We all know it's wrong

So why is it still happening?

The government-mandated useless, ignorant, backward, religiously-motivated pig slaughter is continuing in Cairo (make sure you watch the video and the slideshow with this article). I've blogged about this so many times, and had so many conversations about this absurdity, that it's hard to believe I can still get angry about this.

Stupidity makes me angry. Ignorance makes me angry. Waste makes me angry.

And of course, I'm infuriated by the incursion of medieval mentalities into daily life.

If there were no public health consequence - if the government weren't lying through its teeth - if an already-oppressed minority weren't scrambling for their very existence - I'd say, fine, kill the pigs. Knock yourselves out. You don't want to eat pork? That means more bacon for the rest of us.

But I just cannot stand the hypocrisy of this whole thing. I doubt there's a single person in Egypt who truly believes this government gives a damn about its citizens - especially its Christian citizens. Why doesn't the government just dispense with the "we want life to be better for the zabaleen" bullshit and say the truth, just this once?

"Sorry, guys," the propaganda machine would bleat, "But, well, with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt - which of course we support so we can show America we have an enemy and deserve their funding - there just isn't a place for you Christians any more. So you can either piss off now, or you can slowly starve to death. Your choice, really. I wouldn't count on help from any neighboring countries, though. Or those NGOs. We really enjoy screwing those foreigners over."

I feel like a child who's suddenly realized that you can get punished for something you didn't do. What do you mean, life isn't fair? That governments are stupid and corrupt? That no matter how good a person you may be, you can still get shafted by someone who doesn't even know you exist?

I fervently believe that governments of the people, by the people, and for the people can exist. Even after this past administration, I still want to believe that the American government can be a good, just government, a model government.

And I desperately want to believe that Egypt isn't locked into its current path. I want to believe that the faces I've looked at in my classrooms will rise above their heritage and decide what's important. Would I like those things to be the same things I value? Of course! But at this point, I'd settle for a "things right now are wrong and we're not going to stand for it anymore!"

I want to look in people's faces and see a belief that what they do matters. That voting, and education, and struggle mean something - not necessarily in the short run, but in the Grand Scheme of Things. And even if, like me, they're not quite sure what that means, at least there's an intimation of pride and hope and honor.

Every once in a while I've gotten a glimmer from my students that something I've said has gotten through. Something about bias, or logic, or critical thinking. That glimmer is frequently extinguished when I read too many homeworks - do they even read what they write? - but I have to believe that things will change for these people.

I have to. Otherwise, what's been the point of the last two years?

And I'm not really the one who should be angry here. I'm leaving. Soon.

So many Egyptians are already angry. If we all know it's wrong, why are we still doing it?

Millions of peaches

Peaches for free!

Well, almost. Two days ago, after another hair-raising adventure with EgyptAir (what does it mean that their internal system can lose reservations that their website still displays???) I decided to blow off some steam and shop for a dinner party at a nearby souq.

I wrote about this souq before - it's a bit out of the way for me, so I don't go that often. And by "out of the way," I mean, "across the street." Those of you who have seen Qasr El Ainy know what I'm talking about - somewhere between 4 and 8 lanes (these concepts are fluid here) of moto-mania. It's not impossible to cross at this point, but there are vegetable guys who don't require me to take my life in my hands on this side of Qasr El Ainy.

It's been horrifically hot the past few days, with the beginning of the week absolutely excruciating. On top of the heat, the power went out in my flat for about 20 hours, throwing me back to the Stone Age. I actually used the salt lamp I got in Siwa as my light source for the night. The weather's cooled down a bit, but it's still well into the 80s and 90s most days.

So after my tussle with EgyptAir, I took the Metro back to Saad Zaghloul to get my dinner-party shopping done. I was so hot, so tired, so sweaty, so dirty that I couldn't stand the thought of turning on my stove. Fortunately, in Egypt the produce is so brilliant that cooking isn't really required for a good meal.

The first thing I saw were peaches. Tons of them. Peach avalanches. I'd eyed a few peaches the other day while having dim sum in the Four Seasons (not worth the money, in my opinion), but I'd ended up stuffing plums in my purse instead. If it were possible to eat sex, I think, then that's what eating a good ripe plum is to me. Positively carnal.

I decided to pick up a few peaches for dessert. I settled on 6 peaches that weren't rock hard or already rotting, but when I handed them to the vendor he looked puzzled. I finally figured out that choosing the number of fruits you need is strange - they expect you to buy in kilo increments. I kept trying to explain that I just wanted 6 peaches - these 6 peaches - and I'd pay whatever they cost (which ended up being LE 1.50, or 27 cents US). I'm not quite sure why this was so strange, but I ended up repeating this conversation through the whole souq.

My big splurge came next. I found a vegetable guy who was selling kilos of the most perfect little cherry tomatoes you've ever seen. With a twinkle in his eyes, the guy announced his price, which precipitated a startled "Eh da?" from a nearby patron. I fixed my eyes on his, tacked a smile on my face, took a deep breath to prepare to hurtle myself into my haggling routine ("my husband will beat me if I pay such a price") when the other patron cut in with a flood of Arabic. The vendor, seemingly defeated (but still grinning) cut his price in half, and I accepted it. I paid an outlandish LE 5 (90 cents) for a kilo of perfect fresh cherry tomatoes. Mesh. I would've given him the LE 10.

Yellow and red peppers - check. Cucumbers - check. Cilantro and dill - check. Three pounds, two pounds, and 50 piasters, respectively. I passed on the seafood, although I was sorely tempted by the fresh crabs. I knew that I'd spend the whole meal thinking about the legions of flies that crawled all over the seafood in their tubs of ice on the street.

In the end, dinner was a super-simple affair. I made a raita with yogurt, tomatoes, cucumbers, cilantro, and cayenne pepper. I whipped up another yogurt concoction with various Indian spices. I split the cherry tomatoes in half (I always forget that smaller foods require more, and more careful, knife work), sprinkled them with sea salt and basalmic vinegar and folded in a few handfuls of chopped dill. The red and yellow bell peppers here are so perfect, I just sliced them up and made a side of sun-dried-tomato olive oil, which I served with the cucumber slices. I rounded the meal off with a brie, some beef grisson (I wasn't crazy about the texture, but I tried to compensate by plating the meat in the shape of a fish in a shell bowl, complete with a tiny cherry tomato eye), crackers, and a few fiteer (round flaky bread).

We ended up eating out on the balcony with a bottle of French wine followed by lemongrass tea and a shisha made hazardous by the rising wind. The lemongrass tea was surprisingly good and required zero effort. All I did was put a handful of lemongrass leaves (from the desert development center) into my french press, poured boiling water over them, then put the whole thing in the freezer for a few hours.

But since we were sitting outside, the star of the meal was the Nile. I'm really going to miss this place - there's a strange glamor to my life here that I don't think I'll ever find again.

Take a bow, Egypt

We're number 2! We're number 2!

I'm sitting on my couch catching up on the latest Influenza A information to prepare for an interview I'm giving on Tuesday. It's for a campus-affiliated news magazine, but I still don't want to look like an idiot. Or, you know, start throwing chairs.

[Spoiler alert to any of my students: skip the next paragraph! And why aren't you working on your final?]

I've also been working with some of my colleagues on a short set of questions to give students to figure out whether they've actually learned anything from our class. We delocalized the situation - Egypt's not the only country screwing up, after all - but my fervent hope is in 30 years, one of my students will be running some sort of Supreme Council here and will make the right call.

I found this article from Discover magazine on the the five worst governmental responses to the Influenza A outbreak. It's been a few weeks since this article ran, so maybe it's time to resurvey the field.

Egypt came in at #2, behind (ahem) Mexico. Here's the shout-out:

2. Slaughtering Every Pig in Your Country
Second place goes to Egypt, whose government decided that since the virus originated from pigs, the best way to keep it out is to kill every pig in your borders. So that's what they did. This week, Health Ministry workers began slaughtering the roughly 300,000 pigs unfortunate enough to reside there—a number that would have been far higher were Egypt not a predominantly Muslim country.

Unfortunately for the government—and the pigs, and their farmers, and the Egyptian citizens who will gain nothing from this pointless massacre—killing pigs has absolutely no effect on the transmission of the virus. "The crisis today is in transmission from human to human. It has nothing to do with pigs," U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization Chief Veterinary Officer Joseph Domenech told the AP. Though it's certainly a good week to buy pork chops in Cairo.

Wrong, buddy! You can never buy pork chops in Cairo! At least, this trained observer has never noticed any. I don't think even Gourmet Egypt goes so far, and for sure the very few places in Cairo that sold pork pulled the products (which would have brought their weight in ex-pat gold, I don't doubt).

And yet, and yet ... Egypt is still going ahead with its pig slaughter in the face of international ridicule. Way to stick to those idiot-guns, my dears. In their defense, the government is trying to spin the whole thing as a public health initiative. Check out this article from Al-Ahram; my favorite part is where the unhygenic filthy rotting pig corpses - haram! - are shown to be the victims of vehicular pigslaughter. My question to those spinsters is, oh, really? Then why now? Why not a year ago? A year from now? Five years from now? And most importantly, do you think we're stupid???

The kicker, of course, is that so many of us are ignorant. I can't figure out why people have started trusting the government now, of all times. Convenient adherence to religious doctrine and economic expedience (can't really imagine to whom)?

Here's a quick case in point. Last week I attended a conference here in Cairo that vacillated between being a useful discussion among peers to a social-scientist-hippy-lovefest (no offense intended to any rigorous social scientists out there, of course). I held it together pretty well, I think, by not participating in many discussions.

I finally blew my stack in the afternoon on the second day. I was in a break-out session with a few people, and the topic of scientific thinking and the flu outbreak came up. Someone (erm, it might've been me) pointed out that this current event is the perfect case study for our students. I was interrupted by an Egyptian doctor. Let me say that again: doctor. She said, "Well, but you really have to contextualize this issue. I mean, we are in Egypt."

Mouth engaged before brain and I slammed back, "I don't care what country or what context you're talking about. PIGS - DON'T - CAUSE - THIS - FLU. All this context business is nonsense - you might as well throw out all the red paintings in Egypt, that'll have the same effect on the spread of this disease." Fortunately cooler heads prevailed before she could respond (and I, no doubt, could throw a chair).

Yikes. I'd better calm down before this interview on Tuesday.

Misadventures in Tailoring

I've just lost three hours of my life that I don't get back.

It all started out innocuously enough: I wanted to get some clothes made before I left.

Seems simple, right? All the expats here have their darling tailor, and all you have to do is ask around, get introduced to the tailor, and boom! Personalized-clothing heaven! Right?

Wrong. For me, anyway.

Around 11 this morning I packed up the clothes I wanted copied and headed up the street to my friend's place. She and her husband also wanted some tailoring done, and they've got a car (be still my heart!), so it should have been the perfect storm.

Over at the fabric store in Zamalek, I picked up something like 8 m of fabric for LE 390 (that's $69.50). I'm quite happy with the fabric - I picked out three different ones for shirts for KC, and two sets of fabric for dresses for me.

I realize that I've whitewashed that step a bit. What really happened was my friend's husband drove us around the entire island of Zamalek 2 or 3 times looking for parking, before dropping us off down the street from the fabric store and continuing to circle until we were finished.

It turned out that my friend M had a run-in a few years ago with the tailor I was going to suggest (on recommendation of another friend K). The short-short version of the M's story is the tailor did something badly, and when M asked that the work be done properly, he refused to do it. According to M, she was just supposed to say "maelesh" that her waistband was 2 inches too short. As you can imagine, this didn't work out and she's never been back.

So we figured we'd try out another tailor who does work for our friend L, an exacting woman who never looks less than chic. I called L to ask for directions, and she told me something along these lines:

You need to head over past the Ministry of the Interior behind the old campus - it's the faux-pharonic building with the attack dogs. Go a little further until you see a cafe that's only for men, then take a right. Walk down this street (don't walk on the sidewalk, it's not safe) until you come to a rundown little alley. You'll know it's the right one because there's a concrete balcony on the street level. The shop has metal doors; you might need to bang on them to get someone to let you in. Oh, and did I mention that he doesn't speak any English?

Discussions of this nature, incidentally, are routine in Egypt.

Wonder of wonders, we managed to find the tailor pretty easily. We were even luckier - he had a friend visiting the shop who had flawless English. The store was tiny, sweltering, ill-lit, and full of cigarette smoke, but it was definitely a tailoring shop.

Then everything started to come unraveled (pardon the pun, couldn't resist).

M wanted a pair of pants made smaller in the hips; she'd brought another pair of pants of the same brand that were one size smaller. All the tailor had to do was make one match the other.

After about 15 minutes of heated exchange with M, the tailor refused to do the work. Apparently, it was too much work - and M's assurances of adequate compensation wouldn't sway him.

I was next at bat. I pulled out one of KC's dress shirts and laid it on the tiny table, precipitating a flood of agitated Arabic.

Oh no, madame, the tailor's friend gasped, oh no, you need an expert for this!

I was confused. I was pretty sure KC'd bought the shirt at Target or an outlet store or something like that. "An expert in what?" I asked.

The response was quick: shirts.

I didn't even bother showing the guy the dress I wanted copied.

We stalked down the street, grousing, but forced to admire the tailor for refusing to do the work rather than doing a bad job.

And then, because we hadn't wasted enough time already, because we weren't yet hot enough, or thirsty enough, or frustrated enough - we decided to go back to Zamalek, to the tailor within shouting distance of the fabric store.

This we proceeded to do, through all the downtown Cairo traffic - and wouldn't you know it? The tailor wasn't in! Won't be back until 5:00 pm! (Insha'allah)

[sigh]

Cairo wins again!

Classified

Anyone know where I can get an oud in Cairo?

Am I a twit?

Erm ... tweeter? Twitterer?

To my vast surprise I got an email today telling me someone had requested to follow my Twitter feed. I thought this was odd for a few reasons.

First, even though I know people read this blog, it still surprises me that anyone cares what I have to say. Maybe that's a bit strong - it surprises me that people take the time to read this blog.

I read a few blogs, and I think of it as watching TV (which is strange, because I don't actually watch TV. I don't even own a television). A few nights a week I tune in to my "stories" to see what's developed. Sometimes it's a flashback episode, sometimes it's a mythology episode, sometimes it's a clip show or a crossover show. Other times it's a show about nothing.

Incidentally, I think I've just revealed my whole TV-watching heritage in those last 2 sentences.

Anyway, the second reason I was so surprised is that I don't actually use Twitter. I tried for about an hour, and it was a disaster. I'm not really interested in knowing about people in real-time ... if it's important, it can wait, right?

One of my Twitter friend requests was from my dad, which is hilarious on a lot of levels. One of my stupid cousins in India threw a bunch of internet buzzwords at Dad and he came back to the States frothing at the mouth to join the 21st century. Within a week I think I got 8 invitations from him from software like Facebook (I am not on Facebook), MySpace (why do you need both?), LinkedIn (that one I joined awhile ago) ... and so on. When the Twitter invitation came, I felt obligated to point out to Dad that in 30 years he's never showed any interest in what his children were doing - why would he care about complete strangers? That conversation didn't go well.

It also seems to me that Twitter is meant to work by text messages, so of course you'd need an unlimited text messaging plan. Which I don't have now, although I suppose that might change once I'm back in the US.

Maybe I should give Twitter another try. After all, it's not like I have to read my own feed, or join any others.

Clearly I am not a candidate for the social networking revolution.

By the way, the (surely common) joke that's the title of the post I originally thought of a few months ago at a party. We were trying to figure out what to call someone who tweets, and eventually I came up with "twit."

I felt very witty. I mean twitty. ARGHGHRHGHRHR ....

Random observation

I went to my next-door CIB branch today to get some money broken down into smaller bills.

I'd describe Cairo as a "cash economy," but that doesn't quite describe it. Maybe a "small bill economy" would be more apt - everyone wants change here, and yet no one ever seems to have it.

Even if I've watched them just accept small bills from someone else, or if I'm standing in the bank and I can see the notes behind the counter.

Anyway, I found this note on one of my bills:

To dearest daughter Ayat - with best of wishes - M. Cebad 5-3-2005.

No doubt Ayat could have bought a lot more in 2005 with this twenty than she could now.

Most of the money here looks like it's been through a nuclear disaster, and it's unsettling to think how many hands these bills have moved among in their lifetimes. And what kind of stuff has gotten transferred onto them along the way.

Upon further reflection, some things are better not to think on.