tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388 2008-08-15T21:23:57Z Movable Type 3.34 tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388.7062 2008-08-15T20:57:14Z 2008-08-15T21:23:57Z

In a previous post I mentioned that I'm beginning to think about how to structure a course on gender and the Middle East. The current book on my nightstand is Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Here's a clip from the...

Betsy Beaulieu Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Here's a clip from the Washington Post review of the book: "I am Ayaan, the daughter of Hirsi, the son of Magan." In the first scene of Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a child of 5, sitting on a grass mat. Her grandmother is teaching her to recite the names of her ancestors, as all Somali children must learn to do. "Get it right," her grandmother warns. "They are your bloodline. . . . If you dishonor them you will be forsaken. You will be nothing. You will lead a wretched life and die alone." Thus begins the extraordinary story of a woman born into a family of desert nomads, circumcised as a child, educated by radical imams in Kenya and Saudi Arabia, taught to believe that if she uncovered her hair, terrible tragedies would ensue. It's a story that, with a few different twists, really could have led to a wretched life and a lonely death, as her grandmother warned. But instead, Hirsi Ali escaped -- and transformed herself into an internationally renowned spokeswoman for the rights of Muslim women. The break began when she slipped away from her family on her way to a forced marriage in Canada and talked her way into political asylum in Holland, using a story she herself calls "an invention." Soon after arriving, she removed her head scarf to see if God would strike her dead. He did not. Nor were there divine consequences when, defying her ancestors, she donned blue jeans, rode a bicycle, enrolled in university, became a Dutch citizen, began to speak publicly about the mistreatment of Muslim women in Holland and won election to the Dutch parliament. But tragedy followed fame. In 2004, Hirsi Ali helped a Dutch director, Theo van Gogh, make a controversial film, "Submission," about Muslim women suffering from forced marriages and wife beating. Van Gogh was murdered by an angry Muslim radical in response, and Hirsi Ali went into hiding. The press began to explore her past, discovering the "inventions" that she had used to get her refugee status. The Dutch threatened to revoke her citizenship; the American Enterprise Institute offered her a job in Washington. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's is a fascinating story which helps the reader understand the nature of Islamic fundamentalism. Her focus is both on gender and on religious extremism, and her writing style is as compelling as the tale she has to tell. On a more local front, I recently had the privilege of meeting a Burlington artist who is working on an incredible project about the lives of five women. Interested in personal identity and gender, Valerie Hird invited four women from Middle Eastern countries to submit a diary entry on a set day each month for a year; she herself also completed a diary entry on the appointed day each month. She is now working to create illustrated journals of the lives as they unfolded, capturing both their daily drama and their everyday simplicity. I hope you'll check out Valerie Hird's website to learn more about her work. Click on the Maiden Voyages link to read about this particular project and to see some of the diaries in progress. http://www.valeriehird.com/]]> tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388.7031 2008-08-10T17:46:09Z 2008-08-10T17:49:10Z

Another post from colleague Tim Brookes, who this time writes of cabs and drivers in Cairo. I speak from experience: Although Tim does a good job here, it must be experienced to be truly believed: Somehow, arriving back at Ramses...

Betsy Beaulieu Another post from colleague Tim Brookes, who this time writes of cabs and drivers in Cairo. I speak from experience: Although Tim does a good job here, it must be experienced to be truly believed: Somehow, arriving back at Ramses Station in Cairo galvanized me beyond belief. I hoisted my two packs onto my shoulder and forged out onto the crowded platform and then through a side-exit to the drop-off-and-taxi enclosure which was, of course, mayhem. Two taxi touts each wanted 40 pounds for the journey to Zamalek, and I turned them down without a shred of conscience. I was perfectly capable of doing this thing by myself. A taxi would be cheaper on the ordinary streets. Working from my recollection of our approach to the station, I strode out into Ramses Square. The night was hot, humid and alive. Even though it was nearly 9:30, the square was as crowded, possibly more so, than it had been during the day. Hawkers had laid out blankets or tables and were flogging shoes and sunglasses. Minibuses were pulled up here and there, with one young Egyptian yelling the destination over and over and others crowding around or waiting in clusters of twenty or thirty on the sidewalk, lapping over into the road. Scores, hundreds of others crossed the square, wandered in and out of the lighted shops, all of which were open, headed down into the underpass or up the steps to the flyover. This, I realized, was the Cairo I’d missed by being in taxis that took the flyover to the bridge. This was Cairo at night, at ground level. The darkness seemed to glow. As I say, for some reason I’d lost my tiredness, my apprehensiveness, even my head/throat/chest symptoms. This was more exhilarating than anything else I’d seen since I arrived. Working through the crowd, I found a road heading in what I reckoned was the right direction, but it turned out to be a minibus-only loop; I hadn’t realized that the entire square was, in effect, a bus station. I flagged a taxi and asked if he’d go to Zamalek. He scowled and shook his head. The next road was heading the wrong way. The next was another minibus loop, the sidewalks becoming, if anything, even more crowded and alive. I had thought that Alexandria was the epitome of bustle, but this was the capital of bustle, the Mecca of bustle. By now I was on the opposite side of the square from the railway station, and at last I saw a taxi skewed over by a sidewalk. I waved. He waved back. “Zamalek?” He nodded. I got in, taking the financial bull by the horns. “Twenty pounds,” I said. “Five twenty,” he said. Well, I thought, it is night, and this apparently is going to be a harder job than I thought, so I agreed. I piled into the absurdly cramped space behind him, he waved me across to the other seat, I disentangled myself from my own feet, and we were off. Within seconds it was clear that this was no ordinary Cairo taxi driver. This was the Xerxes of taxi drivers. He had refitted his horn with an echo control so that by touching it one he could produce a torrent of fifteen or twenty diminishing honks, and he headed into the massed traffic as if this neat piece of automotive technology gave him the power of a sonic icebreaker. The first road he tried was simply wedged shut with cars and taxis, so he turned into an alley—not a dark alley: everything in downtown Cairo was alight with shop window displays and car headlights—and shot at twenty or thirty miles an hour between rows of parked cars into gaps full of pedestrians with the unconcerned concentration of a racing driver punished by being sent back to Driver’s Ed and taking the cone slalom at the speed of sound. The short cut took us to another main shopping street that was as solid with traffic and as overrun with people as the one we had left, possibly more so. Xerxes was delighted, though: right in front was a taxi-driver mate of his, whom I’ll call Darius. Darius had clearly not seen Xerxes since Xerxes had installed his Jimi Hendrix Model II Taxi Horn, and Xerxes was only to glad to demonstrate. He did the fast multiple echo. He turned the echo rate down and demonstrated again. He did the single blast, no echo. He was just about to move on to the fuzzbox echo and the wah-wah echo when the traffic at last shunted forward a little, and Xerxes was making gaps where none existed, getting quarts of traffic into pint roads, all the while calling to Darius and demonstrating his horn. In the front seat of Darius cab sat a young lady in a black burka, her pale face glowing in the fluorescent shop lights, staring straight ahead as if trying to pretend than none of this was happening around her, looking for all the world like a nun at a pro wrestling bout. Cars began to move a little, and Xerxes continued carrying out traffic surgery, apparently paying little or no attention to the cars around him or the pedestrians stepping off the sidewalks like extras on Frogger. Instead, he maneuvered so as to be next to Darius and for the next two or three miles, utterly improbably, we kept going side by side, Xerxes calling a running series of jokes punctuated by effects on his horn, Darius laughing and calling back, the nun unmoved, unamused. At one point Darius leaned over and threw a cigarette from his car to Xerxes, who juggled it, grinned, waved, honked, and lit up. We reached a large traffic circle, again completely locked down with traffic. It was now about ten o’clock: rush hour. Cairo had reached its peak, its essential identity. Xerxes shot straight at the idling cars in front and inserted his front right wing just ahead of the left corner of a bus. The bus driver growled something at Xerxes, who responded with some kind of good-natured insult, calling the driver “Excellence.” Given that Arabic is said to have an unparalleled creativity in curses and insults, many of them involving mothers and camels, I was surprised at Xerxes’ tolerant mildness. Again—and Ahmed is still shaking his head at this as I tell him—I have yet to hear an Egyptian get seriously angry at another, or a parent abuse his or her child. Finally, as we reached the approaches to the flyover and the bridge, the traffic began to break up, and now Xerxes revealed that he had not only extra features to his horn, but another seven gears in his gearbox. He shot up the ramp as if preparing a leap over 22 buses into Tunisia. Years ago, I had a friend who volunteered as an ambulance driver for his college Rescue squad. “I tell you, man,” he said, chuckling, “when you hit that siren and you cut through a busy intersection at fifty, hey, it’s better than any video game.” This seemed to me a strangely self-interested reason for being in a selfless profession, but I guessed I could see what he meant. Here in Cairo, Xerxes was now up on the bridge, which was bristling with late-night strollers, lovers and fishermen, racing toward Zamalek, leaving the turnoff until the last minute and downshifting into seventeenth. I had long decided that, for all his apparent insanity, he was either the world’s best urban driver or else protected by Horus, Seth, Isis, Osiris and every other figure of the Egyptian pantheon, and was sitting back in my seat loving it. He didn’t know Charia Ismail Mohamed, so I told him (all this by sign language) that I’d direct him, so we burst into the narrow, quieter, darker streets of Zamalek at only forty or fifty with him looking over his shoulder as I indicated right and left. He took an unexpected early turn, and from then on we kept on not being able to turn left because of no-left-turns and no-entries, but I figured out how to get us back on track and he kept on not killing people. When we screeched into a space the size of a mousetrap right in front of the Horus, I gave him forty pounds. He was astonished. “Very. Very good,” he said. “Very, very good.” I couldn’t have agreed more. It had been the best way to see the city, it had been a wonderful exercise in trust, and it was better than any video game. tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388.7027 2008-08-08T22:22:16Z 2008-08-08T22:31:02Z

Here's another entry from my colleague Tim Brookes, who visited the Pyramids and survived to write about it. Today I went to the Pyramids, an experience that would probably have offered Joseph Campbell or John Ruskin all kinds of brilliant...

Betsy Beaulieu Here's another entry from my colleague Tim Brookes, who visited the Pyramids and survived to write about it. Today I went to the Pyramids, an experience that would probably have offered Joseph Campbell or John Ruskin all kinds of brilliant artistic and philosophical insights. I, too, was granted a profound insight, though I think it’s unlikely that either Campbell or Ruskin had their epiphany, as I did, in the toilet of a camel shop. Let me back up a bit. Knowing that I had two days of concentrated public health work ahead, and a trip to Alexandria some time soon after that, I decided to do my tourism while I could. Andrea, the manager upstairs at the Longchamps, had offered me a driver for LE 150 for the day, 8 a.m.-5 p.m. (these details will become significant later), and having learned in India the value of a good driver who was paid by the day, spoke good English and knew his way around, I went for it, despite all the warning in Lonely Planet that this was the most expensive way to go, a rip-off in every direction. I didn’t care about paying a little extra, and I resented the implicit assumption that an essential part of travel was making sure you got your money’s worth. I have more money than most Egyptians working in the tourist trade. I’m happy to pay $22.50 rather than $18.50 if that lets a little cash seep into the country, and I’m certainly not going to haggle and insult someone just to save a buck. Life’s too short. At least, that’s what I thought I thought. My driver, Magdi, was 50, an educated man who, it turned out, worked in a bank in Egypt, then in Saudi Arabia as an accountant, before returning to Egypt and seeing his daughters into and through college—the oldest, 23, an accountant like her father, the middle one, 21, a computer analyst, and the youngest, 19, studying law. He’d had a knee operation that left one leg shorter than the other, and he moved stiffly; I sympathized, and we compared knee war stories. As soon as we were crossing the Nile from Cairo into Giza, a suburb that extends from the Nile to the beginning of the Sahara, Magdi offered me options. I could rent a camel or a horse or go on foot. Hmm, sez I. Never ridden a camel. I’ll give it a try. All right, sez he. But there were other choices. The typical camel trip was two hours, Pyramids, desert, Sphinx and back. I could pay the government-approved rate and know ahead of time what it would cost, or I could go to an unlicensed shop/stable and pay less, but then the guide might well take me out into the desert and demand more money to lead me back. I’d read about this scam and chuckled, still taking the whole battle between tourism and peace of mind far too lightly. I’d go with the government option, I said, imagining the money going back into coffers somewhere and being invested in the upkeep of Egypt’s historical remnants. As if. Giza is an impoverished suburb. The first donkey-carts I’d seen in Egypt appeared, the first cows on the street, shop and roads signs in Arabic only, houses and apartment blocks of brick, many of them unfinished—deliberately, Magdi said, as the homeowner didn’t have to pay taxes until the building was complete. He seemed to be right: some of the boxy little apartments clearly had people living in them, even though the steel filaments of reinforced concrete stuck up from the structural pillars like Marine haircuts as if the building were expecting several more floors. I’d been told that the suburbs have been built all the way out to the Pyramids, but even so I was utterly unprepared to round a corner on the elevated freeway and see, between these boxy buildings, the radical triangular summit of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. I’m not using the word radical lightly: it seemed not so much ancient as futuristic, a shape forgotten by architects, waiting to be rediscovered. The Transamerica building in San Francisco has nothing on it. Look at me, it seemed to say. I know everything. The narrow streets suddenly filled up with horses—or rather young people of both sexes on horses. Magdi pointed at them disparagingly. “These are rich young Arabs,” he said. “They come out here in the evening, they drink all night at the nightclubs and then in the morning they ride horses.” The true extent of this cavorting became clear a little later, when I saw an extraordinary sight: several young Arabs in a Humvee were standing leaning out of its sunroof, firing canisters of (I think) shaving cream at others in cars or on horses. Battle was joined, and maybe three dozen milled around, firing this way and that, taking over the whole road. Someone produced a squirt-cannon. In seconds, the air was full of fragments of foam, a desert snowstorm. They pounded away past the gateway to the sizeable enclosed area that is, in effect, the Pyramids And Sphinx National Park, and up into the raw desert. It was like a scene from Mad Max. Humvees, pickups, ATV’s and Land Cruisers were parked on the skyline or racing each other across the tawny sand. Group of riders raced downhill or up, shrieking, laughing, yelling, the idle rich at play where nobody would complain. But I’m getting ahead of myself. At the moment, Magdi was pulling over in a cobblestoned area that featured several parked cars, horses, camels and several shop fronts whose windows displayed papyrus paintings and ornate Arabian-nights bottles. “This is where we get the camel,” Magdi explained, but it turned out that was only part of the truth. This was where Tim was nudged toward the whirlpool of tourism, and this was where he had his moment of illumination. The owner of the shop, a middle-aged woman with good English and a forthcoming manner, came out and invited me in for coffee while the camel was being readied. “Please to take seat,” she said, and I sat on the familiar upholstered settee behind the familiar low table. The coffee arrived, with its familiar side-order of water, and all seemed to be right with the world. As I sipped, I noticed that every wall was lined with shelves, and every shelf was lined with the ornate Arabian-nights perfume bottles. This was no mere decoration, and now I was well inside, sitting on a low settee that made it hard to rise, my back to the door so I couldn’t see whether any camel-readying was, in fact, taking place, the owner pounced. Here, she said, sitting beside me and placing a large Chanel No. 5-shaped bottle on the table, was the famous essence of lotus flower. Not oil. No oil. No coloring. No chemicals. Pure essence. She seized my wrist and dabbed me. I was still unfazed, unfluttered. This is part of my education, I told myself. Lotus, eh? Doesn’t mean I have to buy any. I gave a sniff and an appreciative nod. But I’m not really a perfume person, I explained. Without missing a beat she moved onto the second bottle, which she called Businessman. Here, she said, dabbing her palm and wiping it on both my shoulders. You put on your clothes. Smell good all day. Very good for men. Very professional. “You are businessman?” she asked. A rare tactical error. “No,” I said. She hesitated for a second, and it was clear she had talked herself into a corner on this one. She could hardly say, “What are you, then? Yokel? Hippie? Tramp?” Conceding this perfume, she swiftly moved on to the next, which was called Nefertiti. I was resisting this one quite cheerfully too, until she demonstrated that you could put five drops in a glass of water and sprinkle the water on a rug, and it would keep the whole room smelling fresh. As it happens, I could imagine Barbara doing exactly that in her office, and said yes. This was the point when the tide turned, when the moon began to wane, when the hot-air balloon of my peace of mind began to cool and lose altitude. At once she moved into a kind of numerical shell game: everything came in threes, and each of those threes led to another three, and I couldn’t find the purchase I wanted to make under any of them. The perfume came in three sizes of bottle. Well, I’d go for the smallest, as the big one would barely fit in my luggage, break on the plane and drown my clothing in Nefertiti. Now what about price? The smallest was 200 Egyptian pounds, a price that would pay for just about every single bottle of essential oils at the crystal-and-aromatherapy shop in Burlington. All of a sudden I wasn’t so willing to redistribute my wealth to the Egyptian people. I weakly beat her down to 100 LE, but even that wasn’t the end of it. Here was a lovely little presentation box that held three small bottles. She put my one little bottle in it. If I bought another for the same price, I could have a third one free. I felt as if I were on my hands and knees following a small carrot on a long string that was being twitched away from me. No, thank you, I said. Just the one. She finally allowed me to make my purchase—or so I thought. This was a small insight, compared to what would come later, but still worth noting: I was on my guard for people who wanted me to buy when I didn’t want to buy. I hadn’t realized that a second line of attack was also waiting, just behind the dunes: even if I wanted to buy something, I was still vulnerable. It had never occurred to me that the joy of buying something is an incentive in itself, a sufficiently strong incentive that once the rube wants to buy something the seller can actually switch tactics in a brilliant, counterintuitive way and deny the rube the chance to make the purchase while the stakes are raised—while, in effect, the seller goes through the rube’s wallet to see just how much is in there. Pouncing, she added up everything I owed her. “One hundred for perfume, two hundred for camel, fifty for get in to Pyramids—three hundred fifty pounds.” I blanched and handed her my credit card. “You no got cash?” she asked. “Have to pay extra charge for credit card, seven percent.” The truth was that I had only about LE 500 with me, and paying cash would more or less wipe me out, and as this was the first stop of a three-stop day, I wanted some cash in hand. No, I insisted, credit card. All right, she shrugged. Three hundred seventy pounds. Then she made her mistake. At least, I think she made a mistake. She went away. I sipped my coffee, trying to regain my peace of mind. A teenage boy brought me my tiny bottle in a crude cardboard box. She came back: my credit card was no good, she said. She pointed at the slip: ERROR. Fact is, I’d just used the card. My suspicion is that she deliberately induced the error because she wanted cash. I paid the cash. She had won in the short run, but lost in the long: with a credit card I had (to her) unlimited funds to coax out of me; paying her cash had reduced me to the status of a ten-cent punter in Atlantic City. From now on, anyone in Giza trying to fleece me was out of luck. That hadn’t occurred to me just yet, though. Instead, she had induced in me a strange mental condition, one that would do nobody any good but one that is so common it’s central to the travel experience: I was on the defensive, clutching my money, for the first time worrying about every penny. I was, in fact, a Lonely Planet tourist, and I hated it. “Camel is ready,” she announced, the readying of the camel having coincidentally taken just as long as the buying of the perfume. Magdi, for all his warnings about touts, must have been perfectly aware he was setting this up. I stood up, and everything might have been different but for the fact that I felt a gurgle in my intestines. I could have predicted it: a large breakfast eaten perhaps too early and too quickly, and then sitting rather doubled over in a smallish car…. Luckily, at that instant I spotted a small open door to my right with a washbasin behind it. “One minute,” I called after the owner, and went inside thinking I had discovered one of the great truths of tourism: Have Attack Of Diarrhea BEFORE Getting On Camel. My breakfast left me by the express route, and as I looked around the tiny toilet I discovered another of the great truths of tourism: Women Who Tell Each Other “Always Carry Toilet Paper” Are Not Just Being Sissies. There was a spray nozzle like a small garden hose, which I tested (gingerly, not wanting to emerge with my shorts dripping) and figured out what needed to be done, remembering how common this was in India, and why Indians eat food only with their right hands, remembering too how many diseases are transmitted by what is called “the fecal-oral route,” a phrase that had never been as vivid to me as it was now. More than that, though: I realized something about travel. When we quit work for our one or two weeks a year and travel, one of the most important things we think we’re buying is leisure, and leisure (as in the phrase “the leisured classes”) means that we want to be treated as if we’re rich. We want to do nothing at all if we feel like it—an option we don’t have at any other time of the year. Whatever the time of year, we want to bathe in the sun and swim, both of them luxuries of you come from Buffalo, say, or Burton-on-Trent, and don’t happen to own a backyard pool. We want to dress however we want, and we want people to do our bidding courteously—we want servants, in effect. When we pay for travel, we are buying the right to be aristocracy. Sitting in that tiny toilet, imagining what I had to do next, I saw the other side of tourism. Yes, I was dressing as I wanted, but equally, like every other Westerner at a tourist site in Egypt, I looked a bit ridiculous, and on a camel, I was pretty sure, I’d look even more ridiculous. My dignity—the cornerstone, surely, of being an aristocrat or being treated like one—was shattered. Though not as badly as if I’d had the diarrhea attack on the camel. Broke, camel, diarrhea, all the pieces came together and I saw that although we talk of a “tourist trap,” tourism is in fact a whirlpool. The more we give way to its seductive force and agree to do the usual tourist things at the usual tourist sites, the more we’re submitting to forces increasingly beyond our control or even our comprehension. If we make a laughing pact that we’ll going home with our wallets empty (a prerogative of the leisured classes) then someone will be on hand to make sure we do just that. The more seductive the destination on the poster, the more we’ll be out of our depth when we get there, and then less we will even want to use our common sense. And the way we know we’ve fallen into that whirlpool and feel ourselves being sucked down is precisely at that hysterical Lonely Planet moment when we grasp that, far from being world-travelling aristocrats, respected and flattered by everyone around us, we are in fact being taken for suckers, powerless, humiliated. It’s a sign of the power of that insight that while at the time I grasped only the metaphor, I was prescient enough to know what, therefore, would be bound to happen. Every step the camel took carried me farther away from the kind of person I want to be, doing the things I want to do. Once I was six feet or more off the ground I was entirely at the mercy of my guide, Hassan, who led the way on a horse and held my camel’s rope rein with one hand. We went where he went. When he whipped his horse with a cane, he told me, time and again, to whip my camel. “Hit him to stick, sir. Strong.” My camel, whose skin had the texture of an old armchair and whose head and neck were covered with nicks and scars, was plodding along at a perfectly reasonable pace, but Hassan clearly wanted to be finished and back in two hours so as not to miss the next tourist departure time. Just to get Hassan to shut up, I whipped the camel’s saddle-blanket instead. Hassan himself was an epitome of insincerity. Slipping the Tourism and Antiquities police small bribes, he chuckled, “I take care of you sir, and later you take care of me.” His goal, he insisted over and over again, was to make me happy, but that involved me doing all the touristy things I detest. If I wanted to take a photo in one place he insisted on going on to a better spot. Like all the other guides, he cajoled me to stand on the lower steps of the third pyramid, already badly eroded by wind, weather and acid rain, so he could take a photo of me. I, too, had been worn down; I’d reached my basest self. All I could do was make futile, petulant gestures, such as refusing to pay an extra fee to enter the enclosure for a close-up photo of the Sphinx, now eroded so badly it is barely more than a head on a stick, and refusing to whip my camel hard enough to enjoy the experience of a gallop. It was also occurring to me that some of the petty acts of greed and selfishness (the Mad Max rally, the small boys whipping casually, indiscriminately, at any horse or camel that passed) were mirrored on the grand scale of the Pyramids themselves. “What are these buildings down here?” I asked, pointing not up to the pyramids but down to some excavations at ground level. “Those are tombs of slaves,” he said, with the air of one who has just made tenure. “Thousands of slaves made pyramids, afterwards all killed. Why? So nobody would know secrets of pyramid. One of the Wonders of Ancient World.” The pyramids’ very shape was a monument to cruelty. Euclidean geometry—regular solids such as triangles, squares, circles—is not found in nature. It’s a human notion, one that takes enormous force to represent in physical form in any enduring fashion. But it’s a human vanity to want to deal in forms and symbols rather than with people and animals, and for Cheops, his son and grandson, stone meant more than human life. I began to see every massive block as a corpse. Surely even none of the monoliths of Stalinist architecture were built at such a human price. I made a note to myself to write to the Egyptian government proposing that this area be named the Valley of the Slaves. Finally, Hassan reached the fulfillment of his role: on our way back down toward the exit, he stopped his horse and my camel and demanded that I now take care of him as he had taken care of me. I guess I could have slid off the camel and walked the mile or so back to the stable, but I was expecting to pay him a tip anyway. I tip pretty much everyone, and I don’t mind it at all. I gave him twenty pounds, more than the customary ten percent. He all but spat at it. “People are giving me one hundred pounds, one hundred fifty,” he scowled. But he was a victim of his employer’s credit card scam: I simply didn’t have that much cash left. He, in effect, became the sucker, but only because I was all suckered out. Furious, he took my remaining seventy pounds, converting it mentally to dollars, nagging me about how little that was, how much it meant to him, how easily I could afford it, demanding to see if I had euros or dollars hidden in my wallet. I reached the center of the whirlpool, and my better self drowned. If I had been a different person, reaching this same low point, I would have perhaps screamed and yelled at him, becoming a different baser self. As it was I became my don’t-make-waves worst self and did everything I could to get the whole thing over. Back at the shop, the owner demanded to know if I was happy. She and Hassan stood side by side, Hassan knowing that his livelihood through her might suffer if he brought back an unhappy tourist, she knowing that her livelihood through Magdi might do the same. Yes, I said. I was very happy. I got in the car, and with a newfound sense of purpose instructed Magdi not to go straight to the next set of tombs. “Take me to an ATM,” I said, “where I can get more cash.” I wanted to get away from that sense of having to snarl and bicker over my last dollar as quickly as possible. “Then take me somewhere where I can get a cool drink and do some writing.” He wrinkled his brow. This was not on the usual itinerary. After driving around Giza for a while he found a coffee shop. It had rather more flies than I’d have liked and none of the waiters spoke English, but I managed to get a bottle of water, an excellent coffee and a little of myself back. I had no idea how much the coffee would cost—the place had no menus—but I guessed three or four pounds at most. I gave the waiter two fives. The word largesse occurred to me, and its opposite: at the Pyramids I, like everyone else, was demonstrating smallesse. He wrinkled his brow and tried to give one of the fives back, but I was having nothing to do with it. I had rediscovered my better self, and even if that self wanted to behave like an aristocrat and be treated like one, for now that was okay. Tomorrow I could give up all this tourist crap and go back to dealing with public health and infectious disease. I couldn’t wait. tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388.6993 2008-07-31T17:50:50Z 2008-07-31T17:51:02Z

Betsy Beaulieu ]]> tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388.6992 2008-07-31T16:34:10Z 2008-07-31T17:05:26Z

I've been back a couple of weeks now, and I find myself thinking often of my time in the Middle East. I followed my colleagues' blogs obsessively after I left, hungry for the sounds and sights I had grown accustomed...

Betsy Beaulieu Nine Parts of Desire, and while I was overseas I read Finding Nouf, a wonderful mystery set in Saudi Arabia, and Three Cups of Tea, which is a truly inspirational story. When I got back I surfed a bit and also asked friends and colleagues for recommendations. A big box just arrived from Amazon; here's what's in it: The Map of Love, by Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam, by Asra Nomani Persepolis, a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi Married to a Bedouin, by Marguerite van Geldermalsen Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali In Search of Islamic Feminism, by Elizabeth Fernea Qur'an and Woman, by Amina Wadud I can't wait to dig into these books, and also to track down a few films. Many of these, I suspect, will find their way into my Middle East course. For now I'm content to be an armchair traveler. My journey will continue, this time in the comfort of my home in Winooski, Vermont (where I don't have to haggle with drivers and I can brush my teeth with tap water), and I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for texts you think I should read or view, please let me know. ]]> tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388.6932 2008-07-25T14:59:16Z 2008-07-25T15:01:01Z

My colleague Tim Brookes, director of the Professional Writing program and co-founder of Writers Without Borders, is presently in Egypt on the Faculty Internationalization Initiative. You'll enjoy his observations of a day in Cairo: When I threw open the curtains...

Betsy Beaulieu My colleague Tim Brookes, director of the Professional Writing program and co-founder of Writers Without Borders, is presently in Egypt on the Faculty Internationalization Initiative. You'll enjoy his observations of a day in Cairo: When I threw open the curtains I had no idea what to expect. Perhaps the kites wheeling overhead that I saw in India and Pakistan. Instead, perched on the roofs of every house and hotel, tall and short, near and far, left and right, were satellite dishes. I counted roughly 550. All beige, all tilted more or less the same way, they had the alertness and keen sense of purpose of anti-aircraft batteries, yet without any aggressive barrel they seemed benign, earlike. It was as if everyone in the city had signed up for a futuristic interstellar monitoring project, and was straining for signs of extra-terrestrial life. After gazing in astonishment for a few minutes it dawned on me that my legs, where the 9 a.m. sunlight was falling, were starting to burn. Sunburn at 9 a.m.? It didn’t seem possible. It was the title of a bad thriller. I tottered off to breakfast, which had that small-European-hotel muttered-conversation feel, croissants and eggs and bad coffee, until I tottered back out of the breakfast room and saw a couple of people had taken their breakfast onto the potted-plant fifth-floor terrace. Sunburn and eggs at 9:30. Couldn’t imagine it, myself. Napped again, found out how to work the wi-fi internet, got the helpful guy on the desk to write out directions in Arabic to the WHO, which came out as World Half Organization, and directions back to the hotel, printed in Arabic and English on a card with a map. Maps are, of course, a Western vanity: the taxi driver used the time-honored method of pulling over every few minutes to call to someone on the side of the road and ask directions. Luckily, I’m now more or less used to this, and was pleased at my lack of panic and dismay. In fact, I was getting more and more excited. Laura was right: the novelty, the challenge that brings out the best in you—this is what it’s about. I was even starting to enjoy the heat, or at least to redefine it, to take it on as part of the journey: it was a badge of honor, even—given that it enveloped my whole body—a uniform. As my Aberdonian friend said, “It was guid.” Taxi $30 Unlike the WHO country office in Karachi, which has been built on an unused bit of desert on the outskirts of town and my taxi driver couldn’t find it even when we were parked out front, the Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office of the WHO is a marble monument, a cross between a mausoleum and a bank. Very reassuring. I could sense infectious diseases being daunted by its very façade. My contact, Jane Nicholson, had kindly agreed to see me right before shooting off on holiday, and there was an air of great activity in her office, which included lists of publications in progress. I wish I had written some of them down: technical stuff, they tended to have titles such as “Incidence of Boll Weevil Fever in Rural Areas beginning with the Letter F,” and “Ground Water Testing Using Only a Cotton Swab and a Toothbrush.” She herself had that English habit of saying “Yes,” and “Right, then,” to sum up and convert conversation into planning into action. She listened intently to my explanation of why I was in Egypt (an absurdly rambling affair that includes autobiography, bibliography, travelography and pedagography) and at once began to suggest a list of people I should see. She was joined by her colleague Dr. Kassem Sara, a short man with a high forehead, an energetic manner and alert eyes, who had just returned from prayers. Kassem had several endearing habits. Every time we were alone in his office he immediately asked, “Would you like something sweet?” and offered candies, freshly-baked breadsticks, tea, coffee. He also had that Arabic physical familiarity, taking my arm, guiding me into a room or an elevator. He was from Syria, he explained, pausing at a map to show Damascus, the road across the desert through the ancient city of Palmyra to Xxxx, his home town on the Euphrates. Right in the cradle of civilization, I offered. “Yes, we are very proud of that,” he said. But now he had been in Egypt for fifteen years and saw it as his home. Egyptians are friendlier than Syrians, he said, and besides, his children refuse even to visit Syria. I got the impression, though I may be wrong, that Egyptians see Syrians as backward. He also taught me to say “Bism’allah.” “It is what we say when we begin something,” he explained. “It means, `in the name of God.’ You and I are beginning.” “The French would say, `Allons-y!’” I said. I’ve always liked the phrase for its energy, its élan. He nodded. “Allons-y!” he repeated, committing our collaboration to energy, and to God. He had his driver take me home after he himself was dropped off at his family’s home, which was above a mall. “It’s noisy and there are too many people,” he said, “but….” As he got out he asked me something I didn’t catch. He repeated: “Do you have psoriasis?” Psoriasis. No wonder I didn’t understand the first time. No, I said, I’d had an accident, and ran my hand down the length of my right arm to show where the scabbing had been. “Ah,” he said, his face lightening. Then, as if apologizing as well as explaining, “I am also a physician, you see.” In the meantime, Kassem and Jane had drawn up a list of roughly eight dozen people I should meet, and Kassem had started me on the journey of meeting them. The eminence grise and collective memory of the organization, they said, was Dr. M. Haytham Al-Khayat, a teddy-bear of a man who was downstairs in an office the size of a library, sitting low in an armchair with that posture some academics develop in which they seem torpid but are watching everything that happens with such awareness that they observe the movement of microbes, and know the end of your sentence before you have thought of the beginning. He listened to what I said, but I could tell he knew it all and was absently using the unused portions of his mind to play Tetris. “Yes, but the person you must talk to is Dr. Zuhair Hallaj,” he said, with the air of one solving a chess problem involving checkmate in a mere sixteen moves. So Zuhair, the head of communicable diseases, was called in, and within minutes had grasped everything and was calling the head of communicable diseases at the Ministry of Health so arrange for me to meet him the following day. Let me explain something. Much travel literature by Europeans features the author waiting in some dim and stiflingly hot governmental corridor for days waiting for the lowliest functional to return from tiffin and stamp a crucial document that will, in a fashion that can only be described as Oriental Kafka, allow him to visit another governmental functionary who will likewise be out for tiffin, but will finally return and stamp the document with a stamp that cancels out the first stamp. These accounts are by no means exaggerated. To have me visiting someone barely below the level of the Minister on my first full day in the country was staggering. To tell you the truth, I was already a little daunted, and began wondering, in the corner of my mind usually reserved for Tetris, what on earth I should wear. The four of us came up with a list of the top public health stories in Egypt: traffic accidents (a recent crash on the road to Syria had killed 44 and left more than 200 in hospital), street children, Hepatitis C (one Egyptian in three is infected), schistosomiasis (a success story in Egypt, which might have implications for dozens of other African countries), and avian flu. Kassem, meanwhile, was extending the mental list he was making of people I should meet. Even as their names came up in conversation I was starting to feel uneasy, all over again, about my lack of Arabic. Names they threw out sounded suspiciously similar to each other. I wrote them down, spelling phonetically, as quickly as I could—a method that, combined with my appalling handwriting, pretty much guaranteed future confusion. Back at his office, Kassem offered me sweets all over again, and showed me some of his work, including a monumental project: a unified medical dictionary in Arabic, English and French. Knowing how much perception and understanding of disease is affected by the assumptions and history of one’s culture, I could begin to imagine the difficulties involved. Not to mention the fact that our understanding of disease is dynamic, changing so often and at times so rapidly that when I was working on my asthma book I discovered that the entire conception of asthma was in the process of changing so dramatically that the current edition of Morland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary was already hopelessly outdated. A panel convened by the NIS even wanted to change the name to Reactive Airway Disease, which might have been more self-explanatory but ran into the difficulty that nobody in the real world would have known what they were talking about. Kassem agreed, and came up with a subject that showed an entirely different range of difficulties. How were he and his colleagues to name clitorectomy, widespread in Africa? They wanted, frankly, to choose a word that was accurate but ugly, to indicate that the practice was repulsive to them. “Clitorectomy” sounded far too scientific, as if those practicing it had good medical reasons for doing so. “Female circumcision” likewise sounded too acceptable, as male circumcision is standard practice in both Jewish and Moslem faiths. Even to go with the phrase of choice, though—“female genital mutilation,” or FGM—posed problems, as religious conservatives might feel that by using such a phrase, the dictionary was implicitly criticizing male circumcision. (Fine by me: speaking as an uncircumcised male, I’d regard any assault on my foreskin as genital mutilation.) So the editorial team had to have a series of consultations with religious leaders, who (and Kassem sounded a little surprised at this) unexpectedly endorsed the FGM language. Shortly afterwards, perhaps by coincidence, the Egyptian government even came out and issued for the first time an explicit condemnation of FGM. The more I looked at Kassem’s robust volume, with its more than 100,000 terms unified in three languages, the more I imagine Dr. Johnson looking on and being pretty damn impressed. My final act of the working day was to buy a cell phone, which I achieved with the help of no fewer than four guys at the Mobilini office two doors down from my hotel. One told me of the virtues of the individual phones, and I argued him ("Simpler! Simpler!") down to a Nokia that did not include a flat-screen plasma TV or GPS system. (Though it may include Tetris, come to think of it.) He was the one who also showed me how to insert the chip. He, however, had no understanding of my question, "How do I pay for the actual calls?" This only evolved over time. He told me I needed a SIM card, which spoke in Arabic, so another of the guys took over the task of making my new phone speak English, which was a Rosetta Stone experience that took ten minutes and left his thumb exhausted. Somewhere in there I had to buy yet another card that seemed to be for actual calls once the phone was all chipped and chipper, and I got my actual phone number off something that looked for all the world as if guy #3 was offering me a stack of free CD's to choose from, all apparently identical. I was wrong about that, but now wholly off base as they *did* then offer me a free Mobilini backpack, but even that confused me as guy #1 had clearly been badly work down by my state of basic incomprehension of cell phone technology and he began to lapse into French, called the backpack a cadeau (gift). By the time the whole transaction had been accomplished, I half expected a new generation of cell phones to arrive by truck, making my Nokia obsolete. Then guy #3, who had been in a kind of silent supervisory capacity until now, stepped in and advised guy#1 how to create a receipt on the computer and print it out. Finally, I signed a contract that was completely in Arabic, so I may well have signed away my rights to a fair trial, or the Egyptian edition of my next book. I walked out feeling immensely pleased with myself, but not as pleased (or as sensible) as the hotel desk clerk, who asked to see the phone, gave little chortles of glee, declared Nokia a good make, showed me how to access my menu and my messages, and finally did the most important thing of all: he called me on it, and we had a very jovial brief conversation on our cell phone, three feet away from each other across the counter. I was so grateful I gave him the free Mobilini backpack to pass on to his children. We both agreed it had been an excellent day.
 tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388.6861 2008-07-15T15:20:16Z 2008-07-15T15:20:45Z

Betsy Beaulieu ]]> tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388.6860 2008-07-15T15:19:11Z 2008-07-15T15:19:30Z

Betsy Beaulieu ]]> tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388.6859 2008-07-15T14:11:31Z 2008-07-16T14:47:40Z

Well, I've been home a little more than 24 hours. I've slept long and hard in my beloved bamboo fiber sheets, had a long, luxurious shower in my own bathroom with my favorite products, dried off with a fluffy towel...

Betsy Beaulieu Three Cups of Tea and Finding Nouf, regionally appropriate books for Middle East sojourners, we bolstered each other when spirits occasionally flagged or hasslers became too insistent, and she carried my bags when my back was bad. We talked about what we brought that we couldn't have done without (tissues and the anti-bacterial hand wipes, my hat), what we didn't need (the lightweight sweater I brought, in case the evenings were cool -- ha!) and what we'd do differently (learn more useful Arabic phrases). We became more seasoned travelers , we both grew a lot personally and professionally, and we fantasized a bit about where we might find our next adventure. Thanks to all of you for keeping me company along the way. It's been gratifying to have this format to describe, to share, and to think through what I've experienced. Ma as-salaamah! ]]> tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388.6842 2008-07-13T23:39:55Z 2008-07-13T23:41:15Z

Betsy Beaulieu ]]> tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388.6841 2008-07-13T23:37:42Z 2008-07-13T23:38:34Z

Betsy Beaulieu ]]> tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388.6840 2008-07-13T23:36:06Z 2008-07-13T23:36:23Z

Betsy Beaulieu ]]> tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388.6839 2008-07-13T23:34:26Z 2008-07-13T23:34:36Z

Betsy Beaulieu ]]> tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388.6838 2008-07-13T23:32:16Z 2008-07-13T23:33:33Z

Betsy Beaulieu ]]> tag:blogs.targetx.com,2008:/champlainintl/ElizabethBeaulieu//388.6837 2008-07-13T23:28:55Z 2008-07-13T23:30:42Z

Betsy Beaulieu ]]>