game were still there. The only difference is that now it was dark, everyone was screaming, and the cops had abandoned the street and it was all one big crowd.
There we were, again, in a ring around the girls, trying to escape. Guys gathered around us by the dozens, taking pictures of us with their camera phones and trying to grab the girls. We tried to move through the crowd but they stuck on us like glue. A few Egyptians appointed themselves as our protectors and began to shove some of the others away. We moved into an alleyway with a narrow entrance that kept the girls hidden and allowed us to stand between the girls and the Egyptian mob. Eventually our hired mini-busses arrived and we were off. The whole way back on the highway Ahly flags flew from car windows and off bridges and in the street; Cairo was a big party.

Other than this event, my life has been uneventful (for Cairo). I am still crashing on my friends’ couch, but I will be moving in tomorrow to my new apartment. I always wanted to live on the Nile, and though my current residence overlooks the Nile from far above, I looked for and eventually found something a little closer to the water. Some chic apartments are right on the water’s edge in Zamalek, but on the Western bank several houseboats are permanently moored to shore. I found the crappiest of these, a little blue houseboat which looked like it was barely afloat, with a “flat available” sign written in Arabic and misspelled English. After a little negotiation the price was right, and I knew I was home. The landlord. Mustafa, agreed to redo the shower, which didn’t work when I looked at the flat.

My neighbor on the second floor of the boat is an Algerian doctor. There are a few other houseboats lined up next to mine, and fishing boats, tour boats, and rowers keep the river busy. The item of greatest interest to me is Mustafa’s personal sailboat, which he was willing to lend to me whenever to sweeten the apartment for me. I cannot wait to sail it, though I will need to wait for the winds to blow southward again. My roommate on the boat is a southerner named Luke, who ironically was sleeping on the couch in the apartment across from mine. He, like me, had chosen to spend his money backpacking for the winter break rather than returning home. He, like me, is the type of kid who would want to live on a barely adrift and dilapidated houseboat on the Mohandaseen (the name of the district) bank of the Nile. I can tell already, this will be a good semester.

Under African Skies

2009-02-01T11:44:00.000-08:00

On December 23, I said goodbye to the last of my friends, and packed up my things. I left most of my stuff with my pastor, and then loaded my backpack with clothes, shoes, a first aid kit, knife, flashlight, sleeping bag, and camera. I took off at ten at night and arrived before dawn in Nairobi. I met with my friend Matt, who had arrived the day before. Matt is a junior at Umass, a very intelligent philosophy and political science student who had studied with me for the semester at AUC. Fed up as I am with AUC, he transferred to Cape Town University rather then spending another semester in Cairo. But before either of us had thought of transferring, we had devised a plan to cross Africa over land, from our home near the Mediterranean, down the East Coast against the Indian Ocean, to South Africa on the shores of the Atlantic. Our original route was from Djibouti across Ethiopia down into Kenya, but for lack of adequate time and the lawlessness of some of that frontier, we opted for the safer route, starting our journey south from Nairobi, Kenya.

Nairobi is a different feel then Cairo. It is clean. There are trashcans, and signs that say “keep Nairobi clean”, a concept completely foreign in Egypt. There seems to be a very functional government that is devoted to infrastructure and development. These differences alone were culture shock. But the greatest attribute of Nairobi was that, in the very modernized downtown, I could get an Iced Coffee, not some instant coffee on ice, or some concoction of brown muck that is labeled iced coffee on a menu, but real, authentic delicious iced coffee. Our trip had started out right.

When writing about Kenya, I have to mention Obama. Everywhere we went in Kenya, people were excited to tell us that Obama was from Kenya. Have you ever had an Obomelet? Or ate the Obama Sandwich? Or gone to Obama Bar and Grill? Go anywhere in Africa, and you can. Businesses, buses, t-shirts, they all have pictures of the President on them. We wanted to go to Obama’s village but couldn’t find a bus that would take us there on our schedule. And it doesn’t stop when you leave Kenya. Most of the countries we went to in Africa have some official holiday to honor Obama. As soon as we went to Uganda, people would tell us Obama was from “near the border of Uganda”. The Tanzanians were just as excited. The US could have started a dozen more unjustified wars and it wouldn’t matter to these people, Obama makes up for it all!

Their own political system is quite different from the peaceful transfers of democratic power that the US prides itself in. They have a president from the largest tribe, the Kikuyu. However, just over a year ago, Kenya erupted into a civil war as both parties in the presidential election were trying to rig it for themselves. Tribal lines in Kenya are something unimaginable. I soon learned the Swahili phrase for “what tribe are you”, to try to get a sense of how all this worked. Without fail, if a guy owned a store was a Kisi, every one of his employees was a Kisi. When we hired a guide, he told us he only worked with Kikuyus, as they were smarter than the other tribes. Tribal politics is key in deciding elections, and it is upon tribal lines that the periodic wars break out; tribal conflict seems to trump religious strife between the Kenyans.

We had no plans or reservations, but we had a general idea of what we wanted to do. First on that list was to climb a mountain. All the options for Kilimanjaro took more time and money than we had, but Mt. Kenya, which is only a few hundred meters shorter, was a fraction of the cost and took only 5 days, but they said we could do it in 4 if skipped some acclimatization time and rushed it. We made our way North to the Mountain and took the shortest route, climbing all day for several days and spending our nights at shelters on the way up.

It is illegal to climb the mountain without a guide, and when we hired him, he brought along a porter and cook. Being a Kikuyu, the guide brought along Kikuyu help and hung out at night with other Kikuyu guides, with which they could communicate in the Kikuyu dialect. . We felt quite ridiculous being two guys hiring three guys to take us up the mountain. We insisted on carrying our own gear; so the porter ended up carrying the guide’s things, and the guide, unashamed, carried nothing bug a little daypack. Most remarkably, these guys brought no water and drank only at night when we made camp at springs.

We started in the deep jungle on a dirt road, and by the end of the first day were just above the tree line. The next day we passed through highland plains to higher lands, and eventually to rocky plateaus. These plateaus were full of the strangest of flora, including gigantic alpine cacti and broadleaved flowers. It looked bizarre beyond description; I could hardly believe that it was real. It resembled a cheap film set on one of the old Star Treks when they would make up some strange planet. Clouds hung on the upper peaks each day, moving only for seconds at a time to reveal the upper pointy snow-covered reaches.

We spent the night before our summit on permafrost, in a small valley in the shadow of the highest peaks. It is just north of the equator, but at 17,000 feet, the upper reaches were snowy and frozen, with a receding glacier around the top.

By this time, the speed of our accent had caught up to us, and we were suffering from altitude sickness. This combined with our bodies’ strange reactions to our malaria medication we had just started taking. Even the best anti-malarial drugs are known to cause intense dreams and hallucinations, so one can imagine what knock-off 2$ meds bought in the third world would do. My dreams were ridiculous, my hallucinations hilarious, until my body had grown accustomed to the drugs. So this, combined with the disorienting altitude sickness led me to wake up one night out on precipice, barefoot in the snow, mindlessly gazing out at the stars. I don’t know for sure, but I suppose I walked there in my sleep, and the intense cold woke me up. I would not be sure that this had really happened, had I not seen the drunken meandering bare-footprints left in the snow when I got up the next morning. I am surprised my feet or my body still functioned. The cold was unbearable at night; that gnawing, biting cold that infinite layers seem powerless against.

Our last day of accent, we woke up at 3:30 and made our way up to see the sunrise from the summit. This final stretch was unpleasant; it was straight up with flashlights on this odd sort of frosted dirt like we were walking on the moon. The lunar experience was amplified by the celestial sphere, which surrounded us on almost all sides. As Mount Kenya is a lone standing mountain, the horizon on all sides was far below us; it is so majestic to look down upon the stars. Farther along, cold and tired, towards the top there were long intervals of rock walls that frozen hands have a hard time gripping. The faintest hints of light began to reveal great clouds surrounding the peaks like a fluffy dark quilt. Poking up out of this cloth were several large cumulonimbus clouds, and we watched high-altitude lightning dancing on these anvils as we crawled.

At last, and with great relief, we reached the top; and after sitting some twenty minutes in unbearable cold, light began to stretch over the horizon from the east. As it appeared, the sun illuminated Kilimanjaro on the horizon, a great peak emerging above the clouds, as if appearing on our finish line to gloat about its slightly higher stature. Within minutes of the sunrise, the clouds from below began to rise and shroud the peak with the veil it had worn every day since we were there. We made our way down out the other side, passing some of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. Most spectacular among these was the river that became a cascading waterfall down a gigantic canyon that we followed for hours on our way back to the jungle. We traced the southern ridge of this canyon before we came to camp near the upper reaches of the jungle on this same river.

The next day we hiked out to a village, and then drove for an hour or so on washed out dirt roads through terraced coffee plantations until we finally reached a paved road and a town. We grabbed a minibus back to Nairobi and slept well that night.

In the morning we left for the Masai Mara, the part of the Serengeti in Kenya. We went on a Safar and saw everything. Of all the animals, perhaps most interesting was watching Hippos fight, as they do regularly over females and territory. They make a ridiculous low noise that is much louder than one would expect an animal to be able to make. They splash around and try to bite each other; the whole spectacle was awesome. And all the while a few Kenyan soldiers stand with their automatic weapons waiting for the Hippos to attack the tourists; they say the Hippos are far more dangerous than the lions as people underestimate their speed and bad tempers.

We did the safari with 5 other people and our guide. One was a naïve Canadian who was living in Kenya doing missionary work and was completely overwhelmed and taken back by the hospitality of the people and the lifestyles that they lived in. There were two Estonians who had a good sense of humor about the obscurity of their own country (look at a map of the Baltic), and the ridiculousness of every other country. They took full advantage of the convenience that no one knew anything wrong (or right) that their government had ever done. However, they had an itemized list for picking on the US; we had hours of good political discussions. The other two people were a German father and daughter, the daughter being interesting and a good German teacher and her father who stands out in my mind as one of the most memorable people I have ever met. We came to call him Kurtz, and with good reason (if you haven’t already, read the Heart of Darkness).

He was a weathered and experienced engineer; old, huge, and seemingly immune to malaria, tropical diseases and bullets. He has spent years on engineering projects throughout Africa and the Middle East, and he epitomizes European imperialism and orientalism. His choice of vocabulary would offend even the least politically correct. He was a pure cultural racist, and when we first heard him speak of Africa, he seemed like a relic of European colonialism and cultural superiority. He didn’t believe Africans were inferior, just that their culture was backwards, and thus it held them back in a modern world.

He talked tirelessly of his years in Sudan, building roads for the EU and UN aid programs to connect small villages in the South. No sooner would they finish the roads than the government would use them to drive in the village and kill everyone; a slaughter that would have been difficult without good German-engineered infrastructure. He noted that after he built his roads, the governments would let them go to hell, so that he would be back 15 years later to design a new road. He would talk about African work ethic and common sense in purely ethnic lines that made me shudder. But his knowledge and experiences were vast and he was the polar opposite to the naïve and optimistic Canadian who had not yet had her hopes crushed by Africa.

I write about him because, thinking about all that he said, I realize how profoundly my thoughts on east Africa changed as I went along. At first my liberal sensibilities were rattled when he would dismiss the indigenous culture as backwards. I must note that he completely failed to acknowledge that many Africans got along better before western technology, politics and thought, when they were simply hunter-gatherer or small farming communities. He also did not acknowledge the huge parts that Western trade policies have played in destroying local industries and economies. But, I am now inclined to agree with him on some things; namely, that now that deep Africa possesses modern technology, diseases, and weapons, their tribal culture is an impediment to their peoples’ very existences. Tribes have been fighting for hundreds if not thousands of years, but it was always with spears and knives; AK47s, globalization, and HIV change everything.

I am referring more to the tribal agrarian culture of Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, and forgive my generalizing, as with all things, there are exceptions. The first thing one notices in these societies is that men don’t work. The countryside is farmland dotted by small mud huts and fences with the occasional large trees and streams. In the field are hundreds of women, hoeing the land while a young baby is strapped to their backs. The children are out with the herds or helping their mothers on the fields. The men make their way out of their houses and congregate in various shady spots, mostly on benches under trees. There, without fail, they sit, nap, socialize, drink, and play cards. They sit and talk all day; most do not seem to lift a finger. When traveling, the woman will carry the baby on her back, luggage in her arms and balanced on her head, and the man will walk a few paces in front with nothing but his ceremonial stick, which all men carry in their hand or tucked in their belt. When Kurtz first said engineering contractors learned long ago that they couldn’t make any of the African men work and were thus forced to hire foreign laborers in a country with over 50 percent unemployment, I was shocked. Having crossed the center of the continent over land, I now know exactly what Kurtz meant.

Most of these people were starving or very close to it. Malaria, aids and tropical diseases (and in Zimbabwe and Zambia, Cholera) were rampant. Even in a village that does not have any food, the men will seem content to socialize in the shade for the duration of the day, pausing briefly to tell us mzungus (white guys) why we should give them money. Kurtz’s analysis of their culture spoke to other problems. The utter disrepair of everything was obvious the moment you walked into a village. Dung huts, easily fixable with a little bit of labor, were left instead to rot and collapse, only leading to great labor to erect new ones. In Kurtz’s building projects, governments had paid to have bridges built across their countries, and then neglected them to utter ruin, to the point where they would deteriorate, requiring foreign contractors to build new ones, while roads just ended at the river banks.

The common mentality was completely unworkable in the ever-shrinking world; an emaciated beggar always had a cell phone, but had not thought about his next meal. No one seemed to plant vegetable gardens, even in villages with year-round water and long growing seasons. That thinking ahead mindset was absolutely nonexistent there. On top of this, their acres and acres of fields are, due to IMF and World Bank enforced agreements, grown to be sold on foreign markets. It was odd to see rich, dark, and fertile soil with millions of acres of good farmland, and still see an emaciated and sickly populous. Indeed, the trade agreements are so ridiculous that it is near impossible to get a cup of Kenyan coffee in Kenya, despite its millions of acres of coffee plantations.

We spent two nights in a camp out on the safari, and then made our way back towards civilization. We wanted to see Uganda, so we left our guide and friends, and went to a town with a matatu (mini-bus) station. Matatus are a unique way to get around. They are mostly Toyota vans that have been fitted with four rows of bucket seats, each 3 across. Conventional wisdom would dictate that they might fit 12 people in there, plus whoever they could squeeze in front. I boarded my first matatu with no idea of what I was getting into.

In our journey across Western Kenya towards the Ugandan border, most of our matatus had over 20 people in them at all times, not including small children (of which there were always many). Women sit on guys laps; my first ride I had a tiny old woman come over and nonchalantly plop herself down on my lap before I knew that this was normal; it was awkward. There is the matatu driver who works with the conductor, a guy who stands at the sliding door and tries to get people to ride and collects the fares. The sliding door is usually open, or just barely closed, and the drivers fly down narrow mountain roads with no guardrails. When the buses pull over at rest stops or anywhere, locals swarm at it with various wears the wish to sell to the people inside through the windows, mostly chicken, cold drinks, and corn. The coolest thing about the matatus was that their drivers had fitted many of them with new speakers, and a pumping subwoofer. I had a bizarre moment of reflection as, holding on to my seat (no seatbelts, obviously) next to the open door while the driver was doing 70 over a deep gorge with nothing between the van and the fall, while the full load of 20-something people bounced along to the blaring beet of Lil John’s “Get Low” (a popular hip-hop favorite in Africa).

Fortunately, we had learned numbers and prices in Swahili before we left Cairo (many of the numbers are based on Arabic) so we knew what the prices were for the locals. This didn’t stop the conductors from trying to extract huge sums of money from the rich mzungus (us). It was bizarre, even the other local passengers were complacent in the treachery; they would tell us in broken English that the price was 3000, even though we knew well that it was 1000 only. People seemed indignant that we wouldn’t pay higher prices simply because we were white.

So it was in this way that we headed northwest across Kenya to the town of Kisi. Kisi was not my favorite place. Usually we were all up for sketchy towns, but Matt had fallen ill from the water and sunstroke and I had set him on a bench with our bags to rest, and then gone to find a way to get out of the town before nightfall. A nice local girl helped me to get where I needed to go, but in general the locals were highly unpleasant. Asking a local where the bus station was would lead them first to ask for a tip, then to tell you about their family’s sob story to get a donation, and how they have something to sell you. When I came back to find Matt, he was asleep on a bench and people were trying to make off with our stuff. This was not at all a tourist destination, and there were no buildings in sight that were over two stories, the majority of the town was mud huts. Kisi downtown has power, or at least they did at one point, as I gathered from the power-lines. However, when night fell, most shops ran on candlelight, and the rest on generators. The people continued to harass us in a very bizarre manner. We were more than glad to get out of this town and we crossed the Ugandan border at 2AM New Years day. However, the Ugandan border guards weren’t in the office, so we, and the bus full of people, sat outside the office until an hour before sunrise.

While we were sitting there, the fun didn’t stop. A crazy old woman came by. She was raving mad and was yelling and spitting for attention. She directed her antics towards me, one of the two white people there, by throwing stones and trying to prod with sticks, but she wouldn’t get up from her spot in pile of trash. When she was satisfied with that, she held a lighter to her already mutilated earlobes, I suppose showing that she didn’t mind pain. She spoke Luganda so I understood only a few words she said; namely that I was a white (yes, it’s true!), and that she thought one of her beans looked like a lion. Thus we were welcomed to Uganda.

Of course, when you cross the border, there are a bunch of people who will pretend to be some sort of border authority, who will ask for your passport and say that it is there job to take care of it, then they will take off wit your stuff. Also, guys will circulate trying to get you to exchange money, at first at a completely bogus rate, then at a really bad rate once you tell them you know the actual rate; they will try to make you believe that you have to pay border fees in a given currency (false, all can be paid in USD) or that you have to pay another guy the border crossing fee (the other guy is simply their friend posing as authority in order to extract fees from travelers). And then, you cannot forget, that in all these places, people are in crowds of confused travelers, and people are jam packed together in a loud and chaotic setting. If I didn’t find some guy’s, or little kid’s, hand making its way into my pocket, I would have known something was wrong.

I wouldn’t want to forget to mention the actual border officials (not the imposters). These guys were all about corruption as well. They tried to get bribes, or at least to try to convince us mzungus that we had to take a certain taxi or go a certain way, paying for services from some guy who they were in collusion with. They were shameless, and their propositions were ridiculous. We knew there was no law that we had to take this taxi, or stay in that hotel, or pay to get our visa (on top of the visa fees) from that particular office. And no, border officials don’t get tips! And of course, the visa fees in those countries are higher for Americans than for any other foreign nationals; 100 dollars in Kenya, arguably 50 dollars in Zambia, 120 in Zimbabwe (we never paid), 50 dollars in Uganda and Kenya. Other western countries pay less than half what we do; but to be fair, they charge US citizens as much as the US charges them for a Visa. I guess the US government thinks its alright to allow wealthy Europeans to visit America with no visa fees and to charge Tanzanians $100, but hey, you Africans gotta pay if you wanna visit the land of equality!

So we arrived in Kampala, Uganda, on January 1st. The city had recovered from the reign of Idi Amin (Last King of Scotland), and the foreign business people and corporations had returned to the capital city after having been kicked out 30 years ago. There were plenty of Chinese and Indian workers here, and a large European population that had spawned a very westernized downtown culture with a casino and shopping mall. In this downtown, it was bizarre to be back in a place that was majority white, more so than any place I had been in Egypt. We had a few nights there, and the club scene was interesting, but the prostitution was ridiculous. We couldn’t go anywhere without be pestered by call girls. They were not bashful in the least, and were not afraid to try to touch and grab to seduce guys. They had perfected English and French phrases for “I don’t have AIDS”. Walking on the streets after dark looking for a cheap hotel we developed quite a following of ladies who began to get into something of a bidding war with each other, not heeding our stern “no thanks!” It is strange that same techniques that Cairo men use to get the attention of foreign women were mimicked by Ugandan women to get men’s attention. We had a funny moment when we were walking past a prostitute and taxi driver haggling over prices. Matt and I were confounded trying to guess what service was being bought, as the cited price could have been for either a short ride across town or a night with the girl; we never figured it out.

From Kampala we went by matatu and then by boda boda (motorcycle taxi, lots of fun) to Jinja. Jinja is a town near where Lake Victoria becomes the White Nile. Here, the river is choppy with several large cataracts that make for excellent white water kayaking. I kayaked the rapids to the best of my ability, which was as I learned, insufficient, for the largest of the falls as I flipped the craft and had to bail out. Some boys downstream, whose job was to rescue escaped kayaks, grabbed mine, and I was able to struggle to shore after bobbing around and drinking more than my fair share of river for a minute or so. Jinja was fun, but we were on a schedule. We wanted to cross lake Victoria, so we headed by boda boda to Port Bell to try to buy passage on a cargo boat to Tanzania, on the other side of the lake. The Ugandan countryside was gorgeous, small huts surrounded by banana groves; the Earth is a strange reddish color that contrasts with the vibrant green of the foliage. Once you got away from touristy destinations, the locals were exceedingly welcoming and willing to give everything they had to entertain guests. And I have never seen so many recipes that involve bananas! Green bananas are something like potatoes when they are cooked properly, and every course of every meal is some variation on a banana product.

We waited two days in Port Bell before we gave up the over-water passage and headed back to grab a bus from Kampala to Dar Es Salaam. The road back from Port Bell to Kampala goes through the suburbs of capital city. Most of these were without power and the roads were dirt; on either side of the road were gutters into which the locals threw trash and dumped their waste, all to be washed down with the rain into the lake. Here the kids were unhealthy and the people lived in utter squalor. However, 15 miles away, as a crow flies, there was a modern shopping mall with internet cafes, casinos, and a “New York Deli”; quite strange.

The bus from Kampala to Dar Es Salaam was over 30 hours, with a brief stop back in Nairobi to switch buses. On the second leg of our journey I sat with a nice Tanzanian girl named Tatu. Her, and her twin sister Zuhara, were on their way back from University in Kampala, going to spend their summer vacation working in their home city of Dar Es Salaam. I befriended her through the long bus ride, and by the time we reached capital city, she invited Matt and I to come stay with her family. The family was a mix of Muslims and Christians.

Islam was practiced in a different manner in these countries compared to that of Cairo. Most every Muslim man wears a prayer hat, but most have no knowledge of the Qur’an or Arabic. The women do not obligatorily cover up, and at least to a spectator, there seemed to be less religious strife. The family was exceedingly friendly, and welcoming. Like so many people we met, they would declare that we now had a family in Tanzania (or whatever country we were in at the time). It took some getting used to the Tanzanian custom of the women serving the men in everything, but we managed. Again, most meals consisted of banana products, or ugali, which is a major staple, a mush made from corn maize. We eventually bid the girls and thief family farewell and made our way to the docks to catch a ferry to Zanzibar. It was relaxation time.

Zanzibar. Wow. It is beautiful beyond words. The sand is pure white and the Indian Ocean is that ridiculous blue-green that you see in pictures that you assume someone must have doctored with Photoshop. The island is a few hours by boat from the mainland, but it is also the largest in a small archipelago of Islands and sandbars dotted with coral reefs. The local fishing trade thrives and hundreds of little fishing boats take off in the morning into the sunrise, with tiny white sails unfurling attached to rickety masts. Locals in Zanzibar are great, but those who depend on the large tourism industry are insufferable.

On the ferry we met two Swedish university students who were studying in Tanzania for a semester, and were on vacation. The four of us decided to travel Zanzibar together. We spent the first night in Stonetown. The town is a fascinating combination of Arab and native culture. The streets are like back allies in Cairo, with unique architecture and stonework. An old Arab fort guards the bay, and now stands over a fish market where local fishermen bring their catch every night to cook and sell. For a few bucks, you can get several kebabs of octopus, tuna, fish, shrimp, and lobster, served on chapatti bread. I found it best to wash it down with sugarcane juice, which they will squeeze fresh for a few cents. Stonetown is a fascinating historical city and a beautiful place, but the tourist industry absolutely ruins the place.

By the time we arrived in Zanzibar, we could get along understanding a good amount of Swahili (after all it is an amalgamation of Arabic, Portuguese and local dialects). You get off the boat and get stamped in (Zanzibar is semi-autonomous, having joined with the mainland in a sort of union a few decades ago) and as soon as you pass off the docks you are harassed by swarms of guys who want you to by things, get a taxi, go to a hotel, etc. I am used to some pestering from Egypt and other traveling, but Zanzibar was far beyond anything I have ever seen.

We told everyone that we didn’t want anything from him, that we already knew where we were going, but several followed us anyways. They pursued us across town for half an hour, telling us about what hotels we should go to, even though we told them to go away in English, Swahili, and Arabic (Zanzibar is predominantly Muslim). The Swedes would go into a shop to buy stuff and we would hear our self-appointed tour guides negotiating with the shop-owners, saying “We brought them here, give us a tip!” and the shop-owner covertly would give them a tip when we made a purchase. In this way, they impaired our ability to haggle to the absolute lowest price (my hobby), and then would continue to leach off of us. They did the same for us when we went to hostels and would offer prices. When we went to purchase bus tickets, 4 guys on the street would swamp in behind us and yell to the clerk that it was they who had brought us there. I saw two fistfights break out with guys fighting over who “brought the mzungus” to the shop. We went to a restaurant before we went to our hotel; the entire while we were eating, three guys sat outside staking their claim to our group (I guess a group of four Mzungus was a good catch). Others would come by and see that we had our bags with us, and try to stake out, but the patient ones would yell and fight them away; this was our entertainment for our first meal in Zanzibar. The rest of the tourist industry was nothing short of people prostituting their culture; they reminded us of the Kampala ladies, except far more vicious.

We left Stonetown via matatu and got a really nice room with the Swedes on the beach in the north of Island. We could role out of bed, and walk beneath a few tall palms to the hammock, or a few steps further to the white beach, and a few more steps to the water. The Swedes were fascinating. One of them was actually a Coptic born in Egypt, so I was able to practice my Arabic. Having met loads of Europeans through all my travels, and had many a conversation about the differences between our countries, I am painfully aware of the imperfections in the American education system, not to mention our healthcare system. Aside from being fluent in English, Swedish, and German, they had been on government-sponsored travels since middle school. They had a much more all-encompassing knowledge of the world than American kids get.

We decided not to dive the reefs on Zanzibar as it was cost prohibitive and, after snorkeling one day, we determined that the under-water life had nothing on the Red Sea. We sailed out on a small boat to some of the other islands but generally just spent lazy days on the beach. We were on the mainland side, and the waves broke on the reef a half-mile from shore, so that the beach had little more than ripples. We went back to Stonetown, and then saw the East side of the Island. The waves here were a little larger, but the beach was equally beautiful. Our last night, back in Stonetown, we watched the sun set over Africa. Dolphins played out in the calm waters, some jumping just enough that they were entirely engulfed in the falling sun for a moment. And, just for a second, before the sun died, it revealed the African continent stretching out in either direction, though usually hidden in sea fog, for just a moment, a sprawling mass of land larger than imagination.

We departed from the Swedes and then took off for Dar Es Salaam. Back in Dar we had to meet up with Tatu and Zuhara again, as I had left my camera in their house. We took them out to eat, and they gave us traditional Tanzanian cloth wraps, which came in handy during our travels, and saw us off to the train station. We had decided to take a train across Tanzania to Kperi Mposhi, Zambia. We bought second-class tickets, which afforded us a sleeping car that we shared with two other Zambians. The train would stop in many towns for long periods, so we got to quickly explore the countryside. The train took three days, in which time I got to talk with one of our Zambian traveling companions. Like so many people I have met abroad, his dreams consisted of marrying an American girl and moving to America. He asked to see pictures of my friends from home, and treated my iPod photo album like a shopping catalogue, asking if each one of my female friends was married (don’t worry girls, I didn’t give out any numbers). Another interesting guy on the train was a missionary from the US. The guy had been in Zambia for a long time and mimicked Kurtz’s hopeless outlook on the people, determining that the only thing left to save was their souls. By this time I was quite fed up with morbidly hopeless outlooks on the African situation.

But, more was in store. The train route passed through the Northern corner of Zambia, on the Southern border of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Villages in the area were abandoned or burned out, the crops left to go to seed (the mountains of the Southern DRC is where the civil war is being fought). Of course, where there were farms, only the women and children farmed them, but I have already discussed that. Large tracts of forest were logged and left for dead. I wondered why no one had planted grass in the deforested area to prevent massive erosion during the rainy season, but the locals informed me that Indian companies bought logging rights there, and didn’t think it was worth it to throw down grass seeds to save the land, as there was plenty of other forest. So there were large tracts of land with no topsoil, and thus no prospects of sustaining agriculture anytime soon. We arrived in Kperi Mposhi, about two and half hours from Lusaka. We got a matatu to Lusaka, capital of Zambia, and were immediately struck with distaste for that city. It just felt wrong. Alcoholism was rampant there; everywhere on the ground there were these little emptied alcohol containers that looked like Capri Suns, with a few shots of terrible hard liquor on them. The aids rate in this city was very high, and the city administration was having some trouble burying bodies as fast as they came, so that the bodies that were left out began to transmit disease to the barely living. There was a small downtown, but most of the city was spread out shantytowns without power or sanitation. We had a little trouble with a drunk who gave a bad show of trying to mug us and who was in no condition to make good on his threats. We had no desire to stay in this place, so we got a bus to Livingstone, the Zambia border town on the Zambezi River and Victoria falls.

Before our bus left, a priest came on to bless our journey and give us a bible lesson (Zambia is a very Christian country). He talked in a combination of English and local languages, but he gave an interesting biblical interpretation of the conflict in Gaza that was in full swing at the time. It seems that the sooner the holy land is returned to its biblically rightful owners (the Jews), there will be a day of judgment when Christians will be saved and the others (including the Jews, according to this guy) will burn eternally in hell. It was definitely a clever way to turn the death of hundreds of civilians into a positive situation; I wish I could look upon this interpretation of the conflict as a relic of a primitive interpretation of Biblical lore, but alas, our former president (God, isn’t it good to finally call him that?) and an alarming number of senators, governors, and congressman, by their own admission actually buy this stuff. Scary.

Christianity was very odd in these countries. Everyone wore crosses, including the most corrupt of the corrupt. At one point, my own cross necklace, which the pastor had given me before I left Cairo, came in handy and got us through a tight spot. People would see a white dude with a cross and assume I was a missionary or priest; regardless, their superstitious form of Christianity forbid them from extorting bribes from a holy guy, which might piss God off. The average village in Zambia was a bunch of mud huts with a very modern looking church built in the nicest location on the land. In villages where the majority of adults have aids, and thus many kids are born with it, they find solace in a nice priest coming from the US to tell them that they will be with God soon, but God forbids them to use condoms. Indeed, the official Bush Peace Corps policy was to teach abstinence, not contraception; perhaps he should come over and see how that is working. However, to be fair, every Peace Corps person I met (and there were many) said that they ignored the “abstinence only” edict and tried to do practical things to improve the situation here.

Our bus arrived in Livingstone early in the morning. It was not at all like Lusaka. We found a really nice hostel for 8 bucks a night. The town was small but there was a coffee shop that had donuts, the first I’ve had since the last one I swiped from Dunkin! From the second floor of our hostel you could look out and see the mist from the falls a few miles away. It looked like a forest fire, which never burned down or spread, just stayed put in the distance, where the Zambezi River disappeared into fog. Our hostel had a free shuttle to Victoria Falls. The second day, we took off for the falls.

“It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight” said Dr. Livingstone of Victoria Falls, and the guy wasn’t exaggerating. Over a mile wide, and over twice the height of Niagara Falls, the falls were ridiculous. Standing behind them you can get close enough to wade into the water and peer over the edge. Standing in front of them, even in front and above, you are soaked. The air is so saturated with water it is perpetually raining in the jungle in front and below the falls. Where else can you find a place where it has been raining for the last few hundred million years? And with an intense summer sun, the mist formed continual rainbows.

We first crossed the bridge into Zimbabwe and never went through border security, not that there were really any guards there as their wages would be worthless. Nothing in the country worked. The train we had originally intended to take South to Gaborone, Botswana, had stopped working for a lack of employees. Dollars were the de-facto currency, but the shortage of supplies and influx of dollars had devalued the USD currency so much that a meal might cost $50. Because of the cholera outbreaks, clean drinking water was nowhere to be found. The army had resorted to eating elephant meat to survive, and most other employees, including teachers, public officials, and most police, had no reason to work. We were billionaires for the first time (hopefully not the last time) in our lives; we soon felt like Zimbabwe had been done, and we returned to the bridge over the Zambezi so we could jump off.

For anyone who hasn’t bungee jumped before, do it. It was such a rush! And it was awesome to see Victoria Falls upside down. After that we made our way into the park, which I can safely call the most majestic park I have ever seen. It had thick vines and baboons. The walls of the jungle went straight up a hundred meters of sheer rock, with all forms of life struggling to grow and cling onto those cliffs. We descended via the path and then went off into the jungle to swing on vines and explore. I got an arrangement of interesting spider bites that made my leg much larger than it has ever been. When climbing I nearly grabbed onto a tree snake that had become quite adept at blending in. And perhaps best of all was that the baboons were everywhere and not at all intimidated by us, as long as they were with friends. They didn’t seem to be huge into climbing, but they weren’t afraid of the trees and when I got onto one’s branch, he let me know he wanted me off, immediately. We spent one more day exploring Livingstone, than we got a bus to Windhoek.

Windhoek (pronounced Vin-deuk as it was German colony) is the capital of Namibia. It was a complete change from the cities we had been seeing. It was well planned out, with great skyscrapers and a fully developed look. The German colonists had largely intermarried with the natives, so the people looked like an interesting combination of African and European. In this way, it seemed like the racial lines were fuzzier. In the malls downtown (there were a ton of these), the employees and shoppers with all of mixed ethnicity. It did not have the apartheid feel that Cape Town had. The native languages in Windhoek were awesome, as they incorporated the Bushmen clicks and clacks that you might remember from “The Gods Must be Crazy”. Even the white Namibians spoke with these sounds. Another funny thing was that there were many of the local tribeswoman who walked in the modern malls and streets without any sort of top on. They painted their hair a sort of clay-orange, and put it in dreadlocks that looked like something out of “Battlefield Earth” or an Evanescence concert. The first time I saw them was when I was sitting at a second floor balcony of the “San Francisco Coffee House”, above a cobblestone street bustling with mall shoppers, and there below us was a group of them walking and talking with each other, casually wearing nothing but a small miniskirt and beads. Windhoek was a great place to relax. I would say it’s most like Montreal, except in a comfortable tropical climate and much cheaper!

It was here in Namibia that we got to watch the inauguration. We threw on our Obama shirts (easily purchased ANYWHERE in Africa) and bought some South African cider (great stuff). Two other Americans were at the hostel we were at, the rest were Germans, Swedes, Russians, Danes, Brits, Namibians, Japanese, Indians, a plethora of businessman from across Africa, and others that I don’t even know. All of these people huddled around one of the two TVs in the hostel and watched not just the speech, but the hours of preparation as well. The service people and janitors, everyone stopped what they were doing to watch CNN International’s coverage of the event. Of course, that meant that we got to enjoy Wolf Blitzer’s commentary. It was wonderful to see the CNN talking heads detract from Obama’s accomplishments’ by acknowledging how remarkable he is because he is a black dude. It would have been nice for one person to move past his race to say something about his accomplishments past the color of his skin; I can only imagine that when Dr. King said not just the color of skin but the content of character, he would have also displeased by people lauding Obama not based on his merits but simply because he is a black dude that made it in America. Despite this, the Africans had a kind of smile plastered on their faces, so proud of the coming moment. It was humbling to sit there, one of the four Americans out of dozens of people who, for the first time since I left the US, looked at my country as a beacon of hope. Someone bought champagne, and we drank to the US, and to Obama, and ate KFC (yeah, they have it there). The consensus was that the speech was excellent.

We met some interesting people in Namibia as well. We shared a room for a few nights with two college grads who were on vacation from their peace corps assignment in Zambia. They, like so many people I meet these days, were questioning the merits of the Peace Corps program compared with what it used to be. They were sent to teach English to a bunch of poor kids in a village. But the kids would just end up being poor people that spoke English, meaning they would probably get a better job, and use their higher position to extort money from bribes, and hold other people down. Or if the kid was really brilliant, they would use their English to get an education outside of the country; and statistically, kids that can get out of the country move to the West and thus do nothing for the country. They echoed Kurtz’s hopeless attitude from a different perspective. Perhaps the oddest character I met in all our travels was an American, from New Hampshire, who had worked as an accountant in Germany but then quit and moved to Namibia to work on a farm and learn how to build a donkey cart. He was designing it thoroughly, and would soon be making his way across Namibia with four donkeys and his cart, stopping to graze at farms or on the plains. His journey would take many months; a ridiculous but funny character.

We then headed south across Namibia to South Africa. We skirted along the Kalahari Desert, seeing a fantastic mountains and a great sunset. We arrived in Cape Town, which has to be the most beautiful city I have ever seen. It is built out on a peninsula, backed by Table Mountain, and fronted by the Atlantic Ocean. Table Mountain is a gigantic looming wall topped constantly by clouds rolling in off the Atlantic. This city felt a lot like a tropical New York. The party street was something straight out of New Orleans, to the point where they were filming a movie about Mardi Gras using Long Street, where we were staying, as the set. Drug laws were relaxed, and one cafe we ate at offered bong rentals for use on their balcony. Every night the street and the clubs lit up, it was quite the party; there was no open bottle law on the streets; and it was hard to get to sleep before sunrise. It was surreal after spending that long in the bush.

The streets in Cape Town lead right up the bay, where expensive apartments look out over the ocean. These communities, and everywhere there was a predominantly white population, were surrounded by high walls, barred gates, and protected by electric fencing and full time armed security. It was like this all over Cape Town and the suburbs. Black communities were like any other group of houses, and the white communities were mini fortresses with a security force and maintenance service consisting of all black people. The racial demographics of shoppers in the malls were the same as that of the Natick Mall, but the employee demographics were nearly 100 percent black. Shops were owned by predominately colored people (yes, that is the politically correct term for the Indian, Pakistani, and Asian residents of Cape Town). The racial dichotomy in this city was striking, and an acknowledged problem. A Cape Town newspaper I read when I was there mourned the lack of advancement of equality that Cape Town had witnessed since the end of apartheid compared with the other major cities. Truly, walking around the downtown of the city, I saw more black beggars than professionals, even in the government district when the white collared workers were out on lunch break. I had hoped such a beautiful city would have come farther from apartheid.

Table Mountain is incredible in its height, beauty, and proximity to one of the largest cities in Africa. Literally a 20-minute walk from our hostel in the center of downtown, we reached the foot of the mountain. We walked around the backside of the wide and flat mountain (like a table) and it took us nearly 4 hours to reach the top. The clouds that hang on the top (they call them the “table cloth”) parted only briefly to reveal the city and oceans beneath us. I say oceans purposely, as the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet in the waters off the coast.

We met many interesting people in Cape Town. One of Matt’s friends from UMASS was studying at a University in Durban, but was on vacation in Cape Town. We met up with her and her classmates, and spent a few good nights out on Long Street with them, and some Brits and Swedes (Scandinavians are everywhere!). It is very common among British University grads to travel when they graduate. These Brits, like many we met, were on their way across Africa, usually starting in Nairobi or even in the Middle-East, and then making their way south, then flying out of Johannesburg to Brazil, and traveling South America. I cannot tell you how many Europeans I met who were on similar trips.

On our second day in Cape Town we went to the beach, which was only a few minute drive from our hostel. It had been just over a month since we had departed, and the Atlantic Ocean had always been our final destination, the end of our map, and the end of Africa. We dove right in, but got out almost immediately; the Atlantic is freezing compared to the Indian. I have to say, looking back, my favorite day was the one spent beneath Victoria Falls; I would recommend anyone to make sure they visit the falls before they die. A close second would be Mt. Kenya. The most interesting city was probably Windhoek, due mostly to its uniqueness compared to other African cities. But the most interesting were the villages and tribal regions of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia. It was so humbling to see how these people live. And some of the more grotesque things I saw have continued to weigh on me in a way I had never known was possible. When people say you’re blessed to live in America, listen.

I spent 8 hours traveling back across the distance that it’d taken over a month to go over land. I arrived in the early morning back in Cairo and was greeted warmly by a dozen cab drivers all yelling exorbitant prices to me as I walked out into the cool Cairo air. I felt like I was in my element. I argued with them, arriving at a favorable price, and then traveling through the thick morning smog to my friends’ apartment on the Nile. It is odd how much like home Cairo feels.

I have been living at my friends’ apartment ever since, the longest time I have spent in one place since I left Cairo. Tomorrow morning, I start classes at the Arabic Language Institute, a completely separate institution from AUC. This was the only option that pleased both UMASS, and the scholarships I am on. So I will be spending the semester studying Arabic only, devoting half my time to Egyptian colloquial, and the other to Modern Standard Arabic, the language of publications, the Qur’an, and business across the Arab world.

2009-01-27T08:02:00.000-08:00

I am back in Cairo once more. We crossed Africa successfully in just over a month. I will try to write about my travels chronologically and supplement it with pictures as I go, but to this end, I must first post up my pictures from Sudan, where I was earlier in December. Photography being illegal in Sudan without proper permits, our pictures are very limited to the places where we deemed the pictures would be worth the risk of a lashing.

The Nile

Once we got out of Khartoum, with the police force minimal we risked bringing out the Camera. However, my friends continued to sport headscarves throughout the trip.

This guy was many miles off of the highway just wondering with his camel; we came across him as we drove to the Lion Temple

Hours from nowhere, the temple was in remarkably good condition

This portion of water took several minutes, and the labor of several men and donkeys to draw from the well.

This was a sort of vacation home for Nubian royalty. Though its sandy now it was, back then, fertile land with rich orchards and gardens.

It must have looked really cool back in the day

Whats left of an elephant

Can you believe someone drew this a few thousand years ago?

Another city buried in the sand.

Africa

2009-01-07T01:27:00.000-08:00

Hello all,

I have been on the road and haven't had much Internet. After these few weeks, we have hit the relaxation portion of our journey. This is just a quick update.

I am alive and well and on the semi-sovereign Island of Zanzibar off the East Coast of Africa. I flew into Nairobi the 23rd and met up with my friend Matt, a UMASS and AUC philosophy and political-theory student. We headed to Mount Kenya, the second tallest mountain in Africa and spent 4 Days climbing it, though people usually take more for the acclimation, so we got bad bouts of altitude sickness. It was great, but snowy and cold; we missed having a "white Christmas" by only 1 day!.

We next went on a Safari in the Masai Mara, the part of the Serengeti that extends into Kenya. After this, we crossed the border into Uganda. We saw where the Nile pops out of Lake Victoria, and tried to get to Tanzania by boat for a few days but were unable to. We crossed back through Kenya to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, where we stayed with some Tanzanian friends we made. We took the ferry to Zanzibar, and stayed a while in Stonetown, Zanzibar, before heading North up the coast to the Indian Ocean paradise I am in now.

There is a lot more to say but I cannot do any justice to many things now, so I will write after. I just wanted to give an update.

Thanks for reading...

-Nathaniel

2008-12-20T00:42:00.000-08:00

Well, my finals are done, and I am getting things in order for the next stage of my adventure. If you have not read, 3 out of 4 primary cables have been cut at the internet routing hub off the Alexandria coast, leaving Cairo without internet for over a day. Now, we have on and off connectivity, so I am hoping this post will go up. Many of my friends were unable to print off their E-Tickets to fly home, most international phone-calls are being dropped, and business is slow if its happening at all. They say that they will temporarily route our internet through a different hub, but final repairs won't be done til New Years Eve. In the meantime, commerce here will be seriously effected and parts of Africa and Asia will get a taste of pre-globalization isolation.

Meanwhile, I have had some time to upload of few of my pictures.

Zamalek, a random mosque and Cairo tower taken from a bridge to my island.

The Nile, from a different bridge, with Nile party boats and faluccas, and hotels in the background.

Oh, the Nile at on Thursday night. About a 1.50$ each and we rent a party boat for a few hours. The river makes a cool breeze, and the banks are alive with music, clubs, restaurants, and people out walking.

This is about half an hour from my doorstep. I don't know why I've only gone once.
Yes, Aziz, I am wearing the shirt you let me borrow.

The extensive tomb structure at Giza

They are huge...

And then there is the desert... the distant white patches mark the beginning of the White Desert

Lots of odd looking rocks

Very odd rocks... though they make a good obstacle course for a race :-)

Jump!

Let the race begin!!!

All of us

And then there was Cyprus

To one of Aphrodite's caves, I made the stupid decision of doing this when the tide was coming in. Yes, those are Andy's shorts.

The surf was rough, it was a glorious rescue!

Me and my traveling companions

Cyprus rock formations

Exploring Old Cairo

Muhammad Ali Mosque, from atop the old mosque of Saladin's fortress

Then there was my birthday!

Dahab too...

Ras Abu Gallum, north of Dahab.

Warming up with some hot chocolate after a cold evening bout in the Blue Hole

Camel shadows...

The actual camels

Fresh fish for my friend's birthday!

There and Back Again

2008-12-15T01:43:00.000-08:00

Cairo seems frigid after Khartoum. We flew in a few hours ago from after 5 days in Sudan, and I already miss it. I don’t know where to begin in describing it.

I guess I will start in the beginning, which was a little rocky. We grabbed a train from Cairo, South to the last city on the Nile in Egypt, Awsan. There we got a hotel, and asked around to make sure that the weekly ferry to Wadi Halfa was running on schedule. Everyone was sure that it was, so we headed there early to beat the crowds at the docks. After paying to cross the Aswan High-Dam and arriving at the docks, we were greeted by a smiling dock security officer who told us that the ferry wasn’t coming this week. Dismayed but determined, we took the 15 hour train back to Cairo and grabbed a flight to Khartoum. In this way we cut out the part of the trip I had been most looking forward to, but we got to Khartoum sooner.

When we stepped of a plane the next morning, the sun was not even up and it was already warm. We got a hotel and some rest, and then walked around the city for a while. The Islamic festival was still going, so Khartoum was empty. The streets were stained red from the slaughter of the sheep for the feast (Cairo’s streets had been running red all week as every family killed a sheep to honor the tradition of the festival).

Khartoum itself is the capital of Sudan, but I would be hard pressed to call it a city. There are no high-rise apartments or skyscrapers, and only a few buildings that have more than one floor. From the Nile in the center, the city expands in 50 miles in all directions with dirt streets and one-floor mud-brick houses, not unlike the ones their ancestors would have built 4000 years before. Interrupting the skyline is the president’s house, a few mosques and a sprinkling of catholic churches, a few international hotels, the various ministries and government office buildings, and maybe a few others.

Khartoum is much more of a very large village than a city. Most of its streets are just dusty patches of dirt with the familiar layer of trash, but unlike Cairo there are trees and parks everywhere. The Nile in this city is bordered by farmland, which provides a beautiful cityscape from any one of the bridges.

Perhaps the most spectacular scene in the city is the convergence of the Blue and White Nile Rivers. The Blue makes its way from Ethiopia and the White all the way from Lake Victoria. They are two distinct colors and it’s a beautiful contrast as they come together. We took a boat out to the convergence point, and when we crossed the white-capped rapids of the White Nile onto the calm and nutrients-filled Blue Nile. There, we followed local custom and drank deep from the water that has been the lifeblood to much of humanity’s ancient civilization.

My first thought at interacting with the Sudanese was surprise. I have lived now for months in a Muslim Arab society in a developing nation, and was expected something familiar when I dealt with these people. I was caught completely of guard. We walked through the streets, and there were no catcalls or harassment towards my Caucasian female companions. The men on the street did not stare, or pester us to buy something from them. Where as in Cairo a man will greet you and shake you hand as a precursor to selling you something, these people simply greeted us and shook our hand as a precursor to welcoming us to their country.

Perhaps most surprisingly, when the men greeted us, they acknowledged my friends as equals; they did not offer me money to buy them, or call them one of the many Arabic words for “skank” or “sexy” that a woman will hear regularly on the streets of Cairo. In fact, in my short experience in Sudan, I did not witness one time where women were objectified as they are constantly in the chauvinist and sex-deprived Cairo society.

This is not to say that Islam was not prevalent. It was. Every woman, including my friends, wore a headscarf and practiced a sort of measured subservience to men. When a man and women walked together, the man went first. When business needed to be done, the men discuss while the women wait. It was interesting to see that even when the shop clerk was herself female (apparently only possible with coffee vendors), she looked to me to deal with. When we arrived, we went to a fruit stand to get some of the famous Sudanese fruit juice. I ordered, then my two friends ordered, and the man looked to me puzzled at why I didn’t order for them. He stood respectfully until I affirmed their order with a nod, at which point he shrugged and started squeezing oranges, mangos and grapefruits into some of the finest juice I’ve ever had. I should take this time to note that Khartoum is surrounded by and also partly composed of farmland, and that all this fresh fruit finds its way to fruit stands in a matter of hours leading to some of the freshest and best fruit one can get.

Several large markets dot Khartoum. Here, one find just about anything. Like Egypt, you are meant to haggle for a good price, but the salesmen were not out to rip me off because I was a “Bayd” (Arabic for Egg, a Sudanese slang for a Caucasian). They all seemed content to get a fair price; even the taxis were willing to charge reasonably, a phenomenon, which anyone who has been to Cairo will know, is unheard of in Egyptian society. This could be because Egypt sees many foreigners and in Khartoum they are a rarity, but whatever the reason, it was refreshing and delightful.

These markets were bustling with every sort of vendor. My favorite part was the coffee vendors. Sudanese coffee is famous and delicious, sort of like a Turkish coffee with ginger and sugar. For a few cents you can sit and get the best coffee that I have ever had (sorry Dunkin). The food here is also great. It’s a lot like Egyptian food, except they add a few things, like Sudanese cheese (something like less-crumbly feta cheese) and Sudanese bread (like a thick wheat bulky-role/pita combination). With these you eat beans, fresh tomatoes, lettuce, onions, and cucumbers, and if you want some grilled meat from an unknown animal or part of animal, it is also delicious.

Khartoum also has two very good national museums. These display the diverse ethnic groups and empires that have ruled all or part of the Nile over the years. Sudanese archaeology is far less developed than Egyptology to the North. The museum held some more preserved and equally spectacular pieces to the Egyptian museum. The artistic styles and architecture resembled those of Egypt, or perhaps I should say that Egypt resembled them. Though the great Egyptian dynasties did dominate the Nubian kingdoms, the Southern empires had their own periods of grandeur that eclipsed their famous neighbors down-river. However, where as hieroglyphics are easily read, the ancient Meroetic language has yet to be deciphered. Great stone tablets and statues were engraved with thousands of these semi-phonetic characters, completely illegible even to the greatest of the Sudanese archaeologists. I know this for sure as one of these great Sudanese archaeologists was our tour guide for two days traveling the country.

Omeran Elrahman, Senior Inspector for Archaeology for the Sudanese National Board for Antiquities and Museums, is a great guy. Of mixed Indian-Sudanese heritage, he is a small, wise, and kind looking old man with big black eyes and a white beard that extended up to his receded hairline. Over the course of two days I saw a good chunk of Sudan with his delightful company. It was an amazing experience; his depth of knowledge surpassed any depth of wisdom that I had seen in such a specific area. When visiting the ancient capital of the Meroetic Empire, we were exploring the ruins of temple. When asked when it was discovered, he said that he’d found it back in the 60’s. He meant that literally, during a dig in the 60’s he’d personally discovered it.

We started out from Khartoum early in the morning, north several hours on the highway, then west across the savannah on what resembled a dirt road at times, and at other times was more just arid landscape with few trees. We visited several ancient temples there. We were the only tourists at both sites, but we eventually came across a small semi-nomadic tribe that survived entirely off their goats. They were friendly, welcoming, and generous people. Their existence was as meager as I have ever seen. They used a cow stomach bag to draw from a deep well, but they were scraping the bottom already and the rainy season was only two months ago. They had two mules to pull up the small sack of water, which they would pour into troughs. As the goats drank on one side of the trough, the people would drink on the other. Their water was mucky and tasted of cow-stomach, but I wouldn’t decline their generosity. What little food they had they wanted to share. They did not resent us at all. They wanted to meet us, maybe have us hold their young children, and find out if there was anything that they could do to make our stay in their country more welcoming.

The semi-nomads had one-room mud-brick huts or stick shacks built around the base of the savannah trees. Their rough lifestyle left many of them scarred or slightly injured; I am not sure if this was from tribal conflicts, animals, or general hardship. A cobra bite or simple infection out here is more serious than in a place with advanced medicine. They weren’t emaciated, and they looked surprisingly healthy for their diets. Their skin was more like a leather coating stretched over gnarled muscle. This was much the same with all the tribal nomads I met throughout the trip. The men wore a knife on their left upper arms, attached in snake or crocodile skin scabbards, under their traditional light white robes. The women wore brightly colored clothes that were rapped in such a way as to cover their whole bodies and provide a head scarf. The colors alone were dazzling.

The archeological wonders, of course, were amazing. Many of them only partly uncovered from the desert sands, left as they lay, as restoration projects are expensive and the majority of the ruins are still underground. The temple complexes were extensive and beautiful, built in a time of Meroetic prosperity, and in a time where this region had a lot more rainfall to sustain life. We visited a complex where Nubian Pharoahs and royalty lived before coming to power, something of a leadership training camp. It had everything from religious studies to combat training to a diagram showing upcoming royalty the proper ways to engage in sexual intercourse. This particular room was a training place for these activities, and the rather humorous diagram was captioned by an un-deciphered explanation. Digging at this site is ongoing, and the great walls and pillars extend out from the exposed part in all directions.

By nightfall we were on our way to the Meroetic pyramids. These are smaller, but far more numerous than the great pyramids. Their styles were somewhat different, some steeper, others with large entryways with columns, others with attached temples. There were dozens of pyramids arranged in a circle around a valley, which at the time of the empire was green with a small stream flowing through it. For every one of these massive pyramids standing, there were two or three partly or fully destroyed. Over a hundred years ago, an Italian treasure hunter came to this site looking for some fast cash. He brought a lot of dynamite. Starting with the bigger ones and working his way down, he blew up dozens of pyramids, over half of the ones that were standing during his time. A few still stand like erupted volcanoes, with a gaping hole in running down from the top. The Italian never found gold in most of the pyramids he destroyed, probably because the pyramids were each unique and most buried their treasure in an underground complex beneath where the pyramid would be built.

We arrived here at night and the moon was full. The sand was soft and the desert was warm, so we put out our sleeping bags in a valley surrounded by the royal burial grounds of one of the greatest Empires in history. Under the moonlight, we explored the entire complex, and eventually found a large and very steep pyramid that was climbable thanks to our Italian friend’s explosive contribution to the archaeological site. Rather than topple the whole pyramid, the explosion had just destroyed the side, so we were able to scramble up the blast-site. We reached the top and enjoyed a box of After Eight dinner mints, and watched a brilliant moon illuminate the dozens of structures around us. It was beyond magical.

The depth and glory of the artwork and architecture of this civilization amazes me. My appreciation was amplified by the explanation Omeran gave for every picture, every tiny detail that was drawn. One could spend weeks carefully looking at each of the sites we only spent a few hours at. After the pyramids the next day, we made our way back towards the Nile where the ancient capital was. It was a city built on the banks of the Nile; except now, the Nile was no longer in sight. Everything was still there, including the royal bathhouse, which was fed water by ceramic pipes through the mouths of great stone statues. The harbor buildings were still there, somewhat, but many stones had been taken over the years by locals to be used in building houses. It is not uncommon for houses all over Sudan to bear tiny traces of hieroglyphics and ancient drawings, as pre-cut stones make for easy building. In many places in this city, it was the statues and pillars that were impractical to take and thus remained as they once did. Standing in what would have been the palace, I can say with certainty that this city must have been incredible. And everywhere, drawings and inscriptions honor the rulers and the gods. In the more recent structures, drawings depict the victory of the Meroetic queen over the armies or Persia and Rome. Statues show her stepping on Augustus Caesar and holding arrays of Persian soldiers as prisoner. This must have been a glorious era and an amazing place to live (if you were royal). But now, the language is forgotten, as are the names of most of the rulers, and the significance of many traditions. There is a mysterious mark the scholars don’t understand that appeared constantly in the Meroetic carvings, and though no one knows why they do, tribes in isolated parts of the country still engrave these marks into their skin as a matter of tradition. The people depicted in the statues and inscriptions resemble, ethnically and culturally, certain tribes that still reside in the East of Sudan. We were unable to visit these tribal villages.

Sadly, our adventures in Sudan had to end. We flew back to Cairo last night. Even more depressingly I was unable to fly Sudan Airways, which was an adventure I was sure would be worth it. I was also unable to see Port Sudan, Wadi Halfa or the western bank tribal regions. Still, Sudan has a special place in my heart. The majesty of the history and the beauty of the people are inspiring. I was able to see a small fraction of what I wanted to see, and I know I will return. But not yet… now I have finals and papers (actually, I am writing this now to procrastinate on a 25 pager) and a lot of things to finish before I am off to Nairobi.

Thanks for reading, and take care.

I can see Saudi Arabia from my house!

2008-12-01T01:49:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. As for myself, there was no turkey this year; there was fish, crab and squid. I went with a bunch of friends to Dahab on the Red Sea for the long weekend. For most of us, myself included, this was our first Thanksgiving away from our families and friends, so we all wanted to work together to make it a good time. We arrived early in the morning and headed right for the beach for a breakfast. We spent our first day alternating between sunbathing and snorkeling the many coral reefs within walking distance of our hotel.

The next day was Thanksgiving so we rented 4-Wheelers and made our way to a local oasis to watch the sunset over the mountains. It was spectacular. That night we all gathered at a restaurant to pick out what we wanted to eat. Seafood in Dahab is incredibly fresh, and you chose your fish from the day’s catch and have them cook it however you want. For the special occasion we had fresh crab, lobster, clams, squid, and a very large fish, which I could have sworn I had seen when I was snorkeling earlier. Our food was delicious, and we had ordered a birthday cake from a local bakery to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Afterward, we headed out to a club to finish off our night, but we got back to the hotel at a reasonable hour as we had an early morning coming.

We met our transportation at 7 in the morning at the hotel, and from there drove up the coast to the northernmost limit of the paved road that runs along the coast. From there, we went by camel along the ocean for another hour and a half to the village of Ras Abu Gallum. After some tea we put on our masks, snorkels and fins and explored the reefs in this area. The first reef was similar to the others in Dahab, but the second protruded out of the protective bay and made an interesting labyrinth of currents and tunnels of coral. By sunset, we were on our way back. The camels are very sure-footed as they make their way along the steep precipices and over slippery rocks. On our way back to Dahab, we snorkeled in the Blue Hole where I had dived a few months earlier. The snorkeling was breathtaking, but I realized how much more you could see when you have your air on your back and no limit to your depth. I was anxious to go diving once more.

The next day most of my friends headed back to Cairo, but two of us had other plans. I had, almost accidentally, met a friend of a friend who had her advanced certification and was an experienced diver. She had many more dives behind her than I did, and she had always looked forward to having a chance to dive the Thistlegorm, the world-famous WWII wreck in the Red Sea. Any dive book that you read will hail the Thistlegorm as a must see of all wreck dives, and one of the best of any dives that are out there. I was excited to see what all the hype was about, so we caught an 11 o’clock night-bus to Sharm El Sheik, a beach resort south of Dahab. We found a comfortable place on the top deck of our dive boat, wrapped up in sleeping bags, and sailed out into the Red Sea under a brilliant night sky.

Before I continue I should give some background info. The Thistlegorm was a British ship on its way to reinforce Alexandria against the German threat during WWII. She was carrying train cars, jeeps, motor-bikes, weapons, ammunition, tanks, general supplies, and soldier’s boots. A German bomber was out looking for the British destroyer and couldn’t find it, and out of chance ran across the Thistlegorm while on its way back to base. With a lucky hit, the bomber set off some of the munitions the Thistlegorm was carrying, blowing a wide hole in her hull and sending her to the bottom. Nine sailors died in the attack, mostly from the actual explosion, not from drowning. The survivors were picked up by another British ship once the Thistlegorm had sunk.

So, 67 years later, we arrived above the Thistlegorm in the early morning. Our guide attached lines to the hull of the wreck below, and we followed them down to about 30 meters. We made out way around the hull, fighting a strong current and trying to hold close to the ship. The deck guns were still intact and there were hundreds of shells, over a foot long each, in boxes of four all over the deck. The explosion ejected a train car from the sinking ship, and it lay on the ocean floor a few meters from the ship. A tank lay half-toppled out of the cargo hold. The site of the bomb-blast left a warped and mangled hole in the hull and the deck, and the mast now rested against the side of the wreck and ocean floor. The propellers were intact and large fish had made a home between the stern and the ocean floor. We completed a circle around the wreck and then proceeded to the surface to rest and get more air.

Our second dive was about an hour and a half later. We started at the same spot, but then proceeded in through the exploded hull to the cargo-hold. Everything was still there, much the way it was when it sank. We continued along into the crewman’s passage and eventually to the captain’s cabin. I went for a quick swim in the captain’s bathtub (overflowed) and then back to the outside of the ship. I had neglected to keep track of my air consumption amidst my excitement, and I found my tank near empty, which is bad news when below 100 feet. Luckily, my dive partners were more conservative in their breathing, so I completed the last ten minutes of the dive sharing air with the others in my group. To be fair though, my tank had started below 200 bar, while most of the others started around 250. I will be more careful next time.

We then ate lunch and sailed over toward Ras Mohamed, where there are a few wonderful reefs near to Sharm El Sheik. We made a last dive in this place, a drift dive with the current where we are picked up an hour later by the boat. On top of the normal array of creatures, I encountered sea turtles who were drifting in the current, just like the ones in Finding Nemo, and didn’t seem to have a care in the world. They were huge and curious about us, and did not mind us touching them. We left the current to see another wreck, this one of a cargo ship carrying plumbing supplies that had sunk a few years ago. Dozens of toilets, pipes, and bathtubs seeded a new reef that was already forming. After enjoying Toilet Reef (the name it seems to have taken) we headed to shark reef where, if your lucky, you should be able to see grey sharks. We were unlucky and didn’t see any. We did, however, see gigantic moray eels and napoleon fish, and other fish whose names I don’t know. Many of these were bigger than I am, and the eel looks quite fierce when its head bigger than a human's and its body an eerie green and near twice as long as mine.

When our oxygen had expired we headed for the surface and flagged down our ship. We arrived at 4:30 on shore and got the 5:00 bus back to Cairo. It was a great weekend.

I now have a busy week of homework and preparation for my coming travels. The next Islamic festival is next week, and I am leaving for Sudan on Thursday with two friends. Normally, it is difficult for Americans to obtain the Sudanese visa. Most travel websites say to leave two weeks for approval from Khartoum, to have letters of invitation from someone in Sudan, and still not to count on actually getting the Visa. Luck, however, was on our side, and we found ourselves in a delightful discussion of President-Elect Obama. After a few minutes talking about Obama with a bunch of Sudanese who deified him, they had agreed to personally sponsor our visa application, and we left the office with visas a few hours later. The Sudanese that I have talked to about Sudan are very proud of their country and are unhappy with how it is universally vilified in the West. The Westerners who have traveled there say that the people are delightful and that they at no point felt unsafe. I have not yet met anyone who had something negative to say about Sudan, except for the hassle of obtaining the Visa, which it seems we have avoided.

My two friends and I (or my two wives depending on who I am talking to) are making our way to Aswan by train and catching the weekly ferry from there to Wadi Halfa , Sudan. We will, hopefully, find a bus or train from there to Khartoum, the capital city. After a few days there we may fly back from Khartoum, or head to Port Sudan and look for a boat back up the coast to Egypt. The recent pirate activity around there might make this less appealing, so we may seek alternative routes back to Cairo. Unfortunately, Egypt closed all roads to the South to Sudan due to tribal violence, so our options for return are limited. My friends and I are also reluctant to resort to flying back to Cairo, as flying in Sudan is famously dangerous. Most of the planes in the Sudanese fleet are 1950’s era soviet cargo planes that are falling apart, and the Sudanese government refuses to insist that their pilots take international pilot examinations.

Thus with no roads, a ferry that only runs once a week, and dilapidated passenger planes, taking our chances with Captain Jack Sparrow and his Somali pirate gang might be our best option after all. I can’t wait to find out. I will update my Blog immediately when I return to Cairo for my finals. Then I have a few days of rest, and on the 23 it’s off to Nairobi for my 5-week journey to Cape Town.

Obama Time

2008-11-15T02:01:00.000-08:00

In my last entry, I neglected to mention Election Day in Cairo. It was an exciting time, and everyone was watching what American voters would do.

I watched the last debate the night after it occurred as it was broadcasted to a 13 inch black and white TV, missing most of its casing. I was sitting on a crate; one of many arranged in a semi-circle in an alley downtown with a bunch of old Egyptian guys. They praised our great nation for its freedom and opportunity. I should probably give some background. Egypt has been a "democratic" republic for decades, yet Hosni Mubarak has been president since ’81. His party has a majority in the parliament so he is untouchable in elections. In the questionable elections, his top opponents are out of the race before voting even starts, and he has kept the nation under emergency powers (marshal law) for most of his reign. This allows him to arrest and silence political opposition to ensure the stability of the state (I am not arguing that free elections are in necessarily preferable to secure stability).

So it is not surprising that a working democracy like the US is so intriguing and mesmerizing. Here was a black guy with ethnic roots arguing on public television with an old dude with military experience. Since the founding of the Egyptian Republic, every president has been of a military background, and they, and their parents, must have been born in Egypt to even run for the presidency. A public debate like one of ours would never be allowed. So I sat there in the alley and watched my country’s politics unfold while the old guys me how great my country was.

Thus, everyone here was aware of Election Day, and the American study abroad students especially. We were all awaiting the worldwide celebration in the event of an Obama victory, or the heightened animosity we would face in the event of a McCain victory. The election was not decided until 6 in the morning, Cairo time, but most everyone stayed up. Hardrock Café offered unlimited Beer and Wings and stayed open all night for the Americans here. To be economical we went to a friend’s apartment and watched history unfold. It was a great night. Politics aside, for my own safety and that of my friends, I am happy with the outcome. Since that day, you have no doubt read about or seen the displays of pro-American sentiment from around the world. I can attest to many such experiences in Cairo. The dream that is the American idea is a very real thing, something beautiful that even 8 years of imperial aggression, and decades of mankind’s greatest economic exploitation, cannot fully tarnish. The world community will be watching these next few months, as will we all.

That weekend, everywhere in the ex-pat communities were parties with various titles hailing our president elect; the Obamathon weekend had begun. Every cabby, every guy on the metro, every guy on the street, they all wanted to tell us that they approved of Obama.

We finished this week off by heading to the Sakkara. This is not just the name to one of Egypt’s most famous and quasi-drinkable brews, but also the name given to the oldest Pyramid complex on the Planet. From the top of the ruins of the temple, we could see the great pyramids of Giza to the North and the “Bent Pyramid” and the others off the south. There is a nice museum at the entrance to the park, but aside from this, this complex is far from the bustling city. Where as the pyramids of Giza are surrounded by the city, the Sakkara pyramids are surrounded by beautiful farmland. A small branch of the Nile is diverted to the plains between the Sakkara complex and the main body of the river for irrigation. Thus, this place is lush with palm trees and farmland. There are no skyscrapers or buildings not made of stone and thatched roofs, and it is a very nice scene. Pack animals were the vehicle of choice and it was clear that money was scarce. It was not more than an hour from the city, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been converted into a classy suburb for the wealthy. It was, however, intriguing to see the local farmers washing their vegetables (which they proceed to sell in the city, and which no doubt I consume on a regular basis) in some of the filthiest water I have ever seen. The water in the irrigation canal was the lifeblood of this whole area, was an alarming greenish brown, and as the farmer washed his crops in it, a man washed his donkey, children bathed, and a trash fire burned away on the riverbank.

Trash fires, of course, are an intrinsic part of the waste disposal system in Cairo. Trash will gather wherever people throw it (everywhere, absolutely everywhere) and wherever the wind blows it (the windward parts of buildings have a gentle slope of trash at their bases with a few plastic bags on top still whipping around in the wind). If someone doesn’t come to claim it ends up being lit on fire and burned. No one watches it as it smokes away, but we all smell it, and it adds a darker hue to the general layer of smog.

And when I say someone might come and claim it, I am referring to one of the delightful Cairo garbage men. I befriended a few of them in my first days here, and they are hard workers. They collect it from the streets and bring it to a dump. But this is no American dump; this is “Trash Mountain”. This is a hill in one of the slums where trash is brought in gigantic burlap sacks on the back of pickup trucks through winding ghettos to various warehouses and garages to be processed. “Processed” means thousands of workers employed sorting the trash out. They make use of or recycle everything. The people who live up there scratch a living out of “processing” our trash. Every bottle and bag is recycled, every bit of food used for animal feed, every piece of metal melted down, everything is saved.

This process is more efficient than the US could ever hope to be. Nothing usable is wasted. However, “Trash Mountain” is not ideal employment. It is filthy, and poverty and squalor are a way of life. Many of the workers are young children that look to be about ten, though a very skinny ten, and with no real education laws for the poor, (and if there were, what school would they go to?) these kids have to work to support their families. These are the little kids who smile and laugh and chase you down the street when they see a pale face, but they are covered in oily dirt and flies, wearing tattered robes and no shoes. This will be their job, if they are lucky enough to keep it, for the rest of their lives. If you cannot afford a private education, you will not ever make more than a few dollars a day. The class divide here cannot be overstated. It is omnipresent and harrowing.

This is one of the things that have bothered me since I have been here, and I am not alone. My American friends have agreed on this point; we view class differently than the wealthy Egyptians. Attending AUC costs about 25,000 dollars per year for an Egyptian, well over what most in this city can hope to make in half a lifetime. Thus the Egyptians we see most often are the richest of the rich. Though they are kind and welcoming to us, they treat the poorer people as servants, as a servile lower class, as something not to be respected but to be used. They interact with them in a way that strikes the Americans as inherently wrong, but our Egyptian friends don’t understand why. Americans do have classes, but everyone, for the most part, has an air of humanistic equality. I would argue that this is not the case in Cairo. This is, perhaps, as the poor in Egypt are so poor and the rich are so rich, especially in comparison with each other. This place does not pretend to have a vertically mobile socio-economic system, and the dichotomy in the society is blatant and the barrier virtually impermeable. If you are born poor you will die that way.

Obviously, there are many poor beggars and homeless people who live malnourished and depressing lives all over Cairo. And there are many millions here who live way below what we would consider poverty. But they do live. The poor people here, as I have said before, are the most kind and welcoming that I have met. They don’t have much food, but they do have enough to live, and to try to share. They live in tiny and dirty apartments, but they do live. Unemployment is over 50% and many can barely afford the basic costs of living, but they do somehow make it. My point is that they endure. They raise many children, and those many children do eventually marry and raise many more children. Even the poorest neighborhood in Cairo has much less violent crime than any urban center in America; violence is in no way a part of the culture here. Families work together, pool their resources, and figure out ways to survive as a community. Families cannot last on one low wage and this is a forcing woman to bring in money, a force which scholars argue is necessary to shatter the yolk of patriarchal oppression. I am not justifying this poverty. It must change. I would have thought there would have been massive rioting to overthrow this regime long ago, to close the economic gap. But societal attitudes are different here, and it will surely take a long time for equality to be anywhere in sight. But it must happen, and I believe that it will.