Jenyfer Matthews

It only rains in Cairo a few times a year, mostly in the winter months. I knew that when I washed my (many) windows, I’d likely have to do it again soon because we are coming to the khamseen season (sandstorms) I did not however expect it to rain two days later. I really should have expected it though because really, isn’t it always the way? I remember when I was younger it always seemed like the best way to invite rain was to wash your car. Rain in Cairo is not cleansing in the least. It never really rains hard enough to wash away the accumulated dust – it only drips enough to carry the dust in the air and on the trees to the objects below. The worst place to stand when it rains is under a tree! Get caught in the rain here and you’ll need a shower when you get home. Having said all that, imagine the dirty drop marks on my once clean windows…

It dripped on and off all day long yesterday, and then late in the day it started to look very dark and gloomy. Lightening started to flash and then suddenly it started to rain really loudly. Hail!

The hail was pea-sized, not that impressive in general hail terms, but mighty impressive in Cairo-terms!

Even as I rushed around to turn off all the computers because of the lightening, I grabbed my camera to take a few pictures (my daughter was not happy with me for opening the door at such a time!)

If snow in Texas and hail in Cairo doesn’t point to changes in the climate, I don’t know what does…

So another interest of mine is in making pottery. I first took pottery lessons about 12 years ago and fell in love with the process. Unfortunately, it’s not such an easy hobby to take-along and so I haven’t been able work with clay since we moved abroad – until last spring when I discovered that one of the other tennis moms not only had her own equipment but also offered lessons.

So here I am, months later, getting ready to glaze my first crop of pots, and I had the great idea to add a bit of texture and shine by using bits of broken glass – specifically, the green glass of a Cockburn’s port bottle. It is a good idea and I do believe that the end result will look fabulous. The problem? Actually breaking the glass.

Because it’s not enough to just break the bottle – most of it has to be reduced to powder. I did a google search to figure out how best to accomplish this and found one site that suggested that heating glass to red hot and then plunging it in cold water would do the trick – the glass would shatter cleanly and then it was just a matter of pounding it to dust with a mortar and pestle. Easy peasy.

Forgive me, but I have my reservations. I am fully aware of how easily some glass will break when it is exposed to rapid changes in temperature, having once had a glass pitcher explode all over my kitchen while I was in the process of making iced tea. I am, however, somewhat reluctant to repeat such an experiment without safety glasses and perhaps a lead apron. Also, I think I would prefer to use non-cooking pots and instruments for the grinding process to minimize any food contamination and subsequent deaths in the pursuit of my artistic vision.

I haven’t totally formulated my plan but I’m thinking pretty low tech, perhaps involving multiple layers of plastic bags and a hammer. We’ll see what we get (besides multiple lacerations).

I’ve mentioned before that the children’s tennis coach likes to motivate and reward the children he teaches with prizes from time to time. The rewards vary widely (remember the leopard slippers?) Sometimes he might give them a few pieces of candy and other times he might come up with something high end, like a tennis bag.

Last week my son won all the matches in his group and he got what looked like a stuffed monkey as a prize. Little did I know it wasn’t just any stuffed monkey. He dances too.

I love this monkey so much I got out my tripod and figured out how to take videos with my new camera – I even registered at YouTube to share this with you. It’s amusing and absurd at the same time – I only regret that Queen isn’t being paid royalties every time I press the button on his arm. But really – overalls? Given the song lyrics, shouldn’t the monkey really be wearing a leather jacket at the very least?

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.

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:

(click image to enlarge)

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 do!

People often ask me what it’s like to celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas abroad. We manage just fine, I think. I suppose it really boils down to what your expectations of the day are more than anything else.

When we lived in the United Arab Emirates, the weekend was Thursday / Friday so Thanksgiving was never an issue – we always had the day off! The weekend in Egypt however is Friday / Saturday so there have been times when the children actually had to go to school on Thanksgiving. As it happens, this year Thanksgiving coincides with a Muslim holiday so EVERYONE in Egypt has a long weekend.

As my husband and children are vegetarian, we don’t cook a turkey, though they are available. I saw some giant frozen Butterball turkeys at the store the other day. Just thinking how much fossil fuel energy that turkey must have consumed to travel to all the way to Cairo is staggering, frankly. And I wouldn’t want to think about how many times it might have thawed just a bit on the way! But if you are really into your turkey, it is still probably worth the money. A neighbor of mine bought a local turkey one year and in the end was very disappointed. Turns out, the shop had sold her a rooster! They compensated her by giving her a Butterball after the fact, but that didn’t make up for the fact that they ruined her holiday meal.

On a normal day, I’m a one-pot meal kind of cook. On Thanksgiving, I go all out (for me, anyway!). I make a pumpkin pie, stuffing, mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy, cranberry sauce, a veggie (this year, steamed broccoli), and a lieu of a turkey we have lentil loaf. It’s a meal we all enjoy and since we only make it on the holidays, it’s all the more special.

There’s no Macy’s Day parade or football to watch, but the children don’t mind because Thanksgiving is when I finally lift the ban on watching Christmas movies

Whatever your plans for the holiday, I hope you have a great weekend.

The grocery store where I do the majority of my shopping is sort of controversial in my neighborhood. They carry a lot of imported items – at the expected mark-up – and have a reputation for being thieves. I buy a mix of local and imported and am willing to pay for the convenience of shopping there than elsewhere. Truly, I’ve done the comparison shopping and they aren’t so much more expensive than other shops are AND I can walk there. I just watch the cashier closely

They put up this sign in the last year, but I have yet to hear of anyone actually “getting lucky” in the mystery sale – in any sense of that phrase, ha ha! Until recently I’d been doing most of my shopping in the early mornings, but I’ve recently shifted to Saturday afternoons. Still no luck. I’m beginning to think that it’s (gasp!) all a big hoax!! I may have to do some sort of expose and call them on it. Maybe I’ll get 25% off my bill just to keep me quiet…

It’s that time of year again – November, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a time when a largish group of people decide that THIS will be the month that they write the novel that’s been lurking in their heads.

From the NaNoWriMo website:
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

It’s not a bad idea really, setting aside a specified amount of time and demanding a specific output. Quality aside, at least you have something to show for your effort at the end of the month. You can’t revise and edit a blank page after all.

I’m not participating in NaNoWriMo. Every year I find myself kind of seduced by the challenge, but wisely back away. Why set myself up to fail so spectacularly? I am the sort of writer who is lucky to write 50K words in a year, not a month. I feel bad enough when I fail to meet my own modestly set word count goals on a day to day basis.

Part of my problem is discipline – you can’t write if you aren’t sitting down and doing it. Yes, I’m busy. Everyone is busy. Other writers make time. What’s the difference between them and me? Who knows. But at least some of them have contracts to fulfill and deadlines to meet. It’s amazing what those things can do for your discipline. Being accountable only to myself isn’t really much of a stick. What’s the rush? The story is in my head – I pretty much know what is going to happen next. And if I don’t, then what’s the point in sitting down to write? My writing process is often like waiting on the next installment in a serial story. It comes in waves, with lulls in between.

I think that writing 50K words in one gush like that might work better with stories that are heavier on plot. First this happens, then that happens, then watch out! Big climax. Phew – we made it. Most of my stories are very character driven and even though I start out with a premise, the characters tend to reveal themselves as I go along – things happen that I didn’t really plan. I have *tried* to turn off the internal editor and get on with things, to speed things up, usually to no avail. I simply can’t move forward in the story until I feel like the emotional tone of the story up to the point I’ve written is what I mean for it to be. I might only go back and add one sentence or change one word in a scene, but for me that one sentence or word will make all the difference. If I don’t add it when it pops into my head, I will likely forget. (Though from time to time I have an idea of something to add / fix, only to discover I’ve already added it!)

It might take me months longer to finish a story, but on the other hand my first drafts tend to be very clean and require minimal editing. In the grand scheme it’s six of one, half-a-dozen of the other. The important thing is just to keep writing until The End.

Last night was the Halloween fair at the children’s school, the last big costume event for the season I hope! It had been unusually cloudy all day and even sprinkled a few times. The sky looked very ominous by late afternoon and I was sure we were all going to be drenched at the fair.

(Click image to enlarge)

In fact it didn’t rain – or if it did, it never reached the ground – and we had a good time at the fair. The children played games and collected their “spooky prize” at the end. My daughter got a jumping rubber bat, but was upset she didn’t get trick chewing gum like her brother. My son kindly traded with her. He got the better end of the deal though since the bat is still jumping but the trick gum has already broken.

When my daughter brought it to me for repair I got a good look at the label:

Not sure which is worse, the outside of the package or the inner warning label:



Don’t joke the sickman indeed. The translator for this was the sick one. I love the image of the tiny lips along with “no entrance”. I am fairly surprised the party organizers didn’t notice the label before distributing it to small children however. The children haven’t caught on but not all parents have a sick sense of humor like mine!

The gum is proving difficult to repair so I may just quietly dispose of it…

As a mother and an adult, there are few things that will push my buttons more effectively than a back-talking child. I’m not sure why exactly, because I myself am something of a smart-ass, but there is it. A quirk of human nature, do as I say not as I do. My own children seldom get away with it, but unfortunately I don’t have as much sway over other people’s children.

What I wonder is, why does anyone let a child get away with it? When I see the other children who participate in the tennis groups with my own children arguing with or talking back to the coach, it drives me crazy. Not only because it is generally disruptive to the atmosphere of the class but also because the mothers of these children are usually sitting there observing and not saying a word. Sometimes they are even smiling benevolently.

When I mentioned this phenomenon to an American acquaintance of mine, he sort of laughed and said that I was just used to the British system (since my children go to a British curriculum school). I was astonished by that comment – or was it an excuse? Why on earth would that have anything to do with anything? Does that imply that Americans expect and encourage bad behavior from children? That in trying to teach our children to be independent thinkers we are also encouraging them to be rude? I’m trying to raise my children to be independent thinkers AND good citizens. It’s not always an easy task, but I’m not super impressed with the sort of children that having lower standards produces.

I have been labeled a strict mother by more than one person, but I have also had glowing reports of my children’s behavior from both their schools and other parents when they go for a play date (home behavior is another story entirely) I guess if believing that my children are not my equal and that sometimes I do know better than they do and that exerting my authority over them when necessary makes me strict, so be it. At least I can send them out in the world and be (mostly) confident that they will behave themselves.