Jenyfer Matthews

I bought myself a new phone on Sunday afternoon and got a new SIM card with the same phone number from my service provider on Monday. As soon as I installed the new card in the phone, I was back in business. There are some things that are absurdly hard to accomplish in Egypt and others, like this, are just a little too easy. I suppose the fact that you don’t see anyone here who doesn’t have a phone in their hand or attached to their ear has given them plenty of opportunities to perfect the system!

The children’s tennis coach got us tickets to an exhibition match being played on Saturday afternoon at the Gezira Club, a sporting club downtown, between Nadia Petrova, former world #3 (and a former student of our coach), and Justine Henin, former world #1. We thought it would be a fun family outing and a pleasant way to spend the afternoon so we went.

We bought the tickets from our coach – $18 for all four of us. How astonished was I when we arrived and were directed courtside for our seats? As much time as I spend watching the children play tennis, I’ve never been to a real tennis match let alone one being played by professionals.

I can’t begin to give you any sort of knowledgeable account of the play because I have yet to master a proper tennis scoring system and I wasn’t taking notes. All I can say is the Petrova was playing well in the first set, and it was 3-love before Henin started to find her groove. The first set went to a tie breaking match which Henin won. Henin also won the second set, which ended the exhibition. How’s that for an in depth analysis? Instead, I’ll share a few of the pictures I took during the match with my piddly point and shoot. Yes, we were THAT close.

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Our view of the other side of the court wasn’t spectacular, so it’s nice that they had to switch sides every so often!









The children seemed to enjoy the outing as well. My daughter didn’t say much though she did express awe that they could play in front of such a large (and noisy) crowd. My son announced he was going to be a tennis champ when he grows up – and that he’ll beat Petrova. No amount of explaining about age and gender differences changed his mind!

The only irritating that happened is that I lost my cell phone on the way home – probably in the taxi. I was at least able to call our service provider fairly quickly and put a hold on the line so whoever finds it can’t run up my monthly bill calling China! The phone is cheap and old so it’s no big loss itself, it’s the inconvenience of replacing it and gathering all my phone numbers again. Oh well – better my phone than my camera!!

One of the perks of working at the library is being able to borrow books, some of which I stumble across as I’m re-shelving the returns. I just finished reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (2001), a book I first found last spring while it was on reserve for a class. I thumbed through the foreword while working at the circulation desk and was hooked from the first paragraph so of course I grabbed it last week when I found it back in regular circulation.

As fascinating as The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Fast Food Nation book is not about calories and fat content and reporting how unhealthy fast food is. It’s a dense read, each paragraph – each sentence – is simply brimming with information, starting with the history of fast food restaurants in the post World War II period. A classic example of the American dream, the men behind these modern empires started out with next to nothing but an idea and managed to take the idea of cheap food and kitchen efficiency to startling new levels.

But that’s just the beginning. The book goes on to describe how once these new restaurants took hold and gained popularity, they had a tremendous impact on farming, ranching, and meat packing industries. So voracious was the fast food industry’s appetite for potatoes and beef that the only way for the agriculture industry to keep up was to themselves apply many of those same principals of efficiency to their own products in an effort to keep up with the demand.

You might assume that with such high demand would come higher prices, but it didn’t happen that way in farming. In an effort to keep up and make more money, each farmer worked independently to produce a greater yield. So successful were they that it drove prices down. Of course it’s not that simple either – over the years huge agro-companies have grown to mammoth proportions and diversified, crushing individual farmers and ranchers in the process.

What made this book so interesting to me was not only the lesson in national economics but the human casualties in the industrialization of such large sectors of American society, starting with the people who work in the restaurants. The fast food industry typically only pays minimum wage and has actively (and successfully) fought any increases in minimum wage for years in an effort to keep their profit margins higher. And who usually works at these jobs? Unskilled workers, often teenagers, but also recent (or illegal) immigrants, all of whom are vulnerable members of society. Restaurant managers often receive annual bonuses for keeping labor costs low and they have established methods to do so. At best they “stroke” an employee, giving them praise and inculcating a feeling of being an important member of the team to manipulate employees into agreeing to work longer than their scheduled shift, with no extra pay. At worst, managers have been caught deliberately scheduling shifts to start and stop at busy times, forcing workers to stay over time during the rush, again with no extra pay.

Parallel situations have developed at slaughterhouses and meat packing plants as well. In an effort to maximize profits, the line speeds in both slaughterhouses and meat packing plants have increased – a dangerous practice from both the perspectives of the workers who are often injured by the knives they wield and the machinery they work with but also for the end consumer who may well end up with tainted products as a result of poor safety practices. Meat packing used to be a fairly skilled and highly paid profession. With industrialization, the big businesses have turned it into just another assembly line job, paid the minimum they can get away with and staffed with unskilled workers who have few other choices. As you might expect, the injury rate at a slaughterhouse or meat packing plant is high – not only from lacerations or accidents with machinery but also from repetitive stress injuries. Plant managers often receive bonuses based on low injury rate so many injuries go unreported on any official records.

If the working conditions of the people don’t move and disgust you, let’s move on to the animals. Aside from the much less than humane treatment they receive in the industrial feedlots, what the cattle are fed is horrifying. Cattle are ruminants and as such are intended to eat a variety of grasses. In feedlots they are fed whatever will fatten them up the fastest. In the past that list has included livestock wastes such as the remains of dead sheep and dead cattle and millions of dead cats and dogs purchased from animal shelters until the FDA banned such practices in the wake of fears over the spread of mad cow disease. Current regulations however still allow cattle to be fed dead pigs and dead horses as well as dead poultry, cattle blood, and waste products from poultry plants including sawdust and old newspapers that have been used as litter and which contain chicken manure, a source of dangerous bacteria, and parasites such as salmonella and tapeworms in addition to antibiotic residues, arsenic and heavy metals. (pp. 202-203).

What infuriated and disgusted me the most in this book was the underlying greed that was at the root of all of the worst practices in these industries. Here is a short list of examples that jumped out at me:

• No source of potential revenue goes unnoticed. In 1973, amid a bitter union organizing drive in San Francisco, the labor commissioner discovered and ordered a McDonald’s to stop accepting tips at its restaurants, since customers were being misled: the tips being left for crew members were actually being kept for the company.(p.76)

• Taxpayers are subsidizing the fast food industry’s high turnover rate. Through federal programs, fast food chains have claimed tax credits up to $2400 per each new low-income worker they hire. A 1996 investigation by the US Dept of Labor concluded that 92% of these workers would have been hired anyway and that their jobs were part-time, provided little training, and came with no benefits. The extremely high turnover rate in the industry simply means that the fast food companies can claim this credit for each new low income worker they hire. (p. 72-73)

• Pressure for ever increasing profits often drives companies to criminal activities. In 1989, ConAgra was found guilty of having systematically cheated chicken growers in Alabama: by tampering with trucks and scales and over an eight-year period 45,256 truckloads of full-grown birds were deliberately misweighed to make the birds seem lighter at ConAgra processing plants in the state. (p. 159)

• Meat processing plants deliberately recruit and exploit vulnerable groups. In September of 1994, GFI America, Inc. – a leading supplier of frozen hamburger patties to Dairy Queen, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, and the federal school lunch program – needed workers for a plant in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It sent recruiters to Eagle Pass, Texas near the Mexican border, promising steady work and housing. The recruiters hired thirty-nine people, rented a bus, drove the new workers from Texas to Minnesota, then dropped them off across the street from People Serving People, a homeless shelter in downtown Minneapolis. (p. 163)

• The school lunch program in the US might be the most dangerous place to eat. A 1983 investigation by NBC News reported that the Cattle King Packing Company – at the time, the USDA’s largest supplier of ground beef for school lunches and a supplier to Wendy’s – routinely processed cattle that were already dead before arriving at its plant, hid diseased cattle from inspectors, and mixed rotten meat that had been returned by customers into packages of hamburger meat. Cattle King’s facilities were infested with rats and cockroaches. (p. 218)

• Just cleaning the meat isn’t the answer. Steven Bjerklie, the former editor of Meat & Poultry, opposes the idea of irradiation to sanitize meat because he believes it will reduce pressure on the meatpacking industry to make fundamental and necessary changes in their production methods and allow unsanitary practices to continue. “I don’t want to be served irradiated feces along with my meat,” Bjerklie says. (p. 218)

• Eating at home isn’t necessarily safer since the meat is still processed at the same places. Anyone who brings raw ground beef into his or her kitchen today must regard it as a potential biohazard, one that may carry and extremely dangerous microbe [e coli 157:H7], infectious at an extremely low dose. The current high levels of ground beef contamination, combined with the even higher levels of poultry contamination, have led to some bizarre findings. A series of tests conducted by Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona, discovered far more fecal bacteria in the average American kitchen sink than on the average American toilet seat. According to Gerba, “You’d be better off eating a carrot stick that fell in your toilet than one that fell in your sink.” (p. 221)

In the end, I can’t help wondering why. Why is it so important to squeeze out every single penny in profit at such a high cost to the employees and to national health? These corporations make billions of dollars in profit every year, would it really hurt any one of them to ensure better working conditions for their employees and enforce stricter safety measures? To allow farmers and ranchers to make a decent living? To feed cattle grass instead of other dead animals and biohazardous trash? The politicians who are out there shouting their patriotic slogans and calling for tax breaks are the same ones who are in the pockets of these big companies and often benefiting tremendously from turning a blind eye or flat out ignoring what is really going on. With the franchising of these restaurants internationally, the US is not only exporting a business model and a type of food, but all of these associated injustices as well. I’m not suggesting that all fast food restaurants should all be driven out of business, just that as powerful as they are, they need to take more responsibility for the power they possess.

If all of that wasn’t enough to turn your stomach, think about this: the fast food industry deliberately markets its product to children. Not only so the children will push their parents into coming to the restaurants and spend money as frequently as possible (have to collect ALL those toys after all), but also so that they can inculcate brand loyalty at an early age and thus ensure the next generation of customers. Americans are already some of the fattest and unhealthiest people in the industrialized world. Somehow fast food doesn’t seem like such a bargain anymore.

This sign always makes me giggle

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I’ve spent the last couple of days scurrying around trying to finish up my Christmas shopping before the children are out of school for the holidays, and thank goodness I think I’m done! My husband and I decided not to exchange big gifts this year since we’ve been pretty efficient about being generous with ourselves this year. (I never did tell him what I spent to have that ring repaired this summer – ssshhh!)

Christmas shopping in Cairo is hard enough – sure, there’s lots of stuff but finding items of decent quality is difficult. Once you find them, overcoming the notion that they cost 3x what they would cost anywhere else is the next hurdle. It hurts my thrifty heart to pay more when I know about how much something would cost in the US. Since it’s just the cost of living here and it’s not as if I can NOT buy presents, I close my eyes and hand over the money.

Harder still is finding appropriate gift wrap. I have some gift bags which I do like to use for soft items like clothes or for awkwardly shaped items, but I still like to mix things up a bit and wrap boxes in gift wrap.

I haven’t yet exhausted all the possibilities of places to look for it, but I have exhausted myself in the process. Why on earth is it so hard? Does no one else wrap presents in paper anymore? The only rolls I found were a pretty red with gold writing on them. When I looked closer it was all in Chinese. Um…not quite what I had in mind!

I still have some paper leftover from next year but the difficulty I am having in finding anything new has led to some extremely careful cutting practices. No scrap it too small to save for something! I probably have enough but I want a fresh, unique roll to wrap the “Santa” presents in (one per kid) I do still have some time to look, but it may come to just leaving the Santa gifts unwrapped with a pretty tag on them!

Guess what I’ll be asking my family to purchase and set aside for me, and attempting to bring back in my suitcase next summer? Gift wrap – and colored sugars for cookie decorating. All I have is colored sprinkles and chocolate sprinkles (brought back from the US on a previous trip) I will have to make my own colored sugars with white sugar and food coloring I guess. One thing about living abroad: you get good at improvising…

I think most of the rules of good writing are summed up here:

Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don’t start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

~William Safire, “Great Rules of Writing”

I may have to print this out and tape it to my monitor; it’s a good reminder and it makes me smile.

Have a great weekend!

What a weekend! The end of season soccer tournament was on Saturday and it held all the elements of a classic feel-good sports movie: There was action, drama, nail-biting tension, a black moment, and finally glory. This might be a good time to navigate away if you don’t want to hear a proud mother gush.

In preparation for the tournament, I spent all of Friday morning baking cupcakes for the after-party for my daughter’s team – a batch of white cake and a batch of chocolate, both to be frosted with chocolate. I also made a batch of brownies in a mini-muffin tin. You know how it is – if you want something done, you have to do it yourself? For logistical reasons I was unable to be the team-mom for both teams this year as I was last year (they played simultaneously at different fields) but when I sent out an email suggesting to the parents of my son’s team that someone should organize some special post-tournament party snacks and a coach appreciation gift no one responded. I did not want the little man to be disappointed, hence the brownies.

Friday afternoon was tennis lessons as usual. After my daughter’s two hour lesson, I bought her dinner at our club. No more than an hour later she came up to me and said she’d vomited. I felt her head for fever (none) and asked her if she felt better. She said she did so I thought perhaps it was just eating a heavy meal after a fairly strenuous lesson. Not so long after that, she said she was tired and unwell and wanted to go home. She fell into bed at 7pm and ended up waking up 2x more in the night to throw up.

She had no fever and no other symptoms of the flu so I knew it had to be either the food or a stomach virus of some sort and I was so upset for her – she’d been sick last year for the tournament as well. Her team this year had finished first in their league and had a good chance to do well in the tournament, but she is one of their pivotal players. I didn’t want to break her heart by not allowing her play, but neither did I want to make her sicker by letting her go.

She woke early the next morning and asserted that she was JUST FINE and she wanted to play. She still had no fever and her eyes looked clear (you can always tell by the eyes) though she did look a bit droopy. I decided to test her with a glass of water and a piece of toast. She ate it and asked for more so I decided to let her go for it and see what happened, though I did send a text message to her coach to warn him she wasn’t totally up to par.

My husband took my son to his first match at 8:30am. My daughter and I set out at 9am. Each of their teams won their first matches and each had to play again about noon. Each team won that match, advancing them to their league finals. My son’s match was at 2pm, my daughter’s at 4pm – which was great timing because it meant that finally we could all be there to watch each final.

My son is like the Energizer Bunny. He is an excellent mid-fielder – speedy and unafraid to put his body in there and take the ball. In spite of being tripped a few times and getting a kick to the arm (and a cleat-shaped bruise) he carried on and his team won the game and first place in their age division. It was truly a wonderful moment. In the beginning of the season I never dreamed they would get so far since they have four sweet but timid girls on their team who squeak every time the ball comes near them. Since they make up what passes for the team’s defense it is a real credit to the offense that they have done as well as they have this season!

Brownies were distributed, along with some juice boxes and granola bars, and the coach appreciation gift – a poinsettia and a $8 gift certificate to a local bagel shop. (Really? Is that they best they could do?) Since I wasn’t sure anyone was going to do ANYTHING so I had bought him a sports bag from my son and I am very glad I did!

(I collected money from the parents of my daughter’s team and gave the coach a Casio sport watch and a sports bag)

After collecting his medal and taking many pictures, we trooped back to the other field for my daughter’s final match. It was going to be a tough match but it helped to know that either way it went, they would get first or second place.

It was a very tough match. Shortly before the game started my daughter began to feel nauseated again. Coach left her out of the first quarter and then she played the last three. It was the best game she played all season. I don’t know if it was because she knew it was an important match or because she felt bad, she put forth that extra bit of effort but it was beautiful to watch her go. The other team played hard and the match ended 0-0 and went to penalty kicks, best of three.

We got our first, so did they. We missed our second, so did they. A hush fell as my daughter was up for her kick – she blasted it in and it caught in the net above the goalies head. Another hush as the other team took their last shot – and our goalie deflected it. VICTORY!

More medals (phew – two golds avoids any of that sibling rivalry too!), more pictures, then finally finally home at 5pm. The children were exhausted and so were we! I’m glad to have had such a great outcome for them both but the week is going to seem strangely quiet now that it’s all finished.

It’s a bit early, but I put up the Christmas tree yesterday at the children’s insistence. And by “put up” I mean assemble. Since we moved to the Middle East we’ve made do with an artificial tree. You can actually get a “live” Christmas tree here in Cairo, depending on your definition of live. You could buy a large potted Norfolk pine or another sort of vaguely pine tree shaped evergreen shrub, neither of which have branches strong enough to carry large ornaments (and potted are nearly too heavy to move later on!) or you could spend several hundred dollars and get a cut spruce imported from Lebanon which is likely quite dry when it arrives.

Our artificial tree cost me about $20 and we’ve used it for three years. It’s good enough for now.

The best part of having the tree up is looking at all of the ornaments we’ve accumulated every year. I’m not one of those super color / theme coordinated tree decorators. I pick up ornaments as I see them, wherever I see them. Some are from the grocery store, some were from bazaars, some were gifts. A few I have made over the years, like these:

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This one is roughly 3″x3″ and is a tiny quilt block called Secret Garden (a variation on Cathedral Window). It’s based on fabric folding rather than sewing so it’s a fun take-along project. This one was an “assignment” by a friend in a former quilt group. She later taught me to make Cathedral Window blocks and I have one row of what is intended to be a queen sized charm quilt for my daughter completed, oh, seven years later. I obviously need to take that one along more often!

This tiny stocking is filled with whole cloves and bits of cinnamon bark. I made them from fabric and batting scraps one year when I was participating in a craft sale at Christmas time and I wanted to have some smaller, impulse items to offer. I think they were the ONLY things that sold that year!

Looking at these ornaments has made me think that I really ought to make some salt dough and let the children make some ornaments over the school holiday. I think the same thing every year of course – but maybe this year I will actually do it!

The florists near my house are all awash in beautiful poinsettia as well and since all of my stragglers from previous years finally died while I was away this summer, I stopped on my way home from work at my favorite shop to pick up a couple more. I’m not sure why, but the guy who works there really likes me and the children. I only shop there half a dozen times a year but I walk past several times a week on my way other places and he often runs after me and hands me a flower. I indicated some poinsettia that were displayed on the sidewalk and the florist guy shook his head at me and said “no good” and gestured at me to follow him.

He took me around the building to a lean-to covered with a tarp and showed me yet more poinsettia and said they were better. They looked much the same to me and the price was the same so I said okay. It was only when I got home did I realize the difference. They are HUGE! I had intended to put one in the dining room but had to change that plan once I removed the first plant from it’s plastic sleeve.

I bought three of these monsters, all of which are now sitting floor level in our living room. They are gorgeous. I will have to go back and get some minis for the dining room. Or maybe that was his evil plan all along…

We noticed a rather mysterious sign painted on a brick wall last weekend. What on earth do you think it means?

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The wall surrounds what is now a vacant lot filled with rubble. Might it have once been a church? Or a religious school? This sign was painted on two columns of the wall and no others.

This section of the street is very dark at night and there are often teenagers parked there socializing (when the ubiquitous trash pile on the corner permits) so I admit that I had some rather impure thoughts when I noticed this sign. Even if there was once a church in this location, wouldn’t the fact that there was a church be enough of a hint without such a sign, assuming that she is indeed praying?

Having taken a long weekend for the Eid holiday, most of the schools in Egypt (Cairo only? It’s unclear to me) have been forced to remain closed for an extra week – again, supposedly due to worries about travelers returning from the Haj in Saudi Arabia with H1N1. The foreign schools were all saying no way, we’re opening – and then sent around an email at the very last second saying sorry, closed til the 6th.

I have heard further rumors that the government might force the schools to remain closed until February, possibly longer and then just run school through the summer instead. If I knew for sure that was true, I’d go home now for Christmas and start my children in public school in the US in January. NO WAY I’m letting them miss that much time or staying through the summer.

As for now, our school has slipped through the cracks and is due to reopen today as scheduled. All we have to do is keep our heads down and get through until the 10th, when we break for nearly a month anyway. Fingers crossed.

The American school where I substitute in the library is closed, but ironically I have to work anyway. Though I’d love a few days on my own, there is an upside: it’s the weight loss plan that pays you to lose weight. I’ve lost nearly ten pounds of my summer flab, nearly five of it in the last week.

Just in time to make Christmas cookies