Checking His Mail

Waiting for a train to pass a village level crossing I spotted this man leaning against a bridge over the canal and checking messages or mail. Mobile phones have changed life immeasurably in rural Egypt. 

Prepared

Cairo traffic is infamous. Crowded, slow, irritable..you name it. Motorcycles and scooters are commonplace as they can slide among the cars in a traffic jam, but his guy was carrying something extra, a stout walking stick to protect his legs or to rap an encroaching car on the hood maybe. 

Farming Friends

I love the contrast of the facial hair adornments on these two men. They are two of the farmers who brought their animals to the Rural Wellness Initiative clinic last week.

Location, Location, Location

Passing by the mosque on Road 9 in Maadi one morning I noticed that a shoeshine man had set up shop there. Since those who enter the mosque to pray remove their shoes, this is a perfect place for his business. Why not get your shoes cleaned at the same time?

Trailer Optional

One of the guys who works for me was doing some work on his home in the village and needed to borrow a wheelbarrow. They don't have cars so we offered to haul it over with the jeep, but his cousin said that he would take it over with  his motorcycle. This was something we had to see and record!

Pink Cloud

Cotton candy seller

The youth market never fails. In this case a man has filled plastic bags with wads of pink cotton candy (candy floss for the Brits) and is bicycling around the villages selling it to children for probably something like 25 piastres, which is a healthy markup on his materials, although not so healthy for the teeth.

Elbow Grease

People come to Egypt and they marvel at the pyramids, at least 125 or so of them, scattered along the Nile Valley, and they wonder how they were built. Well, when they were built the Nile used to flood the whole valley necessitating many of the farmers living in the valley to move into the low desert around the temple and pyramid sites where they were basically stuck for about four months every year. With pretty much the entire population of Egypt looking for something to do for four months, the labor pool would have been pretty impressive. So they put their backs to it and moved rock.

We recently decided to drill a new 40 meter well on the farm. The actual drilling was done with the aid of a diesel motor that pulled up a weighted pipe into the air and then dropped in to pound it through sand, clay and layers of some of the hardest stone I've ever seen. And then when they were putting in the actual pipe, the well diggers and some of my staff took the handles to push the pipe in circles to disengage the digging pipe. Hard work, but they did it.

Palm Work

P

Palm trees are a type of grass and they have to be trimmed regularly. At least twice a year men climb the date palms to cut off the older fronds. These are then hauled into the villages, often either by camel or if there is broader access, by mule and wagon. In the village, people do the initial processing by trimming off the softer leaves and then drying the rib that supports them. Later the ribs will be cut and made into furniture, boxes, or used in walls. The soft leaves may be shredded for upholstery material, woven into baskets, or mats, and so on.

An Egyptian Cattle Drive

 While driving into Maadi yesterday I encountered an Egyptian cattle drive of sorts. The farmers from the eastern province bring their cows and some of their sheep and goats into the farming area here around Sakkara and Dahshur every July/August. The animals graze from fields that are being harvested and avoid some of the spraying of the cotton plants in their home province. In the old days, they used to walk them here but now they use trucks.

Election Day

Egyptians are voting in the first day of the runoff elections today in fierce sun heat. This line in Mataria, a section of Cairo, stands close to the wall for what little shade it offers. They are choosing between Ahmed Shafik and Mohamed Morsi. Who will be declared the winner is anyone's guess at this point.

Photo by Tamer el Gobashy

Traveling With a Spare

Automobile drivers carry a spare tire, but they never think about what a cart driver needs. Many of them will buy a new horse when it is still young and let the older horse train the youngster.

Always Time To Talk

If there is one thing that Egyptians love to do, it is talking. Most of the social interaction in this country is conversation over tea, coffee, a domino game. In this case two friends stop to chat on their way home from the fields, despite the high winds and the stifling dust. It's never too unpleasant for a chat.

Just Trim The Mustache, Please.

Camels at Giza have intricate designs cut into their coats. I don't know if it is just artistic and or if it's also a means of identification. But these designs are created with an enormous handmade pair of shears. Frightening.

The Tie That Binds

We are having plastering done on the house and this is the scaffolding that the plasterers are working on. Holes are knocked into the wall (they will be filled in with brick and mortar later), holes are dug in the ground and then the poles that fit into the holes are tied together with palm fiber rope. Yep. Tied. With handmade rope. And they move the planks around to give themselves a place to stand while plastering. Workmen's compensation or industrial safety would be having fits.

Tilted

Life in Cairo these days goes on in many normal ways but at the same time seems sort of out of balance, much like the lines in this photo.  Two young men chat beside an empty refreshment stand along the Nile overlooking the Cairo Tower. I'm not sure what the poles attached by a line are...perhaps part of a stand by the river just beyond the railing, perhaps part of a boat.

Water Work

Just a few metres from a busy road traveled by tourists visiting the Sakkara Pyramids a canal flows behind houses and apartment buildings to carry irrigation water along the farmlands and eventually out to the desert for reclamation projects. In the canals there live fish of various sizes, frogs and toad pollywogs, birds of all types and a newcomer to the area, crayfish. An enterprising fish farmer thought he was buying fresh water shrimp but when he saw his purchase, he dumped them into the river. Since then, about 15 years ago, they have multiplied like rabbits with a lovely side effect. The crayfish are especially fond of snails and have been devouring the snails that have carried bilharizia with the result that this parasitic organism has decreased 95% in parts of the canal and river system. But the crayfish are tough on the nets that the farmers set out for perch, so one of the men working in a boat is fixing his nets, while the others by the bridge are fishing water hyacinths and the ubiquitous plastic bottles out of the water.

Attacked!

My sincere apologies for not posting for a while but my MacBook got attacked by a Trojan that was hijacking programs on my computer and using up all my internet allowance. I've had to have technicians clean it out and we are now trying to reconstruct my data which was saved but I worry might be infected. Bear with me.

Meanwhile, yesterday was the birth date of young Khaled Alaa Abdel Fattah, whose parents are Alaa and Manal, two of the first Egyptian bloggers that I found when I started my own blog. Most of their work is in Arabic and they are second or third generation activists who have been working to improve life in Egypt most of their lives. Alaa was arrested by the military on charges that are so obviously false it hurts to even think about it. He is still in detention and missed the birth of his first son, just as his father missed the birth of Alaa's sister Mona, another activist here. So everyone wish Khaled a happy birth day and a speedy reunion with his father.

Taking a Rest

A street cleaner in Giza rests on his palm broom as traffic crawls by in the usual afternoon snarl.

Something Interesting

I was in a village buying some medicines for my palm trees that are being attacked by palm weevils and I saw this group of men squatting together by the side of the road obviously fascinated by something, but I have no idea what. One of them seems to be a shoeshine guy. After I took the photo, my phone rang and when I looked back up they were all gone. Mysteries!

It's Interesting!

 

I have no idea whatsoever what these men were finding so fascinating. One seems to be a shoeshine man. I saw them huddled together near my car in a village near home, got the photo, then my phone rang and when I looked up they were gone.

This is another trial of the Picasa/Blogger mix. Hopefully the photo will come through.