Jenyfer Matthews

A year ago today I was putting my children on the bus to school in Cairo. It was a national holiday, Police Day, so most other people had the day off. Even taking that into account, the streets were exceptionally quiet and the bus driver and monitor quite jumpy. They obviously knew more about the situation than I did.

A year ago today, my life began to change course tremendously. If anyone had told me that the scheduled protest that occurred that day and continued into the weekend would topple the president of Egypt and that a year later I’d be living in Michigan waging war on mice (rats!), I’d have thought they were nuts. And yet, here I am.

A friend asked me the other day if it felt like longer than a year, or shorter. It feels like both. It is all so vivid in my mind that it might have happened last week. Yet, this last year was so filled with anxiety and stress and genuine grief over what was happening and how things were changing that how could it not feel longer? It was exhausting and sad. I never dreamed that when we left on that evacuation flight, the children and I wouldn’t be going back – that the walk I took on my last morning in our neighborhood would be the last time I’d see it.

The last views of my street:

Barricades still up so the self-appointed checkpoint groups could see who wanted access to the street.

The intersection I crossed nearly every day with the children on our way to tennis lessons, as quiet as I’ve ever seen it.

An Army commando on guard, a half barrel across the street for a fire at night.

Knowing what we know now about how the army has behaved in Egypt, his presence on the street conveys a different feeling.

A different friend of mine, this one half Egyptian, recently told me that though I’d lived in Egypt, I didn’t really know it because I didn’t get out much. She said it in passing, in a casual way not meant to offend, but I have to say the comment stung. I never claimed to be an expert on the place and no, I didn’t leave our immediate neighborhood much on a day to day basis. I’ll bet I could say the same to her about where she now lives in Maryland. However, when I was working my way through the archives of this blog to back up my more interesting posts, there are many, many posts about the various places I visited. When I read through them now, I see someone who was interested in the country and curious about the culture (though I might not have always interpreted things correctly). I think that should count for something.

When my husband was offered his job in Egypt, I wasn’t pleased to go. In the end, I didn’t want to leave. Egypt is the kind of place that gets under your skin.

So, though I am now busy making a life for our family in Michigan, I’m still watching the events in Egypt with interest – and missing the life we had there and the people to whom I never had the opportunity to say a proper goodbye.

You saw part of the mountain of boxes I have to sort through on the Wednesday post. It is not only the sheer volume of stuff that makes this challenging, but the way the boxes are labeled.

I deny having every sewed any of my quilt patrons!

It’s a good thing I’m fluent in pigeon English! I do believe this includes “purses”.

And this box contains and African DRUM.

I admit – this one had me stumped.

Apparently “KW” means kitchen ware and “flavors” referred to spices!

I think they could have been more accurate in this label…

They could have labeled it “ducks”!

Then there were things that I bought in Egypt and they were very specific and confident in how to label! This is a small padded bench / seat I bought that is fashioned in the manner of a camel saddle.

I was really hoping that this label didn’t mean what I thought it meant.

And yet it did… sigh. I could have lived without seeing all those shopping bags again! (Or the bag of dead tennis balls or the half a dozen flat soccer balls they packed)

Really, I have to find humor in this situation or I’d cry. So much that should have been purged was shipped. And apparently there was one weak link on the packing team who had an aversion to using any sort of packing paper to cushion things. I have found boxes where there is a jumble of things tossed into it, one of which contained my cast iron skillet on top of the rest. A mirror I quite liked was packed in a box of toys for some reason, wrapped in my son’s fleece blanket. It broke. I am putting any associated bad luck on whoever packed it. And why did they box up empty suitcases? Could they not have used them for quilt fabric or clothes??

While I am busy unpacking household things, I left the books to my husband. It may not sound like much, but just take a look at this.

Having hefted the boxes of books into his cave for him to unpack, I am dropping some not so subtle hints that he needs to think about weeding his collection…

My husband and I have moved eight times in our married life – some of those moves longer distances than others – and this last move from Egypt to Michigan was the first time he had to do all the coordinating himself.

It was extremely difficult for me to not be in control. I gave some thought to going back to Egypt to handle it myself but it didn’t make sense logistically or financially. Would I bring the children back with me? If so, then we would have to pay 3x international airfare (ouch!) and they would miss the start of the school year. Did I go alone? Though I had a very kind offer from a friend in Ohio, I wasn’t totally comfortable leaving the children for as long as it would take me to do the packing, mostly because of the distance we’d be separated. There was no way around it: I had to leave it to my husband and the movers to do the job.

It was a trickier job than you might think.

When we initially moved to Egypt from the United Arab Emirates, we had to create an inventory list of our belongings in order to get duty-free status on our shipment. Doesn’t sound like such a big deal until you read the fine print: it was recommended we list things like rare books, CDs, and DVDs by title and all electronics by serial number. Not only that, but we had to promise to take anything listed on our inventory list back out of Egypt when we left – even broken appliances, old computers, and VHS tapes of The Wiggles, which my children have long outgrown.

That’s not to say that we couldn’t have purged a decent amount – anything that was purchased in Egypt could be left there. I used my toaster oven quite frequently, but given the fact that toaster ovens are pretty easy to come by and the one I had in Cairo was 220v, there was certainly no reason to pack it up and ship it to the US. Same goes for the vacuum cleaner that they did ship. The children have grown quite a bit in a year and most of the shoes and clothes we left behind don’t fit anymore so all of that stuff could have gone.

My husband sold our TV and a few other things, but if I had been there on the spot, I could have had a sale and purged or donated so much more. I could have cleaned things before they were packed so I didn’t have to unroll a large carpet and find it filled with crumbs! Or a water bottle at the bottom of a tennis bag that actually still had some water in it and was leaking. I could have packed things more sensibly. But I wasn’t there and anything that we saved on airfare by my not going, we probably spent on shipping stuff that could have been ditched.

For instance, it was difficult for my husband to get parts for his mountain bike in Cairo so he would bring things like tires and gears back in the summertime. He replaced his tires and tubes one year, but kept the old tires just in case. My husband didn’t purge them in time so the movers packed them up and shipped them. They also shipped half a dozen punctured soccer balls and a step-ladder that belonged to the furnished apartment we lived in. Oops! And that’s only what I’ve found so far.

Those things I can kind of understand – I mean, they don’t want to judge what is and isn’t important to someone – but they also shipped an empty shoebox. Really???

Had I been there, I could also have supervised the packing and made sure it was done efficiently. I found a framed piece of papyrus which wasn’t wrapped at all – sandwiched between two lovely hand-embroidered pictures. Amazingly the glass did not break, but if it had, it would have shredded the papyrus and the embroidery.

The shipment is charged by weight but also by volume. There was no reason for dresser drawers, though heavy, to travel empty. Surely they could have bagged up some stuffed animals or pillows to fill them with and saved us a couple of boxes and that much space. Sigh.

Over the years, people kept telling us it was the items we put storage before we went abroad in 1999 that we would end up throwing away. Ironically, I think there is much more trash in this shipment. After all, I purged and packed all the stuff that ended up in storage!

Oh well, I suppose in the long run it is better that the movers erred on the side of shipping too much rather than making decisions to get rid of things that we might have really missed. It is going to take a long time to sort through all this stuff and find the things I really want among all the junk, however. I’ve already put a bag of outgrown, worn out childrens tennis shoes to the curb along with the bike tires. I can only imagine how much more garbage / donations will be generated. Not sure the Egyptian light bulbs that came over will work here and I know the night lights won’t!

I also see a garage sale and some more furniture projects in my future…

I’ve gone on quite a bit (translate that to whined) about what a stressful year this has been. I can’t deny it has been stressful, but I also have many things for which to be grateful:

I’m grateful that one of my best friends works for the US State Department and that she called me at home in Egypt and helped me make the decision to evacuate Cairo in February at a time when I was so stressed out that it was difficult for me to make any decisions at all;

I’m grateful that my sister and her family were able to make room for us in their home and put us up for nearly a month while we tried to decide what to do next – a month which gave me a rare and wonderful opportunity to get to know my two teenage nieces much better;

I’m grateful that I had a long-lost high school friend who had a big enough house and generous enough heart to insist that my children and I come to stay with her for as long as we needed – even though she and I hadn’t seen each other in twenty years;

I’m grateful that I found a gem of a used car when I really needed one and that my brain wasn’t too fried by stress and anxiety to learn to drive a stick-shift at my advanced age (I can admit it now – it’s kind of fun!);

I’m grateful that my father and step-mother were able to give my children and I a place to stay over the summer – and a bit of normalcy that the children’s lives were distinctly lacking this year;

I’m grateful that just when I was on the verge of buying tickets to go back to Egypt at the end of the summer, my husband was offered a wonderful job in a lovely, stable and safe Midwest community – which seems like almost a miracle in such a fragile economy;

(Just think – my family and I could be in Cairo right now, going through revolution part II)

I’m grateful for my two incredibly resilient children and for the fact that the pieces of our lives are finally falling back into place in a pleasant arrangement.

I’m especially grateful that I am not in Cairo right now. This latest uprising is not a surprise to me – how could it not happen? Ousting President Mubarak was mostly symbolic – who did they think was propping him up? And could anyone have really thought that the military would quietly go away or obediently heel to a new master? It isn’t always a happy thing to be right however.

It makes me sick at heart to think about the friends who stayed in Cairo and what will become of Egypt, whether the elections occur or not.

I prefer to remember Tahir Square and the surrounding area as it was one Friday morning when I took a walking tour with several others from the university. I hope someday soon it can be this way again…

Wherever you are and whatever you are doing for Thanksgiving, I hope you have many blessings to count.

Here it is, already November and nearly the end of the first marking period for the children’s schools.

My little man seems to be settled in nicely. He’s been happy and comfortable pretty much since day one actually. In the past he’s always given me a hard time about going to school and has had frequent, vague “stomach aches” in the mornings. Those are a thing of the past. He still enjoys the weekends more, mostly because he has a couple of school buddies who live in our neighborhood and a patch of woods off the back of the house to explore. What more could a nine-year-old boy ask for?

My daughter has had a rougher transition. For one thing, she started sixth grade: the dreaded middle school. Not only did she have to learn to use a combination locker (I still have nightmares about forgetting my combination!) but she had to figure out her schedule and switching classrooms / teachers. That made her nervous but at least that change in system was new to every sixth grader. The transition has actually been much harder socially.

Sixth grade is a rough year and can be a nasty age. Whether they acknowledge it or not, everyone is so insecure about themselves and their position in the social pecking order that they will do just about anything to anyone to make themselves feel more powerful and “seem cool”. Not a fun age at all. You couldn’t pay me to go back to sixth grade.

My daughter is new to public schools and is a real marshmallow inside. She’s also used to being fairly popular and is having a tough time figuring out how to fit into this new, much larger school with its unfamiliar social currents. She’s a girl who is a superb athlete and has a tom-boy’s fashion sense which sets her way apart from the majority of the girls in her school (according to her anyway). She’s starting to grow her hair out and is demanding braces.

But more pressing, she’s not fluent in US-speak.

She came home very down one afternoon this week, feeling stupid because there are so many things she doesn’t know. Like what a 7-11 is – or a “slushie.” Someone offered her a “pixie stick” and they were astonished when she asked what it was. It is all so minor that I find it kind of amusing, but she. does. not.

I tried to comfort her by pointing out that none of her classmates knew how to call someone a donkey in Arabic, had taken a school field trip that required a flight and a passport, had gone snorkeling in the Red Sea, or had been inside a pyramid. She smiled when I reminded her of all the things that she had already experienced in her short life and also pointed out that all of this is relative – none of this will matter in a few years.

But it’s tough when all you want is to blend into the crowd and you stand out so much.

Also funny for me to think that she did pretty much blend into the crowd in Cairo because her school required uniforms and her friends were doing all the things she was doing and more… and on that thought I guess it isn’t surprising that the girls on her soccer team who she liked best are the ones whose parents are immigrants…

It’s been a busy week, what with upacking and sorting the bits and pieces of my life.

I started by looking through the many boxes labeled “Memorabilia” from our time capsule so I could get them out of the way before our air shipment from Cairo arrived. That was amusing.

Yes, I used to care enough about wearing makeup that I had a mirror which I could set to “daytime” and “evening” lighting. I also found a cordless curling iron and two unopened BUTANE canisters for it! 1) I don’t remember owning or using such an item (though I did have a corded curling iron I used every day); 2) storing the butane canisters was a very bad idea and I’m lucky that they didn’t combust at some point; 3) a butane curling iron seems like a very bad idea – just add hair spray and POOF!

I also found this. What is it though??

I took pottery lessons way back when and according to the stamp on the bottom, I made it. I was looking at it, wondering if I had planned to display a marble at some point, and in the process of writing this post I remembered: I made it to replace the base of a glass salt shaker that had been knocked over and broken by a cat. Since it is loose and I ran across the loose shaker top, I suppose it didn’t fit!

Our air shipment arrived this week, bright and early Tuesday morning. Fourteen boxes in all, most of which looked as if they’d been run over by a truck before being delivered. It’s amazing that none of our glassware broke, but I am still glad that the box mislabeled “sewing machine” wasn’t actually my Bernina. It was my jewelry box!

Since I was not in Cairo to (micro)manage what got packed and shipped, there were some things that showed up by air that could have come a slower method – or not at all!

Hmmm… I am guessing that I was planning to make A LOT of Christmas cookies at some point. I usually bought the sugar and brought it back because you could not find it in Cairo – unless you had a friend that worked at the Embassy. I guess I better get busy this year. I am now in possession of TWO cookie guns too so no more excuses!

Apparently I also planned to make a lot of muffins! Actually, I used to stockpile these – you couldn’t always find decent muffin papers in Cairo so when I did, I snapped them up. With what I’ve bought since I’ve been in our new house I could probably make muffins and cupcakes for a couple of years and not run out!

(Note to self: make cupcakes for soccer game tomorrow!)

What surprised me most about seeing all these things is how sad it all made me. I’m glad to have my things in one place, but my – how time marches on. One group of items is from a life I put on “hold” while I went abroad. In the time we were away my husband’s mother, uncle, and grandmother died, as did my own mother and grandmother. So many memories of them surfaced as I found old letters, photos, and objects that reminded me of them. The arrival of our air shipment contains the items of a life cut-short. We never planned to stay in Egypt forever, but we never had a chance to say a proper goodbye to Egypt and all of the people who we saw on a day to day basis either.

The only thing I can try to do now is weave the strands of my lives together and hope that the new pattern is pleasing and strong…

I never did get back to the blog on Friday because I was having way too much fun opening boxes and remembering all the wonderful things that we put in our storage unit way back in June of 1999.

When the movers called to tell me when they were scheduled to arrive, first thing Friday morning, I was a bit miffed because their timing meant that I was going to have to skip my usual Friday garage sale cruise. It ended up not mattering though because not only was it a cold and drippy day, not the best garage sale weather, but I pretty much had my dream garage sale delivered to my door!

(Click any image to enlarge)

Here they come! So exciting

The friend who supervised the movers while they were loading the truck told me that other than dust, things looked to be in good shape. She was right – about both things. It’s a big job ahead of us to clean everything before putting it away, but what fun to look at each and every item!

Many many times over the years people suggested to us that we were insane to continue paying $$$ to keep that storage unit. I wavered a few times but held firm: yes, it was true that there were things packed away that we would not want / need again but a lot of the stuff was worth keeping. We can probably afford to recycle the assorted glass condiment jars that we once kept spices in, but just look at those brown Ovaltine jars on the shelf. Those are practically antiques by now, LOL.

I love these chairs, from my husband’s grandparents (there is a fourth chair, not yet unloaded as of this picture) These are much better than the plastic lawn furniture we were making-do with. Add the oak kitchen table that I refinished myself and we have a very nice solid wood set for “free”.

This lamp belonged to my grandparents and it is my favorite floor lamp ever. Can’t wait to polish the crystal on the post.

This chair was one of the “casualties” – it did not age well. The upholstery is at least 3 shades darker than it was originally and the stuffing no longer gives. It needs to be totally redone. However, it wasn’t in such hot shape when we put it into storage so it isn’t a huge surprise to me. Given the expense and general poor quality of “new” furniture, I do think this chair is worth re-doing. My husband and I bought this chair for $15 at a garage sale in about 1997 because it had good bones. That much is still true. I’m thinking of having it reupholstered in leather. What do you think? More expensive initially but it would certainly last a long time!

Even my linens survived – they all smell of cedar from the wood blocks I put in everything but that is better than the alternative. Pictures of quilts coming Wednesday…

Zen isn’t cutting it right now. I’m feeling downright sorry for myself.

I’ve washed windows, walls, baseboards, mini-blinds, vent covers, and scrubbed showers with Tilex and Magic Erasers, all in preparation for my things to arrive. I had hoped to have at least some things arrive by the end of this month. Seems like maybe I had more time to get the cleaning done that I thought I did.

When we moved from the United Arab Emirates to Cairo, I split our shipment so that some things would arrive by air and other, heavier, less-pressing items would come by sea. I told my husband to do the same this time. He said he told the movers but somehow the message was lost because when I woke up Tuesday morning he’d written to tell me that the reason the quote they gave us was so reasonable was because it was ALL scheduled to travel by sea.

Not. Acceptable.

I was whining about this to a friend of mine who pointed out to me how lucky we’ve been through this whole process overall. I know we have been extremely lucky – finding a job in such a tough economy and getting all the rest of the logistics sorted out so efficiently has been nothing short of a miracle. However, knowing that doesn’t really help in this moment. I have been living adrift for NINE MONTHS. I’m tired of making do and improvising. I want to have my own stuff, in my own place, and start doing my own thing again ASAP. Having our things shipped by sea will delay that possibility by at least another two months.

Yes, I could buy more towels and sheets and dishes and utensils, but what a waste of money – I have all these things coming to me from two different sources, dammit. It’s just getting it all here that is the problem.

In the end, I basically threw a tantrum by email. Though they are many hours ahead of EST, the movers were still in our place and my husband was able to divert most of our kitchen things by air freight along with as many of my quilts as he could find (they had already been packed). He tossed some of my sweaters in his suitcase and called it good. I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with that for now.

I am still working on getting our US time capsule shipped to us as well. At this point, any of my stuff will do…

If you thought that I must have too much to occupy me here in Michigan to fret about what is going on with my stuff in Cairo, you’d be wrong.

Normally when we move, I sort things in to keep, sell, and purge. I have a house sale and lighten our load as much as possible before starting to pack. I know what things are easy to replace and what things are sentimental and precious. I know what clothes the kids will get more wear out of and which can be donated.

My husband is a very capable guy, but he has never been left in charge of one of our moves before. He’s never gone through the process of purging and sorting for packing and doesn’t know off the top of his head what things stay and what things go. I created a pretty exhaustive list from my memory of what items are stowed in which cupboards, nooks, and crannies but we’ve still been exchanging frequent one line emails with admonitions to “don’t forget!” and questions about this or that. He’s sold a few of our bigger items, but hasn’t had the time for a proper sale.

There is however another complication.

When we were preparing to move to Egypt, we were told that we needed to create an inventory of all of our things for customs purposes. Basically, the university supplies a letter of guarantee to the government that all of our possessions are personal and therefore tax exempt. The catch? We are supposed to take everything we arrived with back out again.

That doesn’t sound so very bad until you get into the nitty gritty of it. We were told for instance that with things like DVDs, CDs, and expensive or “special” books we needed to list them by title – this was also to protect us from sticky fingered inspectors. Have you got any idea how many books two avid readers and writers can collect?? Because of this stupid rule, we are going to be exporting a set of Wiggles VHS tapes that my children outgrew almost immediately after our arrival in Cairo five years ago!

The books and DVDs I can live with, but how this rule applies to electronics bugs me. Before Egypt we’d lived in the United Arab Emirates for six years. Both countries use 220v electricity and electronics are way cheaper in the UAE than in Egypt so we brought many items we already had along with us when we moved. However, since these items appear on our inventory, now we also have to take them out again – whether they work or not. Even if they do still work, they won’t be much good to me here in the US where the current is 110v. Using them with a converter is an option I suppose but I suspect they will end up being donated to someplace like this for children to tinker with.

Whatever – not much I can do about it now.

In short, I told my husband when in doubt, pack it. I’ll sort it out when it gets here…

It seems impossible to think that I left Egypt five months ago. I had no idea of what to expect when we left – of how long we’d be gone or if we’d even be able to go back but what I wasn’t expected was five months of wait-and-see.

Our decision for me to stay in the US with the children wasn’t an easy one, but I’d like to think it was the most sensible thing we could do under the circumstances. I am more willing to take chances with my own safety (which I proved when I had my picture taken with a tank (what was I thinking??)) but we weren’t willing to do the same with our children.

There really are no words to describe how utterly fantastic the children have been through this whole period. They left Egypt with us believing us when we told them it was going to be a short trip, an unscheduled vacation of sorts. We struggled through homeschooling for a month before we came to Ohio to stay with my high school friend, then they had to settle in to a new school here.

Adapt to a new school might be a better description because it was not simply a matter of not knowing their way around the building and having to make new friends. They went to a British curriculum school in Egypt. Here in Ohio they not only had to learn a new American curriculum but a whole new set of teacher expectations.

I wouldn’t say it was an easy process for them to find their way, but they certainly made it look easy. After initially struggling a bit, particularly in math, my daughter brought home an honor roll certificate on her last day of school. I am particularly proud of the “B” she earned in math. It was hard won, and if she’d have had another couple of weeks of school it might have even been the “A” she was striving for.

Both children were teary when I picked them up in the afternoon – simultaneously wishing to return to Egypt to see the friends they left behind and also wishing they could turn back the clock here so they could have a bit more time with their new friends. My own heart ached for them both from a mother’s perspective and from my own – I know all to well that feeling of being torn between places and friends and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

With our summer vacation, life just may begin to feel a bit more normal. We’ll spend the next few months doing our usual Minnesota north-woods summer thing. After that? Things are still a bit up in the air, but if nothing else I am confident that my children will land on their feet.

They are even more agile than I am