Jenyfer Matthews

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…

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…

Now that my family and I have made our way safely back to the US via Istanbul, I’d love to relax a little. It seems self-centered and trite to complain about my own trials during the last couple of weeks when my own problems are minor inconveniences when put into the larger context of what is going on in Egypt right now.

We are out of harm’s way – no tanks in sight here – but still I am having trouble not obsessing about the situation. I am worried about what will happen next for the people still on the ground in Tahir Square and in the various protests around Egypt, and particularly for the many Egyptian shopkeepers and people I knew from my neighborhood. My family and I can leave, but how will all this upheaval effect their lives long term? Not surprisingly, I am concerned about what will happen next in my own life as well. At the core of it, I am a planner unable to formulate a plan at present.

It was extremely difficult to make the decision to leave Egypt – disrupting the school year and all of our usual routines, leaving friends. Even though we were there, it was very difficult to get accurate information without internet or phone service and to know whether or not leaving would be premature – or more scarily, too late. Now that I have left, it is still difficult to make decisions because no one knows what will happen next. Should I homeschool and hope we can return sooner than later? Should I enroll the children in school here? Will we be able to return in the short term? Who knows – not me.

I do hope that the friends and neighbors who stayed behind, sure this would all settle down within a week, a month tops, are correct, but I personally could not have lived that length of time on little sleep and adrenaline. I didn’t bring any books with me to pass the time, but it doesn’t matter because I can’t concentrate on anything but reading Facebook posts from friends still hunkered down in Cairo.

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.

The day this all started, Jan 25th, was an Egyptian National Holiday called Police Day. Most schools were closed that day, aside from my own children’s, and there was news that there would be a protest downtown that day. I wasn’t overly concerned – you hear about protests from time to time and they are usually fairly small and extremely well contained. In fact, my initial reaction was how bad could it be if they announced it ahead of time?

Life went on as normal for the next few days – I did errands, withdrew a chunk of cash from the ATM (which turned out to be a good thing since the ATM networks went down with the internet) and bought groceries (another good thing). I don’t as a rule tend to watch much news because I find it depressing and it usually drifts in by osmosis anyway. We heard there was due to be another big demonstration on Friday, after the prayer. Our neighborhood was almost ominously quiet – I’ve never heard it so silent before in fact. The very stillness was alarming. Still, we went about our business as well as we could with no internet and then suddenly no phone service.

Saturday morning, the garden of our building was buzzing with the neighbors going stir crazy in their houses. I went to talk and heard news of damage in a nearby neighborhood. When another neighbor said he was going out to see for himself, I went with him. It seemed exciting and I didn’t want to say later that I had spent my part of the revolution sitting in my house drinking wine and complaining about the internet while it all went on around me.

We took a 5 minute taxi ride to a mall on the outer edge of the expat section of our suburb and then got out and walked a few blocks. The first thing we saw was a burned out police truck:

While the street where I live and the surrounding blocks are primarily inhabited by expats, this area was suddenly and thoroughly local. The atmosphere was energized and excited. People were milling around taking pictures and talking. Several young men came up to me and said “Isn’t it beautiful?”

There were young men everywhere, talking. As I was taking pictures, people in cars passed by and talked to me. One man asked if he could get copies, another older man apologized to me. He owed me no apologies and yet it seems a strangely prophetic thing now.

Not sure if this child was salvaging scrap or trying for a souvenir, but bits of the truck still appeared to be smoldering and the mother in me wanted to shoo him away.

This burned up motorcycle just across the boulevard from the truck. I haven’t often seen police on motorcyles but it did seem to me that the damage was very targeted to government and police targets specifically (at least at this point)

We walked a few blocks down and encountered three military vehicles – the first I saw on the neighborhood streets but not the last.

At one point a soldier on duty wagged his finger at me not to take pictures so I stopped. I think I was the only one to listen to him. I did notice later, when I looked at my pictures, many of the soldiers disappeared from pictures when I came closer to where they were on duty. Not sure if they thought perhaps I was a journalist and did not want to be identified? They seemed not to be so worried about the locals snapping pictures with their phones.

Notice the soldier on top of the tank. He fades away when I come closer.

My proof that I was there. It seems foolhardy in retrospect but at the time it seemed like the thing to do. I wasn’t the only one out there posing. People were taking pictures everywhere – even of me taking pictures of them.

I think it is important to stress that in spite of these fairly startling images, I never felt unsafe while I was walking around. It felt a bit like a party, though there was a slightly nervous energy about it. We were invited to sit and have tea at a cafe but declined because it felt like it was time to go.

As we were walking back the way we came, a protest march suddenly gathered and stopped traffic. I was intensely grateful that we had already crossed the street and were not caught in the thick of the crowd on the other side nearer the tanks.

It is hard to see in this picture but there must have been at least a hundred young men, if not more. I did not stay to see the end of the line so it it hard to say. One older man tapped my shoulder and (in Arabic) told me to leave. I agreed with him. Though the march was orderly and focused, I had seen enough and did not want to get caught up in any trouble.

Our taxi was not where we had asked him to meet us so we walked back a few blocks, just to clear the area. All along the road, and particularly behind the entrance to the mall, there were more young men stationed with bats and iron bars. I can only assume they were there, ready to defend their shops from looters. We took our taxi home and that was the last time I left the immediate area of my home until we went to the airport.

At the time I took these pictures, I still felt that this was an interesting and exciting situation, though with some potentially serious repercussions. My husband was making noises about my leaving with the children and I was resistant. I didn’t want to upset our routine for no good reason if things would blow over even having seen these signs of upheaval so close to home. Denial anyone?

I think that this was the last day I ate a decent meal or slept much at all.

I took this picture on an early morning walk down my quiet suburban street in Cairo on Tuesday morning. It really struck a chord with me because it is true.

After a week of mounting tension and anxiety my family chose to evacuate our home of five years with four suitcases to parts unknown. I am relieved, anxious, sarcastic, stressed, and heartsick by turns. My relationship to Egypt was like one of daughter to mother – there were things that caused me to roll my eyes and irritated me but so many good things too and don’t let anyone else criticize the place to me now. Though I have tried to provide insight and glimpses over the years here on my blog, you cannot truly understand until you live in a place and even then, I was always a foreigner looking in.

I sincerely hope that the friends who chose to stay, who thought me to be panicking when we decided to leave, are correct and that things settle down sooner than later. It does make me wonder at what point I would ever feel comfortable enough to go back. Our future plans are up in the air but at present it doesn’t seem likely that we will go back to do more than tie up loose ends. I feel like the heroine of one of my own stories – picking up the pieces of my life and starting over when I least expect it.

I would like to say that I never myself felt in any imminent danger in my area and that everyone I ran across, foreign and Egyptian, was very cooperative and helpful to one another in a very trying situation. I’ll have more pictures and posts in the coming days, when I have had some time to settle down and process everything. For now we are taking a few days in Istanbul to regroup and make further travel plans back to the US.

It occurs to me that many of you might wonder why it is that I am writing about pumpkin bread and jam making, given what is going on in Cairo right now. Frankly, I don’t have very much to add to the discussion and I’m trying to keep a low profile in more ways than one: bloggers who have been too vocal / critical have actually been jailed.

Happily, my own quiet suburb has remained that – quiet. It seems to me that there are more police around now, in places where I do not usually see them loitering, and they have a more experienced and seasoned look about them as compared to the young nose-pickers who are usually napping on the end of their rifles (yes, really) The police are watching and waiting like the rest of us.

As for the rest of the city / country – is there room for improvement in Egypt? Yes. Do the demonstrators have legitimate complaints? Yes. Will their demonstrations lead to change. Maybe. My main concern is that if they indeed they do succeed in removing the current ruling body they may not get the change they want. Without a strong fair leader who is ready with a plan of action to step into that vacancy, things could get a lot worse before they ever get better. Nothing happens overnight but there are better and worse paths to follow.

All I ask is that if it comes down to it, they allow me to depart of my own free will at that point.

For now I am sticking close to home and watching to see what happens.

Edited to add: If my blog isn’t updated as usual or you don’t “see” me on Facebook, etc, the internet has been up, down, and S-L-O-W lately with all the “excitement”. It apparently takes a lot of bandwidth to organize a protest…

My husband and I were invited to a Coptic Christian wedding this weekend, the first since we attended a wedding the first winter we lived in Egypt. Unlike the last time, I actually have several choices of appropriate evening dress clothes – I went shopping after I had to borrow items from three different friends to put together an outfit the last time! – however this time we are not attending. The pretty cocktail dress I wore to the Women’s Fiction Festival in Italy a few years ago will have to wait a little longer for an outing (I added a picture from the conference just for you guys, scroll to the bottom).

Given the recent tragic incidents in the last few weeks, not to mention the political instability in Tunisia, my husband and I think it best to maintain a low profile. The tension between the Muslims and the Coptic Christians in Egypt is nothing new – I have been hearing stories of people being prevented from converting from one religion to the other for years now and it was ongoing well before I arrived. Maybe the stories are true, maybe they are propaganda – hard to know in a place like this where there is no real, trustworthy news source. What is real is that some fanatics are taking things to a new level by targeting Christians with bombs and bullets.

I know that by not attending we are “giving into the fear” and in a way, the terrorists have won. I suppose that is one way to look at it. However, there are degrees to this argument. I still walk the same streets where I have heard many reports of purse snatchings in recent months, for instance, because I need to get from place to place. I take what precautions I can by wearing my purse cross body and always looking purposeful and being aware of my surroundings and who is about. I’m also allowing my children to attend a school activity in Alexandria. The wedding however is not for family or even close friends – we were invited as a courtesy by the mother of the bride who is a colleague of my husband’s. I truly hope that the wedding is a peaceful and joyful occasion for all, but I do not wish to risk being caught up in a bad situation because some lunatic decides he is going to seize the moment to make some copycat religious / political statement.

I myself have not sensed any trouble or unrest in my tiny corner of Cairo, and in fact most of the regular Egyptians I know have gone out of their way to express how dismayed they are by the attacks on the Christians here. Let us hope that this sort of reasoning prevails. While I do think that there is room for improvement in the government here (as there is in most countries) I hope that it doesn’t take a civil war to change things. In the meantime, I’m just going to keep my head down and my eyes and ears open.

We’ve been invited to another Coptic wedding in April/May. Perhaps we will feel more confident in attending next time…

I fired the maid.

I tried to like her, I really did. She worked for us for six weeks and she was (nearly) always on time and fairly industrious while she was working. She didn’t stop for breaks or lunch, she just worked straight though. She was nice and seemingly trustworthy as well. With all that going for her, why did I let her go?

I fell back on the it’s-not-you-it’s-me argument.

I found myself going behind her and being frustrated because she had dusted around things instead of moving them. When she did move things, she didn’t put them back the way they had been in the first place. She’d take the cushions off the couch to vacuum crumbs and put the cushions back zipper side out. She’d leave the windows open after she cleaned them with no screens and let in flies. I always felt I had to leave to be out of the way and a few times I came back and found that she’d finished and left early, but hadn’t totally cleaned up after herself. I didn’t care if she finished and left, but I wasn’t happy about finding my kitchen sink half-full of dirty water from where she’d done something (???) and scooted out.

I really tried to focus on the bigger picture and just accept the less perfect aspects. I even tried to give her more direction about what I wanted done and how, but when I started thinking that I would just do my own bedroom… and the kitchen… and the bathrooms… I decided to follow my impulse and just let her go and do it all myself. As guilty as I felt about letting her go, I was so so happy to have the house to myself again. I guess I’m just a territorial freak.

Since I’ve been on my own again, I have cleaned my refrigerator, the microwave, under all the beds, and the under-stair storage room in my kitchen. It feels good actually.

My daughter was asking for more allowance recently so I decided to let her have a go at cleaning the bathrooms. We’ll see how long her enthusiasm for her new job lasts, but she doesn’t have to love it – she just has to do a decent job of it. As for the rest, I may not get things done in one day – and in a family of four nothing will stay clean for long – but at least when I do get around to my various chores, I’ll know they are being done to my standard. It’s much easier to ignore my own imperfections and shortcuts than someone else’s…

We have lived in Cairo for nearly five years and do not own a car. A few years ago a friend was preparing to buy himself a new car and offered to GIVE us his old car and we declined. I love the freedom and independence that having a car gives you and love driving, but I have no interest in driving in Cairo. It wouldn’t be fun here at all.

There are approximately 20 million people in Cairo and probably as many cars. The traffic is pretty much gridlock at any given time and there are few if any lights or signs to regulate traffic flow. Imagine a road designed for three lanes of traffic, both side lined with parked cars, and people jockeying for position and creating four or even five lanes across? When traffic is thick, it doesn’t flow or even creep, it lurches. Car surge forward a few feet and then screech to a halt. Add in the fumes and exhaust from the many decrepit vehicles on the road and you have a recipe for motion sickness. There are frequent accidents, ranging from minor fender benders to pedestrian fatalities as people throw themselves into the road attempting to cross and drivers run them down, either unable or unwilling to slow or swerve.

The roads in all of Egypt are poorly maintained and it is even worse outside of Cairo. There are parts of Egypt where the paving suddenly stops and becomes a gravel track. There are parts of Egypt where foreigners are not allowed to drive period due to security concerns. Many of the roads outside of the city have no street lights. Given the fact that many Egyptians believe that using the headlights on their car runs down their batteries and will drive as fast as possible once they find a bit of open road, flicking on their lights only as soon as they sense the shape of an oncoming car in the dark, there have been some horrendous accidents on the roads connecting the major cities. I can remember a few which have killed entire families and one which involved a bus of Australian tourists. The employees of the US Embassy are not even allowed to drive outside of Cairo after dark.

Now think back to my recent trip to the beach. The place where we stayed was only two hours outside of Cairo and we left at 8AM. The longest part of our trip was on a large highway, at least three lanes across, but the last 10KM or so was on a two lane road that followed the shore of the Red Sea, some parts of which curved around the rock faces of the hills across from the water. Because we went a few days before the official holiday and it was early in the morning, traffic was light and we made the journey in good time and with a minimum of thrills.

I was not so happy or confident in our return trip however. Because we don’t have our own car, we were at the mercy of the schedule of our driver and he was unable to pick us up until 5PM. On the one hand, we had the entire day to play at the beach. On the other hand, 5PM is dusk.

The curvy two lane road was the first bit we had to travel and it was much scarier on the return trip since it was both dark and we were on the outside edge of the road. Traffic was a bit heavier as well because people were traveling for the holiday the next day. Our driver was doing his best to be careful, but there is only so much he could do when there were idiots passing buses on curves. Is it so important to get anywhere that you have to risk your life and the lives of everyone around you to take such risks just to gain a few feet?

I didn’t truly relax until we rejoined the main road – which though it is poorly lighted and cars kept zooming past us at ridiculous speeds it is at least straight, wide, and flat!

There are times I wish we had a car because it would make getting out of Cairo more frequently an easier option. Then I get out of Cairo and once again, I am glad that we don’t. It’s scary out there!