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.

We had bitter temperatures (to me anyway!) and snow late last week and over the weekend but this morning I woke up to thunder, lightening, and rain. It’s supposed to get up around 40F today, then in a couple of days the temperature will drop again and there will be more snow.

While I suppose I am glad we haven’t had any truly bad, record-breaking, storm-of-the-century blizzards or ice storms (yet) this year, this weather is kind of getting on my nerves.

I grew up in Louisiana and the winters there are fairly mild overall. There were some cold days – and cold down there might only mean 30sF but also humid and raw, the kind of cold that really gets into your bones. But the biggest annoyance was the constant temperature fluctuations. You just never knew what you were going to get from day to day. One day it would be 30F and frost and the next 70F and breezy. You’d get all excited about wearing a new sweater and then it might be shelved for a week or two – or until next winter – when the weather turned warm on you. I can remember being keenly disappointed one Christmas because it was clear blue skies and sunny. It just seemed so wrong.

It was much the same in the Middle East. Winter in Cairo mostly meant 60F/40F, with a handful of rainy days thrown in. Sitting outside in the evenings watching tennis lessons was no joy, but for the most part winter was short-lived and not a big deal. I used to get excited when it rained in winter because it gave me that “winter” feeling – which I supposed harkened back to those Louisiana days.

I expected Michigan to be different. I expected to have clearly defined seasons and that once it got cold it would just be cold, end of story. I didn’t expect this yo-yo-ing temperature – or that it would make so much difference to me if it was 15F or 40F. I think I’m going native because at 40F I feel overdressed wearing a coat.

I suppose that I’m tempting fate by complaining about a mild winter so maybe I ought to shut up now.

The children seem to be on the mend. Both had confirmed cases of strep throat and I took my son back to the doctor this weekend for a cough – turns out that he has a nasty head cold on top of the strep. Regardless, they are going back to school tomorrow. I’ve been rather blah myself the last few days. I haven’t felt sick precisely, just low energy. I took a few days off from the boxes while everyone was home but am hoping to make another big push at it this week. I’ve probably gone through about 2/3 at this point. It’s funny because everyone said that it would be the stuff from our storage unit that we’d want to sell / purge. So far it’s mostly the stuff coming from Cairo!

Right now it’s 8am and still dark outside. I think I’ll curl up next to my fake woodstove and read for a while before I get started…

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…

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

Before we left Cairo, our neighbors asked if it was okay for other university faculty who lived in apartments in more outlying areas to stay in our place in the event that things turned even uglier and they felt unsafe or isolated (or both). We agreed – but we also moved our nicer carpets, my quilts, and the contents of our liquor cabinet (it isn’t a house party after all) into the master bedroom and locked that door. That left three other bedrooms, the rest of the house, and contents of the kitchen at their disposal, as well as our TV and large DVD collection.

As it turned out, no one stayed in our apartment. However, when my husband returned to Cairo on Wednesday night and opened the master bedroom, he discovered that one of the windows in that room had blown open while we were away. Cairo is dusty on a normal day with the windows shut, and there had been a sand storm in our absence. I don’t really want to think about the mess that the open window let in. The rest of the apartment was nice and tidy though because a neighbor in the building sent over her housekeeper to clean in preparation for my husband’s arrival – the housekeeper that I fired at the beginning of January. I’m grateful she didn’t hold a grudge, and also embarrassed. You’re not quite good enough to clean for me, but you’re just dandy in a pinch?

Just to make things all the more awkward, my husband will likely end up hiring her back while I am away because while he cooks and does laundry, he certainly isn’t going to do the floors, dusting, or bathrooms himself. Having her help is great for him of course, but then what? I show back up at some point and fire her again like the wicked witch?? Going to put that out of my head for now think about it later…

My husband is going back to Egypt today.

In spite of our neighborbors’ assurances that things are “fine”, I’m fairly certain “fine” is entirely relative. The grocery stores are apparently as well stocked as they ever are and schools are beginning to re-open, but there is still a curfew in effect, there are still army tanks guarding the perimeter of our suburb, and apparently the banks and ATMs are not functioning as usual. What good does it do you to have a well stocked grocery store if you can’t get the cash to pay for anything?

My husband isn’t thrilled about going back just now, but he’s forced to go back for the sake of his job and our collective income. The children and I are staying in the US for now, until he gets back and has some time to assess the situation for himself.

I’m not thrilled with the idea of being separated. I’d prefer to be back in my own home, in my usual routine, with the kids in school and doing their endless tennis lessons. Funny how the same-old-same-old-stuck-in-a-rut-routine can seem so attractive when it’s been abruptly interrupted and taken away.

Given how the unrest is spreading across the region at present, it doesn’t make sense to go back until we can be reasonably certain that we wouldn’t have to pick up and evacuate immediately again. In spite of my post title, I don’t think there is much question that for now it’s best that I stay put – however much I dislike homeschooling the kids…

I’m a guest on Sia McKye’s blog today, talking about what I packed on my hasty departure from Egypt. Stop by and tell me: What would you pack if you only had 24 hours and one suitcase per family member?

My family departed the Cairo airport on Tuesday February 1st, at the private terminal where the US State Department had set up chartered planes, and were sent to Istanbul. I only have the highest compliments for the US State Department – they were very organized and calm in a time when I was so stressed out I could hardly follow the simplest of instructions.

We stayed in Istanbul for a few days, to collect our wits and relax. I wanted very much to enjoy my time in Istanbul because who knows when I might get back, if ever, but it was bittersweet. I was too emotionally raw to fully relax. Also, Istanbul is too reminiscent of what Cairo could potentially be like with proper leadership and care.

Well meaning friends suggested I should take advantage of the tip to shop. There were certainly many lovely items I could have happily bought in other circumstances, but with the thought that we might shortly be both homeless and jobless, I decided to limit myself to taking pictures instead.

It helped that we had been to Istanbul once before because we even though we arrived a bit shell-shocked, we were able to arrange for a hotel in Sultanhamet, the historic area of town. We stayed in Sultanahmet ten years ago – Istanbul was our first big trip abroad after we moved to the United Arab Emirates, before we had children.

Both of the pictures above are from the roof terrace restaurant at the hotel. Isn’t the Bosphorus lovely?

We happened upon this local market and I recognized it as one we had explored ten years ago, and I am pretty sure we bought two lovely carpets in one of the shops. I deliberately avoided the carpet shops this time. I have a weakness for them and carpet merchants are extremely persistent.

I was more drawn to the ceramics, but it isn’t so easy to carry around – particularly when you don’t know where you’re going to end up.

The Grand Bazaar is a wonderful place. I enjoyed it more this time, now that I have more bargaining skills.

We didn’t end up buying anything except two soccer jersey sets for the children – the one bright spot of the trip is that I bargained him down to 50% of his starting price.

Now I’m killing time at my sister’s house in the US, waiting to see what happens next. I find myself alternating between despair and anger. Despair over all that has probably been lost in Egypt and also anger that it could have been avoided if only the regime had listened to the people they ruled. I know it is much more complicated, but even if the president had invested a fraction of the money he lined his pockets with for three decades, it is likely that all of this could have been avoided. As it stands, not only will the country have to be calmed and rebuilt but all of the accumulated mistakes of several decades rectified.

I have often likened the various economic and political problems in the US to a diet – it is very easy to gain weight but it takes a long time to lose it. In the same respect, people expect Obama to fix America’s problems in a much shorter time span than they were created. How long will it take to fix the problems of Egypt?

I was reading a blog summarizing the problems in Egypt recently in which an anonymous comment asked “Why should I care? If they want a better life, they should leave.” It is always more complicated than that. Many do leave, but many more are either prevented from leaving by the immigration policies of other countries or they do not wish to leave because they want to live in their own country. There are no easy answers, anywhere.

Yes, my own life is in a time of upheaval, but I do at least have other options. I have another country to go home to and eventually will find new job opportunities. There are so many hard working Egyptians that I have met in my time in the country who are only going to be hurt by these problems, at least in the short term, that I cannot help but be depressed for them – and perhaps foolishly optimistic that I can return to Egypt if only to say a proper goodbye…

I woke early on Tuesday morning, my brain immediately buzzing with thoughts of things that I had forgotten to pack / prepare for our departure. I wasn’t sure how it was all going to work or even fully trust that the bus was going to come on time to retrieve us.

I walked out early, before the curfew was officially lifted, up to the end of our street. It was quiet, aside from the groups of men and the occasional commando posted along the street, and yet I was nervous as I walked along. It was probably more me than anything else, but several nights in a row of sporadic gunfire and worry does not make for restful nights.

The bus for the airport showed up an hour earlier than I expected, as did more people than we expected. It took some time to load the bags and everyone who would fit, and sort out exactly where we were going. The children wanted to look out of the windows, but the driver cautioned us to keep the curtains drawn and not look out.

Traffic was light and there were tanks posted at regular intervals. I have to say the plentiful tanks did not make me feel so much more secure. I fully understood why our driver was nervous.

The road was closed at one point, all traffic diverted down a ramp. At the bottom of the ramp, the road was suddenly closed and all the accumulated stopped traffic asked to turn around and go the other way, opposite the correct way of the side of the road.

The bus finally managed to get to the airport, and then to the private terminal for the chartered planes that the US State Department arranged. There was a bit of confusion because the driver was not familiar with the terminal but we eventually found it.

Once we arrived, many of my worries were soothed by the organization of the process. We waited in line for about 40 minutes before we knew where we would be going, not that I cared. I just wanted to get out, and not have to wait for two days in the terminal with my two children before we left. The US State Department was also prepared for long waits it seemed.

We were in lines for two hours – very orderly and sedate – and then on a plane scheduled to go to Istanbul. The plane then sat on the tarmac for a few hours – first because there was a lack of airline personnel to load luggage, etc, and then because one of the passengers insisted on getting off, supposedly to help a friend whose apartment was getting robbed. We left our home at 9:35am and our plane finally took off at 4:30pm. A long day, but much better than sitting for hours (days) in the airport.

I am sick, depressed, stressed, and still anxious as I watch the news and watch the conditions degenerate. Will I ever be able to return?

For now we will go back to the US, to wait and see…

Saturday afternoon, after my visit to the local neighborhood and photo op with the tank, I returned to our building where a pre-planned potluck party was going on in the garden. As you might imagine, the only topic of conversation was what was going on around the city. I ran across some people who had headed out to a large grocery store a few miles away earlier in the day and had pictures of looters and smoke billowing out of the building.

There was a curfew imposed that day and as 4pm rolled around, we heard the sound of shots in the distance. At that point, the party atmosphere abruptly dissolved and everyone cleared the dishes to bring them inside, then headed up to the roof to see if we could see anything. At the sounds of shots / tear gas canisters being fired we all decided we felt safer inside. The guards of our building shut our gates and stayed watchful. A short time later, there was an unexpected announcement from the mosque: they were warning people to remain vigilant and be on guard against looters. The men in our building quickly gathered anything that could be used as a weapon, put up makeshift roadblocks and took shifts sitting outside all night keeping a watch on the street for suspicious activity.

There was also a fire hose dragged from the central hallway and pulled over the roof of the guard’s house to be used to repel people if necessary.

It wasn’t just our building that heeded this warning – there were road blocks at nearly every intersection and clusters of men on the street at regular intervals, all of them wearing armbands to identify themselves as peacekeepers.

My husband took regular shifts while I slept fitfully upstairs, in my clothes, so I could be ready to react and herd the children to our designated safe room if necessary. As soon as this situation developed, I packed two trolley bags with every scrap of money I had stashed around the house (in various currencies), my jewelry, our laptops, and small family mementos. I woke often in the night to the sounds of shots which seemed to be coming from a nearby prison and police barracks.

We did this same routine for three nights.

It was very hard to get accurate information without phone service. The news from outside was reporting what they could, but it was also difficult to know if the information they were getting was accurate. There were rumors flying. We had a friend who booked us a flight to leave, but the soonest we could get was Wednesday. My husband wanted to go to the airport sooner to try our luck, but we were hearing terrible reports on the chaos at the airport. One friend went with her children on Saturday evening and ended up sitting there until Monday. I also heard stories of people getting to the airport in a taxi and then being robbed by their driver.

It was interesting to see how people reacted to the developments. Everyone I ran across in shops and on the streets were being very supportive of one another. As I contemplated being hunkered down in our apartment for an indefinite amount of time, I went into conservation mode with regard to food and water – though it wasn’t much of a problem as none of us had much of an appetite. I did go out and buy some staples like rice, flour, and sugar. Others around us tried to keep a sense of normalcy by suggesting potlucks and making cookies and cakes to share. When there were rumors of water cuts and food supplies being disrupted, I filled our bathtub and all the other containers I had with water. Stores in the neighborhood were being overrun and shelves were emptying.

By Monday we were hearing of US State Department organized voluntary evacuation flights and decided to go that route – going as a group to a waiting chartered flight seemed the safest way to proceed. With a heavy heart I decided what to take and what to leave behind, I packed four big suitcases with a selection of our warmest clothes, the negatives of the baby pictures, and a variety of other random objects plus a few bags of food – my recently made pumpkin muffins from the freezer, a loaf of bread and some peanut butter, fruit, and several bottles of water just in case we needed to wait overnight in the airport.

It was not a restful night as we waited to see what happened next.