Life as usual

Back in the office after a trip out and about this morning, Mohamed’s friend called early asking could we take his wife and baby son to the hospital so that was the first task, then a look at the BMWs on the way past to Honda to check out a noise which has turned out to be a broken engine mount (to be fixed next Monday at a cost of 900 pounds), collected Mohamed’s new passport and back to the office.

Had news yesterday that Mohamed’s sister in Kuwait’s new baby is in intensive care; apparently he has a congenital problem that means his food doesn’t go into his stomach but rather his lungs. Apparently he still needs a week in ICU and then they will operate to fix this. We are all very worried. His other sister also arrives from Kuwait on Sunday (I think) to be here for around 6 weeks I believe – she will be here for Hagar’s wedding on the 26th and then a little while after that. She and her husband and two children are coming, Mohamed is very excited as he hasn’t seen them for almost 3 years.

Meanwhile for us the lawyer says the final license will come from the govt between Thursday and Sunday - oh I hope so!!!! We are currently speaking to an Australian company to work with and also a man here in Egypt who brings tourists from the US. Hopefully both these deals will come off and give us some immediate business.

Because we are having visitors tomorrow we have 2 cleaning ladies coming – Umm Rami and her younger niece who looks around 13 and has already had a live-in cleaning lady position – so that all the windows etc. can be taken out and washed and all the lights cleaned and all that stuff you don’t do all that often. Started cleaning the curtains last night. Mohamed gets really fussy when anyone is coming – you should see the flurry of activity if one of his friends calls to say they are coming, even when the place is clean (and really it’s clean all the time!). I have to confess it makes me cross, just one of the things we don’t agree about. Why can’t his friends take us as they find us instead of me cleaning toilets and bathrooms that are already clean and washing down kitchen benches and sweeping floors and putting absolutely everything AWAY? By the time they arrive I want a shower and feel sweaty and horrible and cross and I’m rushing to change my clothes as well so that I don’t ever enjoy a visit. I appear all red-faced and dripping saying “no problem, no problem” – they must all think I have some sort of congenital disease that means I look like this all the time! And I struggle to let my crossness go and relax and enjoy the company. I wonder if they leave muttering to each other – “can’t see why he married her!”

I worry a bit about Umm Rami these days, she is almost 6 months pregnant and looks about 8.9 months and I get concerned for her so find myself saying “leave that I’ll do it” quite often. Crazy! Not sure how much longer she will work. She also cleans the office for us. She told Mohamed the other day her husband is thinking of taking a second wife (remember Egyptian Muslim men can have 4 wives). I felt horrified but when Mohamed asked her she said she didn’t mind, maybe the new wife would help her. This is one of the truly unfathomable cultural things to me – I know I couldn’t do it. But maybe with baby no. 4 on the way and a life of work, work, work, she really does see it as an opportunity to get some help (her daughter isn’t old enough yet to do a great deal although I’m sure she does quite a bit in looking after the smaller children etc.) and maybe all the stuff that would matter to us doesn’t matter to her at all. But I wonder if that’s what she truly feels deep down…. But really what choice does she have?

Egyptian women, at least the poorer ones, really do work hard. Again, I struggle not to get agitated when I see the doorman’s wife washing all the cars in the morning or mowing the lawn in the bottom villa as well as looking after the children while the doorman sits under the tree drinking tea. And I know she goes out to clean houses too. And my hackles go up just a tiny bit when the man from the shack over the road arrives home on his motorcycle beeping the horn and one of the women rushes out to untie the load and take everything inside while he parks and sits himself down in the shade. And I know that those women have been up since daylight cooking for the small shop they run and working in the villa over the road.

That’s one thing that I have found out about myself living in Egypt. I am very accepting of other cultures when I visit, I find it much more difficult when I live here, especially in relation to women and children and their rights and treatment. I hate that I see boys who look about 11 or 12 working in the exceptional midday heat, clearing rubbish from the roads or working on a building site. I hate it that the doorman’s little girl doesn’t go to school and that Umm Rami can’t read or write a must ask her young son, who has more knowledge and power and rights than she does. And although I know that women chose to wear the hijab and abeya etc. for themselves and for God, I still find it difficult to watch the women, especially the older women, in the incredible heat fully covered, often with 2 or 3 layers, red-faced and looking like they might expire at any moment.

I know that all this says more about me than about Egypt, but I must confess I love that I can visit home and just be myself and have what is familiar around me. I feel, from my daily levels of irritation, it’s almost time to visit again…

Lotsa love

Lyndall

Next time

The photos have a couple of problems, I've uploaded twice without fixing it properly, will maybe try again another time

So here it is next time and I’m still here, we are both still here. In fact, after the small demolition by the police on the Sunday after the visit to the governor (and we stayed in a hotel that night, just in case, bought pjs and toothbrushes and had the hotel laundry service see us ready for the next day) things have settled down a great deal. For us personally I mean. We feel more safe and hope we're not being lulled into a false sense of security.

The police visit and the knocking off of a bit of the slab and one wall certainly didn’t stop ole no 88. He’s just keeps on building, finishing the interior walls of the top floor and the external rendering, having windows installed and even re-building the bit of wall that was knocked down. And now the workers are bringing bricks up to the top to build something else on top again. As I was saying to Leah, it’s so ridiculous it’s actually laughable. Not that I laugh at it very often but in my more hysterical moments it seems very funny.

So we are continuing to live our lives as usual – still waiting for the final license for the company and grateful that the piece of paper from the bank didn’t come back for changes for a fifth time. That’s given us a little hope that maybe now all the paperwork is correct at least. The final criminal check for Mohamed is finished and with the lawyer, yesterday the tax documents came back to us and now it really is just waiting for the last license to arrive. The lawyer says we can begin to ask him/chase him tomorrow. Can’t believe it might nearly be this close. Etisalat have almost sorted out the complete stuff up of the phones when they gave our number to another company to use, the signs are up (even if the phone numbers aren’t there yet) and the office sits, cleaned yet again, and waiting for the starter’s gun. If I didn’t have the Internet sometimes I think I’d go crazy.

Apart from all that we haven’t done anything too exciting – went to the Cairo Car Show but it was a total fizzer, very poor, nothing new or exciting and nothing grand or expensive; some manufacturers, like Mercedes, didn’t even show up and many others only had one or two models there. Toyota had a slightly funky looking concept car there but the turntable it was on wasn’t working so we could only see the back of it as it was in a corner :-) I think that sort of summed things up. Mohamed also hoped to be able to look at buses but only 2 low-end models there.

Otherwise our outings seem to be driving through Dreamland and looking at villas and dreaming. The other night we got to see inside the one owned by the Sudanese man that we’ve driven past over and over, asking price 6.5 million pounds with furniture but probably could get it for a bit over 5 million. That’s a partly underground floor of large, open Egyptian/Arabian style room and two large other rooms, ground floor of 200 sq metres of living/dining etc. (known as reception or halls in Egypt) and a kitchen and bathroom, first floor of 4 bedrooms and small central reception and bathroom and top floor of largish bedroom and bathroom and then the large roof. I wouldn’t use that top one as a bedroom unless you had to as you have to go through it to get up onto the roof. And also a room and bathroom for the doorman/maid family on the ground. Quite nice landscaped gardens of around maybe 350 sq. m. Furniture looked high Italian, French or something but I didn’t like it at all. So you can have it unfurnished for 6 million. Beautiful mosque over the road in landscaped gardens and hospital just down the street and international school a little way in the other direction. Mohamed LOVES it!!

I liked the internal finishes, not crazy over the top ornate in the worst taste like the last one we looked at (also 5 million but much bigger), but very classy in fact. No pool, Mohamed says you’d have to put one in (the owner said he had thought of putting one on the roof, I'm so glad he didn't). Apparently the family have never been in it, barely had a holiday in it – the kids want to live somewhere with more action like Mohandaseen. Don’t know what he does but I’m guessing money is no object. So we’ve bought a ticket in the Oz Lotto 90 million – I think that’s the only answer personally. And that's given Mohamed license to dream about a new car as well...our outing the other night was to the Audi showroom :-)

Anyway, am at the office and need to be doing something else, just thought I should put your minds a little at rest – thanks for all the concern everyone

Lots of love

Lyndall

To be or not to be

Mohamed tells me we are going to die. On one level this is true. However, that’s not how he means it. He means we are going to die soon. He means that there is someone out there who wants us dead and he thinks they are not afraid to make it happen. He’s making me nearly as stressed as he is.

It all started almost a month ago. The owner of the building going up in front of ours (between us and the pyramids), from now on called 88 coz that’s the building number, started to add a second illegal floor. He has approval for 4 floors and a roof, 5 altogether. And now he’s up to 7 and still going and we, as well as several other home owners in the building, are losing our pyramids view. Mind you, he’s not alone in this, dozens of buildings around us are of illegal height, but this one directly impacts on us. Anyway, when he started the second one, Mohamed decided enough was enough. So off we went to the local government offices to lodge a complaint.

You don’t need to hear the whole saga, but we’ve now been to either the local government or the governate offices 10 times. And on Thursday we got to see the Giza Governor himself. During all of this there have supposedly been stop work notices issued and notices to take off the illegal work. Nothing has stopped the building, some of it done in the middle of the night (like pouring the slab for the next floor) or at times like 6.00 am on Friday when everything is closed. The building goes on as I write.

As we understand it the governor has now signed a demolition order to take off the illegal floors and the police and government officers will be coming to carry that out on Sunday or Monday. What usually happens is that they knock holes in the walls and floors and order that the owner takes the rest down. Also what usually happens is that it stays like that for months or years, or a little of the floor is taken off and the rest patched up. We see it in lots of places. I guess we’ll see what happens in this case.

The governor was gracious and understanding; he spoke to the police himself and also told his staff we could come to see him any time without an appointment. He told us to take photographs of anything that continued to be done illegally and bring them to him. Very helpful. We hope.

So what has all this to do with dying? Well, this is Egypt. Or a similar thing could happen in any country where there’s a reasonable amount of money at stake and unscrupulous men who don’t like being crossed I guess. Number 88 stands to lose a few million. So far we have had our house and our street under surveillance, been followed, had our car hit twice by two men in a silver Mercedes who followed us from home (from number 88 - this one reported to the police and the Embassy), been threatened over the phone (told to take “very, very good care of ourselves”) and had everyone from the doorman and the man we bought our house from to Sami, the man in charge of the local government office, tell us to leave it alone. We’ve seen number 88 appear with another man in the vacant top floor of a building one street over where he can see into our house, and saw him disappear quickly when he noticed Mohamed on the balcony. And to be honest I do take it all very seriously and feel very threatened and not a little frightened. It’s wearing and tiring and uncomfortable.

Mohamed is definitely on edge, hardly sleeping, spending hours in the dark on the balcony watching what is happening around us, smoking up a veritable storm and barely eating. We no longer let anyone into the house, including the cleaning lady. He’s told his brother-in-law what to do if we are both dead. He seriously believes that something will be done to us – he thinks most likely a bad traffic accident, although I don’t think he entirely rules out someone breaking into the house to harm us. At least I’m sure he didn’t last night when he heard noises on our roof and we sat up for almost 4 hours in the dark with all the outside lights on.

I’m not sure exactly what to think really. I think maybe it’s possible. I think I don’t like living where I live any more and wish I was somewhere else. I hate feeling suspicious of everyone I see in the neighbourhood. I am tired of living in a house with continuously closed and locked windows and doors. I’m glad we’re looking around to buy somewhere else but know how long that will take. I think I’d probably love to fly home for a few weeks and de-stress. Then I would worry about Mohamed, although maybe he can disappear and take care of himself more easily without me around to worry about. I worry that it might take months to be over, or it maybe never being really over. I worry that I’m worrying about nothing and I worry that Mohamed is right.

And if I believe the Facebook quiz, Anne Hathaway will play me in the movie of my life. :-)

Until next time (I hope)

lotsa love

Lyndall


PS And don't you worry - I'm worrying enough for all of us...