Category: Egypt

The Fishing Doggy

Anika Raffle1 Comment

Arf! Bark! Yip! In human, that means Yes! People! Let’s Play!

I live in Dahab which is the best place for a dog to be. And even better, I get to go to the Blue Lagoon every year, and that is where I am now. We play in the lagoon all winter, but now there are so many tourists so my owner is selling barbecue. The only way I tolerate him not paying attention to me is because I get leftovers! Also, the tourists love me.

I am putting up a show by fishing in the lake. I have already caught two! I run into the lake once again, and when a little girl tries to pet me, I run farther in. She tells her dad to wait and runs after me. It is a game. I put up the show, and splash her with my paw. She squeals and sprints out of the water. She is wearing a bikini because this is the only place she can in all of Egypt. My owner calls it “libertee”. He also says that this place is called a “beech reesort”, but I know for a fact that is a hotel.

I catch a fish, but the little girl is gone. Oh well. I guess I will have to eat it myself!

Living as a Bedouin

Paloma Raffle2 Comments

I am excited when I see a tourist come through our town. They will sometimes bring books for me and my brothers and sisters. Reading books is how I learned English. I am the only one in my family who knows it. It is quite a responsibility. I am the one talking to the tourists when they come through.

I am happy to live with all of my cousins and family, but sometimes I want to find new friends of my own, outside of my small community. Sometimes I dream of going into a bustling city, shopping through the streets, buying warm pastries and shopping for new shoes. I have never seen a skyscraper.

I am lucky because we don’t have to move every week. We have an oasis inside a cave that our ancestors found in the desert thousands of years ago. We do not have to be nomadic, moving our home every week, because we have water right in our backyard. Surrounding us is a sandy and rocky landscape but there is one green place, my favorite place to look at. Our oasis is a place with green shrubs, date palms and water.

I am very privileged to be Bedouin. I learn to be part of the desert. I can navigate anywhere using the winds, sun and stars. I see, smell and hear things kilometers away. I can tell you when a car is coming minutes before you will notice, and I can find an herb to ease an aching bone. I know when danger may be around, and I always stay safe.

I am lucky to have an uncle who can help whenever someone gets hurt. A few days ago, my cousin got a thorn stuck in her foot. He got it out by soaking it in donkey poop. Camel poop doesn’t work. After two days, it just popped out! My uncle is the smartest man I know.

We hold our traditions so tightly, as tightly as my baby sister holds our mom when she’s scared. Time here stands as still as the mountains; mountains that have not moved for thousands of years. I will show you our mountains, show you our town, and show you all of the Bedouin secrets. Visit me and you will learn how to use plants for medicine, how to locate water in a desert, and how to live off the land in the desert, how to recite poetry, dance our traditional sword dance, ride camels, herd livestock, make three meals around meat and dairy from our livestock, knit tents, and so much more. When you arrive, I will show you our world.

 

Technology in Egypt

Hayes RaffleLeave a comment

Nile River (Luxor to Aswan) / Dahab, Sinai / Cairo

In most ways, Egyptians use technology like people from other modern and cosmopolitan developing countries such as India. Infrastructure is not great, but it exists. Prices are not great, but they are suitable for the middle class. So, people have smartphones and use the most popular apps like WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook.

The country is famous for the “Facebook revolution” in 2012 when millions of young people organized on Facebook to protest then-president Mubarak. In response to the protests, Mubarak was forced by the Army to step down. Democratic elections led to the Muslim Brotherhood gaining power. MB is a right wing extreme Islamist organization that quickly tried to institute Islamic laws, change the constitution and grab power. The public protested, leading to the replacement of their leaders by senior members from the Egyptian Army, who currently hold power. People seem to both respect and fear President el-Sisi, a man who is both described as someone who is fighting corruption, and who is building prisons to lock up all his opponents. It was not clear to what extent Egyptians live under a military dictatorship right now, but comments from various people indicated that freedom of speech does not exist. This is an interesting contrast to comments that social media allows for the exchange of ideas, news, and information so that people can self-organize without the cooperation of traditional media channels. Activitsts seem to be skating on thin ice. 

Democracy does not come easily to a former dictatorship. Two people (one native Cairo, one long-term expat) independently told me that “Egypt is not ready for democracy” because Egyptians are not educated enough to vote sensibly. Of the two, it was the European-educated Cairo resident who explained to me that people don’t know what “freedom” means. According to her, people think it means “I get things for free” when in fact it means people have to all work towards collaborative self-governance. I noticed such a gap across Africa: democratic elections exist but people don’t know how to make democracy work. Governments are authoritarian and often corrupt.

Literacy is an endemic current issue which limits many aspects of life, not just government. Limits in literacy also affect technology adoption, since most modern technologies – and especially the most affordable ones – are based on reading and writing, and thus require basic literacy to be useful. Services like YouTube are widely popular because they can reach even illiterate people, but using them costs more, and with lack of education usually comes a lack of money to afford higher bandwidth services.

Things to be grateful for this morning in the Sinai

Hayes Raffle1 Comment

  1. we’re not dead yet. so far we are safe.
  2. the mountains here are really beautiful.
  3. the ocean is too.
  4. and the weather is nearly perfect.
  5. i’ve been able to get coffee every morning, even though it’s not very good almost anywhere in egypt
  6. i slept pretty well, even though a mosquito kept waking me up, and i was greeted at 5 am by a house mouse
  7. a cat showed up to get rid of the mouse, but I turned it away. 1 strange animal in my room was enough
  8. everything is a teachable moment, including when i casually threw away the dead cockroach in the kids’ shower last night
  9. they gave us a bodyguard, a logistics manager, and flew out a guide. we cancelled one of the guided trips, the one that this guide specializes in. oops. too tired, and afraid of travel advisories from our government. but he was really nice about it. so there’s that.
  10. the buffet at this hotel is good.
  11. they found us connecting rooms after all, although it took a while and they probably have not been cleaned in a couple months.
  12. tourism is low here, since the revolution. but that means that it’s not crowded, and everyone is really grateful that we are here. I think the media has made out Egypt to be a really unsafe place, but the people here feel pretty secure. I suspect it’s safer than Israel, or most parts of Oakland, but somehow doesn’t feel that way. Maybe it’s all the security checkpoints where there are lots of people but they don’t seem to be doing much…maybe it’s that the army seems to run the government here but it’s not really clear how things work…