Cairo/Beirut Dispatch القاهرة- بيروت

Beirut Dispatch 6.12.09 Ria Finally Meets John Sununu

2009-06-15T13:45:00.015+03:00

In this Dispatch:

Ria Still Lives in Awe of the House of Sekina
Parliamentary Election and Observation
Ria Finally Meets John Sununu

The Story of Cleanliness and Gluttony in the House of Sekina

When measured for cleanliness, Sekina’s house easily puts any other house I’ve ever been to deep and unpenetrable shame. This is accomplished not so much with cleaning products as it is with oceans of water and universes of fresh air. Every single day all carpets are pulled up, brushed out on the balcony, the bathroom scrubbed from top to bottom, and all floors washed. Once a week, every single item in the house is wiped down – all spice containers removed from their cupboards and washed, all carpets hosed down and dried out by being hung over the walls of her outside porch, all bedsheets fairly boiled, all curtains taken down and wiped, each book on every bookshelf eradicated of its dust. Once a year, the mattresses are unstitched, their feathers and wool washed and dried in the sun, and then sewn up again. Yes, its just water water water and air air air, and a lemon or two here and there. For instance, the container which holds Sekina’s very clean sponges for dish washing is a container of water with lemon rinds in it, rinds that are changed every day. The main enemy to the army of cleaners – mostly, yes, women - of my neighborhood seems not so much to be of germs, but of dust and in their ceaseless eradication of this dust, the germs don’t stand a chance. We sleep with all the doors and windows open “because that’s how everyone should sleep.” In the winter, there are more blankets, but still fresh air because we can. I am in a perpetual state of peace and happiness in this condition.

On the opposite end of cleanliness is gluttony, and we do that too, but in a grand and rather tidy way that includes divvying up large lots of food between the apartments in my building. On fish days, twice a week, one of the Sri Lankan maids of the building is sent down to the port of Karantina to wait for Ali, the only fishmonger Sekina deems as worthy of her standards. Many pounds of fish – whose type changes according to the season or even the month – are brought up and laid out on a balcony where a whole row of maids goes to work deboning and ungutting and deeyeballing them swiftly and accurately. This is truly a sight to behold. Scales fly and innards are tossed into buckets which fill up, and are emptied at a feverish pace. On other days, my downstairs neighbor’s maid Dilhane is sent to find buckets and casks of cheese and yogurt, while another girl goes for meat – whole lambs, split up between the residents of the building. Wednesday, the row of girls is reassembled for the stuffing of squash with lamb and tomatoes or the forming of kibbe – holy yum. I like vegetable chopping day most of all because I am allowed to participate. This was only accomplished through a lot of begging after which Sekina relented and said that although I am not yet skilled enough to handle fish or meat, I’m okay with tomatoes and onions. During the washing and disassembling of 20 cabbages the other week, Sekina would save I and her grandsons the spines of the smallest cabbage leaves – sweet and considered a treat in Lebanon. I really marvel at this, a country where the spine of a cabbage is considered a treat and actually is sweet to eat. Sekina will tell me selected spice secrets, but of course not the ones I really want to know. Sabah baharat – seven spices – I have found out, is the answer to many of the mysterious spice questions. When new flowers come into season, I can find a bunch of them – always fragrant and lovely – placed next to my bed “for my dreams,” Sekina says. At 7:45 in the morning, Roro, the Sri Lankan maid comes in my room, places my slippers next to my bed, opens all the curtains and tells me my Arabic coffee will be ready in 10 minutes, which it always is.

When I have a cold, it is the most fun because the maids cook for me - Sekina doesn't like anything spicy but Roro and Dilhane make me scary spicy fish, Sri Lankan style and I am cured almost immediately. It will take 24 hours for me usually to get rid of a cold here, during which I will lay on the largest couch and Roro and Dilhane will vigorously massage various tiger balms into my joints "you need to release the bad energy", drape my arms in legs in strategic positions "because your blood is not flowing the right way," and feed me unidentifiable herbs "because your eyelids are the wrong color." I just love these girls.

Why would I ever voluntarily leave a place such as this? Okay, I do miss talking to men, I’ll admit that much and dating people, well I almost forget what that was like.

Bad Behavior

I am sometimes taken aback by how much I subvert some of my most regular behavior around Sekina. I am, at least while in her house, no longer a nail painter, fiction reader, make-up applier, ankle shower, DEFINITELY not a knee shower, alcohol drinker, pork eater, milk sipper, boy kisser, bubble bath taker, clothes or hair dryer, skinny dipper (most definitely out of the question.) The ways my life has vastly improved though are equivalent – I am fed five vegetables and fresh baked bread by the end of breakfast, clothes and sheets washed as soon as dirt touches them, an active participant in approximately 10K neighborhood lady conversations in Arabic about any topic that could ever be discussed, flowers cut for me just to make me happy, the Qur'an read aloud to me about 5 times so far, and accepted into an amazing community who I would never have expected would have a reason to want to accept me.

In my last few days at her house before her son returned to reclaim his bed, the neighborhood ladies talked election. Who did they like? I asked. "Well, not Sa'ad Hariri but we have to vote for him. We're Sunni." This conversation summarizes most of the 'who will you vote for?' conversations I've had as of late.

Parliamentary Observation and Ria Finally Meets John Sununu

Then, all of a sudden, the mufti was back for the summer and that meant Ria was out on the street. I was lucky to have a friend who shall remain nameless who gave me shelter for one tense day. Then all of my bags were fairly thrown into my lovely, if less clean that Sekina’s, new apartment in Hamra and I spent the next week holed up in the Phonecian Hotel, where I volunteered to help with the observation of the parliamentary election held on June 7th. Now I and the NGO with which I was temporarily accepted were definitely eating, hardly sleeping, but a lot of work was getting done in organizing this observation. On my third day, my 32nd birthday in fact, as a willing prisoner in the Phonecian, I was sent to pick up a visiting observer from the Beirut airport. Who was this observer? FORMER Senator John Sununu, a man to whom I had dedicated almost a year of my professional life to taking out of office. John Sununu, the stuff of so many bad dreams, who voted with George Bush 97% of the time! John Sununu, whose father was the first George Bush’s chief of staff! John Sununu, whose useful days in the US Senate were done!

I knew that this was going to be the best birthday ever.

I did not tell the nice gentleman with whom I went to the airport about my history with Sununu. “Ria," he said on the car ride over "This guy just lost a pretty big senate race and yes, he’s bitter.” I bit my lip “Is that so?” I could not wait to make it to the arrivals gate and look straight into his defeated face and then ask him if I could help him with his luggage. Of course, fate prevented this from happening. Sununu’s plane, we found out as I was practically exploding with excitement in the arrivals lounge, was being held for several hours in the gosh forsaken Charles De Gaulle airport in gay old Paris, a city I usually love but for now I was quite upset with.

I spent days hudled over a computer, holed up in an overcrowded hotel room, gettin' things done. On the actual day of the observation, for the few hours a few of us managed to leave the hotel room where all observation results were coming in, I was lucky to have the chance to go out and observe a polling location, in an Armenian quarter of Beirut called Borj Hammoud. Packed in the car with some DC staff and an Albanian Kosovar staffer in Jordan, it turned out that I was the only Arabic speaking person and so got to ask the observation questions of the polling place officials in my still-mangled Arabic (form question: Are voters fingers being checked for ink – Ria’s messy translation – are officials looking to see if there is blue on the fingers of people before they vote?) I asked the polling center head what the confessional makeup of the polling center was. “697 people - Armenian” one official said, drawing quick fire from two other officials, rather insistent -“There are two Shiia and 1 Sunni!” Then, a large argument of at least 6 people over whether one of the Shiia had died. “Mixed, but mostly Armenian,” I marked down on my sheet. I could have done that job all day.

Then, the morning after the election, I was heading down to the conference room to deliver some documents for presenting the election results when who should I find, standing in a hallway all alone, eating a croissant, but John Sununu. God could not have laid a more lovely present before me. I walked over and stuck out my hand "Senator Sununu" (at this point, I had a hard time not completing the sentence with "who does not have a plan for improving the economy for the hard-working families of New Hampshire!" but I held my tongue) "my name is Ria Riesner and I am a former resident of the great state of New Hampshire." (I was silently trying to figure out if he might, for some reason recognize me of one of the army of Jeanne Shaheen staff and volunteers who liked to attend functions where he was speaking and hold a million Jeanne Shaheen signs) “What did you do there?” Sununu asked. “Well, I’m one of the few people who can say they’ve worked for both D’s and R’s in NH (I spoke of who I had worked for, stressing the R part, keeping Jeanne Shaheen’s name entirely out of it). “Where did you live?” “Portsmouth,” I said. “Well, yours was probably the only vote I got in that town!” he said. FORMER Senator Sununu, if you ONLY knew.

We talked for 20 minutes of the peace process and of Israel and Palestine, of his family's interesting history in the Middle East and South America. We traded favorite book titles. As was my experience in chatting with other "scary" Republicans (John Ashcroft, John McCain) I went in thinking "standing so close to almost evil" and left thinking, he's actually a pretty decent guy. What a world this is, though, when I meet John Sununu in Beirut and he somehow thinks I voted for him.

I am continually amazed by the rich fabric that makes up my life. I'm just not sure I even deserve this stuff. Thanks, you, up there! I can’t wait to see what comes next!

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Beirut Dispatch 4.1.09 Fleeing Creepy Man, Ria Seeks Refuge Again in the House of Sekina

2009-04-01T17:22:00.006+03:00

Top: View of Mt. Hermon, the mountain where the transfiguration of Jesus may or may not have taken place, from the balcony of the home of Dorothy Jabbour in Marjayoun, South Lebanon where Dorothy lets me stay when I am doing research in the security strip. (Photo: Jane Jabbour)

My Lebanese Mother Sekina's son, Mufti Selim, is not the man in this picture (the picture is of Lebanon's Grand Sunni Mufti Qabbani) but Qabbani is Sekina's son's boss, and they wear the same type of outfit.

Okay, this dispatch: I punch a man in the face, move back in with Sekina and the painful process of learning Arabic continues.

An Unsavory Man Meets The End of Ria’s Clenched Fist

Happily underwater at the AUB (American University of Beirut) swimming pool, I was enjoying the peerless view of the Mediterranean as I swam an hour of laps. After the swim, alone in the girl’s locker room taking the obligatory de-chlorinization shower, I heard the voice of a man, in Arabic, who apologized for being there, but just needed “to borrow some shower gel." An altercation ensued whereby the man attempted very gingerly to reach for my soap inside the shower stall as I, in great fear, fashioned a quick sort of dress out of the shower curtain and implored him to leave immediately. He inched closer and closer and I experienced three seconds of terror as I felt myself completely freeze up, and then, much to my relief, a great buildup of fury unleash through my every atom. He began to reach for my arm and so when he got close enough I punched him squarely and sharply in the nose. I wished I could have hit him harder, but I was at a comparative disadvantage being, as I was, naked, without shoes, completely soaking wet and rather covered in bubbles. His face turned blotchy and red and he grabbed at his nose in shock and pain. “Why do you hit me in the face when I only want to borrow soap from you?” He fled, I quickly dressed and found the security chief, and 30 security men fanned out over the sports complex and rounded up the four men who remained in the complex. Then they brought the guilty party in front of me and it almost made me laugh – the identification was easy because he was the only person in the gym who had a fist mark on his face! Anyway, that stupid man watched me swim and followed me in there and didn’t even touch me, but he’s now banned from campus and he’s lost his job at the AUB hospital. I would like to thank the many, many security guards who are now especially protective of my safety and drive me anywhere if I’m on campus. Thank you also, Chief of Protection Shalak!

Please, Sekina, Take Me Back

(background for new readers – in 2006 in Lebanon I lived with Sekina Alwan, the mother of a high Sunni mufti who muftis in Australia. I would sleep in the mufti's bed while he was in Australia and Sekina would try to convert me.)

I was still living with sweet American Lauren, but went to see Sekina to have lunch. I think Sekina’s son, during his stay here last month suggested that keeping a wild American girl in her saintly house was an unneeded pressure on her delicate state - Sekina obese and diabetic. Sekina loves me though and I love her and over lunch one day where we celebrated the birthday of the prophet Mohammed, I told her the story of the attempted molestation of me in the AUB shower and she was horrified in the most sincere way, told me how happy she was that I’d clocked the jerk, and demanded that I move in the next morning.

Ria Returns to the House of Sekina, Attempts to Read the Quran Aloud, Fails Miserably

Several things happened upon returning to the house of Sekina. First, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of joy even greater than the sort you feel when you are seven years old and it’s the night before Christmas. Even walking through her door, I felt I was descending into a bubble bath of many layers of variously correctly spoken Arabic. At any one time I can be talking with Sekina while the TV blares an Egyptian soap opera, a recitation of the Quran plays on the radio, two men in the street below haggle over the price of a new motor for a car, and Sekina’s maid, Roro giggles with her Sri Lankan girlfriends over how long it will take them to save for their dowries ($1000!) in a sort of pidgin Arabic because half of them are Tamil and the other half speak Sinhala. The second thing that happened was that I realized Sekina is Sunni, NOT Shiia. It’s a long story which I’ll spare you, but has to do with the fact that Sekina refuses to discuss the difference between Muslims and my interactions with Sekina’s many close friends who go regularly to the sermons of the Shiia Sheikh Nasrallah (the head of Hizbollah).

Sekina often reads the Qur’an to me, an activity which I genuinely enjoy and which she presumes, if done enough, will impel me to change my religion. I, in a spirit of cultural exchange and in an effort to improve my Arabic, suggested one morning that I read the Qur’an to her. This, I explained, would not be anything close to what Sekina enjoys listening to her Al-Azhar trained mufti son, Mufti Selim, read, but it was certainly a wholesome and time-honored way to pass time. Sekina looked at me askance with some suspicion and told me to take the largest Qur’an from the bookshelves – gently and with a towel – so that I would not touch it (not a rule she said, but she needed mufti clarification on this one). I then asked Sekina if I was allowed to touch the pages with my hand and she said she needed to talk to her son to make sure, but that she would turn the pages for me until we knew for certain. I began to read, starting with the obligatory “Bismillah al rahman al rahim” and then started, with the difficulty all foreigners have, to read. Sekina sat patiently and quietly, with the gentleness of a mother long used to hearing the semi-literate on the long and bumpy road to literacy, to listen to me read aloud but after a few sentences could not conceal the discomfort she felt, plainly visible on her face, which she then explained to me in words – the sound of me reading the Quran, causing “pain” in her ears, and sounding like “sick cats slowly dying in an alley.” I’ll try again later.

Ria Continues To Massacre the Arabic Language

I am downright fluent in about 25 conversations. The most often used of these is called “Yes, I Am Married,” and it goes on, “to a Polish man named Vaclav,” a conversation I have at least once a day. “Vaclav is an engineer for the central government in Krakow, but he came to Lebanon with me while I study. We will perhaps have children when I graduate from school. Until now, we live in Ras al Nebaa where I often make him ice cream from scratch.” Another conversation is called “It Does Not Matter What my Religion Is," and continues "I have the same amount of respect for Muslims, Christians and Jews.” A third is titled “The South of Lebanon is Beautiful,” and it goes on “The people in South Lebanon are good people. Even the political tension in this region cannot take away the beauty of the place – all of the citrus trees, the mountains and the olives, a beauty that God has given for us all to enjoy.”

In south Lebanon, I conduct all of the interviews for my thesis in Arabic. Talk with me about prison conditions, weapons training, military tribunals, asylum applications, resettlement schemes, national reconciliation, I’m fine. Ask me how to say “electrical outlet" and I’m at a loss. So it goes with Arabic, I guess. My friend Salam kindly let me read the newspaper to him the other day. During the first two articles on a football match and something related to factory closings I don’t think he understood a word and probably questioned why I had started to learn the language. The third article, about a multi-lateral summit, came out great. He was rather surprised. Those are the only words I really understand – the political vocabulary. Its funny to watch. I sometimes want to poke myself in the eye for all of the words I still dont know, but I go on.

When I’ve had a long day of Arabic frustration, Sekina cooks me fish and artichokes.
Sekina says her sun is a Lebanese mufti, but that I am her American daughter, and we will negotiate our way through the world together, and I can’t think of a better example for me to follow. Mashallah.

I hope you all are well!

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Ria Finally Gets to go to Syria and there is Finally a Dem in the White House

2009-01-24T20:54:00.012+02:00

Photo of the shrine where many Muslims believe John the Baptists head to be interred, in a section of the Ummayad Mosque in Damascus, Syria, which I visited this weekend.

Damascus, an amazing international city of immense historical import, only an hour and a tantalizing five dollar taxi ride away. In these circumstances, how could a girl not want to go to a country which had been forbidden to her for so long, at whose borders she had endured hours of interrogation, a soaking by a sneaky and hidden sprinkler, taunting by dozens of amused Syrian customs guards, practically days with only Dunkin’ Donuts for sustenance (see earlier posts from 2006 if none of this makes any sense). I spent this past weekend in Damascus, a place I can only describe as an absolute delight.

I was giddy heading to the Charles Helou bus station to go to Syria, this time with a legitimate and entirely legible visa from the Syrian Embassy in Washington. Loaded into a minibus of 11 Syrian construction workers and three Japanese 20-somethings who had been living out of their Hello Kitty backpacks for the past year as they traveled the world, I could not wait to explore the glory of this whole new country. At a stop along the way, I was chatting with a metalworking specialist from near the Syrian border with Iraq when a man came up selling bottles of fake Armani Code and CK One cologne. All of the workers watched as the man pulled bottle after bottle out of his bag, and then they asked me which cologne an American girl would like. I love being able to speak Arabic, well, kind of speak Arabic. In a sweeping a majestic tone, using ample expression with my arms, I said that if a man had soap, he did not need cologne, drawing a scowl from the salesman, but grateful nods from all of the workers. I have been a silent and often nauseous witness to this phenomenon throughout my life in every continent I've been to - the cologne applied with the heavy hand, as if an additional tablespoon of something will drive women insane with lust, when in truth it only makes us lose our appetite.

In Lebanon, some people (ummm, Christians mostly) will refer to Syria in a derogatory sense, as a sort of backwater, devoid of culture, barren of good food, a cesspool of blah. In Syria, many people will refer to Beirut as a quaint, lovely, but overall insignificant sattelite port city, “You know, like Homs,” one friend surmised, referring to the Syrian town of Homs, which is not a port city. Behind all of this trash talk, the Syrians and Lebanese cross each others border in teeming droves, both to visit family on the other side, the Lebanese to shop and some for religious pilgrammage, and the Syrians to Beirut for both the jobs available there and for vacation. So people can talk all the smack they want about you are a backwater and you are a city in the boondocks, but I know how it works.

Damascus is thought to be one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. Over the centuries ruled by Romans, Arabs, Fatimids, Crusaders, Selcuks, Mamluks, Timburlane, and Ottoman forces, for centuries, it was the center of the Islamic empire under the Ayyubids and Ummayyads, and many other dynasties. Walking through its streets and its expansive souqs, the scale of the city reminded me in many ways of Istanbul. The skyline is not dominated (yet) by these large hotel buildings which block the sun and could be described as an eyesore, if I were feeling kind enough to assign that word to those massive blobs of bleck. This was a city of real majesty – dusty, hazy and gorgeous.

My dear friend Alexa Poletto in Washington gave me the name of a friend of hers in Damascus who was the manager of a large hotel – and this was where I stayed, under the care of Alexa’s friend Mohammed, who was sweet and tolerant of my relative American ignorance about Syria. He was a fine and selfless host.

If I were to title the theme of my hotel room, it would be called “Crushed Velvet Fantasia.” This was a room I think that Elvis might have felt comfortable in – the reds, the hot pinks, the assertive and confident gold trim. At night, I would lay on my Baroqueish bed in my man's pajamas watching old Egyptian films and send down to the kitchen for whatever random food I saw people eating in the movie, and look out to the awesome view of the Old City.

Entering the grand covered Souq al Hamidiya in the early morning, I was struck by the sheer number of sequins and ruffles. Indeed, I had the sense that if there were an award given to the country with the highest percentage of sequins per capita, Syria might prevail. What a wonderful souq with its wide, open lanes, soaring arches and bright and dizzying wares on offer. One minute, I was on a street full of faucets, and the next on an avenue of womens panties, until I walked into a wall with a thousand vegetable colanders – there seemed to be no end to the merchandise. Another turn took me to the street of spice merchants and ataars, specialists who extract the oils and essences out of nuts, roots, flowers and other items. The smell of lavender and jasmine (the national flower of Syria, which grows everywhere) mixed with wood and musks. Delicate dried figs were pressed and dusted with powdered sugar before they were laced into lengths coiled up like snakes. Menageries of feather light dried starfish, baby alligators, snakes and other items were strung up over the stalls of the apothecaries stalls, and it was at one such stall, as I was buying dried sage (Ahmed’s mother made it for me in tea the other day in Borj al Borejni and I loved it), that I saw, leaning over a basket of dried lemons, the most beautiful woman I have seen in many years. She looked to be about 50 years old and had jet black wavy short hair and this skin that was absolutely almost mother-of-pearl in its luminescence. I walked over to ask her what she ate, what in the heck she put on her face to give it the sort of light usually reserved for especially innocent nuns and others of that ilk. She smiled, took my hand and started to lead me through low alleys and high, soapmakers and olive vendors till we arrived at a small door, which we entered to reveal an old man, hunched over a press, with a large consignment of fresh almonds beside him, smaller and more round than I had seen before. We sat down on benches, were served mint tea as he took a large quantity of almonds and began to turn a large bolt on top of a marble slab until a light, golden oil appeared trickling from a spout into a glass bowl. I have a bottle of this next to my bed now in Beirut and look at it with a sort of awe, almost not feeling worthy of opening the sweet stuff.

The people of “Sister Syria” seemed to be the progenitors of many peoples in the countries in the periphery surrounding her– there was something of the grandness and scale of the Turk, the modesty and religiousity of the Egyptian. Here were a noble people who drove sensible cars (in Lebanon, every other car is a Mercedes or a BMW) and wore sensible shoes (women in Beirut wear stilettos for a quick trip to the corner pharmacy). My interaction with every person with whom I spoke with was a pleasure.

On my second day, Mohammed took me around the main sights of Damascus – the Ummayyad Mosque, one of the largest mosques in the entire world, where, within a two block radius, you could visit three very interesting sites - the shrine of Hussein (a powerful symbol of resistance against tyranny in Shiia history)’s head (an intimate little shrine, the form of a body, draped in green silk) was meant to be buried, the shrine where John the Baptist’s head was meant to be buried, and the tomb of Saladin, the Kurdish Sunni who founded the Ayyubid Empire which at its high point around the 12th century ruled over Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Saladin is also especially beloved by the Arabs because he led the resistance against the European Crusaders when they were here. Mohammed told me that more than 70% of the people who come to Damascus come for religious reasons, and that most people, aside from the Lebanese, were from Iran and came to see the shrine to Hussein. The mosque was beautiful – with a massive and elegant mosaic soaring above us featuring turquoise, yellow and light green patterns of curling ferns and other items of pretty. John the Baptists Shrine was lit up electric green and had maybe almost a thousand people pushing their way inside. Mohammed said it all got to be confusing about whose heads were really where - for instance - Muslims believed JtheB to be buried here (he’s called Prophet Yahya in Arabic) but some Christians though he was in France and some other people thought he was in Macedonia, while still others thought this shrunken head rolling around somewhere in Rome was The Head, but after all this time, who really knew whose head was whose anyway? He also said he thought Husseins head and John the Baptists head were once here, but probably weren't anymore.

I shopped. A lot. No matter what I bought, it seemed to cost about a dollar. In greater truth, everything was at first $10 until people realized that I spoke the same dialect of Levantine Arabic - almost - that they did - then they would apologize and tell me the thing cost a dollar. I bought sumac and lavender and the most sweet little pinkish pistachios, apricots and dates and bright colored candles for Ramadan. A quick trip down to the pharmacy, I bought an athsma inhaler – in the US, without insurance, $44. In Lebanon, $82, in good old Syria, a cool $4.50. I left this shopping haven back to Beirut in a taxi with two couples and our collective 12 bags of swag– a Lebanese ships first mate in his navy cable knit sweater and his large, hijabed wife who let me spend most of the drive back with my head in her ample lap, and another young Syrian couple who were fleeing Damascus for the freedom of Beirut where they could stay in a hotel together, unwatched (this last bit about those two was constructed entirely out of my vivid imagination and is not based on fact in any way).

Back in Beirut, Fatah Ahmed, now the press secretary for Fatah in Lebanon or somesuch, reiterated his two year old offer of marriage, which seemed especially well-timed since he has recently become engaged to a 19 year old innocent from the refugee camp. We are having interesting discussions about this - there would be the quick matter of my technical religious conversion (there is no civil marriage in Lebanon), and then, bam, done. “You might actually like it, you know,” he said. Ahmed is dear and lovely and I have never met another person even remotely like him before. I would describe my feelings toward him, generally, in this sense - its as if there is the greatest show in the world happening, and Ahmed is the only one with the tickets. I've just never met anyone else who has the tickets. Well, I know I’m into my third glorious decade on earth, but still not remotely tempted to legally bind myself to a car, a house, a loan, even a small pet, come to think of it even a cell phone plan, let alone another person. Thanks, though, Abu Zoghdy, you are still my very favorite person fil Lubnan, well, except Sekina.

My days are a little bit empty with no work and no school yet, so I made a schedule of what I term “intentional conversations,” vigorous and targeted attempts to build my Arabic vocabulary. These are fun, educational daily trips where I go and meet a new person and ask them about their job and what it entails every day. The first day, I met an archeologist from Jordan, who led me through some of the Roman antiquities in the AUB museum’s storeroom. The second day it was a computer repairman, the third, a nurse – then a meat importer, rifle store owner, pilot, psychologist, school teacher, etc etc. Its getting impressive. I think I can order a ship's engine from the conversation I had with one of the main port's directors, and I can also explain how to load a rifle in Arabic, not to mention I just learned how to say "please wipe your nose" from a 3rd grade teacher.

America got a new president. Well, I could not be happier, as many of you all know. For a few minutes, watching the crowds on the National Mall, thinking of my entire family attending the swearing-in and the formal balls in their frilly dresses, I missed the city of my birth, but I am just glad that we have Obama, Biden, and Hillary (please do something about Gaza, Hillary, please), all of these other good, decent Dems locked out of the corridors of power for so long starting the important work of fixing my wonderful country. So, the Arabic is improving, Beirut’s chugging along, Syria let me peek under her veil for a while, and there is FINALLY a Dem in the White House and so I’m happy for now and hope you are too.

Best,

Ria

Ria is Back from South Lebanon

2009-01-07T23:49:00.010+02:00

A British demining expert checks olive trees for potential remaining cluster bombs from the 2006 war between Israel and Hizbollah left in Zawtar Asharqia, southern Lebanon. Photograph: Marwan Naamani, AFP.

Happy New Year, every one of you!

I have just finished this year and what has been a particularly interesting month in my life so far - and to think about forcing a description of these heady weeks into a few, piddly paragraphs seems almost a task not worth attempting. I came to south Lebanon to work on my graduate thesis, which has to do with the topic of the South Lebanese Army (which broke off from the regular Lebanese Army and worked with Israel) during the Lebanese Civil War. To this end, I traveled to at least 40 towns and small villages in the UN Security Zone in the southernmost area of Lebanon. I cannot be bothered to think of how utterly ridiculous I must have looked – an American girl who speaks sort of passable Arabic, on the Israeli border, asking a bunch of former individuals who were tried as collaborators by the government, most put into prison, to give me information on how exactly they were recruited and what exactly they all did during and after the war.

I stayed in a town called Marjayoun, a primarily Christian hamlet a few miles or a vigorous olive’s tossing away from the Israeli border. Ensconsed atop a mountain ridge, I am surrounded by UN HQ to the north, Beaufort Castle to the west, Israel to the south, and Shebaa Farms and the Golan Heights to the east. A cease fire is still in effect here, one which I think of every morning when I wake up –please hold ceasefire, hold do! A certain aspect of calm prevailed, though, and Ill attempt to explain just why.

Dorothy Jabbour, a lovely Englishwoman I had met but only briefly in Beirut before she insisted that I take her summer mountain house for the month, was too kind to me and I am still almost in a state of shock that such a seemingly competent, in charge of all of her senses individual could look at me and think, yes, although I’ve only known her for oh, an hour or so, I somehow trust this gypsy American stranger to live in my beautiful old house, unsupervised, for weeks on end. Thank you, Dorothy.

Marjayoun is a very interesting town – the government electricity cuts out at 6pm, a few people still use outhouses, but you will not have trouble finding a jewelry store – yes, we live a highly politically unstable area with hundreds of peacekeeping forces patrolling the street, but far be it for the Lebanese to be too far away from their diamonds. I passed a crèche on the street a few weeks before Christmas and noticed that the plastic figure of Mary, cradling the baby Jesus, was adorned with both a large faux diamond and a pearl necklace. Virgin Mary, Lebanese style.

In the south, I barely buy a thing from the store, and neither does anyone else – my soap is from the olive trees nearby, as is the voluptuous and uncomprehendibly good olive oil we consume down here – I watched in awe as people who did not have running water, shoes or refrigerators , poured over their vegetables this velvet, golden elixir, olive oil so gorgeous we would pay hundreds of dollars a bottle for in America. In the garden of bayt Jabbour, trees proffering pine nuts, bushes of lavender, bushels of every type of citrus fruit lay before me, ready to be picked. The dear, fluffy chickens next door bequeathed to me their shelly bounty daily, if I express even the slightest bit of interest. I was surprised almost every other day to finally see the tree or bush from which a certain spice or food actually came. You know bay leaves, the large leaves that seem to hail historically from some older version of the modern day McCormick’s glass bottles? Those leaves come from bushes and now I know how they are meant to taste. Wow.

It is cold in Marjayoun in winter, and I sleep with a hot water bottle in gloves and a scarf and a hat. The general electricity goes out at 6pm and though I did have a generator, most of the towns would go dark. We would stand out on the main avenue, among the Christmas decorations, the life-size reindeer posed to look as if they were making a run over the fence toward Kiryat Shmona, the larger than life Santa and his sleigh whose lights had all been extinguished, and regard jealously the Shiia village of Khiam located in the valley who seemed somehow to have electricity ALL the time. Just beyond Khiam was the highest mountain around – jabal as-Sheikh (called Sheikh’s mountain because of the cap of snow almost always at the peak that resembled a sheikh’s neat white cap,) in English called Mt. Hermon, the place where the transfiguration of Jesus was meant to have occurred. I mean to climb this mountain in the spring.

I have never seen so many men in one place before. The southern border sometimes feels like towns full of older people and soldiers. Within about 48 hours of having arrived down south I became more popular with boys than I ever had before in my life entire. I only wished that I could speak Polish, Italian, Spanish, (more) French, Indonesian, Malay, or any of the many languages and dialects of Ghana or India so that I could speak to the UN soldiers. I was able, of course, almost competently to talk lots with all of the Lebanese soldiers. For the foreign ones, my own version of cultural outreach in these difficult circumstances was conducted in the form of a lot of smiling and waving. One morning, I was at my preferred kanafe (kanafe is a sweet cheese confection popular for breakfast) purveyor when a whole battalion of Indonesian UN soldiers pulled up in tanks, ostensibly to also get their morning kanafe. Not even one of them spoke a word of English, but it was expressed to me, utilizing hand gestures, that these soldiers, all 45 of them, wanted a picture with me – and not in a group, but each one wanted a picture of me and them, alone, I think so that when they go back to Indonesia they can tell their friends about their American girlfriend in Marjayoun. I literally stood there with each one of them, in turn, and tried to keep myself from laughing.

I had rented a car and drove all over the south for a month – bumping along roads in many places that could more appropriately be described as piles of rock which used to be a roads before the harb al timmuz (August war of 2006). I have gained new proficiency in how to perform a quick tire change.

I would be popping into these tiny villages, a few hundred people, inspecting olive trees, kissing babies, tripping over chickens, conducting interviews in the form of whispered conversations under old, crumbling stairs, hoping and hoping that a war would not break out, hoping and hoping that I was translating conversation correctly. At bayt Jabbour, I would interview and write all week and on the weekends, Dorothy and her relative and my friend Salam the poet, olive farmer and champion Scrabble player would come down and bring the sunshine from Beirut with them, and we would feast upon Dorothy’s baba ghannouj and irreplicable apple cake.

Every new town felt like an unopened gift – what would I find? Who would I meet?

I went to Hasabaya, a primarily Druze (the Druze are a religious grouping of individuals who split off from mainstream Shiism around the 11th century, all the history books always add though, and I will too, that only the Druzies actually know what their belief system is - shrouded as it is in complete secrecy, written in a book somewhere - I want to read that book that's locked in a golden cave or whatever) town. Walking along a tiny, steep winding back road I came upon a tall, silver haired man and asked him if he knew where the Saraya Chehabea, the main tourist attraction in Hasabaya, was. “I am a Chehab prince,” he said “And I will welcome you to my castle!”We turned a corner where a massive stone fortification stood before us. There literally could be hundreds of rooms in the place. I was given a tour of the incredible building – rooms of Arabic inscriptions written out in marble, large fountains and expansive diwans, and then brought down to the private family quarters, through a small tunnel into a room with soaring vaulted stone ceilings, where I met the mistress of the castle, who invited me to eat with them. The conversation was lovely, and it was at this dinner that I was introduced to the yerba mate drinking tradition in the mountains of Lebanon. Yerba mate is a type of drink, originating in Argentina, that was brought over to Lebanon. I drank so much yerba mate over this last month that my veins are pulsing with it.

I went to Khiam prison, which I wrote about when I visited in 2006 (see blog archives if interested), and which had been almost completely levelled in the 2006 war. The Hizbollah had neatly bulldozed tons of rubble into piles that seemed even taller than the buildings that used to stand there. Interspersed among the piles of rocks were little, bordered flower beds filled with small violets and little bursts of a yellow flower. In one corner, shells of missiles, some fragmented, some whole, had been set into a sort of arrangement, and painted upon the larger shells “Made in the USA.” Peeps, America's PR situation over here is not good, people, not good.

One day I wound up in Shebaa Farms -past rows of cabbage in fields leading up to the highest part of Shebaa, that were so green they appeared on the cusp of becoming blue. I saw what looked like what I imagined to be a gypsy encampment, and then a very tall, wizened man in a long, black gallabiya and a red and white kuffayah atop his head, gently stroking a small, cooing gray pigeon cupped in his hands. He first gave me a tour of all of his animals – pigeons, donkeys, chickens, dogs to guard the chickens from the wolves in the area and then invited me for tea in a dialect I could scarcely comprehend. I was ushered in through a maze of tents which brought me to his family, now clearly Bedouin, the women’s faces all tattooed, the tents covered on all walls and floors with rich and ancient carpets. Two very new babies were presented to me like gifts all wrapped up in wool blankets, and placed on my lap– one 24 and the other just 12 days old. I was asked to stay for dinner. There was a dish involving thick slabs of sheeps tallow, and an incredible, very thin flatbread that was at least 3 feet across and covered in attractive constellation of bubbles. Small hot peppers were eaten raw and whole and then a mountain of raw spinach was chopped roughly and placed into a very large piece of raw bread dough. This was wrapped up in a bundle and tied at the top, and then the ball was placed in a fire pit, on top of the embers of a fire several feet below the ground. There was no furniture in the tents, but rich blankets and cushions and rugs upon which at least a dozen family members were draped over, among pillows and thick wool coverings and I sat and drank mint tea and listened to stories late into the night. When it came time to leave, although I was asked repeatedly to sleep over, I was sent off with a massive bag of produce, approximately half of which was composed of fruit I had never seen before in my life.

Approaching Debinne, a small Shiia village close to Marjayoun, I saw a small river of blood streaming down the steep sides of the road. Officials from the government had told me that 80% of the buildings in Debinne were completely destroyed in the 2006 war, but these had all been rebuilt, villagers told me, by the Hizbollah. Im not sure which stupid part of my brain always tends to make me walk TOWARD streaming blood, when I should want to walk the opposite way, but oh well. I walked up the street to the source of said blood and was invited to the sacrifice of a sheep and the relevant party for a villager who had just returned from the annual Hajj to Mecca. The house and garden were festooned in pastel covered streamers, and an attractive painting had been done on the façade of the family’s front door – a picture of a car, a plane, palm trees and Mecca, a visual representation of the gentleman’s journey to Hajj. The sheep were killed and some was cooked and passed out to guests and the rest distributed to villagers. I stared, agog at a small mountain of tabbouleh that was almost the size of a bathtub. Children danced in their sparkling and ruffle-laden dresses and new clothes and a good time was had by all.

An Interesting Gift from an Ex-Con in Ibl as-Saqi

In Ibl Saqi I interviewed many former SLA soldiers, each with a more interesting story than the last. I interviewed two cousins who had both been in prison during and after the war – one put in jail because he worked with the Israelis, and the other put in jail by the SLA for working against the Israelis for the resistance. One of them gave me a gift he had made while serving time in Khiam prison. It was a picture frame formed out of dozens of meticulously orgamied Winton’s Lights cigarette cartons.

There were so many other towns – Jarma and Blaat, Kfar Rouman and Nabatiye, Deir Mimas and Kfar Kila, Houla and Aytarun, Bint Jibayl and Rmeish, Mesa Jabal and other places I stopped in that even now seem a blur of identical gray houses, outsize pictures of Hassan Nasrallah, Fadlallah, Musa Sadr and the young soldiers of these towns who had been killed, huge olive presses, and piles of oranges the size of large trucks.

It came time to leave my lovely month in the south. I adored living in the mountains, getting my eggs still warm from the heat of their actual producer, breathing air so clean I wished that I could bottle it. I left the south with a much more profound understanding of Lebanon, and I also, of course left with many new friends, new friends who ran the gamut - soap makers and army sargeants, sheepherders and Sunni, Greek Orthodox and Shiia auto mechanics (I had several flat tires because of the condition of the roads,) peacekeeping forces and ex-cons, olive farmers and mukhabarat, Druze princes and kanafe experts. Oh south Lebanon, I have seen your charms and I will return soon with fondness and a gut ready for some seriously yummy victuals.

Its nice to be back in Beirut, though. I think its great that within a block of where I am currently staying I can go to a mosque OR get a Brazilian bikini wax. What a city. Sekina is still in Australia, and I am lucky to be staying with a dear girl called Lauren in Hamra until she returns. I talked to Sekina on the phone the other day, and she apologized that she isn’t back quite yet. The first question she asked though, was not how are you, Ria, how is school, how is your family. It was “ Ria, are you married yet, or please, at least engaged?” Oy vey. The communal attempts to get me married here, are really, beyond the pale.

I walked all over West Beirut early one morning – grand old, bullet-pocked houses are being knocked down and replaced at a steady clip with high rise condos that hold all of the allure for me of bottles of cheese that are dispensed from an aerosol can. My first apartment in Beirut from 2005, on Makhoul Street just next to the Blue Note Jazz Café, which boasted stunning views of the Med, is now a massive 50 foot deep hole in the ground where another set of condos will go up. The old parts of this city are disappearing, but I just try to look at the buildings while I can and I remain grateful that I can even be over here at all.

More on what has happened in the last few days in Beirut soon, promise.

A VERY happy new year to every one of you. Please keep in touch.

Best,
Ria

Off to Marjayoun for the Month! 11.25.08

2008-11-25T17:16:00.005+02:00

Hello Mountains, goodbye internet!

I'm leaving tomorrow mornign to stay in Marjayoun for the next month - if you look at this map, Beirut is almost in the middle on the western coast of Lebanon. Marjayoun (spelled "Marj'uyun) is the southeasternmost city on this map - way in the mountains. Here's hoping the area stays very bomb-free, inshallah!

Hope you all are well.

Ria

Ria Returns to Beirut 11.14.08

2008-11-16T09:25:00.008+02:00

Oh, I understand the premise of blogging – you write the here, you write the now, you keep it short, and people might care. This'll be a tad longer, because it describes a period of several months – leaving DC, working on the Democratic campaign in NH, travel ending up in Beirut, where I write you from now. Humor me, just for a second or two or five. Min fadlik, por favor.

I came up to New Hampshire only at the point where I just could not resist the siren song of the granite state even one day longer. During the last week I would live in DC for at least the next year I made it a point to use each of the 17 separate metro cards I had somehow accrued without even trying. Friends amused and overjoyed me by coming into town for one last visit from other states. I had drinks with my boyfriend from when I was 16. This made me smile. He had recently gotten the “R” tattoo he had inked on his ankle in a wild expression of adolescent affection when we were about 19, removed for the sake of his spouse. Smart move, Cab.

My mother spent the better part of a day tailoring my favorite clothes to fit perfect and even better sewing me up a set of pillowcases made from a pair of Yves St. Laurent sheets she had acquired in the 70’s, a set of sheets whose delectable remnants have become a matter of absolute obsession between my sister Gabrielle and I. Mom then loaded up the ipod she gave me for my birthday with songs I just adore. Muchas gracias, mi madre! Mom and my Rugga hosted a goodbye party of my favorite people in Washington the night before I left, a party which included many mojitoes and ended a few minutes before sunrise.

Hurricane Hannah and I made the long trip up the Eastern coast from DC to Boston together – she spewing explosions of balmy water and shredding rows of docks as if they were so many matchsticks, while I was curled up in a frothy, thick wool sweater with a book and a mediocre glass of club car wine, a silent and rapt witness to one stunning maelstrom. My friend T took me in for the night in Cambridge. T is a mom now! Wow – what a babe that Saw-dog was to see! As she drove me up to New Hampshire to deliver me to the state Democratic HQ, I assembled her breast-pump which T made use of going 70 mph down the highway. Impressive, that bit and that girl.

Working on any large campaign in a presidential cycle is akin to riding into the eye of a storm and I think it was Helen Thomas who said “They say that the only thing worse than working on a presidential campaign cycle is not working on one,” and she goes on to say how wrong “they” were. Ha! How right she is! Although I balked at the sometimes 4am alarm clock demands and the general lack of vegetables, I was more than honored and excited to work again with for my old bosses and the army of New Hampshire Dem state party loyalists and was incredibly impressed by the resourcefulness and general ability of the 8 staff in my office, who were all working on separate campaigns – Obama-President/Shaheen-Senate/Lynch-Governor/Carol Shea-Porter-Congress/Daphne Kenyon-State Senate (Emily, Hollie, Liz, Shauni, Jamie, Josh, Courtney, Matt.) Some of these very capable staffers had been in the trenches for months and had laid down important infrastructure. I worked for all of the campaigns and wanted every one of the Dems I worked for to be elected, but I woke up every morning thinking of Jeanne Shaheen, who was running for U.S Senate. Jeanne Shaheen was a beacon of light in a sea of desperate and sad John Sununu negative advertising. Jeanne Shaheen was a former school teacher who the Republicans attempted to vilify for doing something as wholesome and wonderful as expanding access to kindergarten for New Hampshire children. New Hampshire residents, I have learned by now, take their live-free-or-dieitiveness VERY seriously. I admire this about NH'ers in a serious way, and I would not sleep until I saw that girl elected.

On my first weekend in NH I was flown out to Valley Forge, PA by Rotary Intertional to tour the awesome battlefields where George Washington and his troops spent that famously difficult winter and so that I could give a speech about my Rotary year in Beirut to incoming Rotary scholars from around the world. We stayed in a historic location built over the site where munitions were forged in Washington's days and the place was oozing with energy – I could almost feel the cold suffered by the shoeless and almost coatless soldiers. I could practically taste the hardtack. On my third weekend on the campaign I took my GRE on almost no sleep and absolutely no studying. That morning was enjoyed thoroughly, as were my GRE scores, which were reflective of the preparation I undertook before the test.

In our dirty Derry office could I even explain the all out sprint in those last few weeks? We lived off of adrenaline, grilled cheese sandwiches and oh yes, a desire for change. My dear old friends Jeremy Hastings and Abi Green came in for the last days to help whip everyone into shape - bless them both. My old friend Gene Corbin came up, and though vastly overqualified, ran a phone bank. Elworthy came up with a bag of my favorite farmstand vegetables and with his cousin Lisa helped orchestrate the correction of an incorrect label debacle that had been worrying me much.

On election day, among untold drama and intrigue, we were able to help secure victories for all four of our top tier-candidates, and in the decidedly Republican area we were concentrated in, a few well-appreciated victories in more local races. Thank goodness, the world was finally going to become a better place. I think I had slept about 4 hours a night for most of the last week, but only a precious few winks of sleep after the party on election night before I raced down to Boston and then to Salt Lake City, Utah to see my dear and beloved niece and nephew and my equally dear sister Nicole and my bro-in law Kevin. We went to the Jazz game and at home danced and ate and read books and generally made trouble. Hillary Clinton, yes Hillary Clinton had been at a fundraiser in SLC this summer which my sister Nicole attended – there she randomly met a guy named Ali, a Lubnani- and so nice, while I was in town, he invited us to a huge Lebanese feast of so many foods I had missed. Thanks, Ali!

Elworthy oversaw the organization of my very last night in America. It is here that I would like to thank him for the scrumptious bubble bath which included more bubbles than I have ever seen in a bubble bath– you needn’t have used the entire bottle of bubbles, BRE, the glorious oysters, the lovely walk in the North End just after sunset, the cut of steak so stunning it could bring a girl to tears, and everything else. Your meat is always Grade A. Thanks, BRE.

The trip to Beirut was a long one. I had nary a piece of clean clothing on me, was plagued by the obligatory post-campaign cold, and had so very many miles to travel. My afternoon in London was spent perched half-asleep, nose dripping disgustingly, listening to Townes Van Zandt in a derelict British Airways lounge in a forgotten terminal far removed from the more popular, Boots, Harrods and WH Smith-packed terminals.

The descent into Beirut gave me goosebumps, though. I missed the way the Arabs cheer when the plane lands. Oh, this beautiful city. Stepping out to a taxi I smelled the sea. I stared in awe at the indecently attractive police force. I am too too lucky to be back here.

I will soon be living with Sekina again but must wait for her to return from Australia. It did not become obvious that Sekina had not yet returned from Australia until I was almost in Beirut. For yet another time in my life I was inches from homeless. I am very lucky that my friends John and Irina, married a few days ago, Irina in her cowboy boots, by a guy who had been knighted by the Order of the Cedars in a ceremony in Cyprus, are selfless and tolerant of vagabonds, and I write this from their cozy apartment in Sodeco, where I am eating a Lebanese breakfast of a cucumber, a tomato and a piece of cheese – I missed this!

My first day back in Lebanon - a walk across the city from East Beirut to the West, an old man squeezing a pomegranate in front of me for my breakfast, a lunch eaten on the corniche of the Mediterranean composed of chicken tucked into fresh-baked bread, topped with whole yogurt with garlic, a few slices of tomato and some mint leaves. On my first day in Beirut I met Salt Lake City Ali’s brother, Samir at 5pm and by later that night I was having dinner with his relatives – mountains of gorgeous fish, dandelion greens oh so gingerly caressed by lemons and oil. The next afternoon, a long walk down to my favorite cafe Rawda on the ocean, grilled Halloumi and salad, proper tea with mint. Everything here is making my mouth water. I dont know how it happens but I am hardly ever dissapointed here by anything. Oh, Beirut. I feel whole again – your beauty, your legumes! I do not NEED to go to heaven when I have this town.

Until the next Dispatch, I hope you all are well.

Ria

Beirut Dispatch 11.12.08

2008-11-12T16:13:00.000+02:00

I've just arrived back in Beirut after a whirlwind few weeks - Obama/Shaheen/New Hampshire Democratic Party in NH until election day, Salt Lake City the couple of days after, back to Boston for a night, an afternoon in London, then last night I got to Beirut. Wow, have I missed this place. More to come soon!

Mexico Stories - UPDATED

2008-08-10T22:15:00.002+03:00

I wrote most of the good Mexico stories, and posted more interesting pictures. Just scroll down to see.

Just Another Saturday in our Nation's Capitol

2008-06-17T22:37:00.005+03:00

Very randomly and all of a sudden, I was invited to a private meeting at John McCain's VA campaign HQ last Saturday. Just 45 Hillary (former) staff, surrogates, donors, volunteers and Senator McCain. He sat with us for an hour and a half and let us ask any questions we wanted. He stood up for the entire meeting when many a younger person would have sat down. Carly Fiorina told us the story of how McCain's 96 year old mother went to Europe to tour around. The car rental agency said she was too old to drive, and because they wouldn't agree to rent her anything, she went out and bought a car.

McCain was actually a funny, entertaining guy. I was not convinced, though.

Quel fun!

Here is a pic taken of me standing next to him - the one we took when we actually posed was not in focus. Note my Hillary t-shirt.

Thanks for having me over for the afternoon, Senator McCain.

Hillary to Speak on Saturday in DC

2008-06-06T00:14:00.007+03:00

Above- pictures from Hillary's campaign HQ with my friends Matt, Ann and Vanessa. We spent many, many hours there in a conversation with America.

For people in DC who would like to show their support for Hillary Clinton, to thank her for her work and to watch her concede the election and throw her (considerable) political weight behind Obama, see details below.

Thank you so much for your amazing commitment and generous support of Senator Hillary Clinton. We are profoundly grateful for your incredible work throughout this hard-fought campaign. It would mean so much to Senator Clinton if you would join her on Saturday as she extends her congratulations and support to Senator Obama. Preliminary information for the event is included below - please register online at www.hillaryclinton.com/june7.

Date: Saturday, June 7, 2008

Time: 12:00 p.m. - doors open at 10:00 a.m.

Location: TBD - Washington, DC

Registration: Please register online at www.hillaryclinton.com/june7 - an email will be sent to you once location details are confirmed.

Pennyslvania Presidential Primary

2008-04-24T20:17:00.003+03:00

Pennsylvania Primary

I spent last weekend with my friends Matt, Ann, Elizabeth, Vanessa, Dahn, Emily and Diane volunteering for Hillary in Pennsylania - outskirts of Philly. We walked and ran and talked to voters in Plymouth Meeting, Coshohocken, King of Prussia and Norristown, among other places. There was Obama money everywhere - a gazillion signs, but Hillary had the people on the ground and I cannot tell you how excited people were about her. I talked with schoolteachers, electricians, housewives, the waiter at Friendly's, retired police officers and everyone else. We were outspent 3-1, but my girl Hillary won by almost 10 points and my overwhelming sense was that the people who were voting for her were voting for her because they felt the economy was a great issue that needed a real solution, and that the healthcare system was about due for a restructuring. In the 24 hours after her important win in PA, she raised $10M and she, and the rest of us are ready to go on to Indiana and beyond. Go Hill!

Dateline: Dayton, Ohio - Presidential Primary

2008-03-04T22:10:00.002+02:00

I am just back this morning from 3 days in Dayton and Columbus Ohio with my friends Matt and Ann working for Hillary. We drove through a blizzard on Friday night and now back, barely have voices anymore. Go Hill!

I can tell you one thing, having lived in Ohio for three years when I attended Ohio State, that as goes Ohio, so goes the nation, and there was none of this Hillary or Obama buzz that we've seen in other states, but rather a down in the dirt, knock down drag out dog fight between two great candidates earning to win the votes of an electorate who seem evenly split and almost immune to buzz. Ohio has an electorate that I think can give us a good idea of what the general election might look like. I sang and held signs and existed on donuts for days for my girl Hill and my fingers are crossed and my heart hopeful.

Go Hillary Go!

NH Primary Special 1.8.07

2008-01-09T18:12:00.002+02:00

Me, just to the left of Hillary, the day before she won the primary in NH. More on this later.

Only in New Hampshire. At the very last second, I boarded a bus up to New Hampshire. I hadn’t actually decided who I liked yet, but I had a lot of friends who were on staff for Hillary, and so that was the bus I took. We were meant to get to Concord by midnight, and my friend Amy Morse’s family very kindly said I could stay with them. In the way that political campaigns always are, we were all in for an adventure, and midnight turned into much later, and all of a sudden our bus was going to the part of New Hampshire close to Canada, instead of centrally located Concord, and I had to get off the bus and switch real quick-like. Bleary-eyed in a New Jersey rest stop, I chatted with a group of retired female Navy officials. We drank hot chocolate and stocked up on those hand warmers as New Hampshire was meant to have a lot of snow. A bus that would be stopping in Concord pulled in, I was pulled off of mine and thrown on the other one. We arrived in Concord at 6am to several feet, literally, of powdery snow. Oh New Hampshire. Several house lights on the little street flicked on, and people welcomed us in with maps, descriptions of the school everyone was to report to in a couple of hours for a rally. Only in this state did it seem normal to walk into someone’s house before sunrise, a friend’s parents who I had never met, to tiptoe upstairs quietly and crawl into a bed, trying not to make any noise. I slept for 2 hours. Amy came back from Boston. We canvassed- Amy for John Edwards, I for Hillary, and Amy’s little sister for Obama. We just wanted to get out the democratic vote and were all friends, we said.

I watched the debate in the state capitol, Concord, in the bar across from the state's Obama HQ. I seemed to be the only Hillary person there, but it was fun to watch her win the debate to the dismay of so many of my obnoxious Obama friends.

So much fun, NH - one minute you are being whisked off to a rally, then you are standing in the snow with a sign, then you drive off to sleep in random people's houses. Never a dull minute! I was allergic to Amy's cats and so my friend Reuben Teague, a great volunteer I worked with in 2004 in NH, told me I could go stay with his parents on their farm outside of Concord. A ladybug slept next to me on my pillow and in the morning I was licked awake by one of the family dog's, but over breakfast Reuben's dad offered me maple syrup that they had extracted from their own trees, and I heard the stories of bear break-ins and crazy trips around the world. Thanks, Teagues!

In Hampton, NH I stayed with my friend Bev Hollingworth, former president of the state senate. Bev is one of those blessed people who is old enough to be my mother but who makes you dizzy just watching how much energy she has. We went to hear Hillary speak and Bev passed me off as a daughter so that I got to sit right up front. I felt guilt, since I was no longer a NH voter, but quel fun to sit right up close to Hillary. The next morning, before dawn, we drove to the other side of the state for a press conference.

On actual primary day I went to the Portsmouth field office in the morning for an hour until I headed out to polling places, where we would collectively attempt to make up the minds of the undecided by outnumbering and outtalking the Obama people. In that one hour, a nice bit of people watching. First, Billie Jean King came in, bid me good morning and then talked about why she was working for Hillary like the rest of us. She wore this electric purple wool blazer with rimless glasses that were tinted the same shade as her jacket. She had paper white skin and looked a lot like Elton John, strangely, not in a bad way, but in a way that you might guess they were brother and sister. Accompanying her was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life- tall, muscular, cropped blonde hair, an unbelievable knockout. I think her job was to drive Billie Jean around and make sure she didn’t leave her purse anywhere. I wondered if she was her lover. Next, as I came back from the bathroom I practically bumped right into General Wesley Clark who was warm and effusive, a very nice handshake, and had very pretty and very tanned skin. Sunblock, Wes! Sunblock! Before I left, Chelsea fairly skipped into that tiny office, shook my hand and said she liked my hat. I said “Chelsea, funny but your mother said the same thing last night.” I chatted with her for a minute and asked if she was getting the chance to eat anything that approached the vegetable family and she said it was scary, but she had probably already had 6 cups of coffee to drink and it wasn’t even 10am.

I went out to stand at a polling location for most of the day. Mine was in Newington, which is a suburb of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, gentrifying like any other fortuitously located place these days, those gentrifiers loathed by any of the original inhabitants of the town. I stood that morning with 3 farmers from Newington, from some of the last farms left in that town. I had never wished so sincerely that instead of my jeans and cowboy boots and pea coat, I had been wearing overalls and construction boots and a Carhart jacket. I wished I had a beard and and could talk about backhoes, but I can only dream. An outsider, a woman from another part of New Hampshire walked up to stand with us. People starting talking about where they were from. It seemed to be an internal, farmer, type of talk and I stayed quiet. Finally, after going around an entire circle of farmers, one of their wives looked at me and said politely “And dear, where are you from?” I gritted my teeth and tried to smile. “I’m from Washington, DC,” oh, “Of course you are,” they chuckled. Oh well.

My dear mother, Leah, has devoted her days to Obama, and I hope she is having fun. I went to NH for Hillary, then Leah decided to go to South Carolina for Obama, and every time I know she is working for him, or any of my friends is working for him, it makes me roll up my sleeves to work more for Hillary. I sort of wonder if this has the effect of my mother and my own work on behalf of our respective candidates cancelling the other ones work out, but at the end of the day all any of this does is drive up voter participation if we are lucky, and so last Saturday while Leah was in SC, I was on the phone for 10 hours to people in rural Tennessee for Hillary. “Honey,” a sweet 84 year old woman named Lois just cooed, “Im in a bubble bath right now, but don’t you fret, Ill get out to vote for our candidate.”

I think it'll be a long road for my girl Hill, but Im ready for the long road and I feel in my gut she is the person who can win. Go Hillary!

10.28.07 Ria Runs (and limps) her First Marathon

2007-11-09T21:00:00.001+02:00

Marine Corps Marathon, at the start.

My inspiration on many a long run - Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, 3rd district, Connecticut

Ria Runs (and limps) her First Marathon

The Marine Corps Marathons. Certainly the requisite 26.2 miles. But also a kind, gentle marathon as marathons go, with the nascent promise of few hills, a view of lovely monuments and no pesky speed requirements for entry.

My dream to run a marathon has existed since I was about 7 years old. I dream, and remember my dreams, almost every night and most of them end in my almost crossing the finish line of a marathon, and in this dream I am somehow mostly surrounded by a group of Ethiopians who I have trained in the African highlands with. Running 26.2 miles was high on my list of the 25 things I must do before I die. Last May, I thought, was as good a time as any to begin to train.

You lose friends training for a marathon because all of the hours that used to comprise your “free time” are now spent running, stretching, being injured, but saying to hell with it and running some more. When I am at the beginning of a chunk of work that I know will take months or years to finish, I always imagine this speech I heard at a town fair in rural New Hampshire during the presidential race in 2004. We were surrounded by bales of hay and obnoxious Bush supporters, and the speaker was congresswoman Rosa DeLauro from Connecticut – with a direct manner, a blunt cut bob of brown hair, and irresistible charisma, her basic message to a bunch of hemming and hawing Democratic supporters a month before the election was “I hear people worrying about what does this newspaper say, what does this poll say, and I look at you sincerely and I am telling you all to stop, suck it up, and get to work.”

Suck it up, get to work – I think of that almost every time I run and every time I study Arabic too.

For most of the summer I ran every other night near midnight around the National Mall, the loop of the Tidal Basin, and up to the Lincoln Memorial. Then in August, it was still 105F at night and I joined a gym where I could run and watch TV. I don’t have TV at home (on purpose) and when I became addicted to watching the Biggest Loser I found I ran more miles because I didn’t want to miss an episode. The only television show I would get a tv for is Wildboyz from MTV, and its off the air now anyway. Okay, that and Super Ninja Warrior. Can't watch that enough.

At the end of the summer I joined a running group of scarily fast women and men, all-American track athletes, girls who had quit their jobs to train full-time for the Olympic trials, and various Africans who looked muscled and lean enough that I knew right away I should shy away from starting with their pace group during our weekly runs. I was just happy that I was not ever forgotten in the woods on these runs, though I think this had something more to do with the generosity and speeding down of some of my running club friends more than any speed on the part of my feet.

Over these months, after running almost a thousand miles, two slight knee injuries and a pesky hip issue later, I had lost toenails, 17 pounds and a fear of any distance over 10 miles. My last long run was 18 miles from Arlington, past Arlington Cemetary, National Airport and into Alexandria. My hip felt okay. I stopped running for the last 10 days and enjoyed by many degrees the nicest part of training so far, a beautiful time called “tapering.”

The day before the marathon I went over to the DC Armory to pick up my tracking chip and my number. I sat to listen to a panel given by the race director, a chipper guy called Jim, who twitched in his black track suit, legs looking ready to run off the stage. Jim was ready to answer any of our questions, many of which seemed to revolve, interestingly, around urination. “The Arlington Cemetary,” Jim said “is not a bathroom. Believe me, we’ve seen that happen. We put up a wall. That shouldn’t happen this year.” Otherwise, he explained, there were 22,000 runners and that many Port-a-John’s did not exist on the entire eastern seaboard. “Wooded areas,” he assured us, “are God’s bathroom,” and leaves, his assistant said, were “God’s TP.”

On the glorious morning of October 28th, I headed to the Pentagon parking lot before dawn, chewing on a banana and praying to god, kinda. Because my pace group was about in the middle of all of the runners, I barely heard the starting gun, but we were off – a slow, steady shuffle, 11 minutes until we actually got to the start line.

I ran the first 16 miles with a group of 8 very cute Marines with nicknames like “Dark Horse,” “Toes Up” and “Milky One.” (huh?. They sang the whole way – some of the most catchy, naughtiest songs I have ever heard. I found that in the parlance of this group of soldiers “Devil Dog” referred generally to a Marine, alluding to observers during some war or another who said that Marines could fight as tough as a back street dog. In the songs I heard, Devil Dog could also refer to the male phallus, as in lyrics such as “Mama and Papa laying in the bed and Mama said - gimme more, gimme more uh huh, ya gimme some more of that Devil Dog.” “Kitty Cat” referred in many songs to female genitalia. When a hill would come up they would sing “I like it – yeah – I love it – Ummmm – I want some more of it!” This little song somehow made hills fun. They let me run in formation with them for most of the time except when we became separated, as in the times when they or I would visit God’s Toilet.

Along the route I cannot tell you how nice it was to see the faces of friends and family who came out to watch and ply me with Gatorade and peanut butter. At mile 9, my friend Zoe was there with a sign, though I somehow missed her. Mile 12, my mom and stepfather, who had black baseball hats that said “Run, Ria, Run!” Mom and Rugga noted that it seemed the more “equipment” a person had on them – visible energy gel, mini bottles of water strapped around them in a belt – the slower the person was. At mile 13, I cannot believe that I missed my 6-foot tall redheaded friend Olga Krushelnytska, probably the tallest and most visible of all of my friends, but somehow that happened. At mile 16 a horrible, shooting pain shot through my left hip. I started to limp. The Marine’s moved ahead. I bit my lip and kept going. Have you ever limp-run 9 miles? Wow, is that fun. Shortly after this happened, I met my friend Jenna Beveridge, who had run the same marathon before, and convinced me that it was really okay to take more the recommended dose of Aleve. At 17, my fantastic workstudy Joe Eadeh had walked something like 6 miles to get to the very end of an island in the Potomac, where he waited almost in the middle of nowhere for me to run by. Jenna was back at mile 18, and then at mile 20 BRE’s friend Melissa Davenport, her husband Jonah, and their daughter in her stroller, adorned with a sign that read “Future Marathoner,” ran with me along the 14th Street bridge. It was about at this bridge that the marathon was no longer fun at all. It felt like I could actually hear my legbone rubbing against the socket. My friend Maggie Daher ran a mile with me toward the desperate end.

The most incredible thing to me about running this particular race was the way it really made the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan real to me. Thousands of people run that race, moms and dads, sisters and brothers, wives and husbands, to honor their family and friends who were killed, were injured, or who still faced these threats everyday because they are still deployed. I ran with people who showed me their shrapnel wounds, a man who had half of his face blown off, a whole family who had lost a little brother named David. Whole platoons ran, with the name of a fallen comrade stenciled on the back of their shirts. More than anything, actually feeling the loss on that scale, with thousands of people who had been directly affected by the war, was humbling to say the least.

I think past mile 20 every runner can feel every pebble in the road with as much sensitivity as they could feel a fleck of sand on their tongue. In training, I kept mentally thinking of how I would keep running when I was exhausted, dehydrated, and covered in blisters, etc, but I felt full of energy even at the very end, my feet were in perfect shape, I had nary a blister – but my hip was on fire. I finished though. Yay! I finished and I have the picture and the big, obnoxious medal (that medal, my mother said “Was designed by a man.”) to prove it. A hot marine wrapped a foil blanket around me at the finish line. My work for the day was done.

Ria

CHD 6.28.07 Arabic Calligraphy

2007-06-29T04:56:00.000+03:00

At work today I went to the Freer and Sackler galleries to see some Islamic Art in DC. I love Arabic calligraphy. Really, it gives me chills. Above - a kufic script worth looking at.

Capitol Hill Dispatch 4.25.07 Happy Anniversary Rugga!!!!

2007-04-26T00:55:00.001+03:00

(To the right, a picture of the SS Drotningholm which left Gotenburg, Sweden on January 17, 1947 bringing my stepfather Rugga to America, where he has in large part stayed since then.)

If you ever had the mistaken idea that my life is an adventure, let's remember that me and many of my friends have interesting experiences out of a sense of adventure, a certain willing to do almost anything. Many people close to me, though, my stepfather Rugga included, have whole lives of adventure that they didnt even seek out!

I write today in honor of my stepfather, Roland Gustav Droitsch's anniversary. The anniversary of his 60th year in the United States. Happy Anniversary, my Rugga!

Rugga's mother, whom we called Omah (grandmother, in German, I think), was a warm and sweet woman, built sturdily, my sister Nicole says, "like a peasant." It was always amazing to me, as a young girl, to see an exact match of Rugga's face, albeit on a woman. Omah was sweet and kind and everyone liked her. At Rokeby, the estate in the Hudson Valley where Rugga and his sister Ingrid grew up, stories abounded of Omah running around grabbing the children and rubbing them down vigouriously with rough and malodorous lye soap, which, if you believe the descriptions Ive heard, was always done in the gaping, freezing cold.

Rugga's trip to America started when he was but a 5 year old wisp of a boy. Omah snuck he and Ingrid (10) out of Communist Czechloslovakia through Prague and then, by way of a week-long bus trip arrived in the port of Gotenburg, from which the SS Drotningholm sailed. Because of WWII mines, the ship's captain was obliged to wind all the way up north of Scotland. Omah was deathly ill from seasickness, and only 5 berths were available for the six of them in their little cabin in steerage. Ingrid and Rugga were adopted by a Swedish gentleman who occasionally took them up to a more advanced grade of cabin where they ate something that wasnt gruel, and who kept the young Rugga from sliding over the banisters into the icy water below.

They arrived on a Sunday night and anchored off of Brooklyn. The next morning, Rugga heard weeping and crying above on the deck - the group had just come in view of the Statue of Liberty. People were "half crazed," Rugga said "with joy." They docked at either the 57th or 59th street pier. Their trunks had all been stolen. "Thus began our life in the wonderful land of liberty and opportunity."

For this anniversary my mom kidnapped Rugga for the weekend and took him to NYC, to a room with a view of the Statue of Liberty, a beacon of hope for so many people who come here.

Needless to say, we are all quite happy that Rugga did make that trip. He's one of the people that make our country here a great one.

Again, Happy Anniversary, my Rug!

Love,
Ria

Capitol Hill Dispatch 3.25.07 Sunny Day on the Mall

2007-03-26T17:37:00.000+02:00

This is BRE and I laying out on the mall yesterday. The picture on the right was taken a few minutes before a six year old boy came up to us and asked if we were homeless, because, he said "We looked like homeless people." Tee hee hee.

Capitol Hill Dispatch 3.21.07 Celebrating Rumi

2007-03-21T16:54:00.000+02:00

pictures from left:

Mevlana Jelaleddin Rumi, Persian philosopher, poet, mystic, thinker

The whirling dervishes of Konya, Turkey

Ahmet Ozhan, noted Turkish pop star before he found God

Ahmet Ozhan now, Mevlevi and proud of it

My roommate Amy is a friend I met in Cairo who now works as the front desk girl of the Saudi oil behemoth Aramco. As such, my roommate Nadya and I are sometimes the recipients of Aramco's "extra tickets." And so I say thank you Amy, and thank you Aramco.

Last week Amy invited me to a special performance of "An Evening of Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi's poetry and Sufi music," sure to be chock full of Turks, Sufis, and whirling dervishes - yay!

Sufi's are a mystical branch of Sunni Islam. One sect of Sufis are the Mevlevi order which Rumi (a Persian philosopher who lived for 40 years in Turkey)'s followers formed after he died in 1273. Mevlevis are a community of religious devotees, whirling dervishes who spin their way to religious ecstasy and higher communion with god. There are festivals and performances of whirling dervishes everywhere in the world, but Konya, in central Turkey, is the real dervish capitol of the world. In Konya, there are festivals where dervishes literally spin for 3 or 4 days at a time. Until the 16th century, women and men sometimes whirled in the same religious performances. The whole world seems a little more chaste now, and why?

Sufis are Sunni Muslims, but they are also considered heretical by some other Muslims because of various aspects of the way they worship. Rumi is probably the most famous Sufi. His pronoucements were sometimes seen as problematic within accepted Sunni doctrine, example:

Why should I seek God? I am the same as
He. His essence speaks through me.
I have been looking for myself!

( The Essential Rumi. Translations by Coleman Barks. 1995)

Even in Walt Whitman and other contemporary writers, one can see shades of Rumi.

Rumi's influence goes far beyond the phenomenon of Mevlevi's in Turkey. His poetry serves as the basis for much of classical Iranian and Afghani music. His writings have had a great influence on Turkish literature. Persian Jewish performer Sharam Shiva's CD "Rumi: Lovedrunk" is a very popular suggestion on Myspace these days. It is thought that Rumi is the best-selling poet in the history of the world!

Rumi's major work is Masnavi-ye Manavi (Spiritual Couplets), a six-volume poem regarded by many Sufis as second in importance only to the Qur'an. It's also sometimes called the Persian Quran.

At the event the other night, held in a hall of the Library of Congress, it was great fun to hear Turkish spoken all around us. Members of the Turkish parliament, Turks Turks everywhere, a scene I LOVE - interspersed with various members of congress and good old Karen Hughes. The highlight of the show was a performance by Ahmet Ozhan, who used to be a very popular singer and performer in Turkey. A few people have described him to me as the Turkish Tom Cruise before Tom Cruise got wierd. One day, though, Ahmet Ozhan found God, and has devoted the rest of his life to the study of Sufism and a celebration of Sufi artists and poets, including Rumi. Ahmet Ozhan had on these tight black pants with a vest that had these little cap sleeves and made him and his band look like a gaggle of wood nymphs. They played some instruments that had been played continuously around Turkey for the past 6,000 years.

In the middle of the performance it looked as if once of the dervishes ran off to get sick. "Dont sign up for the beginning level of whirling class!" a Georgetown professor joked with me, when I relayed this story to him, since there was sure to be a puker every time.

2007 has been named by UNESCO as the international year of Rumi.

So, if you haven't ever read a little bit of Rumi, now is a good time to do it. Oh, its good stuff.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Capitol Hill Dispatch 2.11.07 - A Beiruti Engagement!

2007-02-12T18:00:00.000+02:00

Congratulations, Redwine and Irina, engaged last week to be married this summer in Tangiers, Morocco. Alf Mabrook!

Capitol Hill Dispatch 1.23.07- Everybody Dabke!

2007-01-23T18:17:00.000+02:00

People having fun dancing the dabke in Palestine. Picture: www.georgie.ripserve.com

I am writing a quick note because Ive found that at least 10 people from 6 different countries have found the Dispatch because they've looked up the word "dabkhe" or "dabke" on google or technorati.com. People in Paris, France, the Czech Republic, China, the U.S., Turkey and Brazil. I wonder why?

The Dabke is perhaps the most well-known folk dance of the Levant and is the national dance of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. Its also found in Iraq but there is it called, according to the Wikipedia article I have just looked up, "Chobi."

The most famous dabke troup, historically, is named Firkat el Arz and comes from Lebanon. Other internationally famous dabke troupes today are called Ibdaa, Sareyyet Ramallah, and El-Funoun, all in Palestine. The Arabs say the dance is theirs, some say it comes from the Armenians or the gypsies, still others believe its a historically Turkish dance.

To me, dabke is always just a whole lot of fun. Anyone can dabke, but being a competent dancer in this genre in many places including Lebanon if you are a man, tends to suggest an undeniable and virulent masculinity. A really respected dabke dancer can tamp his or her foot down so hard on the floor that the walls shake and your back teeth tend to vibrate.

Oh dabke, it makes me happy to think about because I have so many memories of dancing the dabke in the mountains and by the ocean and in the middle of refugee camps in Beirut. To think about the dabke also brings me sorrow, to think of all of those wonderful places and all of the trouble that exists now because of the current riots in Beirut that have brought that whole beautiful city to a halt.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Capitol Hill Dispatch 1.9.07 - Go Bucks :(

2007-01-09T19:25:00.000+02:00

(Top- OSU head coach Jim Tressel, in happier times. Certainly not last night :( www.frii.com)

Well, that OSU/Florida game last night sure was a tough one to swallow. I wanted to cry or run over there to help them in any way I could, by kicking a field goal or ferrying gatorade along the sidelines or something.

It wasnt just that Florida looked good. And when I say Florida looked good I am not just talking about their insanely mignon quarterback. I would take an OSU waterperson covered in warts and unfortunately dispersed body hair over any Gator any day.

In the spirit of unadulterated school football pride, I must remind you all that OSU players have won the Heisman trophy more than any other college football program (7 times.)

You wouldn't have known that by watching our fair Buckeyes last night. We werent even fair. We were a complete disaster.

Tedd Ginn junior returned the opening kick for 93 yards, scoring a touchdown within the first moments of the game, and all of Ohio loved him at that point. Soonafter, he was out with an ankle issue, caused, he said, by his jumping around in the endzone when he made his touchdown. The game essentially went to crap after that.

Its a difficult thing to say when you love the Buckeyes as much as I do (which is not even as much as most of my sorority sisters who still regularly drag themselves out for away games), but maybe the system for selecting the national championship team does need to be shaken up so that it isnt dominated by the Big Ten just for the sake of being dominated by the Big Ten. I would like to have another season of practice and know we could beat Florida or any of those other piddly SEC teams. Well, maybe a season and a half.

Even on the bleakest of days, I continue to say, Go Bucks.

Ria

Capitol Hill Dispatch NEW POST December 27, 2006 Goodbye, James Brown

2006-12-26T23:05:00.001+02:00

Top right: Simryn Gill, an Indian artist (with a Malaysian passport who lives in Australia) whose show, Perspectives, is on display at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington until April 29th, 2007. Her "Pearls" are shown to the left of her photograph. (www.washingtonpost.com)

James Brown, 1933-2006
(www.dallasnews.com)
Sweet Dreams, Mr. Dynamite

Happy Birthday to My Sister Nicole!
Go Bucks!
The Mecca of All Rotisserie Chicken
Thank you, Hilary Metcalfe and Zaa Zaa
Ria takes a boyfriend
Adieu, Godfather of Soul

First,

Happy birthday - TODAY!- to my sister Nicole, who is laying on a beach in Hawaii with her beautiful, screaming children.

Second, I have taken into account many comments I have received on the blog:
-more background for new people who don’t know you (from these guys I don’t know in Munich)
-more pictures (“preferably in a bikini,” from the same guys in Germany)
-but more than anything "It’s too long!"

I am listening to you all. I am going to start writing whenever. This will make entries short and timely. You can check whenever. Maybe there will be a post and maybe there will not be. Is that okay? As always, please let me know if you don't read the Dispatch and want to be taken off the list.

Now, Dispatch

I want to thank my friend Hilary for bequeathing upon me several bags of warm sweaters and other usefully wooly things that are the only reason people do not mistake me for homeless these days - most of my winter clothes are at my friend Abdul Rahman's (alf shukra!) apartment in west Beirut. Bless you both, ya Zaa Zaa and Hilarya.

I like it a lot when fall turns to winter because that’s when its time for the Ohio State-Michigan game. More than a few buckeye fans are regularly so nervous the night before a Michigan game that we cannot eat dinner – sitting with my hands in pockets, I often wonder where I ever put the lucky old buckeye nut that had provided me so much comfort in the past when similar episodes of desperation struck. This year, when famed Michigan coach Bo Schembechler passed away literally the afternoon before the game, I spoke with my best friend Meredith, a dyed-in-the-wool Buckeye, who actually said "Of course those Michigan people would let something like this happen to try to get an advantage!" We won the game and another Heisman trophy for Troy Smith. Hang on Sloopy!

An Ohio State football game is one of my favorite places to be on the planet. At the Alpha Phi sorority house, sometimes we would wake up just after dawn, put on our obnoxious scarlet and gray pants and shirts, stumble down the Pepto-Bismol colored stairs and head out for kegs and eggs, an OSU tradition whereby you eat a bunch of raw eggs and then do keg stands upside down and hope you don’t vomit. After that you drink Bloody Mary’s and watch your friend's parents do drunk cartwheels in the stadium parking lot, hopefully making into the stadium for the game before you resolve to drag yourselves over to the Varsity Club where you wade in beer cups up to your knees and sing as loud as you can. Go Bucks! How I miss those days.

My baby sister Gabrielle, the pretty sister, a high school earth science teacher, visited from Asheville, North Carolina. We spent a good chunk of her trip wandering around the National Botanic Gardens, sniffing the pinus parviflora and staring in awe at the ingeniously produced scale models of all of the monuments of DC someone had made out of twigs and berries and acorn tops.

I feel downright guilt that all of the American taxpayers pay for the awesome museums we enjoy pretty much only in DC. Below, the most inspriing new thing I saw at the Smithsonian was in the Sackler Museum where an artist named Simryn Gill

(see the exhibition online at http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/SimrynGill.htm#)

had ripped up famous works of literature and formed "pearls" out of the pages. The lines of pearls made out of the biography of Mahatma Gandhi were tiny because of his elegant soul and she tore the pages against the grain because Gandhi had lived his entire life against the grain. The Pearls for Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind were long and graceful and sweeping like those dresses Scarlett wore when she pranced around Tara. I liked those Pearls so much I wanted to eat them, but they were paper and museum-worthy and I am an art-appreciator and a law-abiding citizen, after all.

What and Gab and I recently decided, after decades of reconnaissance work involving massive consumption of poultry products, is that our own hometown of Arlington, Virginia can safely be considered the rotisserie chicken capitol of not only Arlington, but of the entire, vast universe.

Do you even doubt me? Perhaps you have not sampled the pollo at the Caribbean Grill, the Mecca of all chicken, frequented mostly by non-English speaking Latino construction workers, my sisters and I. Of all of the meals on the planet, the $3.99 lunch special at Caribbean Grill is the one meal I crave continually no matter what corner of what country I am in. Gabrielle and I, when we move to a new place, will often list the main shortcoming of our new city or town not as its lack of running water or a functioning government, but rather the dearth of a similar chicken establishment - a place where you can get a grilled chicken breast and wing, black beans and rice, a bowl of steamed spinach or carrots and little buckets of this insane yellow sauce that Gabs and I actually drink for a pittance, really. Hurry and get there before I eat all of the chicken!

I have not had a real boyfriend in 8 years because the whole institution still seems somehow wrong to me. I'm rather of the mind that you should keep looking around constantly until you find the person who makes you not want to look around anymore. Oh well, I’m strange, and I should let go of that idea and not only so people will stop asking me if I like girls.

There were several months of elaborate negotiations leading up to the boyfriendization of BRE (for a picture, go to the 10/30/06 dispatch on this very blog.) This included a phase when people would innocently ask us how long we had been dating, whereupon my cheeks would glow beet red and I would squeal much in the manner of a 12-year-old-girl "WE are NOT dating!" BRE then asked me to report him to people as "my partner" which sounded like we were either both women, or both men. Later, he began to throw around the mysterious phrase "I'm dating a woman," and okay, BRE is 26 and I experienced that year a few seasons of Gray's Anatomy ago, but this made it sound like I was a borderline senior citizen addicted to Botox injections who was financing his polo habit. We did not speak for one day for mental reorganization purposes. That one, long day is referred to as "the divorce." Amends were made. BRE wanted me to add here that we are “together,” for clarification. The world is nicer now.

Christmas would have been just great except that James Brown died. How could I celebrate with any sense of joy the birth of Christ when the Godfather of Soul was laid out on a gurney having his icy veins pumped full of formaldehyde and his eyelids stitched shut with cat gut? One obit said that he let a TV station air a local concert live the night after Martin Luther King was assassinated in order to head off a race riot, and another read "He is known to be the father of at least 4 children,” which made me giggle. Go listen to “Live at the Apollo 1962.” There’s this part in that song “Lost Someone” where he says “And I don’t want you going to see my next door neighbor” – and it would give anyone goose bumps. A man on a New York Times chat board wrote “My iPod is about worn out just listening to your gift.” Rest in peace, funky soul godfather.

So, with a slightly heavy heart at the end of 2006, I send you all warm wishes for a happy holiday season and a wonderful 2007.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Beirut Dispatch from Capitol Hill - November 29, 2006 - Another Lebanese Assasination

2006-11-22T21:50:00.000+02:00

It sort of never ends in Lebanon. Another assasination last week. Why? Well, I could talk all day about why- its complicated. Its also a terrible tragedy. If you are so brave or obligated to enter the world of politics or journalism in Lebanon, well, your life will be great and full of excitement, but your days may also be numbered. I truly hope this trend ends soon.

A timeline of assasinations and attempts since 2004.

1. Rafiq Hariri, former Prime Minister,
Assasinated on Valentines day of 2005 by 1000 pounds of explosives that also killed 21 others. He was laid to rest near the middle of Beirut in a massive shrine with his bodyguards.

2. Samir Kassir, anti-Syrian journalist and prominent Palestinian activist,
Assasinated June 2, 2005 via car bomb.

3. Elias Murr, pro-Syrian leader,
Wounded by assasination attempt on July 12, 2005.

4. George Hawi, former head of Commmunist Party
Assasinated on June 21, 2005.

4. In happier days.
Left: Gibran Tueni, publisher of Lebanon's largest anti-Syrian newspaper, An-Nahar was killed in massive car bomb that also took the lives of 3 others on December 12, 2005.
Next to him, May Chidiac, anti-Syrian journalist, blown up by a car bomb under her seat on December 25, 2005. Her left hand and leg below the knee were amputated, but she still works as a journalist.

5. Right- Amin Gemayel, former President, urged calm in Lebanon after his son, Pierre (left, below) was shot several times through the head last week in Jdideh, Beirut.

Happy Independence Day Lebanon :(

Capitol Hill Dispatch 11.8.06- Mid Term Election Special

2006-11-09T19:38:00.001+02:00

Bottom Left: Dems take over the House, and maybe the Senate too. (photo, Washington Post)

Top Right: I spent election eve with former Atty. General John Ashcroft, who is, I must admit, quite the charmer.

Capitol Hill Dispatch 11.8.06

Chinatown Bus to NYC to See My Best Friend Nicole
Election Eve with John Ashcroft
A New Day for America/Christmas Comes Early for Ria This Year

(note: in response to several requests, I posted a picture of BRE on the last dispatch, so scroll down if you want to take a peek ;)

My best friend Nicole Rodriguez lives in New York City and never misses a chance to suggest that I relocate there. I like the city, the park, the shopping, the energy, most of all I adore Nicole, but I have a general inclination not to live for too long in places where a 10 minute walk to the store will result in a fine mist of sticky black on my face as a result of ambient pollution, a la Cairo. I take the Fung Wah bus, which is $16 each way, between DC and NYC. I think there are two kinds of travelers between Boston, NYC, and DC- those who are too good to take the Fung Wah bus (many of my good friends, most of them, I might add, Republicans), and then the others, like me, who are excited by this form of transportations’ very existence. Okay, the bus breaks down here and there and I will grant you, once in Chinatown in NY, my bus driver became suddenly embroiled in a knife altercation with a driver from a rival dirt cheap shuttle service family, but I think of this as all rather colorful than negative.

Because of a complicated relationship between my best friend's high school buds, their employment within the entertainment industry in NY, and on account of the stars appearing to almost align, I almost got to go out for dinner with Britney Spears and K-Fed and I’m not kidding. Rods was pretty sauced by the time I got in though and we made friends with a couple of bottles of red on her couch, which is as good a time as I can imagine anyway. She demanded that I get a pedicure to remedy a condition I apparently suffered from which Nicole had diagnosed as “homeless feet,” the product of running and not having had a pedicure in two years. She exerted considerable social pressure that I get this $45 dollar service called “Lord of the Legs” which consisted of an elaborate set of gels and emulsions composed of rare mint extracts and unicorn pastes or something being swabbed all over your lower limbs and guaranteeing you would never develop cellulite. I thought it sounded suspiciously like a service that the Lord of the Dance would partake of after he had finished a particularly taxing tour. I took the $17 basic job and felt bad for the woman who had to do my feet but she was, after all, a pedicurist.

I spent the eve of election day in a cozy room full of 100 George Washington University college Republican club members and John Ashcroft. Just prior to his entering the room, "Pump up the Jam" and "She's a brick house" were turned on full blast, and everyones’ feet were a tappin'. A man who I assumed to be Mr. Ashcroft’s personal minister, during his opening prayer, somehow wove a story of Jesus into a parallel parable about the god-driven mission of John Ashcroft, who was needlessly attacked when he was in reality a beacon of hope and a servant of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

The AG masterfully avoided difficult questions by preempting and then dismissing them "I have a joke. I’m making a speech at an elementary school and a boy named Freddy gets up and says:

'Atty. Gen. Ashcroft, I have three questions:
1. Where are these weapons of mass destruction?
2. Where is Osama bin Laden?
3. What is the deal with this Patriot Act and our loss of privacy?'

At exactly the right time, the bell rings for recess. Upon returning, a girl gets up and says
'Mr. Ashcroft, I have five questions for you:
1. Where are these weapons of mass destruction?
2. Where is Osama bin Laden?
3. What is the deal with this Patriot Act and our loss of privacy?
4. Why did the bell ring 20 minutes early? and
5. What happened to Freddy?’”

The boys in black suits guffawed and laughed. No one would even let me approach either the microphone or AG Ashcroft because I had a blue wristband and not the more coveted red one which indicated a person who would not ask a remotely difficult or consequential question. In the deepest parts of my soul I wanted to ask him if there was fear in his heart for what could happen the next day.

Ashcroft is a charmer in the truest sense of the word. The overwhelming feeling I had in his presence was that I might like to share a chicken pot pie and a pile of mashed potatoes with him, maybe follow it up with an Apple Brown Betty while we read to each other aloud in front of a roaring fire. I am not inspired toward a feeling of saftey, however, that he has played such a major role in determining the security policy of our nation.

His voiced rose and cracked a little when he began to discuss the types of containers that could be utilized to carry out terrorist activity "Suitcases! Small backpacks!" He concluded with a recitation of "Let the Eagle Soar." I sat giddy in my seat and just couldn’t wait for Tuesday.

To me, election day is by far the most exciting day of the year, far better than even my birthday or Christmas, actually. Now I'm an independent, not a Democrat, but I was cautiously optimistic all right.

BRE and I went to one of those schmoozy Capitol Hill brasseries where the important and the self-important congregate to talk about themselves and look like they are throwing their political weight around. The TV holding the precious election results obscured by one of these people, we gulped our Pinot Noir and headed to a party. I had notes scribbled onto little post-its on all of the races I was watching (which was, essentially, almost every race) and was barely conversant as I waited for the returns to come in. Over the din of conversation no analysis was audible and so we sped back to BRE's apartment and stayed up half the night checking every possible local newspaper online waiting for something to happen.

I felt a great load lifted from my soul when I saw the House turn over. It was great fun to watch the returns come in from New Hampshire and realize that I had met or worked with almost every single Democratic candidate who won. I thought of all the Dems I worked with in New Hampshire, Ellen Bennett (who let me live with her during the campaign and beyond), Lenore and Gary Patton (who never ceased to brighten my mood and appraise me of what was going on), Bev Hollingworth (who always knew a way to accomplish something that seemed impossible), Billy Shaheen, Terrie Norelli, Maggie Hassan, Elaine Ahearn, Dick Caravati, Jackie Weatherspoon (who gave me dozens of Phillips Exeter Academy kids every week who would do whatever I asked of them), Chip Moynihan (who quietly showed up every week with dozens of cases of water for thirsty canvassers), so many others, not to mention the other JK staffers (some of the greatest people I have ever met), Kindl, Abbey, Abi, Zac, Ike, Clemons, Mikey Vlacich, Amy, Hastings, Sholmes, Jess, Loughlin, Brendan, BRE, and my beloved intern Nicky "Business" Beeson (the best intern in the world, who followed my car the whole day I taught myself to drive stick so that I wouldnt accidentally kill anyone) and all of the other former Kerry staffers who are now in law school and thought about how I was smiling and they were probably all smiling just as much too after the veil had finally been lifted after what had seemed a particularly unpleasant and uneccesarily long and dark period in our recent history.

BRE and I went to sleep, and I woke up continually through the stormy night staring at the skylight with a terrible desire to run downstairs to the TV to see if there were any new results. Just after dawn, wearing the same clothes as the night before, I rushed to a Rotary function in the hotel where Nancy Pelosi had celebrated victory the night before. I talked with a man named Igor, a behemoth from the Siberian oil ministry on his first visit to America when a man next to us, a Japanese fellow called Toyo chimed in with "What election?” I could barely explain the situation and eat my bacon with the joy and beauty I felt blooming in my heart over the new political landscape unfolding right in front of me, but I somehow, no matter what the circumstances, always find a way to eat all of my bacon.

Bush gave a speech, starting off with "Why all the glum faces?" I sat silent and grateful for him for once, albeit not for anything he did on purpose.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Cairo Pics - Last night of the campaign

2006-10-04T01:31:00.000+02:00

Cairo Pics - Bedouin woman and her children, Sinai

2006-10-04T01:23:00.000+02:00

Cairo Pics - View from my bed

2006-08-31T23:26:00.000+03:00

I took this picture while lying in bed reading on my houseboat. At night, it would have been easy to roll off the bed right into the river. The fishermen would row under my house at night and I would hear them singing. Ah the Nile - what a view!

Cairo Pics - Sudanese refugees

2006-08-30T22:32:00.000+03:00

I took this picture at a gathering of mostly Sudanese refugees (the main refugee community present in Egpyt) on the occasion of World Refugee Day, a day when Sudanese children, many of whom fear playing outside for being caught as illegal immigrants, had the chance to play outside on the campus of the American University of Cairo. What a cute baby, I thought when I took it.

Cairo Pics - My first week in Egypt - Matt and me at the pyramids

2006-08-30T19:18:00.000+03:00

Cairo Pics - Eid, my Bedouin camel guide in the Sinai

2006-08-29T21:04:00.000+03:00

Top: a woman and her children near Eid's village.

Below: a picture of Eid, my Bedouin camel guide who climbed with me up the side of Mt. Saint Katherine, the highest point in Egypt, in the Sinai - the place where Moses revealed the Ten Commandments. Here we are near Eid's village as he checks his text messages. See the blog from 6.5.05 that tells the story of Eid and my trip to the Sinai.

Cambridge/Beirut Dispatch 8.22.06

2006-08-23T17:45:00.002+03:00

I feel a little like I live in the Twilight Zone most days here. How can life change SOOOOO seriously in a matter of months? In Boston, I run outside along the Charles River and I drink Budweiser outside with my friends- great! And then no one says hello in the street and I work on the weekends and the grapefruit taste like wood chips and costs $2 and I buy it anyway. In Boston, my best friend Nicole’s family tells me about the problems with the zoning laws around their pool in the suburbs, and in Lebanon my friends are reporting from still essentially what are near war zones.

I went to camp in the Adirondacks with my good friend Fay and her father, Alex, his wife Danna and several of their friends. At least one of our friends has described Fay's family camp as the only place in the world they would sell their soul for. You can hike for days there and never get off of the family plot of land. So many times in Cairo, when I was smooshed between too many sweaty bodies at a public protest, I would travel to camp in my own imagination, to the docks off the boathouse, where Fay and I and many of our friends haven’t skimped in the skinny dipping department. There is something magical about staying a place where your only worries are about what hiking trail to take, which old claw-foot bathtub to take a bath in, what beautiful old wooden guide boat to take out fishing, what to cook for dinner over a fire on the island as you sit in a lean-to and drink wine from the bottle and listen to the plaintive call of the loons.

The following weekend, before Fay returned to San Fran, we went for a weekend at our friend Sarah and John and their 6-month old son Charlie Westwood’s massive old farmhouse. It rained the whole time, but when you are with fun friends and a lot of wine, that doesn’t really matter. John, an amateur (are there professional ones? There have to be) pyrotechnic engineer in the practically lawless state of New Hampshire, had arranged a fireworks display for us. At first, a spray of red and purple, innocent enough, and we politely clapped. The light of the fireworks had illuminated a complex scaffolding holding what looked to be hundreds of pounds of explosives. I think NH must be the fireworks capital of America. By the end, I had thrown myself to the ground, trying vainly to duck behind an immature sapling, witness to the type of performance usually reserved for medium-sized town’s Fourth of July celebrations. Thanks, Sarah and John.

I am working part of this summer in a lab helping to write grant proposals for AIDS research in sub-Saharan Africa. Its fun to work in a laboratory – there are always people with vials of stem cells or some strange bacterium in the elevators – I ask what they are carrying and then just reply – WOW! or with E.Coli - EW! My boss, is Dr. R, Professor at Harvard Medical School, noted AIDS researcher, is intriguing and scary. In the lab, I often think about the monkeys, they are cute but they all have strains of recombinant HIV. Before I was hired to work in her office, several of Dr. R’s staffers tried to assess whether or not I was secretly an animal activist. “I’m a raging omnivore. I saw a t-shirt the other day that said “PETA – People for the Eating of Tasty Animals” and wanted to buy it,” I told one girl. “I’ve watched people die of AIDS in front of me. I’d rather see a macaque go any day.” They let me in.

BRE and I had to move our stuff. Cambridge to western Massachusetts to Portsmouth, NH (where Ellen Bennett has let me keep all of my wordly posessions in her basement since the Kerry campaign, bless you, Ellen) and then back to Cambridge, up four flights of stairs with no elevator. BRE almost abandoned me at that point. Approximately an hour into a 12 hour day, he shut his hand in the sliding glass door of his apartment, which retained on its frame, a nice chunk of his middle finger dangling disgustingly. Just prior to this moving, we had done a Myers Briggs personality test and found that I am an ENTP (extrovert, intuiting, thinking (as opposed to feeling), perceiving) and BRE is an ESTJ (extrovert, sensing, thinking, judging). BRE loves order, tasks, and process. I think about things on a broader scale and I just like to enjoy things generally. He is good at controlling situations and I am good at reading people and analyzing the bigger picture. It also said that I can sometimes seem able to predict the future, whatever that means. We are so different in so many ways that in daily life, we often say to each other - what in the world are you thinking when you do that? But now Brian will say, Ri, we need to have an ESTJ day today – moving was one of those days- and other times I say, Bri, let's switch over to ENTP now (please!) so that we can actually have fun. I think all of our fun days, in fact, were ENTP days, but I will admit that we get a lot more done on ESTJ days, too and I am happy to split half half.

All summer, BRE and I have gone to his parents house in Merrimacport, MA on the weekends where we sit on their dock off the Merrimac River to swim, play in the grass and eat rare pieces of steak and read almost the whole New York Times on Sunday afternoons in our pajamas. Mostly, though, we all pay attention to his dog, Dory, aptly nicknamed Princess. Princess does not like it when I sit in the front seat of BRE’s car, because she, a 2.5 year old chocolate lab, feels that this is HER seat. BRE's mother, Denise, said she thinks Dory KNOWS I spend more time with Brian than she does and the dog is not happy. The other day when we were driving somewhere I put my hand on Brian's arm and Dory just stared as if to say “lady, take your hands off the frickin' merchandise.” BRE woke me up near dawn to take princess for a walk down by the river. "You would sleep until 10 on Sundays if I let you," he spat out in a tone that made it seem as if it were somehow a BAD thing. Oh we laugh. It is so much fun at BRE's house to play Scrabble with his family because I haven't lost yet. Every time I win BRE likes to say that it’s a fluke because I went to public school. I will begin to pay attention to ridiculous, ever so slightly uppity comments from BRE when he can actually produce a double-digit scoring word.

I think about Lebanon all the time.
I asked several friends in Lebanon if they had heard any news of my friend Qassim, who works for the Red Cross in Tyre (where a lot of the major bombing was happening). After a few days, my friend Sophia reported that she had seen a picture of him on CNN, and that his Red Cross truck had been hit by a bomb, that there was blood coming out of his ear. Then my friend Alaa, the Reuters correspondent, said that he had met with Qassim, who had shrapnel explode in his face and who was now at least temporarily partially or totally deaf. It doesnt take much to make me happy these days - at least I knew Qassim was alive.

In Cambridge, I will be walking down the street talking to a friend who is talking about the fight she is in with Verizon, who is worried that if she doesn’t get to the mall right away, the red shoes she wants will be sold out, and I will sit there and think – which, if any of my friends in Lebanon has died? And will I ever find out? I cant tell you how many times I’ve buzz killed a fun conversation where people are talking about their Ipods and new coats and boring package vacations and ask what I’ve been up to and I say, well, I spent the day trying to figure out what towns in Lebanon were bombed and if any of my friends had been killed.

The only person who seems to be of any emotional use to talk to about Lebanon with is my Rotarian friend George Haddad, who is a retired attorney. George is from Jezzine in Lebanon, his family left in 1912, some via Ellis Island. He lives in Florida most of the time but waits out hurricane season in Cambridge. One of the first things he ever told me was how in the tomato fields of Florida, after the pickers went through, he would take his bucket and pick the remaining tomatoes himself, and he still does this every year. My ears perked up because George is 95 years old. On a bad day, he looks a youngish 70.

As best as I can tell, George doesn’t use a hearing aid or wear glasses. How? We sit outside of a café in Harvard Square sometimes in the mornings. He has gone there for 25 years. The staff people actually butter his toast for him, although there is nothing approaching a tremble in his hands. We are of one mind on many things, mainly the importance of vegetables and a general love of life. He thinks it’s quite funny when other Rotarians will tell him about what expensive vitamins they are all taking to preserve their bodies as they are struggling with their walkers and bifocals. George doesn’t take vitamins. He just eats Lebanese. He eats the same breakfast Sekina used to make for me every single morning, and I returned to eating it every morning again too. Oh, what a specimen.

Anyway, so a week before I should have left to return to Beirut, it became clear that I am leaning toward taking the easy way out and will likely move to DC to take the final class of my masters at the Elliot School of International Studies at George Washington, U. AUB has brokered some sort of deal with them. I am such a baby, I will admit! Where in the heck am I going to live when I get to DC? No idea. That’s really the story of my life, though. A vagabond I will stay till the bitter end, probably.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Beirut Dispatch from Cambridge 7.20.06

2006-07-20T21:02:00.002+03:00

Well, what a fine mess this is. Lebanon is burning and to look at the pictures is to think the attacks had been going on for months because the Lebanese haven’t even finished cleaning up the bombed out buildings from the last war they had, which ended in 1990. But this is Beirut - where the parties never stop and the wars never end.

That any side in this current conflict could be said to be right or wrong is well, hogwash.

Less than a week before I left Beirut, I sat for hours in the Hizbollah HQ and the affiliated library and research center, drinking dark Arabic coffee from little china cups, doing research for my thesis. Those buildings have now been levelled. A couple of days before I left Lebanon, I went to the town of Tyre, down near the Israeli border, to hear a speech of Hassan Nasrallah, head of the Hizbollah, on the occasion of the anniversary of the withdrawal of Israeli forces. I got reasonably close to Nasrallah, I joked and then outright begged, but fearing that I would shoot him, the guards assigned to me would not let me take photographs. Tyre, now, is an inferno.

It would be difficult to understand the enormity of what is going on if you were to watch American TV. I cant tell you how much I yearn for news that can just tell us the straight up what happened. I watched a familiar blonde tv reporter, who, for morality's sake, shall remain nameless and who sometimes seems to have been alloted a family-sized package of Toll House cookies for brains, on a prime time tv program. "How can we help the Israeli's to beat Hizbollah?," she asked a pompous and, at least visibly, only partially informed "policy analyst." Might a responsible journalist not have said a bomb went off here, this many people died here? Is said blonde tart a journalist or is she enrolled in the IDF? Is the flesh parade of hot boys and girls on tv that is expected to stand in for real, informative news coverage ever going to end? I truly wonder.

I honestly dont think this military action against Lebanon is any way to significantly dampen the popularity of Hizbollah, not just in Lebanon but in any place in the Middle East. Friends in Egypt have told me they are seeing posters of Nasrallah at sandwich shops all over Cairo. He used to be a Shiia Lebanese hero, and now his popularity may spread across borders and religious divisions.

Lebanon has a Muslim majority ruled over by a powerless Christian minority, and there there has not been a census since 1932. No one knows how many people are even in the country- but the population is estimated at about 3.5-3.9 million. The Shiia actually may be in the numerical majority.

My friend Patrick, who I know from Cairo, had just arrived in Beirut a few weeks ago to do a summer Arabic program at AUB and is presently fleeing Beirut via taxi through Damascus (I cannot begin to imagine how busy that main road is) and then Istanbul. He is meant to arrive in Boston in a couple of hours via Paris.

My friend Rym Momtaz, whose family I lived with for a month in Beirut, and who is meant to begin her masters at Sciences Po in Paris in September, has been emailing from Beirut. The last of her family members in Beirut were in a convoy heading to Damascus and had two spaces for four people. Rym is staying at her house to wait things out. Ya, haram.

She wrote: “What pains me the most in this situation is that …the Lebanese people – who in large part have been vocal against Hizbollah's strategies for the last year and a half – have been forced to cheer on Hizbollah when they retaliate and hit a city in Israel instead of the settlements in the North. What do you expect from people under complete blockade and who are subject to constant shelling and losses in human life and capital? While much of the Lebanese population questions the timing of Hizbollah's kidnapping of the two soldiers, and some even criticize the whole operation, all of them are now calling for national unity to face the Israeli assault. Had Israel not retaliated in such a disproportionate way, the Lebanese government and people would have pressured Hizbollah into giving back the soldiers. One stops here and ponders at the gross disproportion in the value of human life. Are 2 soldiers worth (now hundreds of) lives, and thousands of refugees?”

My friend Alaa, a correspondent for Reuters, has been traveling all over Lebanon covering the war. I asked him yesterday, if Israel was trying to take out Hizbollah and have the Lebanese Army take control of security in the south, why was Israel hitting Lebanese Army targets? He answered: "They say the army is helping Hizbollah. I am fine but there is no good news. I can't find words to describe the U.S. administration, really, or the embassy here. I went to cover the evacuation and they were saying please don't take pictures of the guard posts because we don't want to expose the embassy. Expose it to what? The Israelis? The biggest irony is that the Lebanese army guards the roads to the embassy, the army the very target of some of the US-made weapons the Israelis are using. The embassy issued a statement reaffirming its non-negotiable commitment towards the Lebanese people. This is hopeless. Alaa"

Some of my American and Lebanese friends have fled, but Redwine, from Iowa, is still in west Beirut and so are most of my professors and almost all of my Lebanese friends. PLO Ahmed and his sisters and brother, mother and father, grandmother and cousins live sandwiched uncomfortably in between the bombed out airport and the area where the Hizbollah HQ has now dissapeared. With no means to contact many of my friends in Lebanon, I can only cross my fingers and hope that everyone I know is still alive.

The people I most worry about are more than a dozen people my friend Sophia and I met when we visited Tyre one weekend last year. We spent the day with them at a picnic with their families. Red Cross workers in the seaside town, where Israeli fliers have been dropped warning of an increase in attacks, all of these people survived the civil war and now, I doubt many of them will actually leave. I truly wonder if this recent endeavor could make absolutely any gains toward its stated aim to "counter terrorism."

With sadness, until the next Dispatch, Ria

Beirut Dispatch from Cambridge 7.17.06

2006-07-19T23:20:00.000+03:00

I will post a dispatch about Lebanon in the next day or two. RMR

Right:This is a street near the Hizbollah HQ in southern Beirut. A little over a month ago, I walked down this street, talked with the PR people and librarians at Hizbollah about my thesis topic and drank black coffee from tiny china cups. This picture shows that neighborhood today www.nytimes.com.

Ria Returns to America 7.11.06

2006-07-11T23:49:00.001+03:00

Pictures - around Harvard. Memorial Hall and Sculler at dawn. Della Huff Photographs - culled from the web.

I thought about many things on the 17 hour flight back to America. I listened to that Simon and Garfunkel song, "America" about a dozen times. I tried to think of what would have changed while I was away.

My good friend Tamara Tiska picked me up from the airport. Like my own family, Tam is from potato farming stock, and it was good to see a salt of the earth face, a girl who might even have been related to me, first thing when I returned. Thanks, T.

Americans are some of the fattest, loudest, most freedom-loving, and best smelling people on the planet. I was reminded of all of these things when I entered the baggage carousel area of Logan International Airport - first the lines upon lines of seriously obese moms and dads and grandmothers and children, then the zippy and fantastic smell of Mountain Fresh Tide on people's clothing. At base, I’m an American, I can’t help it - I love the smell of completely artificial laundry detergent.

The greatest thing about America is freedom and the second greatest thing is our work ethic, I think. I LOVE efficiency. I get giddy watching lines that progress quickly and in order. The at least some or most of the time partial racial and gender equality that we enjoy in the United States cannot be appreciated enough.

One of the first things I did in America was to fly up to Columbus, Ohio to see my best friend Meredith and her new baby Ella Sarone. Piled in the car with all of the baby things, we drove to Toledo, then to the Hufford cottage on lake Erie for a couple of days and then to Cleveland where we and several other of our sorority sisters including my other best friend Nicole attended our other pledge sister Caryn’s wedding.

The best part of the wedding was when the rabbi said that he had asked Caryn and Jason questions about their impending nuptials and neither knew what the other one had answered. The rabbi read the responses to his question about what getting married meant to them. Jason’s response was long and sentimental, about how over the years that he had known Caryn, he felt them getting closer and closer and realized he didn’t want to spend any more days without her, I think something about how life had no meaning without Caryn, etc. Ever my pledge sister, Caryn said “Ever since I was a little girl, I have dreamed about a big wedding, and I will have a big dress and everyone will be looking at ME! The day will be all about ME!” God bless that pair.

America, after so long away seems, in some sense, sparkly and magical. I ran every day the first couple of weeks I was back. I was alive with joy running to the Massachusetts State House to pick up my friend Elworthy from work, and it was so nice, to run halfway across the city, walk into an old and official building, hopelessly sweaty and wearing miniscule shorts, and have absolutely no one seem to care. Running in shorts, outside, wherever I want. In Lebanon, even if I was wearing pants running along the ocean, I was often asked how much I charged. Ugh.

In Cambridge, I am staying with my friend Brian Elworthy from the Kerry campaign in NH, from here on out refered to as "BRE." I have never actually lived in the same room with a boy so this is sort of like a vast, strange scientific experiment. BRE is the only person I know on the planet who hears the alarm clock blaring at 5:45am WHEN IT IS STILL DARK before his spinning class and does not press snooze and actually does not hesitate even a half a second before he jumps up out of bed, completely awake. Oh, the horror. But he makes us breakfast every morning, which we usually eat outside on the deck, and it’s a complete breakfast, the kind with eggs and toast and fruit and orange juice and cereal and coffee and milk just like we see in all of those breakfast commercials but that no one ever actually eats. On my birthday he made me breakfast in bed and that's one way to stay perhaps permanently on my good side.

BRE has just finished his first year of law school. He will be pleased that I mention his class rank, which is first. I often worry, since we spend so much time together, and since he is so conversant with the rule of law, if I am unintentionally doing illegal things of which I am entirely ignorant. For instance, the other day as we returned from a weekend in the Hudson Valley in NY, he noticed that I had rather adopted a beach bag of his and started bantying around terms like "intentional dominion and control over the private property of another," and "conversion," which, hitherto, I thought had something to do with currency exchange.

It does not please BRE that I sometimes refer to him as the Breck girl of our apartment, but truly, I think he spends more time on his hair than I do. Or at least he thinks about his hair more than I do. I let him read the parts of the Dispatch that talked about him before I posted anything - I dont usually let people vet anything I write, but I have to wake up everyday and see the kid. BRE asked that if I were going to talk about his hair, that I at least say that I do like his hair, which I guess I do, though I cant say Ive actually ever thought about it much. BRE has also excised a few passages which he has deemed defamatory to his character. Those were all of the interesting bits. Oh well. When I worked at a magazine in Egypt, the government censors went through our articles once. In the house of Brian Im censored 4 or 5 times. Oy.

I flew off to Canada to spend a week with my sisters, their husbands and my niece Callahan and 6 month old nephew Charlie. While I am aware that most people feel their nieces and nephews are very cute, truly, I can assure you, mine are just flipping adorable. Callie, 21/2, and just learning about the different parts of the body, recently told a group of people that her vagina was going away and soon she would grow, she said "A BIG penis." What a fun one she is.

We all stayed with my sister Dani and her husband Dave, who live nestled right at the foot of a mountain in what looks like a Nordic wonderland. As we drove around Banff, I thought about the highways and city dirt I live among and momentarily sulked in the back seat. In town for Canada Day, we watched a parade with Canadian Mounties and a besequinned gaggle of Canadian cowgirls in chaps and fake eyelashes. The float for the seedy nightclub in Banff had a couple of girls in skimpy bikini’s dodging the horse crap down the street with a banner in the middle of a majestic mountain wilderness.

My sisters and I are all rather independent and hearty souls. When, after a hike, my baby sister Gabrielle became very dehydrated and had trouble breathing, we left her on the couch with some Gatorade and went out immediately after said hike for a canoe ride down the Bow River. As we walked out of the door, Danielle yelled after her "We arent going to have cell phone reception down on the river so if things take a turn for the worse, you are going to have to 911 it." Only in my family would we say things like this, Im convinced.

Out of us four, I'm supposedly the "least outdoorsy" sister, a judgement that my sisters have made, I believe, on the basis of my owning a cocktail dress, more than one pair of high heels and my not being in posession of a truck of what I call "outdoor equipment." My sisters looked at what I consider to be rather innocent and benign red flip flops and laughed mockingly. "You are going to canoe in THOSE?" they asked. My sissys all have these shi-shi water shoes called Chochco's or something, which apparently, you are supposed to canoe in. I dont pay attention that any of this stuff. My sisters continued to laugh at me. Oh well. That's what happens with sisters, I guess.

At the foot of a glacial mountain in the fantastic Banff National Park, we all marveled at the perfectly tourqoise lake water. To get an idea of what the area looks like, Brokeback Mountain was filmed there. I had seen pictures of Banff on the internet and thought that people had photoshopped the brilliant blue color in, but its real. My sister Nicole and I were talking about how we would gloat to our friends that the water was so clear and sparkling, we could fill baby Charlie's bottle with it, when Danielle enlightened us. Danielle is the Bow Riverkeeper, the legal advocate of the Bow River which runs through Banff. Whenever the rest of us look at a body of water and our first inclination is to drink or jump into it, Dani likes to give us the dirty, some might say inconvenient truth. A friend in Beirut who had visited Banff described it as "if there were a place in the world where princesses still lived in towers, that would be it." I was thinking of how right they were when Danielle told us the lake had a warning against eating fish from it. How? We thought. It had nothing to do with any dumping or chemicals from the region. Fallout from the dirty air produced in other places had floated over the mountain paradise of Banff and had made their fish toxic. This same thing is happening all over the world. If the fish are toxic in Banff, I wonder, what hope is there for us in other, less freakishly beautiful natural wonderlands? I wonder how long it will be before we can’t eat any fish at all.

Anyway, do I miss the Middle East?

Of course. I never know what is going to happen to me there, and how I long for the vegetables and the music and most of all the people and the Arabic – that I only speak English now greatly perturbs me. In Boston, I have a very nice life with few surprises, and if I didn’t live with Brian, I’m sure I’d already be itching to go back (thanks, BRE).

His family, at dinner the other night, asked whether I wasn’t scared about living in such a “dangerous” region of the world. Sure, I said, in Lebanon, we have political violence and instability, an assassination here and there. Recently before I left, even, there was just a smidgen of a suggestion of an emerging civil war breaking out. But no one ever cares about killing ME. In Lebanon and in Egypt, I rarely worried about being hit by a drunk driver. I never feared that a random middle school kid would march in and blow up a school, never felt like someone random would walk up behind me as I jogged in a park and cut me into little pieces. In fact, on the whole, I do feel safer outside of America, ouch, but its true.

However, with only the summer in America, I am surely appreciating every second. I looked over photographs by Ansel Adams and Margaret Bourke-White, to remind me of the beautiful cities, our utterly amazing mountain chains, the great expanse of beautiful land we have in this country. The glorious pork products! The sale rack at the department store! The diversity! What a place!

Do you all want another Dispatch if Im in America and almost all of you know what it's like? I will comply if you post any demand on the blog.

Ria

Beirut Dispatch 6.3.06 - Goodbye (for now) Beirut

2006-06-23T21:18:00.002+03:00

Right - Hassan Nasrallah, head of the Hizbollah, Warhol-style
Left: Two girls float on the Mediterranean in front of the Beirut coastline.

On my last few days in Lebanon, I looked at the streets harder so that I wouldnt forget them over the summer. I drank every orange juice like it was going to be my last. I watched the Mediterranean as if it was going to dissapear.

I went to Tyre, near the Israeli border for the 6th anniversary of the liberation of south Lebanon- the anniversary of the day of Israeli withdrawal. On my bus full of girls, I the only one not in higab, we headed out. Soon, the highway was thick with Hizbollah flags hanging out the windows of cars. For all of the excitement between the cars, the squealing with delight, I almost felt as if we were a bunch of teenage girls heading to a Shakira (who, incidentally, is half Lebanese- and so is Salma Hayek) concert.

Just next to a former Israeli army headquarters, a quarter million people crowded an enclosed field. Once I had been checked- repeatedly- for guns or other weapons- I walked into the large square where Hassan Nasrallah, the spiritual leader of Hizbollah was to speak. I knew I was in for an interesting day when I sat down next to Miriyam, an 18 year old nursing student wearing a pink flowered higab who told me her name, in Arabic, and then all the names of all the martyrs who had studied at some point at AUB with a smile. “And then, blah blah blah, he was an engineering student and now he is in paradise.” Her own father, a Hizbollah official, had been shot in the head outside of their apartment when she was 14. He lived for 10 days after that in a coma. She carried a picture of him everywhere. I could do nothing but say I was sorry.

The only two Westerners I saw were two boys from my program at AUB. I walked around to try to find a good place from which to get a picture of Nasrallah. A whole brigade of highly efficient Hizbollah security officials, women in long black abeyyas spotted and surrounded me as I tried to sneakily ingratiate myself in with the gaggle of sheikhs before me. “What are you doing here?” everyone asked. It seemed I was very possibly the only Western woman in the audience. I asked them if I could get closer, up on the platform to get a picture. They gave me an ox of a woman who grabbed my arm and began to lead me to the stage. Many people, especially the Shiia but many others all over the Middle East really like Nasrallah- they were not amused by this woman dragging me through the rapt crowd. Nasrallah is one of the most charismatic speakers I have ever heard and interestingly, he has a lisp which causes him to call Condoleeza Rice “Condoweeza Wice.” In Lebanon, it seems no matter who is making an important speech, someone is on their cell phone or talking to their neighbor. Not so with Nasrallah. I asked, in Arabic, for a couple of explanations and was promptly shooshed. As we shoved our way through the throng of giggling, fatigue-wearing toddlers and tiny infants wrapped tightly in Hizbollah flags, I noticed my guide began to look a bit woozy. I gave her my bottle of water, she took a drink and about 30 seconds later she dropped like a pile of bricks. Everyone stared at me – why, it seemed they wondered, did the only person here who drank from the Americans' water bottle drop to the ground? I wish I had a picture of the faces of all of the women around me. Contempt, I guess would be the expression. A male Hizb guard standing atop a divider picked me up from behind by my backpack and got me to the front of the crowd. Thanks, Mohammed!

International bodies are trying to have Hizbollah disarm. I wish them the best of luck on that front.

Back at Sekina's house, I dreaded the day I would leave her. We sat on the roof and looked at pictures of her children and drank dark Arabic coffee in tiny china teacups among the roses.
Sekina and I watched an awards show where I received many questions about the gender and sexual preferences of Marilyn Manson, as if there is a way to explain Marilyn Manson accurately even in English. I confirmed that he did indeed have a known– female- girlfriend. Sekina thought I was insane. Then she asked me about lesbians in America. Marriage between them was wrong because they could not have children. You cannot begin to imagine the fun I had attempting to explain artificial insemination in Arabic to her.

On one of my last days in Beirut, I went to Borj al-Borejni, and sat on the sunny roof lined with red potted flowers and had lunch with Ahmed. His next door neighbor, a distant relative, had died the night before and he was bidden to the funeral. We talked of death. Ahmed said it might even be nice. I said, Ahmed, do you know how many people would cry if you died? Maybe a thousand, probably many more. Do you know how many people would cry if I died? If I were lucky, 6 or 7. He laughed. Me and your family. I laughed.

I left America 492 days ago on a plane to London with my friend Elworthy from the Kerry campaign. The last thing I saw in America was the Boston airport on a snowy, even blizzardy day in February. The last American thing I ate was a hot chocolate that the girls at the airport stand gave us for free, well, frankly, I think for Elworthy’s benefit. I forget what America smells like. I am kind of scared to go back.

My friend Sophia went back to NY after being in Beirut for a semester and wrote that she sat down in front of a salad with old lettuce and salad dressing that came in a packet and wanted to cry. My friend Steve, from PA, who I worked with in Istanbul recently wrote me an email “Emel (Steve’s lovely Bulgarian wife) got a transfer to pricewaterhousecoopers nyc office, but we hated it and decided to get the f___ out. The states is lame, boring, and disgusting.”

I know, from the excitment in my gut, by the fact that I will soon get to see friends and family who I have missed and not talked to or seen for such a long time, that if only for them, I will be overjoyed to return for at least a while.

When I left Cambridge, I knew about 10 words of Arabic and now I can speak at approximately the level of a 4th grader with a serious learning disability. But that’s progress.

Ive had orange juice almost every day since I left and not once has it not been fresh squeezed, most of the time right in front of me, from oranges that taste peripherally of honeysuckle and roses. For the past year and a half, about 95% of the people I walk past in the course of a day say hello and wish me good morning, and well, its just not the same at home. I find something new and amazing over here every single day and well, I know Cambridge. That doesn’t mean I don’t love it. But I know it. Oh well.

As I got ready to depart, Israel came in and bombed one place in the Bekaa valley, Sultan Yacoub, then a PFLP (a faction of the PLO) General Command (we think, we are told, it is actually unclear) because they wanted to kill a PFLP leader, just 12 miles south of Beirut. Then, someone fired 6 rockets into Israel, lightly wounding one Israeli soldier. The Hizbollah usually entirely claims any military things they did but they did not claim this one. Then the Israeli’s said they bombed 20 Hizbollah posts all over southern Lebanon. Soon after, a firefight broke out in Shebaa farms. I left right in the middle of this all happening. Oh, Lebanon. I love you, Lebanon, but frankly, I’m kind of relieved to go back to Cambridge where people fight over traffic congestion, the gentrification of their beloved neighborhoods and the cost of the Big Dig.

An American guy came and visited our Rotary club here for a couple of days. A few of us went out to dinner and walked him around the center of Beirut. "This place is cleaner and nicer than most any city in America - certainly cleaner than New York or DC," he said. There was not a speck of any trash anywhere. Downtown Beirut, we told him, "is about 5 years old." All of the buildings were so utterly crushed during the war that downtown, which stood on the Green Line which seperated Muslim from Christian Beirut, is almost being rebuilt from scratch.

I left Lebanon in a very appropriate, Beiruti fashion, spending my last night at my friends' Maha and Jana's cocktail party. What better idea is there, before 17 hours of trans-continental travel, than to mix champagne, red wine and beer, only sleep for two hours and then have 15 minutes to finish packing at dawn. I dragged myself on the plane, we flew over the coast and the snowy mountains and millions of trees - what a gorgeous country it is, an Eden, how could I leave? And then, Lebanon dissapeared completely, at least for now.

I will write one more dispatch when I get back, but I wanted to write just a few hours before I return to America. Wow, has this been a fantastic year and a half. That’s an understatement, I dont have words to describe it, so there it is.

Beirut Dispatch 5.21.06 - Another Cat Adventure at The House of Sekina.

2006-05-20T19:41:00.000+03:00

(Three great ladies: Bottom left, Fayrouz;Lebanon's most famous singer, bottom right, Om Kalthoum; the most famous singer in the Arab world. www.arabmusic.com. Top, my cute neice Callahan last summer. I just felt downright wrong not having a picture of her up when her brother is in an earlier post.)

I dread the day when I must leave Sekina, and this day is coming soon.

Sekina has a great balcony on our roof with a blue tiled fountain and dozens of rose bushes and several couches and ceiling fans over the covered part of it. A dirty white cat had her kittens right under my window the other night, but more importantly, she gave birth to them rather just next to Sekina’s extra supply piles of potatoes and onions on the back part of our balcony.

Sekina does not like cats. She demanded they leave. Water was used to scare the mama cat away and she fled, leaving the four tiny tiny kittens crying. Ibrahim, the sweet little street urchin that Sekina feeds, picked them up and we put them in a box with some shredded paper so that we could arrange for the entire family’s relocation.

The mama had run to the roof just above us. Despite the fact that there were no less than 7 women from Sekina's Quranic group on the balcony and that I was the only person with both a serious cat allergy and a flu, somehow it was I who was elected to go up and retrieve the mother and reunite her with her offspring. I climbed up with the box, gingerly approaching the mother who was hissing at me scarily, showed her the contents of the box and attempted to cajole her into getting in. When she had, we realized that both the bottom and top of the box would not close. Roro, the maid, brought up a dish drying rack and the plastic piece that catches water underneath it and I placed these on either side of the box both to keep the rather frisky mama cat from biting or killing me and to prevent the small kittens from falling to their certain death.

It was during the process of carrying this highly bulky broken box of 5 cats held together by the various parts of a dishwasher drying rack, down a highly suspect ladder which had survived the war but perhaps not ought to have, covered with bullet holes and with some of the more necessary rungs missing, that seemingly every resident, more than 30 people from the apartment buildings opposite came out to their balconies to give me conflicting advice in Arabic about how to most appropriately descend from the ladder. Most pressing, not that I was perched on the edge of a quickly disintegrating ladder hanging over the ledge of a 4 story building, carrying a large, unwieldy box of cats which were completely obstructing my view, but rather, that even though I was wearing a long, very religiously appropriate Egyptian man’s gallabiya, approximately 4 inches of my left calf was showing. Sekina gasped and ran, not to help me down the ladder, but to adjust the hem of my gallabiya.

Two days later, after inquiry into the fate of the kittens, sadly I found that they had all died, even though I had seen them drinking from their mama the day before. I saw said mama in the street out of the corner of my eye as I headed to my Arabic lesson and tried to walk quickly away before she saw me, but it was too late. She rubbed up against my leg repeatedly and scandalously and looked up at me as if to say “Why don’t you brining me something to eat, you stupid American chick. And by the way, thank you for killing all of my kittens.” I have no idea why I apologized to her in Arabic, but she was an Arab cat after all.

I'm adding this, because I'm almost out of here, but I would be remiss in writing anything about Lebanon without mentioning her most famous singer, Fayrouz, who has a very yummy soft drink named after her that is popular all over the Arab world.

There is no equivalent for Fayrouz in American culture. I guess you could say Elvis, but that wouldn't really be correct. Maybe if Elvis had lived during the American Civil War and had written songs about what a tragedy it was that so many Americans were killing other Americans, that might come close. The only singer in the Middle East who is more famous than Fayrouz is Om Kalthoum, from Egypt. There are many places I have been in Egypt who ONLY play Om Kalthoum. Somedays, when I walked down Om Kalthoum Road, then past the Om Kalthoum hotel, the massive Om Kalthoum statue, the Om Kalthoum coffee house, I just think Egypt should be called Om Kalthoum. If I had a pet, I might name her Om Kalthoum. (pictures above)

After I posted this bit about Fayrouz, I received some criticism from indigenous friends over here, who told me pointedly that my Elvis/Fayrouz comparison was not correct. Elvis is not American enough. Who, then? Who was more American than Elvis? Robert Redford, my friend Ismail offered. Or if not, perhaps George Washington. Ismail's friend's suggested that no one would dare to impersonate Fayrouz after she dies, as has been done with Elvis. I will continue to seek an accurate comparison and will alert you promptly when something appropriate pops us.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Beirut Dispatch 5.10.06- Sekina, My New Gym, Another Try at Syria, Noam Chomsky

2006-05-17T00:35:00.002+03:00

(To the right, Noam Chomsky, an image from http://www.writersmugs.com/. Noam came to AUB last night. Always a hit with the Beirutis.

To the far right, Raya and Sekina, Egypt's most notorious serial killers. I now live with a woman named Sekina, so we are Ria and Sekina.)

My friend Rym was moving to Germany. Her father was in Jordan, but he put me under the care of Hajj Khalid, his most trusted aid. Rym's fathers instructions to put me in a very good home, a safe place where only Arabic was spoken, translated to being sent to the house of the venerable Hajja Sekina Alwayn, called Sekina.

The most famous crime story in Egypt, one of the most well known in the whole of the Middle East, is that of Raya and Sekina, two sisters who ran a brothel in Alexandria around the turn of the century, who gruesomely murdered dozens of women in order to hawk their jewelry. There are still television shows that run about Raya and Sekina. When I lived in Egypt, entering school each day the guards would laugh good-naturedly, and make a thumping sound with their feet, singing the show's theme song in Arabic "the chorus - durik, durik - its your turn next its your turn," and ask me “Ya Ria, where’s Sekina?”

My new home is composed of Ria and Sekina and Sekina's Sri Lankan maid, called Roro, but whose real name, inexplicably, is Pamela. Sekina is a massive and very religious woman, and her son, a high mufti in Australia. There are massed produced calendars with a picture of him for every month. We have enough copies of the Qur'an and other religious texts in the house to build a bridge between here and Mecca. Sekina, not unlike many other Lebanese mothers I’ve come into gastronomically exuberant contact with, expects me to eat about 5 times the amount of food that is actually necessary for me to survive and even feel quite content. On my first day in the house she cooked me a 7 course lunch. She does not make anything that includes anything from a can, a box, or use a condiment. She buys groceries every single day. Her industry in the kitchen is incredible.

In Lebanon, we tend to get fruits and vegetables only when they are in season – and its better this way. Imagine, in America, how the tomatoes taste when you buy them from a farm-side stand at the peak of the season. ALL of the fruits and vegetables in Lebanon taste that yummy. Sekina buys mass amounts of vegetables at their absolutely most glorious state of development and then freezes them. She had half a bathtub full of artichokes in the house the other day. I am beside myself with joy at what she produces. Almost all other food I eat now feels somehow, slightly sad. Sekina also bakes me a whole cake several times a week- I eat about half a piece of each cake and I think she finishes the rest. She packs me a little bag of snacks to bring to school- a little bag of sugared almonds tied with a ribbon. She looks as if she is near to crying if I don't finish a Hungry Man sized portion of whatever she has made.

Sekina does not have any friends who are male. No men, without any exceptions, are allowed in our house, except for Sekina's sons, but I am not allowed to be in the house when they are. Our social lives revolved around the ladies from the mosque. They are dear and hilarious. The other day, as I sat with a bunch of her friends who were coming in, she asked all of them if they had any gold, just as the real Sekina would have done before she robbed and killed them. We all laughed. Because Sekina goes to bed at 7:30pm and I sleep no earlier than 2 am, Sekina has bought a red light bulb for outside the front door, making our apartment look, hilariously, even more like a brothel.

One day, when she had some particularly religious gals from the mosque come over, I caught her in a tiny fib when she told them I was studying shariah law, because to her, it was much more appropriate than telling the truth about my deplorable interest in political science. Out on the street, Sekina wears a long, loose black cloak with a tightly-tied scarf around her head. At home, she dons a lacy black slip that can only be appropriately described as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

We sat and watched a Lebanese music video. A girl and a boy who seemed somehow to be her boyfriend were variously rolling around in the sand in their bathing suits, building a sand castle, making a fire on the beach. “Look at these girls! How inappropriate!” Sekina and Roro boomed. I nodded vigorously in assent. On the couch beside her, I kept it quiet, the fact that I cannot WAIT to roll around on the beach in my bikini again.

At a party, I sat and told Ahmed and some friends about how Sekina was going to make a concerted effort to convert me while I am living in her house. “Ah, Ria, don’t change your religion, and if you are going to convert for Sekina, convert for me instead!” And we all laughed and then he took me to the back of the house and sat down and said “And by that I mean, I actually actually want to marry you. Think about it.” I thought about things. Because he is a refugee in Lebanon, for Ahmed to have any chance to get a real job, to have regular access to schools or decent medical care, he basically has to marry a foreigner. Or at least that seemed the case initially. I think its sort of sad that Ahmad thinks he would have a better life in America when in Lebanon when he gets a cold 400 people show up to make sure he gets better.

After eating one too many slices of multi-layer cake, in an effort to avoid disaster, I joined a gym. Sekina picked it, so its interesting all right. There are separate floors for men and women. It’s a laugh – the men’s floor, where women are allowed if they want, has a dozen televisions, a radio blasting Snoop Dog, windows all around, fans aplenty. The womens’ floor has only a window or two, a carpet that seems it surely must have been some other color before it was brown, a few treadmills who don’t seem to be capable of reaching a speed beyond a brisk walk, and in the corner, one of those machines, in the 1950’s advertised primarily to women, that is composed of a belt which you sling around your hips, whose shaking action is meant to, I think, jiggle the cellulite off of your upper thighs. When I tried to actually run on the treadmill, it made a scary noise and a group of women came up and said that I was going too fast.

I went down to the boys floor, I turned up the speed, everyone stared and then told me I was running too fast. That I run faster than almost all of the boys in my gym does not say much for the aerobic fitness of my fellow gym-mates. In my aerobics class, taught in Arabic, we are waging a jihad against love handles. It’s so fun to understand Arabic. “mashallah, I want to get down on all fours and raise your leg like you are a dog peeing on a fire hydrant.” On the first floor, the boy members of my gym are trying to see which one of them I will date. In front of my treadmill, they do situps and lift dumbbells. It's like a 1980's Olivia Newton John music video. I laugh and turn up the speed.

To Sekina, the gym has been a crisis – “You are like a stick, my dear Ria, and barely eat anything as it is!” After the first day, she cooked me a whole chicken for lunch, stuffed with pomegranate. She cuts roses from her rooftop rose garden and puts them next to my bed. I was out to dinner the other night with a boy, telling him about what Sekina had done that day. “Ria, how can anyone date you? None of us will ever be able to compete with Sekina.”

I want to say something about television in the Middle East. Most television shows and movies all over the Middle East are Egyptian. This explains why the Egyptian dialect is the most widely understood in the Arab world. Egypt has a history of filmmaking that is more than 100 years old- I love old Egyptian films. Over here, Star Academy is probably more watched than American Idol at home because its a competition not only between individuals, but also between countries. Recently, the Lebanese Minister of Telecommunications halved the cost of the call people have to make to vote for the Lebanese contestant on Star Academy. The Lebanese are way into 18th century Mexican dramas dubbed into Arabic. I haven't figured out why yet.

The commericals are hilarious. Skin bleaching cream is big all over the place. There is one commercial where a mother, in a private moment with her daughter, tells her that she needs some "Fair and Lovely." Upon using this product, after mere days, she has not only somehow, despite having seemed fairly unemployed at an early moment in the commericial, suddenly and randomly attained a lucrative career in television advertising but is also, without any suggestion of a boyfriend existing earlier in the commerical, is miraculously and suddenly engagaed. This unreal standard of beauty does not apply only to women. In another commerical, a boy approaches the door of a girl he is meant to go on a date with. When she answers the door she looks out dejectedly at him and asks accusingly "No Layl?" Layl (night) is a swank hair gel for boys. Said boy is sent away, goes back to his house, loads up on the Layl, and returns to the house of his very pleased girlfriend who then invites him into the house, and I am just guessing, kisses him. Several other commercials show a Gulfi couple in a car or on the street, and a fight ending in the girl ripping off her higab to reveal lustrous, voluminous hair, usually courtesy of Herbal Essences or something like it.

My best friend Meredith (I have two best friends – Meredith and Nicole – we are all in the same pledge class of the same sorority at Ohio State.) had been sending me a photo of her every month since she became pregnant- and to see her, blooming like a rose at month 9, what a babe she is, my Mere and I'm so proud of her. Anyway, Mere-dog gave birth on April 20th to a 7 pound, 6 ounce baby, Ella Sarone Douglas, a little girl, such a bundle of yummy, who I am very excited to meet when I go up to Columbus to visit for my friend Caryn Altshulers (congrats Caryn!) wedding, 3 days after I return to America.

Syria, per several reports, had opened up. For Americans, it would only take 4 hours of waiting. With a fair amount of jubilance, I sat in the Charles Helou bus station and waited to depart for a taxi to depart for the border. In that barren tract of land between Syria and Lebanon at the border control, it was like seeing an old friend when I glanced at the rickety wooden bench where my friend Sophia and I had spent so many hours when I tried to go to Syria the last time . “It will take 6 hours for you to go through – you will get in when it is dark, it’s better to go back!," the green wool uniformed guards yelled. Then they brought me into the boss of the director who questioned me the last time, this new one’s office way in the back, with more shi-shi furniture arranged to reflect, I think, his advanced rank. He asked various questions, and I answered. Then he said, “I am from Syria, nothing of what you are saying makes sense, I think you are making it all up, what are your REAL intentions in Syria?”

This time, though, I was prepared. Sekina, after doing several elaborate prayers for my safety, sent me off with a lunch worthy of the name Sekina. She had packed several lamb sandwiches, a bowl of roasted vegetables, a bag of several types of fragrant and beautiful fruit I had never tasted before, cucumbers and tomatoes and labneh (Lebanese full-fat and very delicious yogurt), homemade shortbread cookies stuffed with pistachio with a little container of cream on the side. I found a friendly patch of grass in front of the border patrol Dunkin’ Donuts, spread out a blanket, set out my picnic and opened up my book on Lebanese history. After a quite satisfying meal, I laid down for a nap. That was when the sprinklers decided to come on, soaking everything I own. I went back to sit inside, the loser American who had to wait for several hours when no one else did, and now I was soaking wet. Oh well.

I waited and waited and waited. People had pity on me. The directors office brought me endless cups of coffee in little china cups. I found a great spot on the floor next to the heater, where I might dry off. People thought I was a prostitute and began to subtly inquire as to how much I would charge.

Long ago having counted every white marble tile on the floor, 11 little girls came giggling into the office, all dressed up for a wedding in Aleppo. They came over and began to talk to me and ask me what I was doing. I told them I had been in the office for 7 hours, that I was very bored, that I hoped to go to Syria. A tiny girl said she was sorry and asked if they could sing me a song. What songs did they know? Nancy Agram, of course! They got into a huddle to plan their performance and then did an elaborate dance with a lot of hip gyration. That was the only thing, besides the interrogation I would incur, that was at all entertaining.

“YOU are not allowed into Syria,” a group of guards yelled, waking me up suddenly from sleep, perched as I was, homeless-like, on the bench, clutching my Arabic vocab lists and probably drooling. I demanded to see the director. I was fully interrogated, and he went through my books and my phone book, looking for something, I had no idea what. It seemed rather futile, as he did not speak English, the language in which all of my books were written. He said there was a specific reason that I was not allowed in. He would not tell me what it was. A nice diplomat from Canada came in and asked if I were okay. The Syrian director said he would send an official car to TAKE me back to Beirut. I declined, but went back anyway. Argh! Syria! You elusive muse!

The Vagina Monologues made their Middle East debut in Beirut a few weeks ago. Sekina has definite opinions about this. They are not favorable toward public discourse on female (or male) anatomy. Sekina also feels that it is definitely a good idea that girls are medically checked to make sure that they are virgins before they are married. Isn’t THAT the truth. Sekina might do well to get a job on President Bush’s Families First initiative or something.

Sekina is very curious about American culture. She asked if there were any Muslims who were not immigrants from other countries in the United States. I explained to her the history of Malcolm X, and how when he converted to Islam, he started a movement that had great influence among minority prison populations in the U.S. There was a second generation of these converts, so really, there are many Muslims who were Muslims from birth. Of course there were others, but this was maybe the most well-known group. This connection between prisoners and Islam is not what Sekina wanted to hear.

Ya’ll are funny. I love to get sincere warnings of caution, that I please, please stay safe, watch myself, from my friends who chain smoke and eat fried food for lunch, because it is I who worries about every one of you who I think smokes or doesn’t eat enough green vegetables, doesn't exercise or works too many hours with not enough sex or vacation or both or whatever.

I am doing much of the research for my thesis in Arabic. This is a slow and very painful process. My friend Alaa took me down to the Hizbollah HQ to see if I could get into their archives. I was asked to explain my research, and I did. “But what is your REAL purpose?” I’m sick of this question. Truly, I’m sick of this question. The Hizb guy told us not to make any quick movements because cameras would be watching for anything strange on the street. As if it wasn’t going to be obvious that I was the only American there. The archives were lovely. Studying in libraries where the no talking rule is actually enforced and where a guy continually walks by making me new cups of Turkish coffee in little china teacups is much better than the regular garden variety of study I’ve become so used to in the United States. Okay, so I was the only patron there that morning who wasn’t a sheikh. They told me I could come back whenever I wanted, god bless em'.

I love Sekina. It’t not just because she takes care of me more intently than anyone has in my life. She’s just sooooooooooo nice. When her three sons left Lebanon for other countries, she said she cried for 3 months in her room and now she is on Prozac. She cooks for several orphans who live on our street and boy are they, like me and the rest of our neighborhood, lucky to have her. What will happen when I go home and don’t have Sekina? It’s just too awful to think about just yet.

Today, a quarter million people, backed by Hizbollah and Michel Aoun, marched in Beirut to call for the resignation of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. I walked through as the mob hit my house, all the way down to Riad el Solh, and I'm just waiting to see what else Beirut has in store for me before I leave!

The next Dispatch is the Last Dispatch- at least for a while!
I hope you all are well!

Ria

Beirut Dispatch 3.27.06 - I Move Again, Trip to the Israeli Border, The Sectarian Cornucopia of Lebanon

2006-05-17T00:02:00.003+03:00

(At left, My Cute Nephew Charlie. Right, at the heavily fortified border between Lebanon and Israel, a sign in English, Hebrew and Arabic- www.pbs.org; far right, the border immediately after Israeli withdrawal, before it was heavily fortified. There are a lot more guns now.)

I feel guilty, as though this might be a horrid, short-sighted mistake, but I put the Dispatch on a blog. You should know that I loathe blogs, and rather despise email. But re: the blog, maybe it's just easier this way. If more than 2 or 3 of you think it's ridiculous, I'll go back to the email - just let me know.

Oh, it wasn’t going to last long anyway, I moved out of my Nebaa house. The first question when I announced that I was departing? "What religion are the people where you are moving to?" "Homma kan Muslimeen" They were Muslims. "Ria, we will go to church on Sunday and pray for your soul." They asked if they could keep all of my clothing. I’ve lived out of the same two suitcases since I left America. You should see the state of my clothes – not one thing is the same color as it was when I left the mainland, some shirts have nearly as much shirt as they do holes, and it’s hard to believe that even a homeless person would want the great majority of it.

If another shi-shi Lebanese boy tries to pick me up by telling me oh so subtly how much his armored Mercedes cost, I might resist the urge to vomit on myself. And if I meet another woman who seems to have no inclination to have any conversation with me on any subject deeper than the discussion of the new shopping mall being built down the street, I might cry. But this is only a segment of the population, I thank myself continually. Many Lebanese repeatedly tell me that Beirut is a thoroughly 1st, or at least 2nd world city. But given the war, the destruction of so much of the country, on a drive anywhere outside of Hamra or a few other places, it starts to look a whole lot like the less developed parts of Egypt. In Lebanon, long considered to have one of the highest literacy rates in the Middle East, the adults in my Nebaa family were essentially illiterate. The children, going to a French school, could all read French, but had no idea of the meaning of anything they were reading. I translated it into Arabic whenever I helped them with their homework. You know it is indeed a sad state of affairs when I am entrusted to translate French into Arabic.

I have taken hundreds of photographs since I left America. Mirella and Coco- my Nebaa sisters, looked at a book of pictures from Cairo. They looked at one picture of an Egyptian baby and exclaimed "How cute, look how pretty her face is!" and then, toward another, I think objectively equally if not more cute Sudanese baby "That baby is disgusting. It’s black. It looks like the srilankeeen (Sri Lankans, who constitute much of the domestic labor force in Lebanon)". The family thinks it was insane that I would go to India on vacation. Their impression was that the whole country was made up of domestic workers, and why, they asked me repeatedly, would I EVER take pictures of people who were too poor to have shoes, they wondered. You cannot imagine the response when I told them that not only did I have friends who were from Sri Lanka, but that in the United States, many Americans would not be able to tell the difference between a Sri Lankan and a Lebanese. Their jaws dropped. But this racism isn’t any different from when my American friends seem scared that I have so many Arab friends, as if that, in itself, is a threatening act. These attitudes are not Arab attitudes. They are not attributable to any specific place in the world, to any “kind of people." It’s just ignorance – and it exists in abundance in every country on earth.

A week later on a hiking trip in the mountains of the north, a boy described how a friend of his had recently been stabbed in Nebaa - he had called his mother crying. How could YOU live there, Ria? Everyone is nice to me, I told them. "The man on the corner wont even let me pay for oranges!" Everyone laughed. "They think you are a relief worker, Ria. That's the only reason a Westerner would live in Nebaa."

I had been invited to dinner at the home of my Lebanese friend Rym, whose family, though they are able, at least try not to speak English with me. Almost everyone seems amused by the stories I tell in my deplorable Arabic of my living situation - my manic, delusional father who runs, without knocking, into my room screaming regularly, the 14 year old Mark who hides under my bed waiting for me to disrobe. All of the dinner guests had a good laugh when the Ethiopian maid told me how sorry she felt for me - though she had fled the war in her own country, it was clear that I now lived in more "challenging" conditions than she.

My friend Rym, kindly and selflessly, demanded that I live with her. After initially refusing, I came to my senses and moved my things in and SHOWERED, and after you haven’t showered in a while, its like pure heaven, to marvel at the soap and the hot water and toilet paper. In the kitchen its almost too much to fathom, the idea that there is milk and Nutella and peanut butter sandwiches and all of the other things that I have no doubt must also exist in heaven right next to the angels and all the rest of that stuff. And now, I was in such a clean and quiet house, watched the news in Arabic with Rym, she translating the words I don’t know, I trying out vocabulary in various gramatically incorrect contexts which she then corrected, her brother teaching me Arabic army slang. We sat on the couch and watched Walid Jumblatt give a press conference, saying Shebaa Farms, a part of Lebanon in the south of the country, wasn’t controlled by Lebanon. A few days later he said that even the security at the Beirut airport was controlled by the Syrians. That this place is even considered a country at all often seems, well, a stretch.

Under UN Resolution 1559, the militias in Lebanon have been "disarmed" but you could have fooled me and probably everybody else. Many Lebanese friends here have boxes of Kalishnakovs stored in closets with their winter clothes. When going to someone's house, I always assume there are guns somewhere.

Rym's father the other day described Lebanon not as a country, but more as a sort of jinena alhayawan – animal farm. He was an intelligence official during the war, (and an aide to former- assasinated- Lebanese PM Rafic Hariri) and was kidnapped from the very apartment where I am now living in by black-hooded militiamen during the war. This sounds incredible, but perhaps a higher percentage of older Lebanese were kidnapped during the course of the war than the percentage of Lebanese who have had plastic surgery. "Rym, are you really, completely sure about this girl?" her father asked. I met him, a person lovely beyond description, speaking perfectly clearly and gesticulating generously to aid my comprehension. I again embarassed myself with my Arabic. I told him I was from DC. He just laughed when I took notes when we talked - in order that I could look up the Arabic words I didn’t recognize from the conversation, and we laughed even harder when a large printed document of mine sat on the dining room table, its title written in Hebrew. When he came back the next week, we sat around in our pajamas talking in Arabic about the war. A report about the state of the Israeli lobby in the US sat on the table. "Ask the jususa (spy) what she wants from the grocery store," he asked Rym.

Rym's mother, who does not live with us, took us to the military sporting club one morning after we went running along the ocean. The old army officers sat around in their track suits, their silver hair gleaming, drinking orange juice with the sun sprinkling gold off of the sea, and if anyone slipped into English, as seems inevitable in Beirut, Rym's mother boomed "NEVER speak English to Ria. She's here to learn Arabic." Bless that woman.

I feel more and more as if I really live in Lebanon. In one weekend, I can spend the day in the mountains with my friend Sophia at the TamerLand with our Maronite friends showing us Lebanese Forces training videos. Georges, the younger brother, said he was once put in jail for 25 days after he stood in lineup in the Lebanese Army and yelled out how much he loved Ariel Sharon. He explained how he would GIVE Ariel Sharon his heart if he needed it. Georges and Jean routinely kiss the picture of their great uncle, the Maronite patriarch of Lebanon, not to mention a picture of Geagea, which is never far from either of their hands "Look at how beautiful Geagea is, Ria, you cannot tell me this is not a beautiful man," Jean says in Arabic. In the afternoon I could head down to Borj al-Bourejni to have lunch at Ahmed's house, where Yassir Arafat had meetings during the war, sit on the roof where Ahmed slept as a boy, in a camp that was cluster bombed into oblivion. In Ahmad's house, Ariel Sharon is referred to as "al-jirah," the butcher. When Ahmed tells me stories of how they fled the house days before the shelling began, I think of what I was doing in the mid-1980's- primarily investing my time in the collection of Cabbage Patch Kids and planning my next pool party. Then back home to Rym, whose family are soldiers, partly Syrian, and almost all Sunni Muslims. My Lebanese colloquial teachers are Shiaa. My Fusha teacher was a Druze who stayed in Beirut through the war, going to school every day despite the shelling. Its like my friends make up the different factions of the Lebanese cornucopia - and if my LF friends went into the camp, there would be a fight and they might be hurt, but I sit with them and play cards, and at Ahmed's house I sit on his parents bed and talk to his parents while they watch Syrian soap operas and at Ryms we watch the Oscars and make fun of everyone in Arabic. "That woman's face looks like plastic that is going to slide down off onto her dress," I said. In my Argentinian Tango lessons, my dance partner is a staunch Syrian nationalist from the SSNP. In Lebanon, the boring conversations are there, but they are few.

The other day, I saw a commerical about Naomi Judd's discussion of her diagnosis of "food addiction." Food addiction? what in the world does that mean, is it a real disease now? A friend asked me about the obesity epidemic in America. What was going on, they wondered. When some of the good people of my dear homeland become too fat, instead of taking control and eating normal amounts of food, some of us get an invasive surgery which reduces the size of our stomachs to that of an egg. I feel slight relief, but also sadness that French people also now have their own obesity epidemic happening. I once saw a gaggle of seriously obese Japanese children in an Istanbul McDonalds one time, eating two Happy Meals each, with sundaes. This is not a problem that is isolated to our country. As with other things, we are just ahead of the curve – perhaps in 25 years other countries will have their own public health crises, similar to our current one and we wont have to feel so bad.

Ahmed tried to quit smoking and came down with a serious lung infection. He was sent to the hospital for 3 days. He lost a lot of weight and was hooked up to an IV. I went to his house and had to be pulled by guards through a crowd of more than 100 people to get to his front door. It was wierd to see him skinny. I learned a handy Arabic proverb. "A man without a belly is like a house without furniture." We just laugh. His sister Sara said that dozens and dozens of people came to see him the first day, and by the second his mother yanked the phone out of the wall because it wouldn’t stop ringing. "What is it about him?" Sara said. "If I were sick, maybe my best friends would come over," but Ahmed sneezes, doesn’t come out of the house for half a day, and its like every person in the whole camp just misses his face.

A couple of weeks later I went to Hassan Nasrallah's, (Hizbollah's secretary general) neighborhood with my Iranian friend Mohammed. This area, Dahye, was depicted in the fanciful thriller “Syriana”- Dahye is the place where George Clooney is blindfolded and driven through streets lined with mask wearing, machine-gun toting Hizbollah fighters. These days, Dahye is a regular part of town where CD’s are really cheap and most of the women are higabbed. We went to the Hizbollah headquarters to ask about the state of the south, which they, in part, control. They laughed - I would have absolutely no problem going to the Israeli border. Oh those jokers, they were wrong.

My Egyptian friend Summer Said came in from London for a vacation. Summer, who I am friends with from Cairo, is my kind of girl – just for fun on her vacation, we decided to head to the border just to see what was going on there. We drove down the coast to Sida (Sidon) to the government office to attain permission to head down south. Summer, an Egyptian, could go straight away. I was an American, they laughed. No chance, that week at least. We were shown the way out of the compound.

Like any self-respecting Lebanese with any wasta (connections) would do, I made some phone calls to Red Cross friends near the border and a soldier came down to the street and said they had made a mistake, of course I could go.We went to the UN buffer zone along the border, site of frequent, though low-grade crossfire. Electrical fences, layers of razorwire and several Israeli positions, covered in camoflouge, the Israeli flag blowing in the breeze. In Israel, a crop of the houses made a ring all the way around a hill in front of us and above all of them, a gigantic military fortification on the top of the hill. I could hear the clank clank clank of gun turrets being swung around. I could just make out a man taking groceries out of his car up to his house. On the Lebanese side Hizbollah fighters had positions in abandoned buildings. I walked past and heard some men laughing down through a window, eating what must have been salad and bread and cheese and fuul. The two boys we were with were from the Red Cross, so they were officially neutral and stood to the side. Summer, like many an Egyptian, threw rocks and yelled not very nice words toward the Israeli positions. I served as protection and yelled "I’m an American citizen, please don't shoot us!" A young Lebanese couple strolled along the perimeter of the fence, she holding a handful of pink and purple wildflowers her boyfriend had just picked for her. At Bab al Fatima, there are warning sides on the Israeli side, but not the Lebanese one, that the border is closed. A friend from school, an American, innocently walked up the road a couple of months ago and was shot at.

We drove deeper into the incredible mountains to Khiam, a notorious prison managed by the South Lebanese Army (the proxy army of the IDF), which was just opened up in 2000. When Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon, 144 villagers stormed the prison, release the detainees, and many SLA (South Lebanese Army) - fled to Israel. High on a plateau surrounded by steep sloping hills and mountaintop Hizbollah positions, I had my picture taken with the turbaned Punjabi UN troops who were guarding the buffer zone, with Shebaa Farms just behind us.

Abu Ali was our guide. He was a hulking man with a kind eye and broad shoulders. He looked about 65 years old, born in Khiam, and had the distinct look of a man who had spent several years in a torture chamber. Some Lebanese men, he said, came to him one day and asked him to get a coffee. They were collaborators, took him to the prison, where he stayed for 4 years. He said he still has no idea why he was sent there - a lot of the Lebanese don’t- many people had ties to militant factions, but many other people were just rounded up.

Abu Ali had scars covering much of his body, a mangled eye, a pronounced limp, but he spoke perfect Arabic to me, and his sense of humor was intact. He put one of our friends in a small metal box, where Abu Ali had been put many times before under less enjoyable circumstances in the past. He banged and banged on the metal, kicked it repeatedly and then yelled "Be back next week" in English, chuckling. The same tourguide had showed my friend John the prison and had given him electrical charges on his fingers. Abu Ali’s knees were badly injured. He described, how soldiers would tie peoples hands together and drag them around on their knees until there was no skin left. Then they would pour salt on them. One mural at the prison read: "Israel will be annihilated." The second mural showed a dove flying through a jail cell window, with a message that read, "And with God's help, victory will be ours." An old Israeli Jeep in the courtyard was draped with Hezbollah flags.

I was glad to be able to understand him in Arabic – and I’ve reached a point a while ago where I don’t make a distinction between someone speaking English or Arabic to me – when someone is talking to me, I am just listening and trying to understand what they have to say. The main thing that is great about understanding (some) Arabic, is that for so many Arabs I've talked to, I've literally been the only American they've ever been able to actually have a conversation with.

In Beirut, its getting warm, I walk along the beach at night, I eat the green almonds that just came into season and have lunch at a place called Aunty Salwa's a lot, where she makes us roasted eggplant and bowls of pumpkin soup and fresh squeezed lemonade with mint leaves in it.

I cannot express, though, the excitement that fills my heart when I consider how it will feel to return to America for the summer, after not having set foot on her shores for something like, well actually exactly 491 days. Of course to experience the normal things of home, and most of all to see my friends and my sissy's and their spouses and my niece Callie and my nephew Charlie who Iv'e yet to actually hold! But I also quite look forward to being in Cambridge again- the middle-aged women and their adopted Chinese girl babies, their 3-legged Dalmatians, all the other things that I wonder if they exist like they do in Cambridge anywhere else on the planet.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

p.s. To anonymous poster on this entry - please refrain from sending comments which include profanity. My sisters read this.

Mumbai Dispatch 2.22.06 - Spontaneous Voyage Across the South of India

2006-05-16T23:53:00.000+03:00

(Right, the stunning riot of color in India - imagesoftheworld.org)

Spontaneous travel - a balm for the soul, even a reason for living, I think. We landed in Mumbai before sunrise- and, ever eager for new places, I ran in front of John and Ben to the airport parking lot - full of dust and pollution and the smell of incense and entirely magical to me. "You will be wide-eyed until you die," Zogby said, I think. I can only hope. For 30 minutes, we endured by far the scariest drive any of us had ever been on - to the train station- with I think more than 4 near-death experiences under our belt before the first light of day showed her face. We waited at the bus terminal, we saw the gypsies, they gave us red dots on our foreheads, we were officially then tourists in India. Hundreds of people had their sari’s pulled over their faces and were sleeping in well organized rows, along the side of the street.

A severe tactical mistake was made - and it is here that I will admit all responsibility for this, and I wonder if Redwine and Zogby will ever forgive me, but, perhaps our first 27 hours spent on a thousand-mile train ride to Madras wasn’t going to be the most relaxing mode of travel if we were only to have 9 days. We stayed in a second class sleeper cabin - much preferred to the first class- which was severely over-airconditioned and barred any non-ticket holders from passing through. In the second class, there were 3 levels of bunk beds and we 3 were on the top level - as below us a veritable parade of humanity layed itself out before us- convincing transvestities with perfect maquillage, every sort of human deformity, miniscule babies with their eyes ringed with kohl, a red-sari'd woman hawking beads and belts and a taxidermied mongoose which she had propped over her neck. India is crowded- no matter what track of land we were going through, past the nuclear reactors and farms and factories, every place seemed just chock-full of humans and I was not surprised that the country’s population surpasses a billion people.

For the first 20 hours, too scared to eat - we lived off of a couple of packages of crackers, bottled water, a few bananas, and two rolls of Mentos. Before sunrise the next day, though, we broke down as a man vending tea from a metal container on his head walked by- and we drank luxuriantly of the spicy, fragrant masala chai he proferred, and after that, we bought everything that came our way - tangy samosas, a spicy white paste over sweet breakfast rice, fruit that tasted of canteloupe and caramel. As the sun came up, a woman selling fresh flowers walked through, and mothers bought bunches and pinned them into their girl children's hair - blossoms the color of salmon and honeysuckle.

The colors everywhere were unbelievable - I think I must have seen every hue that ever existed in the longhis and saris and shalwar kameez of the women and men in India. We memorized a few phrases of Hindi and learned to count to 10 from our phrase book and were quite sad to find, when we alighted at Madras (Chennai) that hardly anyone there spoke Hindi -in India, the language changes every few hundred miles and often even less. 16 languages, someone told me, are recognized by the Indian Constitution, and over our 9 days there, we would hear half a dozen of them being spoken. Between the 3 of us, we were at least marginally conversant in English, Arabic, French, Spanish, Persian, Turkish, a bit of Urdu and a few other languages, but often none of these helped, and despite what many people say, everyone in India does NOT speak English.

Madras, somehow, seemed even dirtier than Mumbai, but was offset by the by the crisp and brightly colored Madras plaid skirts called longhi's - that all the fishermen wore. I found a guy who took me on his motorcycle and showed me where the locals bought theirs, and they finally sold me a couple - after repeating many, many times, that these longhis were for men, not women. When it gets hot, they fold it in half and tuck in the front wear a little miniskirt-type thing. I put a lilac-colored one on and have had a hard time not wearing it since I’ve been back in Beirut.

We ate a scary-looking lunch, I had a bundle of milky white blooms pinned into my hair, and we headed down on a local bus to Mumalapurram, a beach town a couple hours south that had been hit by the tsunami last year. We got a hotel near the beach, with a SHOWER - the first one I’ve taken in a while, and we spent a couple of days wandering around the touristy enclave, swimming in the Bay of Bengal, the town with lovely restaurants serving spicy fish and avocadoes and frosty beers, and the warm, inviting beach, totally eroded from the tsunami - the boats that were ruined had almost all been replaced by various philanthrophic organizations. We visited the awesome temples, walked lazily among the high rocks that overlooked the farms just west of us. I, wearing no shoes, raced a horse along the lovely beaches and hindu temples and learned a valuable lesson - never ride a horse fast while wearing a longhi.

We had had enough of the tripped-out hippies on sabattical from reality (tee hee, Elworthy, I borrowed that phrase from you, and I acknowledge it here happily) and trained it, through Chennai, to the middle of southern India. On this train ride, a fortune teller read my palm for free- a VERY good future for you, she said - and her sister slid glass bangles of many colors onto my arm, and actually tried to give me some of her gold bracelets. They put their small girls to sleep on my lap and fed me fruit and fiery creamy pastries.

Then, Bangalore- weathly, cyberific, Westernized, but still somehow still worth seeing - and the site of my favorite meal in India - incredibly spicy chicken with lime and coconut, served on banana leaves and eaten with our hands. We had a laasi with every meal - and boy are laasis amazing when they are the real deal, and fresh lime juice with soda, and Indian beer - yum yum yum. We went further south that night, to Mysore - stayed in a highly-sketchy hotel, as in perhaps the sheets had never, ever been washed, and we definitely shared our bed that night with the roaches. I had the only mosquito net so we all slept sweaty and squished together, and I love my mosquito net more than some people that I know - I never get bit while Im asleep. In Mysore, we walked around the quaint little town and realized we had only a few days left, and rather then spend our last few days on an even longer train than the first, we bought plane tickets and rented a car and headed for the remote tropical rainforests of Kerala in southwestern India.

We drove deeper south, bought yards of beautiful silk for a pittance from a roadside stand and then were about 2 miles from the border of the rainforest as the sun began to set when out of the window we saw a Bollywood film being shot in the field beside us. I asked our driver to stop, ran out to take a few pictures when the director from high atop his blue crane yelled something undecipherable to maybe his producer, I don’t really know. A tall man with a long moustache walked over to me "Step into the frame" - Now I don’t know anything about makin' movies, so I just walked toward the who I presumed to be the main actress, where I received, in translation, directions, to walk, but not that way, smile, but not too much, and tilt my head just so. We were pressed for time, so I gave my apologies and left, ON TO THE RAINFOREST! not until later realizing that I had not caught the name of the film, and also realizing that I could spend the rest of my life trying to go through all of the newly-released Bollywood films trying to figure out which one I might be in- I take comfort in the thought that my part was probably cut anyway.

We drove into the blackness, saw the forms of many large animals in the shadows, and then when John stopped to take a picture of an elephant just next to the shoulder, the elephant got spooked and charged after a car. From that point on, Redwine and Zogby, I think were also into the idea of a tiger, as much as I talked it up to them. Anyway, we came to our hotel "The BEST hotel in Kalpeta!" our driver said, not meaning much since it was a rather small town in the middle of the jungle. We ate a lovely dinner and went straight to bed. At 5am the next morning we awoke - entirely at my demanding - my only desire at this point- to see the tiger, the only big scary animal, besides a rhino and a panther, I haven't seen in the wild. We drove and drove through the rainforest, through the huge painted murals of Marx and Che and Lenin in the communist canopy of the forest, many miles too far, got lost, lost again, not being able to communicate at all with our driver, save for hand motions, arriving at the entrance to the most populated game reserve at 10am- too late to see anything great.

I insisted on walking, though - safari's aren’t worth it in a car unless you can’t walk, I don’t think- though later, I would wonder how our gunless guides' machete would be able to save us from much. Monkeys of many types swung high through the trees, jumped at our feet as we headed deeper into the brush- where we saw fresh tiger paw prints, elephant, leopard even, and plenty of running deer, peacocks, freakishly blue birds - but for hours, no tiger - and we wouldn’t see one either, to my dismay - but as the hours went by, having run out of water and the sun rather boiling, our guide made an abrupt turn when in front of us, just down in a watering hole beyond a patch of trees, stood slurping, a pair of adult elephants and but a wee wee baby. We sat for almost an hour, creeping closer carefully, tip-toeingly, the guide removing his shoes so as not to make any noise. "They can see us and they can smell us," he said when they all turned toward us - waiting and waiting for something, a charge or something like it - but the elephants just played - squirted water over each others' backs, looked like they were kissing, general elephanty things- to see an elephant in the wild when you are on foot in front of it, nothing like it, really, just amazing.

Our time in Kerala was coming to an end, we had a great dinner on a deck in the mountains, spicy spicy again, with mountains of perfect chicken and coconut and limes. We walked through the miles of palm trees and banana plantations and the next morning, headed to the coast of Kalicut where the airport sat waiting. The drive was gorgeous- at first, just stunning rainforest with birds and beauty everywhere, we turned and all of a sudden realized we were not far from the top, in the clouds of what Redwine, a mountainclimber, said was maybe a 6,000ft mountain, incredibly steep, absolutely covered in hundreds of tropical trees, 30 foot tall palm trees as big around as your leg, and then lower, reached through hairpin turns over an hour later, spice plantations, and terraced orchards and the smell of everything beautiful. What a drive it was! And then after a quick 3 hours spent in a hotel in Mumbai, again we were off, to spend half a day in Kuwait, courtesy of our layover.

There is nothing going on in Kuwait. Let me repeat that. There is nothing going on in Kuwait. It’s the cleanest city, perhaps, I've ever seen, and one of the most expensive, certainly, but when our Turkish stewardess Yurdegul told us there was only one place to see in Kuwait City, the Kuwait Towers, she wasn't kidding. All of the buildings were new, and looked almost the same, and nary a soul seemed to be on the street. Almost every person we met, in fact, was from somewhere else and our taxi driver was actually from Madras, which was fun, because Zogby picked up a few useful phrases of Tamil while we were in India. It was probably an hour or so's drive from the Iraqi border.

Let me describe this to you in case you don’t happen to make it to Kuwait. Kuwait Towers are three space needle-looking things on the beachhead of the Persian Gulf at the end of the city. They have 3 huge globes that look like they have been impaled over the needles, and these globes have been covered, per the brochure given to us, by 55,000 I forget but perhaps Chinese steel disks which look like enamel dinner plates, in various colors. One of the tanks holds water storage for over a million gallons for the city. We went to the highest globe, and there was a Lazy Susan and a great view and some mediocre popcorn. I had insisted that in our 5 hours in Kuwait we find authentic Kuwaiti food, but it soon became obvious that this was not going to happen. The best part of the globe were the pictures from when Iraq invaded Kuwait- they destroyed much of several of the globes but this has all been rebuilt. The Kuwaitis have more money than God. The captions under the pictures were fantastic. "This shows when the Iraqi Barbarians attempted to destroy the powerful symbol of Kuwait." There was only one other person in the whole globe besides the staff. Kuwait can be a lonely place, I think, but at least we could speak Arabic again.

Anyway, to come back to Beirut and have it seem to be so civilized was interesting. I went back home to Nebaa, where Izdihar immediately did my laundry and made me a narghile, and I've drempt about Kerala ever since. I didn't see the Taj Mahal, I'll leave that for later – I like to leave something to go back to- so that's a trip to make when I’m almost dead. But go to India! None of us got sick and I promise it will stay in your brain forever.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Beirut Dispatch 2.10.06 - I Move to Nebaa, It's an Adjustment, but I Love Lebanese Food

2006-05-16T23:44:00.000+03:00

(Above - Lebanon is one of the few places in the world where you can ski and swim on the same day. Above - Faraya - where Ive spent several weekends. Below, the gorgeous beaches of Southern Lebanon, where Ive also spent a lot of time. Right, Mar Charbel, the Maronite Saint who my new Lebanese Family asks me to draw about every other hour. photo- www.marcharbel.com)

In this, my fourth month of living in Beirut, I can look back upon the halcyon days of my previous living situations with nothing but longing and incredible fondness. Those houses and apartments of years past where there were such amenities as sheets on the bed, toilet paper, showers, hot water, forks and knives, and oh the phenomenon of glorious and uninterrupted electricity. I’ve moved in with a Maronite family in a desperate effort to not speak any more English.

When I was 21, I lived in a village in sub-Saharan Africa in a hut with a currogated metal roof, no real windows and no actual running water, a village that had been trampled flat by elephants and hippos on more than one occasion. My new home is significantly more of a cultural adjustment.

It is not so much that it’s difficult to take a bath from a bucket each morning, but it is not greatly fun to take a bucket bath with only cold water in the middle of winter near the mountains. This exercise is character-building, I keep saying to myself as I shiver my way through my daily ablutions, gosh darn its character building. And when in my life resources have become seriously curtailed, I think - did Jesus or Mohammed always have a proper source of light by which to read at night? Who am I kidding – Mohammed, I know, was illiterate. But did Amelia Earhart always have access to a real shower? I tend to think not.

I live in a town just outside of Beirut called Nebaa- a place which one Lebanese friend recently described to me as having the aroma of basterma - an Armenian sausage whose mention here is often more a criticism than a compliment. “Don’t worry,” Izdihar (prosperity), my ami lubnani (Lebanese mother) told me when I moved in here – they killed all the Palestinians during the war – its very safe.” Elias, the father, is on psychotropic drugs, and speaks unintelligible Arabic to himself and everyone else, and Izdihar the mother works part-time as a baby-sitter. In order to live with the family, I’m paying them more than the rent of their entire apartment. The three children are named Mark, 13, Mirella, 10, and Coco, 7. In America, Mark might be one of those children whose parents send to those terrible military camps we are always hearing about on Frontline where at least one kid kicks it every summer of either an athsma attack or a hitherto undiagnosed heart defect. As her name might suggest, Coco is ridiculously cute.

I live in the dining room on what can only be described as a cot. There is a giant shrine to Mary just outside our front stairs, a bleeding Jesus hologram clock over the place where I sleep, and another shrine on the back balcony, from which the children regularly annoint me with oil in the shape of a cross on my forehead before I set out for the day. I feel too awful to tell them I'd most accurately identify as religiously confused and not particularly looking for an answer.

Privacy is certainly a thing of the past. The chitlins have gone through every single item I own, and have read the various parts of my diary which are written in Arabic. They also sleep in my bed if I’m not there and walk into my room without knocking. Mark seems to be on a mission to see me naked. When I’m taking a bath, he hides under my bed and waits for me to return to my room and disrobe. The kids asked if I knew how to draw. Kind of. For hours, I was made to draw and redraw the Virgin Mary and various Coptic Saints, especially one called "Mar Charbil."

There is no toilet paper in my house. There is no toilet paper in much of the Middle East. There is an emphasis on pure, running water in the Arab world, which actually makes much more sense if you know how to do it, but I still rely on good old tp, even though highly secretly. Officially, we have electricity, but it runs, optimistically about 40% of the time. Oh, how I love electricity. I can only dream of all the electricity that awaits me when I return to the fair shores of my homeland. I'll never turn off the lights.

Despite the fact that I am 28, Izdihar hand feeds me. And by feeds me- I mean that she peels my bananas, cuts my meat, spoons soup into my mouth. No matter how I try to cut an apple, no matter which friend of Izdihar's is over, they always say that I’m doing it wrong. Who brought you up? They ask. Idzihar makes me a narghile (Arab water pipe) whenever I’ve had a long day. When I go to wash my hands before dinner, she puts the soap on them and rubs them together FOR me. She also washes my clothes. They smell like heaven.

My friend John, a boy from Iowa who speaks quite decent Arabic, found me the house. He also lives with a Lebanese family, a gaggle of teenage boys and their mother, Margot. Margot is sort of the blonde Joan Collins of his neighborhood. She has this incredibly hairsprayed hair, wears high-heeled black boots and lots of feather trim on her clothes, and is always ready with boy advice for me. This other morning, as she came for a visit, she made me stand up and turn in a circle in front of her. "I know why you are not married," she said. "You are a pretty girl, but you don’t pay attention to your make-up. You need more lipstick and maybe some more eyeshadow. That would fix things." My thoughts exactly. John and I have funny conversations - we refer to the "bed" and the "shower" when neither of us has access to this anymore, and if we wanted to be correct we would say "cot/or for John, couch" and "bucket" instead of "shower."

The other morning when I awoke, Izdihar's sisters' approximately 12 children were waiting in the hallway. Their mother, quite pretty and quick to laugh, I’ve yet to see anyone like her, carried a large wooden spoon in her back pocket to keep everyone in line. The baby's name is Vanessa - she is 10 months old and very cute. They feed her Coke in her bottle. I just cringe. I distributed dental floss and gave the whole family a talk about dental hygeine - their mouths look like train wrecks and they just think I’m strange. Izdihar's entire family is keen on me marrying one of their cousins, a low-ranking police officer who tends to hang out at our house and smoke narghile a lot. Sometimes his boss calls inquiring as to why he is not at his post, and my Lebanese dad Elias tells them that of course he's out at work when he's not. My cot, conveniently, is located directly below the telephone, so no matter what time the phone rings, no matter who is in the house, they run into my room without asking in order to answer it. What great fun that is.

I still hang out with my friend Ahmed a lot. Everyone in his camp and others call him by his nickname which translates, a few people said, to "father of all the beautiful things." Now, when I go to there, I’m invited into dozens of houses and people bake me cakes and I’m invited to watch the scouts be trained and the girls sing songs and salute me. Ahmed tells them that I speak better Arabic than him, and they chat me up for hours. The Palestinian girls, generally, also tend to think that I'm rather short on the eyeliner front.

Its sort of a hoot to read on yahoo "Kevin Sites - in the Hot Zone" because I’ve come to find out that I apparently live in the "Hot Zone," and one day the other week as I came back from a nice lunch on Ahmed's roof in the camp, that day the "Hot Zone" staff had been in the same camp and had written an article titled "No Man's Land," describing the place is hellish, which it is, but it also the place I like to go when Beirut gets to be too much.

The other week, over break, I visited Ahmed's family several times- everyone in Beirut had the flu and I sat with his mom and dad and sisters in his parents bed and we drank tea and watched Syrian soap operas. When it became late, Ahmed called a cousin over to walk me out of the camp.

(I cannot walk into the camp alone - so every time I go I wait in front of a giant almond roastery where the owner, standing in back of his huge vats of roasting almonds, watches after me, and I text message Ahmed that I’m there. Someone, and never Ahmed, shows up within seconds to take me to his office or his parents' house. Mostly its a relative, and one time this was a monstrosity of a man in full army fatigues and another time it was a tiny boy, his face smudged with dirt, who tugged my sleeve and whom I asked kindly to please go away because I thought he was asking me for money.)

Anyway, I wondered if Ahmed was just lazy for not coming down to get me, and just curious, actually rather naggingly, I asked "Why don’t YOU ever come down to the roastery to get me, and why don’t YOU ever walk me out?" Ya, Ria, habibti, it takes too much time, you don’t understand, yada yada. Ahmed walked me out into the alley and within seconds families leaned over their balconies yelling "We love you Abu Zoghdy!" Sometimes when he walks through, old women run up to him clutching photographs of small children who need surgeries, one time a small baby who needed a heart surgery - he said he would try to take care of it - and how is that possible? Of course its not but life keeps happening. By the time we walked a distance that usually takes approximately 7 minutes to where I would take a taxi home, we had taken more than an hour. He asked if it was okay to send someone down the next time I come to the camp and of course I apologized and assented and felt genuinely bad.

I have made an assumption, after several months here, that possibly every taxi driver falls into one of two categories: 1. Drivers who have lived or have a relative who lives in Detroit, Michigan, or else 2. Drivers who have applied repeatedly for a travel visa and have been repeatedly denied. I would frankly be surprised if there are not more Lebanese in America than there are here. I was talking with my waiter at a restaurant the other day - Lebanese, light hair, green eyes. "But how could they deny my application? I LOOK like an American!" I wondered what an American looked like. People also seem to think that bringing me to the American Embassy with them will somehow aid in their desire to see our fair country. I have turned down more than 100 of these requests.

I have to say another word about food here, just because I can’t really seem to get over it. In Lebanon, when I just need a quick bite in between classes, despite the fact that there is a McDonalds and a sort of Lebanese version of Au Bon Pain, I do not go to either of these places. Lebanon has real food, and it’s yummy, and cheap and fast. If I only have 10 minutes, I can grab a cup of lentil soup with yogurt, if I have 5 minutes I can eat a chicken schwarma with fresh mint and tomatoes and garlic and yogurt, if I have less than 5 minutes, I can walk just outside of the front gate at school and get a hard boiled egg with horseradish, a chunk of freshly hacked coconut, a bowl of fruit salad, a bag of fresh roasted chestnuts. If I’m down on the cornice near the ocean for a walk, 50 cents buys a roasted corn on the cob, rubbed with lemon and hot pepper. In much of the Middle East, its half the price to drink fresh squeezed juice- the Tropicana in the bottle is expensive and only the wealthy AUB kids drink it- why would anyone ever do that? I wonder- the citrus in the ME and north Africa is the best in the world.

One day a few weeks ago, unannounced, the orange juice turned red, blood oranges are in season and to have this juice every day is unbelievable. Almost every corner has a juice shop, and you can get anything under the sun juiced. One juice is avocado with sugar – amazing, and we often eat avocado ice cream too. I can’t really imagine giving these things up. Oh, it makes life better to have real food.

I used to be scared to go to the south of Lebanon, which is still heavily mined. I remained scared and reticent to head down until I met the director of the UN de-mining task force, who showed me a map of all of the unexploded ordnance in Lebanon – which covers the entire country, including Beirut. I gave up and headed down on the next bus. My friend Sophia and I, after final exams, took a trip around the country before she returned to America. In Lebanon, you can make it from Beirut to close to the Israeli border for about $5. We stayed in an old lighthouse on the point of Tyre (Sour)- thought to be perhaps the greatest surviving Phoenecian city. Our room seemed to float over the ocean- we looked out and straight into the water, where long black fish darted over the underwater ruins of an old souq. We napped in the clover and yellow flowers in the middle of the hippodrome used for the chariot scenes of the film Ben Hur. The next morning, after breakfasting near the ancient port, with its boats of a hundred shades of azure, near the fishermen who mended their nets with thread the color of the sky, we walked through the walled city and took pictures. We happened upon the Red Cross – in the south of Lebanon, with so few foreigners, the volunteers were more than happy to see us – and invited us for the weekly Red Cross barbeque- where we discussed the de-mining process in Lebanon in Arabic, and where the director agreed to take me in a few weekends to the Hizbollah-controlled area just next to the actual border. After the bbq, we went up to the roof to smoke narghile- and it was indeed strange – to be sitting on a roof overlooking the sunset – the first rise of a mountain in Israel just in front of us – a few miles away- but it couldn’t have seemed any more foreign from the place where we were.

We drove up to Faraya – a hamlet up in the mountains where I’ve gone several times with Sophia– not least of all for the mountains and trees, but mostly for the existence of the Tamer Land Inn, a quaint ski lodge with a huge fire place and a wonderful family who run the old place. The couple who own the Tamer Land have 8 children, the 4 oldest all boys my and Sophia’s age- and they are funny and entertaining and speak no English with us. Well, Jean likes to pretend he can speak English. "Ria, I want you look at this picture. This is picture Dr. Geagea and her groups." Dr. Geagea is Samir Geagea, leader of the Lebanese Forces (essentially a Christian militia that is now vaguely a political faction), and very definitively, a man.

This past weekend, all of their siblings and parents gone, Jean and Georges were running the lodge themselves, and much like the other weekends we’ve stayed there, we had very little sense that we were guests of the hotel, but rather felt like distant cousins or something. Jean and Georges let us run around and cook with them in the industrial kitchen, put extra heaters in our room, brought us plates of crispy apples every other hour which we ate next to a crackling fire. Their Kurdish house-boy/man, Nadir, cut us up carrots with lemon juice and we probably ate bags of them. We drove through the snow into town to pick up provisions, and Georges told everyone that we were cousins of their family, who run the regional authority for the 80 villages in the region. Georges had the baker make our bread right in front of us. In the warm sitting room, we sat in front of the fire. Georges procured juicy pears from under a bench in the room – from a crate with apples and pears on top, and rifles and possibly Kalishnakovs underneath “Just in case something bad happens.” He has a crush on Sophia and made her animal sculptures out of apples and pears. Although rather near the center of the country, we hiked through snow up above our knees – up high above the tree line, past any sign of civilization and at the last peak after several hours of hiking, we crested a hill and saw the beautiful Mediterranean far below.

Georges and Jean's father came back from town. Sophia and I could only agree that the way to describe him was that his was the sort of DNA women might universally agree they would like to make their children with. His name is Tamer. I went out in the snow with him to collect branches from a certain tree, tie bunches of them together with all of the leaves facing down for the animals to eat. Nadir carried the branches ahead of us and Tamer and I headed up the side of the mountain to visit the animals. The farms on the side of the mountains were terraced and filled with apple trees and pinecones and the wind whipped around furiously. I slipped momentarily and Tamer grabbed the back of my jacket, picked me up and, almost 70 years old, carried me over a wooden bridge completely covered in ice. We reached the animal pens high up and tossed corn to the chickens. Then we tied the branches up in the goat pen and a mama and a papa goat came out followed by two tinsy babies who galloped around playfully and munched on the lowest leaves. Sophia came up and we watched the animals running around in the bucolic splendor that is so much of Lebanon.

I returned to Beirut, and a huge protest broke out in opposition to the Danish cartoons. Those stupid, stupid Danish cartoons. A group lit police cars on fire, took over a fire engine and torched it, burned out several floors of the building that housed the Danish consulate. There were similar protests in Damascus and Istanbul and these later spread to other parts of the globe. My friend John and I went down while the buildings were still ablaze- while protesters angrily painted huge red and white Danish flags on the street, emblazoned with the word “SHAME.” All the way down several blocks, banks and jewelry stores, couture shops and airlines had all of their first floor windows smashed- some of the panes of glass were more than 1 floor high. Churches were desecrated and every car on the street had its front window smashed out.

Some days, it’s not that fun that many of my experiences as of late have been rather 3rd world. But mostly, I feel relief and contentment that I have the ability and the gut to take a long step out of my own educated, 1st world bubble, and to attempt to rethink my contribution to the world around me. This is too much for one Dispatch, I know - and it’s unedited, because I have no time, and I truly apologize for that fact.

A few days ago my friends John and Ben and I decided on a whim to get the bejesuz out of Beirut and find a cheap airline ticket to somewhere warm. I’m sitting in the computer lab right now with my bag and mosquito net next to me, and in an hour, we'll be leaving for Bombay. Nine days in the south of India - elephant safaris, ancient temples, the bustle of Mumbai. I'll be sure to report.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Beirut Dispatch 12.24.05- I Have a New Nephew, A Try at Syria, Another Lebanese Assasination

2006-05-16T23:36:00.003+03:00

Right, the funeral procession I walked through last week in response to the assasination of Gibran Tueni, editor of Lebanon's main anti-Syrian newspaper, an-Nahar. photo- www.pbs.org. In fact, I am almost definitely in this picture somewhere.)

How are you all? In America and Canada and England, France, Mexico and Turkey, Argentina, Columbia, Egypt and Iraq and several others countries, I hope that you are all doing well during this season of santas and menorahs and all of the rest.

The attempted trip to Syria proved interesting. Many things have happened to me at borders. Once, going by truck from Malawi to Zambia, I was made to surrender my passport and walk alone through the veldt for several minutes where I was told I could pick up said passport on the other side. The border guards didn’t look, er, very official and as I eyed the shadows of what I had by that time, convinced myself were illegal gasoline smugglers in the bushes, I wondered if I would be shot in the back, frankly. I just kept saying to myself- you know, Ria, your life is just too interesting to end just now. And I don’t mean to scare you with stories like that. If you don’t go to Africa before you die, boy are you missing out.

But in Syria, or rather just outside of Lebanon but not quite in Syria, as I sat with my friend Sophia and a Syrian/American boy on a bench in the border office, I was for the first time, actually barred from entering a country.

It became clear that it would be a long day when the guard looked at my passport and fairly giggled. Droves of people passed by - no Americans, but carloads of Pakistanis and Iranians and skeevy contractors for oil companies in their Ray Bans and belt-mounted cell phones, and dozens of Druze, wearing black harem pants, white skullcaps, and many a handlebar moustache. I asked one bearded young truck driver if he knew where to get some tea - he started rambling on in broken broken English- no speak Inglizce, no speaking Arabi- I speaking Turkce sadece! And wow did he seem amazed when I broke out my ever-worsening Turkish and we could actually have a conversation. "No one," he said "speaks Turkish on the Syrian border, especially not an American."

There my friend Sophia Brittan and I sat, in the freezing cold of the barren mountainside office, for hours and hours, and studied Arabic vocabulary from flashcards. The main desk guy, clad in a smart green wool suit with a nipped waist and rows of military decoration, summoned me over. "Let me pick a few words to describe your situation." From the thick stack of cards he extracted "pitfall," "hopeless" "hidden connections" "bleak" and a few other choice vocabulary. "Do you think I will be allowed through the border today?" I asked him. Hmm, he smiled. "Maybe today, maybe next week, maybe next year." As the sun began to sink, almost the whole day gone, we gave up and left the building, jumped into a taxi and attempted to leave.

But they wouldn’t let us.

Officially, we had left Lebanon but we hadn’t entered Syria. Apparently, this was a problem. Several Syrian military officers emerged from nowhere and brusquely informed me that we would be interrogated by the border director, who was just on his way down now. Would I have a translator, I asked. "No, your Arabic's good enough." I just couldn’t wait to mess up on a vowel or a misuse a verb conjugation and implicate myself in something awful. We were led into a massive cement office, with baroque gold and turquoise chintz armchairs and a big screen television playing Tom and Jerry. The director walked in- Sophia, I think, aptly described him as the movie version of what you think a Syrian border guard would look like. He sat at his desk for, sincerely, 9 minutes and just looked at us. Lit a cigarette, smoked it out of the side of his mouth, the course of my weekend travel plans entirely in his control. "Do you have any idea what your government is doing to us?" he boomed, and clearly did not want an answer. I sipped my tea and just waited. "How, exactly, have you heard about Syria, possibly from the internet? And what kind of people, exactly, do you think the Syrians are all liars and terrorists?" I gave a speech, I thought rather convincing, about how I lived in Beirut, and like many Beirutis, I wanted to visit Damascus while I still could. Further, I was in possession of many US dollars which I wanted to spend because Syria was known for producing so many fine items unavailable in other countries, in turn, supporting the Syrian economy. Perhaps, I thought, these would be some of the last US dollars coming into Syria for a while, but I didn’t say that.

We were, alas, refused. The guard from before at the desk apologized over and over. He said he hoped we would visit again when our countries were on better terms. An account of my and Sophia's adventure at the border showed up in a couple of newspapers here. And, with Beirut being the small town that it is, word on the street came back to me with people saying that we had been interrogated for 7 hours, when it was short of even one in reality. From what I’ve heard, we tried to go through on the first day they decided not to issue any more new American visas. Once we were let out of the Syrian side of the border, the Lebanese were not sure they could let us in back into the country we had never left. A saintly UN worker came to our rescue and personally took us over. I stepped into a coffee shop and asked the assembled drivers who could take us to a beautiful mountain village - any village, really - where we could sit in front of a fire, eat a nice piece of steak and drink a bottle of Kfraya. A man stepped up, tucked us into his car, and drove us to the other side of the country where we ate the best meal I’ve yet had in Lebanon. We slept in the snowy mountains and woke up to hear the birds chirping and the wood being chopped. In the morning we ate a breakfast of fresh manaqeesh on a cafe perched over the side of a mountain and the owner, after the meal brought us tiny Arabic coffees and a large tray of small pink oranges with their leaves still on. Oh, the goodness.

My friend Ahmed took Sophia and I to the Refugee Camp commemoration of the first anniversary of Yassir Arafat's death. In a room of perhaps 550 people, women on one side, men on the other, Ahmed us amid a group of extremely polite 7 and 8-year old boys who very kindly shared their boxes of gumdrops with us. One speaker delivered a fiery sermon that, from what I could understand, included a vivid description of the descent of the American government into the fiery recesses of hell, etc, etc, etc. Ahmed, sensing from across the room that we had in fact, understood what had been said, ran to the front of the stage and whispered to the next speaker, who then warmly welcomed, in Arabic, the American students who came to share the day with the people of the camp. From there, the speeches moved on to a singer who set out with an impassioned injunction, for all of the women to produce more babies for the resistance. Often I’m silently extremely grateful that I was born into a family and a society where this type of thing will never be demanded of me.

Ahmed took me to a huge Palestinian Fatah wedding. And I was definitely, definitely the only Westerner there, this point so obvious that the bride dragged her gigantic dress over to my table and asked what country I was from. This particular wedding included lines of military-clad men dancing dabkhe, rows of bagpipes, and a procession of people bearing lit torches and swords. This was followed by a quite provocative dance with said swords between the bride and groom, a bride, who I must add, on whom not a sequin or a speck of eye shadow had been spared. A whole group of men had come up from Ramallah for the festivities, and we all danced and danced and danced. I was seated in front of a cake 8 layers high, stacked with fruit and cream and much taller than me, and was made to eat several slices over a long night that I will not soon forget.

I walked down to the protests held in response to the assassination of prominent Lebanese anti-Syrian journalist and Member of Parliament Gibran Tueni. 4, and maybe 5 people, depending on who you read, its said, were killed, and 3 coffins draped in the Lebanese flag wound through Sahat an-Negmi Square, through the throng of people, one coffin passing just over my head as the crowds chanted "Kisahtak Suria" "F___ Syria" People shook the coffins in anger, and you could actually hear the bodies banging around inside. Later, I went down to the actual burial, definitely the only Westerner there when I arrived, just down at Tueni's grave with my camera where people lay prostrate on the ground and wept among the flowers. Its difficult to describe how injured Lebanon feels right now - with this the 15th bombing of the assassination campaign in Lebanon since former PM Hariri's death last February, and with so much tension surrounding the Mehlis Report, Lebanon right now, seems, well, close to the edge of something – these people, really, have had about enough. In the middle of all this death, bodies rattling in boxes around me, I received the news that my sister Nicole had just given birth to Charles Frederick Gustav Droitsch. Oh what a world, all this death surrounded by a new life of a person I cannot wait to hug and kiss! I am so proud of you, Nicole!

Assasination attempts were made in the last year in Beirut against Gibran Tueni, anti-Syrian journalist, Rafic Hariri, former PM, May Childiac, journalist, Druze MP Marwan Hamadeh, Samir Kassir, journalist, George Hawi, head of the Communist Party, Elias Murr, a pro-Syrian activist. Dozens of others were also murdered in these attacks. Hamadeh and Murr survived the attempts against them. After losing her left foot and hand in a car bombing, May Childiac is again working as a journalist, though now from Paris. There were 16 major bombings in Beirut in 2005.

I went to a dinner up in the mountains at the house of Lebanese friends. That is the saving grace of Lebanon, really - for all of the action down in Beirut, many Lebanese find a way to escape up into the beautiful mountains, often with a view of the sea and elusive quiet. The old stone house, near orchards of grapevines and lemon trees, was set high on the side of an incline. 8 of us sat around a fire in the living room and roasted chestnuts. Sophia’s friend Cyril's mother had made us fondue of several kinds of meat, a gorgeous avocado salad, plates of grilled vegetables, followed by pastries and deep chocolate truffles and a fruit that we have in Lebanon that I don’t believe exists in America called eshta - it looks like an artichoke but takes a bit like lychee fruit.

One thing they do in Lebanon and in much of the Middle East is that after dinner, a huge plate of fruit is laid in front of you. I can’t imagine going back to a way of life that omits this from a meal- it just seems so sad. Another thing in Lebanon is that, among Maronite Christians, people will often just speak French to each other socially. My friend Sophia and I requested over and over, to please speak Arabic, because we would just not understand much of the French. And over the course of the night, after more and more bottles of yummy vin rouge had been drunk, everything eventually switched to Arabic. Relaxed and all toasty, a lovely girl my age, the daughter of, I forget, either a cabinet member or a minister here, told the story of her being briefly kidnapped a few months before. She kept filling our glasses, speaking of the incident as calmly as one might describe, say, a trip to the mall to exchange a sweater. She said she was actually glad it had happened to her, because now she knew that she could handle herself. We all giggled at her now permanent bodyguards, one of whom, she said, had been loaned to her father from the family of Dany Chamoun, and the most burly of whom she and her boyfriend referred to as "Kevin Costner." We talked and talked and talked. And after several hours one half-French girl asked me if I knew that I spoke Muslim Arabic.

Now, this is getting a bit out of control. I am not even remotely proficient in any of them, but I routinely switch from Lebanese colloquial, to Modern Standard Arabic, to Egyptian colloquial, with several Palestinian phrases that have proved quite useful. The Druze pronounced their "qaf's," so do the Bedouin, I think the Saudi’s, but not very many other people and I try to pay attention to that when I am speaking with people. Now, the group wanted to teach Sophia and I to speak "Christian" Lebanese. They conjugate their possessives in an entirely different way. And their "because" is different. Many especially Christian Lebanese also used French verbs, but conjugate them in Arabic. It’s completely annoying. Their faces, collectively, dropped when I told them that all of the Americans I knew in Beirut were being taught Muslim Arabic. They could not believe that could ever happen.

I would be remiss in writing anything about Lebanon without mentioning her most famous singer, Fayrouz, who has a soft drink named after her that is popular all over the Arab world. There is no equivalent for Fayrouz in American culture. I guess you could say Elvis, but that wouldn't really be correct. Maybe if Elvis had lived during the American Civil War and had written songs about what a tragedy it was that so many Americans were killing other Americans, that might come close. The only singer in the Middle East who is more famous than Fayrouz is Om Kalthoum, from Egypt. There are many places I have been in Egypt who ONLY play Om Kalthoum. Somedays, when I walked down Om Kalthoum Road, then past the Om Kalthoum hotel, the massive Om Kalthoum statue, the Om Kalthoum coffee house, I just think Egypt should be called Om Kalthoum. If I had a pet, I might name her Om Kalthoum. (pictures above)

Indeed, during any normal person's study of the Arabic language, I think you happen upon days where you sit in front of a text and think - what on God's green earth have I gotten myself into? Over a period of great Arabic despondency last week, I had a picture of my Arabic instructor Saeed from Cairo blown up, and put it right over my desk for inspiration. Sometimes you only need one person who really believes in what you are doing, and really, ustez Saeed is that person for me.

I've spent one Christmas outside of America before - when I was 21. I had hemorrhagic malaria, I was living in Malawi and I weighed 114 pounds. You could see all of my ribs and it was the one and only time in my life that I’ve been too skinny. I will hazard a guess that this will never happen again. Christmas in Beirut will be interesting. It’s too warm to snow, and I sit on my balcony in shorts with a beer and listen to the Christmas carols coming from the orthodox church just below my balcony, where a tank sits just in front of the gate because someone important must be attending church services, while Israeli jets fly low over and over the beach in front of me.

So, from far away, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, etc, etc, and many warm Beiruti greetings to you all.

Until the next Dispatch,
Ria

Beirut Dispatch 11.18.05- Borj al-Borejni, My Roommates Rhinoplasty, Beirut Marathon

2006-05-16T23:17:00.003+03:00

Right, a picture of dead children in the street from the massacres in the Palestinian Refugee Camps of Sabra and Chatila in 1982. www. galeon.hispavista.com.

Right, an advertisment for the Beirut International Marathon.

I have received 23 emails asking where a Dispatch is and I thank you sincerely, people who care. The truth is, I’m busy, and I try to wait for at least 3 exciting things to happen for me to write one–my main concern being that I don’t want to bore any of you. Often the upholding of this standard requires several weeks of no news, though 3 exciting events never takes long in Beirut.

I had dinner at the Korean Ambassador’s house last week. The wife of the Ambassador, a petite little sprite named Sunny Kim, is a piece of work alright. “I don’t want to be formal tonight – take off your shoes, just relax, we having reel reel relax dinner” And then the food came out – escargot, lobster soufflé, 5 kinds of vino flown right in from good ole gay Paris, beef carpaccio, veloute and confit and all the rest. You could tell from the perma-smile, and the weary gait of the petit woman in her white cashmere suit as she shuffled the chocolate mousse around the table, that in her role as the ambassador’s wife, her primary practical responsibility was to repeat night after night ad naueseum, the superior arrangement of entertainment and dinners that she must always describe as “reel relax” even though she had spent all day organizing everything. Give me the ambassador’s job any day.

Eid, a high Islamic holiday that falls at the end of Ramadan, is celebrated with much the same sense of excitement at Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanza is at home. And I’ve been to many a family meal during this holiday, including a few in the spectacular mountains of southern Lebanon.

I made my first trip to a Palestinian refugee camp a couple of weeks back, and I give you a longer description of this event not for any specific political reason, but rather because I am assuming less than 2 or 3 and very possibly none of you have ever been to a refugee camp before, and it’s a situation worth describing, in my opinion.

My friend Ahmed (Ahmed, to be fair, is sometimes jokingly called everyone's favorite Palestinian)'s family has lived in Borj al-Bourejni since they were forced out of a little town north of the fishing village of Acca in Israel in 1948. Lebanon has a huge refugee population, spread around 12 camps.

In the camps here, people are barred from access to many forms of medical care, from political representation in the country outside of the camps, and are explicitly banned from joining 72 professions.The water is often unclean, the electricity unreliable and rats occupy every corner. The main source of aid to these populations is the UN High Commission for Refugees and the UN Relief and Worlds Agency [1], but this aid is not enough to cover many basic necessities.

Ahmed is funny and kind, smiles almost all the time, and like many Palestinians I have met, he drinks his tea with not one, not two, not 3, but 4 teaspoons of sugar.He's sort of the person who takes foreigners to see the camps, because he speaks decent English and well, is a good communicator. He took me to dozens of homes. We went to one wizened old broad’s place, her walls hung with 4 life-size pictures of her sons who she said had been kidnapped or killed - she still didn’t know - in the massacres of Sabra and Chatila in 1982. One of them, Mohammed, was 8 at the time. He had green eyes and a crooked smile. She held my hand and we sat and watched an old man in a gallabiya reciting the Qur'an in front of the pictures on the same kelly green rug as some religious man or another had done for over a decade. In her living room, grandchildren showed me their cartwheels and played on the floor. I kissed a lot of babies during the day, and my informal survey concludes that possibly every baby boy born in a camp since Abu Amar died has been named either Yassir or Arafat.

We went to Ahmed’s house to have iftar (the breaking of the fast during Ramadan) with his family. I sat on the floor with 10 other people and ate unexplainable amounts of fatoosh and crusty just-from the oven flatbread, roasted eggplant with garlic, labneh (a very yummy kind of yogurt that you eat with basically every meal in Lebanon), a few kinds of chicken, one topped with pomegranate seeds. I love pomegranate and luckily for me, it shows up in a lot of Lebanese food, and at this particular iftar, an luscious bowl of them sat in the middle of the feast- the product of a dozen pomegranates, Ahmed's father said. We had lamb soup, rice with almonds and newly-shaved cinnamon, pistachio shortbread which Ahmed dipped in ishta (cream) and brought around to everyone. Oh I could go on, but it would just take forever. Ajnabe'een (foreigners) can get very chubby during Ramadan, because we don’t fast through the day and then celebrate iftar at night where is possible and actually practically obligatory that you eat about 3 or 5 meals in one sitting.

My place was next to Ahmed's father, who sat cross-legged in his gallabiya and personally fed me bread and cheese - we spoke Arabic. During the war, he had contracted an infection in his mouth and could not leave the camp for treatment. A resourceful man, he pulled all of his back teeth out with a pair of pliers himself. "Ria,” he said quietly, “Your president is an idiot." I decided not to answer, and like the survivor that I am, I just kept on eating. "He says he is a man, but what is a man? Who do you think washes the dishes in this house - I do! Do you think that Bush washes the dishes in his house?"

Ahmed and I went out - his best friend Wasam checked the underside of the car for bombs and then, sitting behind the tinted black windows they blared Hamas songs about fallen martyrs which they both sang along to. Another guy, Kamel, said that when I pronounced "wallah," (really, by God), he felt as if I really must be Muslim (thank you Egypt, you gave that "wallah" to me).

My roommate Pieta had her rhinoplasty and I went to see her in the hospital. Pete doesn’t speak that much Arabic, and the nurses’ English seemed limited to “It will be okay, this is normal, the doctor cannot see you now, I will get you more water, I already gave you as many painkillers as I am allowed.” Pete spat out in her thick Australian accent which is often a challenge for even me to understand "Get me a frickin' bag, I’m going to hurl!" but no one understood her. I translated every variation of medical complaint and bodily function into sloppy Arabic, using all sorts of vocabulary that I had been saving up for just such an occasion. They brought a bag and I held it as Pete puked about a full liter of blood. To be this close to the action, really a splash or two on my arm was enough to feel certain I will never ever have elective surgery on my face. Pete’s nose looked normal, maybe a tiny tiny bit crooked before she had the chop job. I wonder if Lebanon made her think the surgery was necessary.

People travel to Lebanon to get cosmetic surgery – it’s cheap and quite common, and lots of boys get it too. On the street, if a Lebanese sees someone with the patch over the nose, they yell out “Mabrook!” “congratulations!” even if they are across the street. The practice is partly a sign you are wealthy enough to think nothing of changing your face – but it has produced strange results. Many people at AUB look unnervingly similar to each other- and you can see two distinct styles of nose – the pinched end done before 2000, and the later model ski slope into a slight upturn, almost a Jennifer Aniston-type schnoz, that’s popular right now. In Cairo, my Egyptian friends and I used to play a game, "Who are the American spies?" and now with my Lebanese friends at AUB, we play "Who are the American and who are the Syrian spies?" and "Who HASN'T had a nose job?"

I went to a Halloween party. About 90% of the Lebanese girls were coming to their first costume party and their collective dress could fairly be described as “scantily-clad Scheherazade from 1001 Nights.” My friend Ben dressed as a Lebanese garbage collector, a boy normally considered by the Lebanese girls to be a very cute specimen, they could not comprehend why anyone would do such a thing. “I don’t understand you Americans, you should always dress up as someone MORE glamorous than you, not someone less, habibti, come on, really,” one particularly bejeweled and mascarraed friend advised me.

Along the top of the Beirut seawall at the cornice of the Mediterranean, men in long silken robes in hues stood sporting ornate headdresses and blew their horns and wove flags as long as 18-wheelers at the Beirut International Marathon, which I ran 10 hilly kilometers of. We ran guarded by perhaps a thousand fatigue-wearing military police, everyone toting, I believe, an AK-47, past the skeletons of dozens of bombed-out buildings. At the finish line, a Lebanese band played "Smoke on the Water" - it was all rather surreal. Two days before, I had received a massive wasp bite on the back of my leg- said bite was located mere inches from the poisionous spider bite I received in Malawi. When I was bitten this time, the whole upper half of my right leg swelled up and promptly turned black. Would my leg fall off this time, I wondered? I ran as fast as I could the whole time and it didn’t. I have an impressive collection of scars now though and boy did the other runners feel sorry for me.

I ran for an NGO called "Jinsea" which in Arabic means "nationality." If a Lebanese woman marries a non-Lebanese man, their children cannot claim Lebanese passports, even though its fine for a Lebanese man to marry a woman from anywhere and his children will be Lebanese citizens. And if the husband leaves the woman, the children effectively have no legal identity. This is a problem for many reasons, not least of them that approximately 57% of the women affected by this law are married to Iraqis. And whereas the Lebanese have a hard enough time traveling to Europe or the United States, their Arab brethren in Iraq are far more disadvantaged on the international travel front. Egypt had the same situation several years ago, but changed the law to the relief of many. Lebanon has not done the same thing because of the Lebanese women who have married Palestinian men, but the number of women who have done this constitutes less than 1% of the total number of the concerned population. I was asked repeatedly what my t-shirt was about- and at one point near the finish line, a group of people stood around me and listened to my explanation - and what a funny sight that must have been- an American girl explaining Lebanese law in Egyptian Arabic to a gaggle of sweaty and sweat panted Lebanese.

School is interesting. In the computer lab as I write, a couple, girl sitting on the boyfriends’ lap, are literally tonguing each other about 12 inches from where I sit – and it’s a pretty deep toungeing as toungeings go, and this pretty common. Especially after Cairo, it feels almost pornographic to witness. A few years ago, AUB students actually demonstrated on campus to be allowed to engage in public displays of affection. They won. Oh, did they win.

At the student elections at AUB over the past few days, students wear t-shirts printed with the name of their candidate, and an armband that shows which militia their family sides with. If you go down the ballot, the last names all sound familiar to anyone even slightly conversant in Lebanese politics – Aoun, Chamoun, Gemayel, Jumblatt. At the last minute, the Maronite Aounists forged an alliance with Hizbollah, and unexpectedly took the election from the Amalists and the SSNP. Some voted for the socialist candidate in disgust. Police in riot gear with teargas canisters surrounded the campus and truckloads of Hizbollah, AMAL, SSNP, LF-flag waving students blocked traffic for hours. The political parties at school, several people said, are funded by actual political parties. I will repeat, this was a school, not a general election, and oh boy was it Lebanese.

The most beautiful rain storm I've ever seen was in the South Luangwa game reserve in northern Zambia. I sat with a group of Zambian guides in an open-top truck in the bush - the parched earth so dry it had cracked for miles around, where wildebeests ran amuck in the dust, past mapang tress that were being debarked by the trunks of hungry elephants. Suddenly, heavy drops poured out of the sky onto our heads, we took our shoes off and splashed in the quickly-forming puddles, the rain changing the color of everything within hours, which would hopefully hold out long enough to provide crops for the villages around us.

But here in Beirut, I've seen the most intense storms of my life-the wind blew a window out of our bathroom the other day, and the floor of my room the other morning was covered in water- its almost as if I live outside and that doesn’t bother me too much. I sit on my balcony and watch the storms come in off the Mediterranean - from my perch high up on a hill, as the thunder cracks like eggs do, over trees as long and lithe as tall green ladies.

I’m taking 5 hours a day of Arabic, and mine is almost intelligible now, I keep trying, I talk with everyone I can. Tomorrow I think I am going to Damascus, because I would like to see Syria before/in case sanctions are imposed.

I miss many things from home:
*clothes dryers
*lobster rolls on the beach
*skinny dipping
*big libraries in English
*efficiency
*Bruce Spingsteen

But most of all people, so please do write or call. For all of the action, it’s downright lonely over here and I have at least a couple of seasons before my return to the mainland.

Until the next Dispatch,
Ria

p.s. In mere days, my best friend Nicole is moving back to America after of a couple of years in London. Safe travels, Rods, and even though you are farther away from me now, America is lucky to have you back and oh will we have fun next summer.

[1] UNHCR's website-

Beirut Dispatch 10.17.05 - How I Almost Didn't Make it to Beirut, Landmines, My Strange Arabic Accent

2006-05-16T23:11:00.001+03:00

Left: Lebanon is one of the few places in the world where you can actually ski in the morning and after an hour's drive back to Beirut, have lunch and swim in the sparkling Mediterranean on the same day. www.snow-forecast.com

Right, the Cedars of Lebanon, steel-engraved print, 1850. The cedar tree is the national symbol of Lebanon. Only a few cedars have survived the war here. www.lebanesestudies.com)

I completely forgot to tell you all about my last hour in Cairo. In complete Ria fashion, I left Cairo with only $190US in my back pocket, and enough in Egyptian guinea to give a few hundred to my fantastic boab Mohammed and pay the $5 cab fare to the airport. Long story short, the cab got lost, only depositing me in front of the correct gate about 40 minutes before my flight was to take off. I was, without any aid, carrying every single thing I have owned for the past 8 months, including many books and a few dictionaries, in 3 bags, and in the process of this very dramatic dragging of the luggage, I was pick-pocketed for the first time ever. I got to the gate - it was closed. “There is no flight available for YOU,” the stern airline employee said in menacing tones, and in any case, I had no money to buy a plane ticket even if I had wanted to. It could get worse, I kept saying to myself, it could get worse. It can always get worse until you are lying dead in the gutter.

Standing at the front desk, the plane hadn’t left yet, and, in Arabic, I explained basically how if I didn’t get on the flight to Lebanon I could become an impecunious, permanent, and involuntary resident of Cairo. I used much less sophisticated vocabulary than that, but the intention was the same. An airport employee asked where I was living. "Imbaba," I said - and he looked at me intently and asked me to follow him. "My family is from Imbaba, and Ill get you on that plane," he said. An angel, he was, an angel. I don’t like to bump the entire customs line, but in some cases, I do. And I shouted an apologetic explanation to the whole group of white-robed Saudi businessmen who I had cut in front of, and they "mashallahed" me and gave every sort of Islamic wish that God would watch over me.

The shuttle to the plane had departed long a go, and an unofficial black van pulled up sneakily, they ushered me in, and the driver kept telling me over and over "This is sooooo haram (forbidden), sooooooo haram" - and I kept apologizing, he knew I couldn’t tip him, but I dug through my purse and gave him everything I didn’t absolutely need- the sim card from my phone (it at least it had minutes on it), all of the chocolate in my bag, which was a formidable amount of chocolate, a random Outkast CD, some chapstick, pens and paper and some subway tokens. The plane was mere minutes from taking off, the driver had porters take all of my luggage and put it in a seat on the plane, because there was no time to check it. I walked past the stunned stewardesses (who IS this random girl?) sat down and breathed a sigh of relief, we took off, and I began to ponder my situation.

I keep an emergency $50 in my phonebook under "C" for "cash,” and it was not a dumb idea to start this practice when I was 21, I don’t think. In my life so far, I have had all kinds of adventure- becoming sick with tropical diseases, hitchiking alone through much of central Anatolia, working as a staffer on a presidential campaign in a battleground state, being stalked by lions in Zambia, but on that sunny afternoon, I faced a whole new type of scene - the financial adventure of not actually knowing if I had enough money to get into Lebanon. It was only an hour flight, but rather a tense one. I arrived in Beirut, and got a single entry visa for $40, and a car picked me up. My best friend Nicole Western Unioned me a stack of cash from London within about 5 seconds of hearing of my predicament, and if I didn’t have her, I don’t know what would have happened. From the airport I went straight to my Beirut apartment (there were already clean sheets on the bed and a towel on the desk!) which I very fortuitously had arranged before I left Egypt by chance meeting with a Dutch journalist who I met in Cairo a few nights before the presidential election at an Ayman Nour rally.

(Back to Beirut)

Everything in Beirut unfolds in a sort of parallel universe - many normal things happen in the midst of the strange - I do my Arabic homework at the dining room table as my roommate Pieta and her best friend here discuss the twin rhinoplasties they will have later this week – a few people have estimated to me that a full 1/3 of the girls at AUB have them.

I missed the trees so much in Egypt that I joined the hiking club at AUB. In the first meeting we all asked questions about the places we were hiking, and girls and boys and T.A.'s and professors asked questions not only like "Has that preserve been cleared of landmines?" which is said with amazing nonchalance in Lebanon, but also the much more specific "Has that entire preserve been cleared of landmines in accordance with such and such amendments to such and such a document. The very nice Lebanese guy, Samer, who runs the club, by virtue of his position, must possess not only a knowledge of the location of different climbing sites, an ability to identify poisionous plants and to counteract snake bites, but also has a quite impressive understanding of the status of the effort to clear landmines in this beautiful country.

The hiking club is overwhelmingly Lebanese and no one will speak English to me and I couldn’t be happier about that. On the bus on the way to our hikes, people bring their drums - similar to an Egyptian tabla, and the drive, as have other drives that I’ve been on in the ME, feature music, belly dancing, the disclosing of sticky pastries from people's bags, and last week, a day when we all had to make up a song in Arabic- which had to rhyme. We hiked for half a day at an elevation of about 3,000km through cedars and cedars and cedars, and drank from little streams the sweetest water, and looked down upon everything.

Classes are going well. My accent is still awful, but it is getting better. A few people have told me that I am the only American they've ever heard speak Arabic without an American accent. What kind of accent do I have?, I asked. My friend Omar volunteered "It's kind of like, maybe you grew up in Eastern Europe. Your father was Egyptian, but he wasn’t around so much. Maybe you spent a couple of summers in Lebanon. You studied formal Arabic, but not very much. But your parents know it - they just spoke something else to you at home, but the radio was playing Om Kalthoum songs or something all the time." When someone asked me to explain how good my Arabic was the other day I said "I think it’s finally reached the stage when it’s a level above just being noise."

In Cairo and in Beirut, there are lots of Norwegians learning Arabic, and generally, I find them to be good students of the language and also of Arab culture. In the past week, I've learned how to say several phrases in Norwegian "On a day like this, sometimes the only thing a girl can do is go and take a bubblebath," and the very useful "Well, he's not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer." My friend Anne Marie says I have a perfect Norwegian accent "You should learn Norwegian too!" Umm, I think Arabic is enough for now. Another thing is that I have met so many international students over here that are learning Arabic for such useful reasons. When Americans learn Arabic, many of them seemed headed on the route to national intelligence or oil consulting. But in Cairo, I met Norwegian police captains who worked in areas with large Arabic speaking populations, and in Beirut, I have a classmate who is a Spanish clergyman in Madrid and wanted to be able to give some sermons in Arabic.

Beirut is great – Its boring compared to Cairo, but everything seems boring compared to Egypt. I’m cool with it though, boring seems very nice now actually, and I will report on all developments and I hope to hear the same from some of you.

Until the next Dispatch,
Ria

Postscript: CONGRATULATIONS to my sister Dani and her new husband Dave – hitched just days ago in Dani’s favorite state of Tennessee! I know the whole fam is tres excited to have Dave join the bunch!

Beirut Dispatch 9.26.05 - Second Day in Beirut, First Bombing

2006-05-16T22:56:00.001+03:00

(The Lebanese Civil War began in 1976 and ended in 1990. During that time, more than 7% of the total population of the country was killed. A picture of downtown Beirut looking toward the mountains during the war. Most of the buildings shown here are gone now.)

-photo: www.travel-to-lebanon.com

By plane, Beirut is approximately 1 hour and, by my admittedly unscientific estimation, 4 or maybe even 5 thousand universes away from Cairo. I think I had a good preview walking off of the plane - the first person I saw was a woman wearing the tallest, skinniest black high heels I've ever seen, skin tight black silk capri pants with diamante starfish appliqued all over her abdomen, and only a few basically bandages of lace covering her very fake, and very elevated breasts. In fact it seemed that about a full 1/4 of the female customers in the airport could have walked right into a Versace ad and not looked out of place.

On my second night here, my lovely Australian roommate took me to a party in East Beirut. In a beautiful old white mansion, the inside walls painted blood red with candelabras everywhere, we drank rum punch from a big crystal bowl. It was warm, and so we headed up to the roof, decorated with candles and lights when BAM, a loud explosion happened on the other side of the neighborhood. A newcomer to Beirut, and still in possession of rather quick reflexes, I jumped and started to run toward the stairs, when I noticed the scene at the table: 1. everyone seemed to get a phone call immediately from their closest friend or relative- people really seem to keep track of each other in the midst of so much political instability, 2. about half of the table, journalists, ran down to cover the event, and 3, the rest of the table started to place bets on what street this bomb happened on, and then quickly returned to refilling glasses and dancing on the tables among all of the tinkling lights while smoke began to waft up from the bombing not so far away. A moustached American oil contractor on leave from a stint in Baghdad leaned over and skeevily whispered in my ear “Welcome to Beirut.”

The Lebanese have a way of living that is unbelievable. Site of an incredibly complicated and horrendous civil war, the terrible destruction of the country, the death of thousands upon thousands of souls, has led this nation of 3.5 million to combat the deep sadness of their history by producing the most decorated women, eating the most luscious food and partying like the world might end tomorrow, which, after all, it just may. There is a club nearby on the site of a former torture chamber where people dance over the burial site of martyrs, and pastry chefs balance delicate chocolate concoctions in the window fronts of buildings still riddled with gun shot marks.

At the very same time, the Beirut of the Western press, "the Paris of the East" describes such a small subset of Lebanese society. There are parts of Beirut that look just like Egypt, there are other parts in the countryside that are tiny villages and livestock. But everything here, excepting the sectarianism and some of the new, characterless buildings going up, is wonderful.

A friend took me for coffee on the site of a restaurant that during the war that also served as an arms dealership. "All of the militia people would sit here and buy their weapons. You could sit and have an espresso while you ordered that a dozen AK-47's be delivered to your door next day, and it only took 72 hours to get a tank!"

For the first 2 days, when I cleaned out my ears, it was still black from Cairo. And my feet stayed black for 4 days, and by that day, when I coughed, nothing that came out was black anymore either. The air isn’t perfect here, but last night I ran along the beach (wearing shorts!) and there are no problems.

I was especially amazed by a few things:
1. On my third day here, I went to the bank to open an account wearing a very short miniskirt - absolutely no one cared, and the bank administrator who came to help me with my paperwork was indeed wearing an even shorter skirt than I was. I think you can only do this in Hamra, however.
2, In between classes today, I went and took a dip in the sea and returned to my next class with wet hair.
3. The washing machine - I haven’t had access to a real one since I left Ellen Bennett's in New Hampshire, and now I sat in front of the machine in wonder. In Cairo, one of the interns, Henry and I would do my laundry together on the houseboat in a process that evoked medival operations or at least the American civil war. It included us boiling water, pouring it into an open-topped mechanized basically metal basket, and to keep the clothes from being torn apart, Henry, stronger than me, would take a wooden spoon and put his hands deep into the contraption, which made all the difference in the cleanliness of my clothes, but also seemed to threaten the loss of one of his digits.

The bomb the first night (2 people killed, 23 wounded) happened just across the street from my friend Daisy's house in East Beirut, which is Christian and prone to more violence as of late. I live in West Beirut, which is predominantly Muslim, and markedly safer. Yesterday, a well known anti-Syrian journalist, May Chidiac, had a car bomb inserted into her Range Rover as she had lunch at a friends - her condition this morning was upgraded from critical to stable and she has reportedly lost a hand and a foot. In the downtown Beirut Virgin Megastore you can buy a set of shot glasses that read “Have a blast in Beirut!” with bombs printed all over them.

Despite all of this, wierdly, Beirut maintains the aura of a bucolic village - the streets are absolutely quiet at night, and for the first few days I really missed all of the nighttime noises of Cairo. And for all of the bombings, there is a sense, confirmed by everyone and by the reports of the bombings, that these are "targeted killings" that by and large, hit their intended mark, and I rejoice in how little I matter often, and I walk along the streets with almost no worries at all and the overwhelming feeling one gets when one is here that its just such a nice city with fantastic food and an incredible geography and history.

School is located very close to my apartment, on a sprawling campus located on a rocky incline that tumbles into the sea. To get to a few of my classes, I walk past pretty little orchards of lime and fig trees and no one cares if you pick one or two. Similarly, the dress code is awe-inspiring. No where have I ever seen so many high heels, protuberant and siliconetastic breasts, shirts composed sometimes of nothing more than a translucent bra and a couple of strands of fabric struggling to cover nipples and the like.

I do speak Arabic here, and people are confused "Are your parents Egyptian?" they ask. When they hear me speak, they either attempt to switch to Egyptian colloquial or laugh their faces off.

I never thought that any view could beat my Nile-side houseboat's, but in Beirut, my bedroom looks out over the Mediterranean and a crop of towering and swaying trees. In the afternoons, I walk the 7.5 minutes through crooked alleys down to the school beach for a swim. From my balcony, the sea is a hard and intense blue, from the street next to the beach it looks tourquoise in spots, but when I dive in off of the cliffs, its pure emerald green with gold flecks from all of the rocks, and to swim in the ocean every day and look out over the beautiful city and all of the mountains reaching up to the clouds, well, it gives one a reason to wake up in the morning.

Before I left Cairo, my friends in Egypt said "You will never get people to speak Arabic with you." They were wrong. People WILL speak Arabic because I'm pathologically insistent and a lot of the time I tell people I’m from Spain. I told the wine store owner yesterday that I found Arabic to be much more beautiful than either English or French (which I do) and said that I thought the Lebanese should give the language more credit (it's very flash here if you speak perfect English or more importantly, perfect French)- and the man glowed and I know he will never speak English to me again.

The Lebanese seem to feel sorry that I spent so much time in Cairo "But there is no freedom there, and the food is awful and there is no culture!" And they are wrong too. In Egypt, people are more polite, they actually all speak Arabic most of the time, and you can drink the water right out of the tap, which I’m hesitant to do at this point in Beirut mostly because there isn’t a government. Cairo has some incredible food if you know where to find it, and there aren’t electricity outtages regularly, and as I wrote this, there were two here. Most of all, it would be difficult to describe the richness of Egptian culture and history. There will always be a spot in my heart for umm dunya, I might always speak Arabic with the Egyptian "Ga" sound and I will do it with honor.

As I sit here in the computer lab, looking through the window out past the palm trees, over the sea and into the quickly pinkening late-afternoon sky, I feel that indeed my Cairo friends and my Beirut friends were both wrong. I know from experience that both places are absolutely nothing less than fantastic and that I am a lucky girl to have been able to live in them both.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Cairo Dispatch 9.7.05- Egypt's First Contested Presidential Election

2006-05-16T21:59:00.000+03:00

(To the left, veteran Egyptian President Mohammed Hosni Mubarak, who, at 77 years old, cleans up pretty well. On the right, Ayman Nour, opposition candidate, who could either wind up as the next Egyptian President or a convict in jail.)

Final Cairo Dispatch

On the morning of Egypt’s first ever presidential election, the sun rose, as always, over the Nile. Just after dawn, the fisherman dropped their nets, hoping for a big catch, and coffee shop workers washed down the pavement and set out the chairs that patrons would soon fill. But in this country of 70 million, on this particular day, something did change. Egyptians had gone to the polls before, but they had never really voted for a president. And as they trickled in to elementary schools and meeting halls, they received a sheet of paper, that in colored illustration, gave them the choice of not one candidate, but ten.

There had been problems, of course. Gameela Ismail, the wife and spokesperson for Ayman Nour, the candidate from the Al-Ghad party, alleged that the fuscia-tinted ink
(also used to mark cuts of meat at the butchers) used to identify those who had already voted, was easily removed using deodorant. I saw her around 2am, after leaving dinner at the Greek Club the night before the election. She had a look on her face not dissimilar from how John Kerry looked when he came into Portsmouth only a couple of days before the election – I think the correct word would be – haggard. “Are you okay?” I asked her. “Go home and get some sleep!” I said in Arabic, though it seemed obvious she would be up all night.

At 10am, at the Nasr School in Fagella, lines of government trucks, their windows pasted with Mubarak signs, drove back and forth in front of a school where Ayman Nour was speaking. Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif announced that no protests would be tolerated, but hundreds gathered in the center of downtown Cairo, chanting in Arabic “Mubarak, you coward die, you are an American spy.” Some members of the opposition movement Kifaya “Enough” tied yellow bands imprinted with “kifaya” on the front, to cover their mouths. Mohammed Tawfik, 34, with tears in his eyes said “I must say that today, I am ashamed to be Egyptian, because of what this government is doing – this regime that people call a government.”

Around the city of Cairo, under the new election laws, polling places had been relocated, many of them unmarked – in a country whose literacy rate has not yet reached 60%, many cases documented the struggle of people who spent hours looking for their designated polling location.

A great problem existed even in advance of September 7, since almost all of those who were not already in possession of their voter ID cards before the election law changed, would not be able to apply for one. In a country where there was no precedent for voting in a presidential election, before the referendum, there seemed little reason to ever feel that one might need a voter ID card, but as of the date of the election, because of this situation, large numbers of people were not even eligible to vote.

In protests throughout the past spring and summer, as newly-reenergized opposition parties began to increase their political activity, there was a swell of violence against opposition groups – most notably at protests surrounding the May referendum to change the constitution, where many individuals were assaulted and a few required hospitalization. On that day, armies of government thugs in plain clothes patrolled the streets bearing identical black billy clubs, a few of which were definitely utilized. Women journalists were groped, as in most political protests here, and several women had their higabs and other pieces of clothing ripped off of them.

However, for all of the problems incurred on election day, one stark difference between protests before and on/after the election, was the notable decrease in government security forces, and on the street in Cairo, many people hope this trend is a continuing one.

Just after the polls closed, I had the chance to talk with a few people who had been beaten up. Mohammed Sharqawi, a well-known activist with the Youth for Change movement here, sat at a table at the Journalist's Syndicate, his shirt smeared with blood, his face bruised, and with two long gashes slashed across his back. He told me he had had his wrist broken by the police earlier in the year. I wasn’t sure I believed him, he’s a very cute but quite dramatic boy, but when I looked through some pictures I’d taken of earlier protests, there was Sharqawi, months earlier, his arm in a cast. Later, a bystander who had witnessed the attack gave a deposition to several human right’s watch groups – the woman, wincing, described how he had been kneed about a dozen times in the janglies – and Mohammed looked faint – he didn’t remember it happening – he was unconscious during the beating, but now he said, it made sense, because he was hurting a lot in certain places that perhaps ought not to be kicked.

On September 10th, as the election results became clear, and showed that approximately 23% of the electorate, around 10% of Egypt’s total population, had awarded Mubarak 82% of the vote. It was fun to watch an election from the outside. In 2004, as a staffer on the presidential campaign, I sat in a room with all-star Kerry/Edwards intern Nicky Beeson and a lawyer, fielding calls from poll workers telling us what was happening all around New Hampshire. Now, I went where I wanted to watch everything. Kifaya activists gathered in Midan Talat Harb, site of the law offices of opposition candidate Ayman Nour, who soon joined the group marching toward the middle of Cairo. Faster than other Kifaya marches, the group gathered speed and numbers, many individuals in tears, and by the time they reached Midan Tahrir (Freedom Square), more than a thousand people had blocked traffic on all sides.

It would be hard to imagine that Hosni Mubarak hadn’t won an incredible percentage of the vote, despite the inaccuracies and charges leveled against the government in the election. More than anything else, Mubarak’s 24 year tenure has been marked by the strength and size of the Egyptian security system – and although there are many problems which face the great majority of Egyptians, in a country with so many young people, many of them simply cannot conceive of any ruler besides Mubarak- hero of the 1973 war, and subject of innumerable billboards in every corner of the country. A quick walk through any part of Cairo could include a talk with a shopkeeper who may show you his NDP membership card. It would also be difficult to describe the role that the several-million strong Egyptian military, under Mubarak’s leadership plays in the security balance of the Middle East as a whole.

Egypt is a better place now than it was before the election – people have started to talk about the government, to call officials into account, to demand more transparency – and I was very excited to be able to watch this happen. I sat at Ayman Nour’s post-election day conference, and a journalist friend asked him, in Arabic, if he feared vengeance from the NDP after the election. Nour laughed and said “There is a saying in Arabic, that when you walk in, you don’t fear the forest for the rustle of the leaves.”

In my own wanderings through Cairo, a deep sense that one change Egyptian’s hope to see in the future, is the cancellation of the “Emergency Law” that has been in effect since Sadat was assassinated. The Law gives the government the authority to arrest and detain people on very flimsy charges- presumably because for the last 25 years, Egypt has been in a state of emergency. As an example, every time a bomb goes off anywhere in the Sinai, hundreds of innocent Bedouin are rounded with no plausible link to the bombing.

A couple of days later, it was my last night in Cairo – and friends and I had dinner at the Italian Embassy club. I felt good about leaving – the table was split into two sections – because of language issues, the English speakers on one side, the Arabic speakers on the other, and on my last night, I could not have been happier to know that although my Arabic is still awful, I do indeed feel more comfortable or at least happier sitting on the Arabic-speaking side of the table – telling stories grammatically flawed to their very core, to know that however much I massacre the language, I at least elicit a laugh and know that people understand – mostly- what I mean. I will miss this place - the energy, the history, the flow of the Nile, the sound of the sand blowing in the desert, the din of the markets, but above all, the people - but I will come back – oh I say without any hesitation, one day , I will be in this wonderful place again, inshallah.

And it's off to Beirut!

Until the next Dispatch,
Ria

Cairo Dispatch 9.4.05 - Election Imminent, I Love My Khodarji

2006-05-16T21:38:00.001+03:00

(Right, one of the colorful Hosni Mubarak posters which cover almost all of Cairo in anticipation of the election in 3 days)

It is the honest to goodness truth that you all have approximately 1 week and 4 days to come and visit before I move to Beirut. And if you did happen to pop over to Cairo, you might make it in time to witness the first multi-party presidential election in Egypt's history. And I would make sure that you all had an up-close view of the proceedings.

As you all are surely very aware by now, Cairo is one hot metropolis at the end of the summer. I headed to a private club about 40 minutes out of Cairo with my friends Michael and Summer and Summer’s internet boyfriend Marco. As we walked in, I was just itching to de-robe. Among the swaying palm trees and high-end hookers, a perfect turquoise pool lay just waiting for me to dive in. We had almost reached the deck chairs and the beloved beer girl when a club employee whispered under his breath to Summer that muhaggiba (veiled) women were not allowed anywhere on the premises. The club staff were needless to say taken aback when they realized that Summer was not someone to mess with and that I, a rather scantily clad American, gave them a bawling out in rather incorrect, but nonetheless coherent Amaya. We yelled and yelled. "If this club had enough Saudi investors and patrons, there would be no problem with the veil, correct? And there is no sign outside anywhere that says you cannot be veiled! And who does this club belong to? Foreigners or Egyptians?" Sadly, the answer was foreigners, foreigners who wanted, understandably, to wear their little bikinis when the temperature tipped up over 100. Because of the big scene, the management took us out to a parking lot so that the patrons could not hear us while we waited for the director to come down.

They were not happy to hear that we were all, in one way or another, journalists- and that Summer, perhaps more than the rest of us, was ready to scream and embarrass the entire club staff if that was needed. We won a partial victory when they gave us a spot in the garden justnext to the pool, but behind a little crop of bushes away from the eyes of the ban de soliel'd patrons hanging around the piscina. I, for one, was glad to finally be able to strip down, lay in my little bikini with a freezing cold beer and laugh.

I wrote a story in this weeks Cairo Magazine if you are bored, you can read it here:
Sunday September 4, 2005
CHURCH AND STATE: Coptic leaders reprimand Mubarak opponents
By Ria Riesner
http://www.cairomagazine.com/?module=displaystory&story_id=1304&format=html

You know that your houseboat is dirty when your boab Mohammed, who lives in a ratty little shed with no real running water, tells you that all of the neighbors will begin to speak ill of you if you don’t dust the floor. But my roommates were not inclined toward hygeine, I have a strict personal philosophy about not cleaning up after boys- let them rot in their filth, I say. So, until they left last week, I stayed for the most part in my room and fairly tiptoed around the almost condemnable bathroom. Upon their departure, I, or more appropriately my maid, cleaned the entire place, and now you can eat off the floor and drink your milk out of the bathtub if you so desired.

A massive mosquito invasion occurred shortly thereafter, and I’m sure it was a funny sight to see when I lay in a cold bath, with a mosquito net hung over the top, drinking a beer and reading the newspaper.

I don’t know if I’ve ever written about this, but I should have. Egyptians have a habit, which I feel, if duplicated around the world, would surely contribute to the betterment of the planet. If someone is eating or drinking anything on the street, never, ever have Iwalked by and not have the person offer me a bite or a sip. This is mostly just a formality, but many people actually want you to come to sit down and eat with them. And if a family on the docks of the Nile sits down in front of their fire on the ground, ready to eat their fuul and salad and bread, if they see me at all, they will beckon for me to come down and join them for dinner. I sometimes do actually go sit on the floor of my vegetable seller’s store – where all of the khodarci’s on 26th of July street meet on Thursdays to discuss the produce transport business. My khodarci has the best oranges ever. This food offering from strangers deal does not usually extend to the shi-shi establishments around Cairo, although one day, as I was caught eyeing the crepes and grilled shrimp of a lovely girl on a date with her fiancee in a swank French bistro, she crossed over from her table, balancing a forkful of seafood her dinner in her hand, and personally fed me a bite. After the main course, I did the same with a bite of chocolate mousse and everyone laughed.

On the second to last day of allowable campaigning, I was listening to Marvin Gaye as I got ready in my room on the houseboat. I was sipping a Stella Artois and anticipating with no joy the inevitable groping that would occur. Every problem has a solution, I thought to myself, and organized a stratagem. Thousands of people had gathered clad in the orange t-shirts and bandanas of the Al-Ghad (tomorrow) party. With my rather complicated camera, I was let up on the stage with all of the international press, even though I was there mostly for fun. Then came the inevitable groping, but boy was the offender surprised to find a strategically placed sock in my jeans. He looked at me in horror, and I just winked. Finally, a solution to this problem had been identified!

After the rally, a group headed for a beer and dinner at the Greek club, and with a large group of international press flown in advance of the election, the conversation was interesting. As all of the Cairo-based journalists spoke about the relative calm of the atmosphere around the event, a reporter from a well known publication in America spoke of the chaos and lack of organization and we all laughed. What did we mean by that, he asked, and I replied "A badly organized demonstration would end with a bunch of injuries probably inflicted by government thugs, and a naked woman on the ground who had been stripped of her higab and everything else."

We have all seen pictures of Hurricane Katrina. The scale of the disaster isunbelievable. Over here, people mostly seem surprised that there are so many actually poor people in America – to many foreigners, all Americans seem to be filthy rich. And as I looked at the pictures, the only thing I could think of was how similar many things looked to shanty towns in sub-Saharan Africa I've visited- especially in Malawi, where the hospital's halls were lined with decomposing corpses, people faced the same sort of hygienic problems, and where far, far too many small children had lost their parents to unutterable catastrophes. And in Egypt, as in almost every country I have to assume, there is a great outpouring of sympathy and of hope that the people of the South will soon receive all the help they need.

So, with only a few days until I move to Lebanon, I’m still excited by Egypt and I know I will love this place until the day I die.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Cairo Dispatch 8.24.05- More of the Scary Ferry, Movenpick Spa on the Red Sea, Election 1 Week Away!

2006-05-15T19:59:00.001+03:00

Left- my friend Charlie Levinson and I sitting in a horse-drawn carriage with Ayman Nour's bodyguards at an opposition protest just before the election. (photo by Nasser Gelby)

Right http://www.regal-diving.co.uk/, the Red Sea in Egypt has some of the best diving anywhere in the world.)

It boggles the mind, really it does - this life of mine, which seems too crazy to be able to exist for anyone, and about 30% of it is scary and awful, but the other 70% is amazingly good, and you know, that ain’t too bad.

The situation with the boys on the dock got worse. One afternoon, after they followed me and grabbed me en masse, I jumped onto the ferry, when the scariest boy said a few things that made me wish, for the first time here, that I didn’t know as much Arabic as I do. I screamed at the boys that I had a friend who was a high-ranking police captain, blah blah blah, and the boy almost whispered. "Oh, your police captain friend might come once or twice, try to scare us, but I am going to be here every day waiting for you and one day you will be alone and I will get you."

You know, Im no baby, but that was enough for me. I called my landlord Wa'il, an interior ministry official and former police captain, and that very night, he came over with a gaggle of officers and another official from the interior ministry. We discussed, in Fusha- what could be done. The officials all seemed set on one idea - that I would prosecute them of an offense, equivalent to assault, a level of assault that, in Egyptian law was just one step below rape, and if any of the boys had a prior record, they would go to jail for 6 months. Whoa. Barring the injury of my sisters or a few close friends, I will not willingly jail anyone. They asked what I wanted to be done. I had an idea - it involved stripping the boys naked, swiping a razor blade uncomfortably close to their genitalia, and telling them that certain vital parts of their anatomy would be cut off, scaring the boys until they cried, giving them a stern warning, letting them go and posting an officer at the dock. Then I realized that I had said these things out of rage and fear, and began to try to explain in Arabic my wish that the boys have access to some sort of vocational training which I thought they might benefit from. My explanation in Arabic was significantly less correct than the English here, but the officers understood, laughed and said that I was certainly creative. One suggested- jokingly (I think, I hope) that if I weren’t an American, I might consider a job with the interior ministry. Oh, Egypt. Really, one of the most effective interior ministries as these things go, and I do not mean this in a good way either.

And of course, they said, they could not let me go down to the bus station alone after so much drama on the dock. 4 of them drove me, and as I sat in the back of the big black car, I felt the sort of nakedness that one senses when one is the only person in the car not packing heat. On one hand, I don’t like guns, but on the other, I felt very, very safe under the protection of scary and powerful security officials.

And I was off to Al-Gouna for work. I learned something interesting. Hotel employees are very nice to you when you pay them a lot of money, but hotel employees are extremely nice to you when you are there to write a several page feature on their spa in a tourism magazine.

Al Gouna was a beautiful, but very strange place. Even the trash collectors told me "good morning" in English. It barely felt like Egypt and I missed speaking Arabic the whole time I was there.

I was actually quite ill, but could not have picked a much better place to convalesce, and was given a suite just steps from the perfect beach, and every few hours someone would pop by offering bowls of fresh fruit, asking what type of grilled fish I would like for dinner, offering a tour around the resort by its botanist. I sat in my plush white robe on the beach, a glass of fresh pomegranate juice by my side, a copy of Marjane Satrapi's "Embroderies" in my hand, and had to wonder, how does life work out like this?

The spa - oh yes, the spa, that's why I had to endure all of this hardship. The therapist who worked on me, named Piyamas – like pyjamas, with an I, but called Nim, had been brought in from training at a renowned spa in Thailand for the last 5 years. Nim told me what she would do to me: a foot massage, a full body scrub, a seaweed mask, a scalp and facial massage followed by something intriguing called “Ibu’s Secret.” I didnt know Ibu, but much like Victoria, I was sure she had a lot that I would benefit by knowing.Nim mixed up a paste of ginger, seasame seeds, honey and other sticky stuff and spread it all over my entirely naked body. Her hands were like butter. She actually exfoliated my breasts, and girls, if you've never had your breasts exfoliated by a professional, I give it my highest reccomendation.

Nim followed me into the shower and then washed myback - oh, was I ready to die laughing, but I tried to maintain the zen-like state that the atmosphere, I think, was meant to inspire. When I got out of the shower, Nim dried me off - that dear, dear sweet woman, she did. Slowly, she poured a warm, spicy tumeric oil down my back and rubbed me deeply until the only thought I was capable of forming was that I sincerely wished that Nim could be my permanent companion as we traipsed across the globe while repeating this ritual daily. I put on the robe again, and I thought about her life: living in pagoda-like residences around the world, spending her days up to her elbows in aromatic pastes, making people feel good. For a scant minute, I considered the profession. She prepared the tea: first, bran was put into a piece of cheesecloth with cuttings of fresh ginger. Both were steeped in a teapot for several minutes. This stuff, I kid you not, was the nectar of the Gods.

It was difficult to return to the real world, a cold, unfeeling place where we must do unthinkable things like dry our own bodies after a shower and drink our tea from uninspiring little bags. I crawled into my bed, skin completely soft, muscles as relaxed as pudding, into the very clean white sheets, the sound of the surf pounding the sand, and could not, for the life of me, fall asleep. It seemed ridiculous, but I longed for the noise and the filth of Cairo. Its in my blood obviously, the need for almost constant noise, the call to prayer, the fights in the street, the snorting of the donkeys, the clang of the man on the bike selling propane, and the distinctly different clang of the man selling cold juice from a metal drum slung over his back.

Back in Cairo, there were more protests. I dread the all-but assured crotch grab that almost all of the foreign females who go to protests receive. The worst one I ever got was at an opposition protest in an area downtown. I and my friend Charlie, from the magazine where I work, walked down to see a march. Ayman Nour’s security detail took us in a horse and carriage where we rode down to the press conference with a bunch of his security men. We arrived at the march. I was wearing a skirt to my ankles and a long-sleeved shirt. We sweated bullets as we stood in the darkening Cairo night, in the middle of a huge throng of humanity. At almost all of the larger government protests in Cairo, women constitute usually less than 1% of the protesters.

My friend Charlie was standing right next to me. This appeared not to matter, since at one turn approximately 15 people grabbed me in the place where girls least like to be grabbed by people they don’t know, at exactly the same time. Such a small percentage of men over here would do this kind of thing, but this percentage seems somehow to always know where I am. In these cases, I've found, the best thing to do is to go find an old woman who everyone appears to know, and stand very close to her and pretend that you are somehow vaguely related. My friend Tara, a photographer, said that she often wished she could just take a picture of everyone’s hands simultaneously groping her – what a shot that would be. After these events, we go have a beer at the Greek Club.

A bunch of people came over to have drinks on the houseboat last night. We stood on the footbridge, and as we crossed onto land and laughed, under the pressure of this shaking, the bridge halfway collapsed- some of our feet were actually in the water - nothing fell into the Nile except my phone, but I yelled out to Mohammed that the phone had dropped into the Nile, he ran down, dove heroically into the water, dug around the sticky bottom of the river's floor, extracted the muddy appliance from the miasma, and this morning, it actually worked.

Oh it’s so warm here, I’m ready to move to Beirut. But I love this place, I feel so alive, I’m doing something that interests me, my Arabic is still awful, but I’m trying- and that's all any of us can do when we are involved in anything, just wake up and try and try and try.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Cairo Dispatch 8.9.05- Drama on the Ferry, Midnight Ride at the Pyramids, Fayoum

2006-05-15T19:11:00.000+03:00

The so-called Fayoum portraits, one of which is to the right, date to the first 3 centuries after the death of Christ, are the largest body of ancient portable paintings to ever have survived. They were very lifelike funery masks illustrated with great detail so that the soul could recognize their body. They are portraits of individuals, believe to have been painted during their lifetimes, sometimes framed and displayed in the homes, and later were sawn to fit inside the sarcophagus where they were placed on top of the face within the mummy wrappings to preserve the memory of the deceased. The interesting thing about the Fayoum Portaits is that reflect some of the artistic standards of the ruling Roman empire, but were used by Egyptians for a quinessentially Egyptian practice- mummifcation.

The Sharm el-Sheikh bombing killed, according to hospital figures, 88 people (initial government total estimated 64). The London tube bombing killed 52 people. Both were terrorist incidents that killed innocent people, awful events which compromise the security of our world. However, if my reading of the NYTimes every day is any indication, in the United States, you heard about the Sharm bombing one day, and the next day it was off the radar. We will hear about the London bombing for months, as if somehow people expect bombs to go off over here because we are in the Middle East. This makes me want to cry. What if people kept saying they didn't want to go to New York City because of 9/11.

On the same morning, a small bomb went off near the pyramids. This news was kept quiet in Cairo. The government claimed that a collector of antiques had a pile of junk which, for unexplained reasons, just blew up. Then unidentified police sources suggested that a nail bomb went off prematurely, severely maiming the man handling it. In the hospital, he is reportedly too injured to be interviewed. Two days after the bombing, I went down to the pyramids. You know, if a place has just been bombed, wait a half a day and that's the safest time I think you can go there.

The municipal ferry that I ride has been the site of a lot of drama as of late. It’s so close to my house, I’m absolutely the only foreigner, I practice my Amaya and I love crossing the Nile by boat every morning. It's crowded, full of people, chickens, baskets of bread, a lot of cigarettes - thus, the best way to ride, in my opinion, is to sit on the front of the boat with the fishermen. I walked up to the front and wait to leave the dock when the driver came up and told me that I was not allowed to ride up front. "Why" I asked in Amaya. "Because you are not a man," he said. "Oh, but I am, you just can't see," everyone laughed. The driver was not amused. I told him, that if he wanted me to go down underneath, he had to make the 25 men on the front of the boat go too. He hollared out for them to descend. A grumble was heard from everyone, and one teenage boy absolutely refused to go down. I stood on top, I wasn't going to leave. A fight between the driver and the young boy ensued, fists flying. The muhaggiba ladies stared me down. But, they let me ride on top now, and I’ve even gotten other girls to go with me as well.

I had the first really scary travel experience of my life. And of course, it happened on the ferry too. I went down to catch the ferry as I usually do, and the dock was empty but for half a dozen troublesome teenage boys who began to yell out really inappropriate things to me. I called my boss, who didn’t answer, and just pretended to be having a conversation. Two of the boys came up and pinched me and then ran away. I asked them - "If someone did this to your sister, would that be okay? This is not appropriate, and you know this!" They came back, kept saying really really crude things in Arabic, and looked as if they were going to grab me in earnest. I was saved by the arrival of the ferry - which I jumped on to before it had actually reached the dock. I descended the stairs and took a seat next to the driver, when the scariest of the boys jumped down the stairs, grabbed my arm, leaving several scratches, and seemed intent on pulling me out of the boat. I don’t readily admit this, but I was scared and I screamed, and a huge melee ensued where the old men on the boat fought with the boys. The meanest scariest one had 3 guys sitting on his back. Oh, it gave me bad dreams, and I had many friends offer to beat the crap out of all of the boys, but I went to the ferry the next day, apologized to the driver, and sat there sharpening a steak knife, and told the dock master that the boys were trouble and shouldn’t be allowed to swim off the dock again and I haven’t seen them since. I think I’m now quite infamous in my neighborhood and really I don’t want to be, and jeesh, I wear appropriate clothing every time I walk around Imbaba, and what else am I supposed to do?

My friends Ahmed and Razan, etc, movie came out and it’s not that great, but it is the most widely distributed movie in Egypt right now, playing in every large theatre. It was a strange feeling, indeed, to be chatting with Razan the other day as I drove in a taxi over the busiest bridge in Cairo, into Midan Tahrir, the center of downtown - when I saw a gigantic movie poster, covering the whole side of a massive building, with a picture of Razan. "Ya sharmuta," I said, "I’m looking at a poster of you in Midan Tahrir." "Oh, I hope that they airbrushed my ass in that one." Tee he, the girl has serious joie de vivre.

Over 105 for the past few days, even humid, I was sitting in my room reading, the pages of my book began to stick together, my chapstick having long ago having melted into an unidentifiable mush. Near midnight, how could humans be expected to bear this for very long? To the pyramids, I thought, for a midnight ride. It was my first time to ride in the darkness, and it would be fine, my friend Ania said - we could steer our course by the light of the moon and the stars! This seemed like a fine and very romantic idea until we actually arrived in the desert and noticed that clouds and drafts of sand had brought the visibility down to a foot or two. Added to this that I was given a huge and quite wily young horse who seemed rather eager to shake me off of him while neighing deafeningly. I didn’t get thrown, but just barely held on using pretty much every muscle I posses, my hands clutching his long black mane, my legs squeezing the horses’ sides for dear life. We trotted through the dark alleys that surround the stables, then past the graveyards and the huge fields of bersim (greens eaten by donkeys and camels), the graceful, arching white-barked willow trees that surround them, then, as we entered the desert, raced through the blackness down mountainous dunes, through valleys and then up inclines of sand, until behind one, the tips of the pyramids came into view, lit up and glowing with the lights of the city far behind them. How I longed to just keep riding far, far into the desert. At the same time, it was rather intense- you couldn’t see a thing, just hear the silence, the howl of the sand blowing around, the plaintive wail of mysterious creatures in the inky darkness. My heart pounded, I felt we would certainly fall off of something, or that the horse would trip on a pile of rocks, but we returned sweaty and uneventfully.

We walked through the back alleys back toward the main road when a family invited us in for tea. The grandfather, parents, children and children's children all sat out on the porch of the quite large house near the sphinx. The wife, an Egyptologist for the national museum, and her daughter, 15, wore sleeveless mid-calf grazing sundresses and bare heads. This is rare to see in Cairo. The family was shocked that Ania and I were not married, and agreed to find husbands for us. We laughed and laughed, but this was a great and clearly very noble family and the patriarch was quite adamant. He said that they would do it in the Egyptian way, and since we didn't have family over here, the wives would manage the selection and he would do the blessing and throw the big party and the rest. They asked us for criteria. I, quite jokingly, gave my ridiculous list of requirements, but Ayman got on the phone- he thought he might know someone. My young, sweet friend Ania said in a honeyed and innocent tone that she only wanted a boy who loved to ride horses and spoke not only Arabic but yes, Polish too. But she was serious. She said, no one speaks that combination of languages, and I want my children to speak both, and if you can find me that boy, and he is nice, I will marry him.

We talked and talked for hours and I felt terrible, but I began to yawn and I couldn’t help it. I was covered in sand and horse-sweat, I smelled not dissimilar to the camels around us, it was near 4am and I am still not used to staying up all night. A young granddaughter asked me, in Amaya, what time I went to bed. What I think is a quite respectable, 2:30am, was met with laughs from the family, who judged that I wasn’t quite as Egyptianized as I thought I was, was I? The grandfather gave me a great compliment, though. About a hundred times a day, people tell me that I speak very, very good Arabic, which is something beyond an exxageration, let's call it perhaps a bold-faced lie. The old man looked at me solemnly and barely whispered "Your Arabic is...okay."

A combination of factors, including something which must be a close relative of dysentery, caused me to lose 12 pounds in 10 days, which is sort of fun, because I haven’t weighed this little since my post-malarial days in Malawi, but is also not fun, because my pants will not stay up. Sure I feel just god awful, but if the situation permitted it, I would be very happy to walk around in my bikini all day in my quite skinny state.

One of boys I work with at the magazine and I decided to embark on an adventure the next day - perhaps, we thought, we would head to Memphis, ancient capital of Egypt, site of the largest cemetery in the entire world, less than an hour away. After a morning spent in a burning, steaming hot, very dusty bus station with no sign of any busses to Memphis, we just jumped on the first bus we saw - to Fayoum, an oasis several hours away. It was beautiful, to leave the craziness of Cairo, first to be in the desert for hours, drive past a stunning cemetery in the desert that was dozens of miles long, and then to happen upon the oasis, thousands of palm trees, green fields, donkeys, mango trees, no tourists. Not thinking that we were going to wind up at an inland lake, we had not brought bathing suits. We went to a beach club, and I befriended a family who invited us out on a boating trip for the sunset. The water was rough - at some point, we lost an oar momentarily and the young mothers looked at me, quite frightened as the boat listed precariously. "Do you know how to swim?" they asked. "Yes," I replied and they handed me a small baby. I realized their point - not only did they not know how to swim, but their huge black veils could have drowned even the best of swimmers. As is always the case, we got back okay, a little drenched, a little bit scared, but all intact.

On the way back to Cairo, we sat in the back of a small covered truck, two benches on either side of the back, an oil lamp revealing the faces of a dozen women, young and old, who were from Fayoum, and thus quite excited to be able to talk with a foreigner. Henri, the boy who was with me, does not speak much Arabic, so it was fun to practice my Amaya with the women and make up a fun story that Henri would not be able to understand. "No, he is not my husband, he is my brother. He is married to a Mongolian woman," I said. "She is very pretty." "Does he have children," they asked, "And where is his ring?" "He lost his ring in the lake here in Fayoum. Every week, we return here to try to find it. Since he lost the ring, he has become crazy. His wife wants to leave him. He is also impotent, and that is the reason that they can’t have children. My poor, poor brother." I felt pretty bad - the women were genuinely concerned for him. I patted his hand and shook my head with feigned sadness. I didn’t tell Henri what I had said until we got off the bus. He was not amused, but I will be laughing for weeks. Arabic is so much fun.

Last weeks issue of Cairo Magazine was banned by the government censors because of one line in a story quoted a man who was not complimentary of the president. Our editor, Matthew, decided to distribute the magazine anyway. That night, I went to see a movie with Charlie, who wrote the offending article. We watched "The Embassy in the Building" a new Egyptian film about a man who comes home one day to find out, to his great horror, that the Israeli Embassy has moved in next door. This causes him endless problems - the most hilarious, I thought - when he brought a prostitute home and she found out his neighbor was the Israeli Embassy - she refused to, well, keep him as a customer. The whole time, in my complete naivete, I was half waiting for the police to grab Charlie and possibly me, but he looked at me uncomprehendingly and just laughed.

After such a dramatic few days, I was quite ready to head out of town - as I thought about this and sat out on my deck to drink a beer, a friend, editor of a tourism magazine called. "Ria, I have a favor to ask of you. Would you be able to leave this weekend, go down to this oasis and stay the weekend in a 5 star hotel and spa, and get a bunch of spa treatments, and then write a review for me?" I didn’t have to think for long before I answered. "Si, senor, si."

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Cairo Dispatch 7.23.05 - Bombings this morning in Sharm el-Sheikh

2006-05-15T18:56:00.000+03:00

To the right, the port of Sharm al-Sheikh in the Sinai of Egypt. Sharm was bombed this morning and 88 people are dead.

Bombing in Sharm al-Sheikh

Multiple bombs hit the Egyptian resort of Sharm Al-Sheikh shortly after 1am on this morning, killing 88 people and wounding more than 150- primarily Egyptians, also British, Kuwaitis, Swedes and others. A terrorist group with ties to Syria and Egypt, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades claimed responsibility for the attacks, but this information has not yet been verified. This is the largest terrorist attack in Egypt since the 1997 massacre at Luxor, and since there are only preliminary death tolls coming out, today's attacks may surpass the numbers dead in that attack. The events of Luxor devastasted the tourism economy here, and tourism is one of the most important aspects of the Egyptian economy. We can expect that the attacks at Sharm will have the same effect.

Many of my Egyptian friends have family who are in Sharm right now, and are having trouble contacting them. It is an awful, awful day for Egypt. I am in Cairo, so do not worry. And you should also know that I am not the kind of girl who goes to Sharm. It's by far the most, most touristy place in this country, and everyone speaks English there! Give me Cairo any day! But above all, and I stress this, don't let news like this prevent you from visiting Egypt or any other place. When people become scared of terrorists, the terrorists win.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Cairo Dispatch 7.22.05 Lamb Slaughter in My Garden, and I Finally Swim in the Nile

2006-05-15T18:36:00.001+03:00

(Yes, the Nile is polluted. No, I am not too scared to swim there.)

The other morning, as I sat in my garden under the palm trees next to the Nile with my tutor Said, discussing classical Arabic grammar and eating ripe plums in the shade, a fluffy white lamb sauntered by. What? A lamb? I yelled out for the boab.

(Digression for the sake of explaining Egyptian culture- There is a boab in almost every building in Cairo. He is almost always a man who lives under your stairs, but my boab, Mohammed has a little shack behind the palm trees in my garden. In a way that seems entirely strange given my American upbringing, Mohammed is practically a full-time servant. He does everything from running to the store for groceries, to standing at the edge of my dock to tie and untie the ropes before and after my daily row. Many of my female friends here agree that Mohammed is the hottest boab in Cairo.

Mohammed said that my landlord Wa'il, a high-ranking interior ministry official, would hold a slaughter two days later in my backyard. Of course I was invited for the barbecue that would follow. The next day just around sunrise as I lay under my mosquito net, I was awoken - for the lamb had come into my room and "baahed" only a few inches from my face. I don’t know if I have ever been awoken in quite such a startling way, but I calmed myself with the knowledge that I was not the first person to be woken up by a lamb, nor would I be the last. Said lamb shat in my doorway and moved on to other lamb things. I told Mohammed that we should call the lamb Naguib (in reality, I first suggested that we give the lamb the time-honored name of Mohammed, which is when I found out that Muslims name people, but not farm animals after the prophet Mohammed (PBUH)), and that we should at least be nice to him while he sat in death row among the jacaranda trees, even if he had crapped on my floor.

I avoided Signore God’s calls all week, but I did go out with him a few days ago. It was just so very warm on the awema, and how I longed for an interesting talk and air conditioning. I do not know how much humans are meant to go out at 1am, eat dinner at 3am, and return home near sunrise, and my body is still not used to it. But all of SG's Lebanese friends seem to think that this schedule is so normal, an absolutely daily occurrence, and come on, who am I to be the wallflower American? I have to represent.

Sitting next to him at dinner was certainly an experience, as multiple flawless and stunningly adorned girls approached him and whispered, within earshot of me, what some might term vaguely inappropriate offerings to him in Arabic and in French. Who were these girls, I wondered, “prostitutes?” “No,” he answered, “but not far off.” How did I like the filet mignon? He asked. It was scrumptious. Within minutes, a second one lay in front of me, perfectly rare.
SG's Egyptian friends tell me that he is the most Egyptian person they have ever met, and his Lebanese friends tell me that no one is more Lebanese than SG. With him having grown up in Europe, and with Egypt and Lebanon being so different, how could this be true?

We are certainly a study in contrasts. At the pool, I dutifully apply SPF 45 and wear a hat, while SG rubs oil, SPF 4 if there is any SPF at all, to his already deeply tan skin. I cover up a lot more here than I would in the States and wear no jewelry, and SG wears his shirts unbuttoned halfway – ventilation, you know - always enough to show the huge gold cross that identifies his religion. The other night, as I ate a lovely bowl of raspberries for dessert, SG poured a half cup of sugar over his already very sweet mountain of Lebanese custard. I tasted it and thought that all of my teeth might drop out and my head would explode. I study and SG shops and parties - I don’t understand how we are friends. I told him about how awful I felt for the lamb who I now felt so much affection for. Did I want to keep him as a pet? Just say the word; he would talk with my landlord.

There is a lot of action on the street these days. Every Thursday near sunset, the Kifaya (Enough!) government opposition movement stages a protest downtown. At Cairo Magazine, we head down to the protest and afterward, dozens of journalists head down for a communal dinner at the Greek Embassy Club. Sometimes, the attendees at dinner will show off fragments of police shields that have been smashed in (relatively minor) clashes with government forces, or on rare occasions, there is a splash of blood on someone's shirt. This past week, we celebrated the birthday of a reporter for the LA Times. His editor had cakes made - perfect reproductions of a bomb, a bottle of beer, and a pack of Marlboros- the stuff of Hossem's life.

I am beginning to understand more about Imbaba. In the 1990's Mubarak's government came to my neighborhood sending between 14,000 and 15,000 troops when Islamists claimed that the area was now an autonomous region called the "Islamic Republic of Imbaba." The mosques were cleared out, hundreds were arrested and dozens were killed. It’s still a decidedly, we say shaabi neighborhood – in some ways not even remotely Westernized and I’m actually always relieved because it’s what I naively think of as “real” Egypt.

Days went by, and Naguib the lamb remained among the bushes. "You don’t want the lamb to die, do you?" Mohammed said and I nodded in assent. I described, in Amaya, how it might be nice to have a lamb in the garden, just to run around and play and leave if he wanted to. That evening near sunset, as I sat on my balcony and read, Mohammed came and beckoned me to the garden, where a tall and ancient man with a gallabiya and turban stood, surrounded by half a dozen baby lambs who galloped around the garden awkwardly. "Which one would you like?" the man asked me. I was embarrassed- I hadn’t meant that I actually wanted a lamb, and I wouldn’t take one anyway, since I was leaving for Beirut in a month (this was one of the times I learned that in this region, I should be careful what I ask for, because people will always take it literally and bring you ANYTHING.) The man wrapped the smallest baby lamb around his neck, and had the group follow him up the stairs where they solemnly filed out. “Oh, but they are beautiful lambs,” I yelled out, feeling awful that the man had led the lambs for over a mile in order to bring them to me.

Naguib was entering his final hours. I brought some hideously expensive French salad greens and with great sadness poured them out on the ground in front of him, but he ignored them and munched on the dirty grass instead. The next day, Naguib was killed and I couldn’t bring myself to eat him. My tutor, Said, was so affected by the plight of Naguib that he said he has stopped eating any meat. When he told me this, I marveled. Said is now an agnostic, vegetarian Egyptian poet, and I joked to him that he might be the only one.

Cairo is around 110F and often more right now and I don’t have air conditioning. It's a character-building exercise, I keep telling myself. The incredible heat often leads me to seriously contemplate jumping off the balcony into the Nile. This morning, suffering from the highest temperatures I’ve seen so far, combined with the effects of a rather late and cocktail-heavy evening prior, I walked into the living room and convinced 2 of my roommates to jump in with me. Bilharzia[1] be damned. It's hot and I live on a river – how can I NOT swim? We did – it could not have felt any better and as I swam in the strong current, I tried to block out the mental picture of the dead, bloated camels I had seen floating along it’s course. The fish were plentiful and I figured, if a little fish can survive in the Nile, so can the Ria.

I’m riding more now, and I can post almost competently and I was offered a job at a stable, which seemed like a good idea for about 5 minutes. The other day, as my horse ran at full speed near the Sphinx, my friends and I saw the members of the Ahly soccer team – Egypt’s most successful – running up and down the dunes in the unbelievable, unbelievable heat. And I don’t think anywhere, anywhere feels as free as riding through the desert at full speed on a horse, with no sound and no people – it still gives me the chills every time I go! And what else in my life can I say that about?

Until the next Dispatch,
Ria

[1] Bilharzia (schistosomiasis) is a parasite that you can contract from swimming in infected bodies of water. Long after you contract the disease, you can succumb to liver failure as a result of the parasites. Centers for Disease Control Fact Sheet – schistosomiasis/bilharzia-http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dpd/parasites/schistosomiasis/factsht_schistosomiasis.htm#what

Cairo Dispatch 7.14.05 Signore God, Birqash Camel Souq, Still Working on the Arabic.

2006-05-09T00:49:00.001+03:00

Top: this is my Lebanese movie star friend, Razan Moghrabi, one of the most fun girls I've ever met. She has had her own tv show, titled Razmania, for several years.

Below, Birqash Camel Souq, the largest camel market in the world, picture courtesy of the blog, en Francais, http://sylvielasserre.blogs.com)

Cairo is never one to deprive me of an adventure.
Every week, I go to have coffee with Matt's dry cleaner, Nabil. He doesn’t speak English, and gives me all of the gossip of the neighborhood bil-Amaya – in colloquial Arabic. A couple of days ago I rolled out of bed and, still sleepy-eyed, took the ferry over the Nile to bring Nabil my dirty clothes. A cute couple came up and joined Nabil and I at our table outside. The pair, he, an Egyptian film director and his feisty Marxist Italian producer girlfriend, asked me to come over for a drink at their apartment. The next thing I knew, I was eating dinner with a table of Lebanese singers and movie stars of whose stardom I was completely ignorant. I sat next to one of the more well-known of them, a stunning tv show host cum actress named Razan who had just completed her first film.

Girls at other tables were trembling and whispering her name into calls on their cell phones. Razan kept me laughing for hours. At one point, talking to Ahmed the film director, in a voice loud as day she demanded "Ahmed, look at my breasts and look at Ria's." From across the table, he began to choke on his soup. "They are essentially the same breasts, but I paid $10,000 for mine and Ria got hers for free, a wonderful gift from God." All of the other tables stared at us, I just turned red and looked at my shoes.

A tall, swarthy and quite cute boy came over and sat at the end of the table. He was obviously an interesting case. A Lebanese/Egyptian Coptic Christian who had grown up in Paris and London. He changed the language he spoke without pause depending on who he was speaking with - English to Egyptian colloquial, to Italian, to French to Lebanese colloquial - and he spoke Fusha to me, because he found out that I was studying Arabic and said he might as well speak Arabic with me if that was what I came to Egypt foranyway. When it was close to 6am, Ahmed and Miguella the Italian stood up to take me home. Said boy then asked that he take me home instead. This brought on quite a scene from two other girls, who demanded that he take THEM home. We all stood in the street, the girls screaming at him in their low cut silk dresses, long expertly bleached hair cascading down their backs, huge dangling diamond earrings, impossibly high heels. Let's call him one of his friend's nickname for him, Signore God, was there in his white linen suit, and I with my dirty flip flops and unwashed hair in a ponytail. Oh, I wish that I had a picture of this and so many things that have happened in my life, and I will admit that I was perhaps more fascinated by the spectacle than I should have been.

He called one morning and asked if he could take me swimming at least for a few hours. It was SO hot in Cairo, I knew that Razan and Miguella would be there, so I agreed. He came to pick me up. It was quite a scene, again, as he pulled up in my very shaabi neighborhood with all of its donkeys and unpaved roads, in a brand new cherry red Porsche. I don’t know if a carlike this has ever been to Imbaba and I just had to laugh. He came down through the garden to my houseboat to get me, and when we ascended the stairs to the street, dozens of the people from my neighborhood had gathered around the car, not to oogle it, but rather, because they wondered what his intentions were with me. One old womanI often talk with who sells tissues on the corner yelled out with genuine concern to ask if I were okay.

We sped off way way way beyond the speed limit. Who am I kidding? There is no speed limit in Cairo. But felt crazy, to drive through all of the bustling streets, sharing lanes with donkey carts and overcrowded busses, and then on the highway, past the city into the desert in a convertible going maybe 100 miles an hour. SG laid out for me his ideal scenario that Egypt again by governed by its Coptic minority. There are no reliable population statistics, but the CIA reports that Egypt is composed of 94% Muslims (mostly Sunni) and 6% Coptic Christians. I asked him if he had perhaps had the time to read up on instances of a small ethnic or religious minority ruling a government. It hadn’t worked out so hot for, say the Tutsi's in Rwanda for example, and in his own Lebanon, well, there were problems there too.

We stopped at a lovely villa in the desert, an expansive pool in the backyard, surrounded by palm trees, and a gaggle of Lebanese beauties in their teeny-tiny rhinestone-encrusted bikinis. SG and I talked at length. He was confounded by the fact that, as an American, I could accurately quote some dates and military leaders related to the Lebanese civil war. Anyone who says they really understand this war is probably lying- its an unbelievable mess, I don't think many Lebanese even understand it, but a good read of "Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon" by Robert Fisk is a book in English that gives one a pretty decent idea at least of the extent of the crisis in that country from a (decidedly liberal, but not to be discounted) journalist who spent decades in the region.

What did he think of (Egyptian President) Mubarak, I asked. "Oh, he's okay for the time being, and of course, Mrs. Mubarak (the First Lady) is a dear woman, why, we just had dinner with her earlier this week," he said nonchalantly.

SG wanted ice cream. He let me drive his car to the store, a route to which required driving the wrong way down the road on a highway. "Just drive as fast as you want, the police won’t stop anyone in my family." And then "Really, when I get a little bit ofmoney, I like to just buy a new car," he said as effortlessly as a girl might describe buying a new book or a lipstick. Then he leaned over said quite earnestly. “Ria, have you heard of this amazing band, I think they are American, it’s called…Journey.” Every time I have seen him, he is driving a new car and it always matches his shirt. Boy is that just weird.

He asked what I missed about America. My sisters and friends, the ability to walk down the street without everyone staring at me, and bacon, in that order, I said. He got on the phone to the kitchen in the nearby resort. "There is no bacon in the kitchen? Somewhere in this country, sir, there is a pig, and I suggest that you go and find it." He said in French. I grimaced. I wanted bacon, but I was not impressed. I sat on a float in the pool and he insisted on cutting my meat and personally feeding me a plate of beef carpaccio and arugala. I consider myself a girl relatively open to new experiences, but boy, was that strange.

All of his friends thought that I was genuinely crazy, I think. I described the events of the day before. I had ridden out in a flatbed truck to the famous Birqash souq, the largest camel market in the world - where thousands and thousands of camels had each of their right frontlegs bent at the knee joint and tied back on themselves to keep the animals from running away. I had sat in a stall for hours with a Sudanese camel trader who explained to me in Arabic all about what differentiated a valuable camel from an invaluable one as he walked from animal to animal in their stalls, showing me the bottom of a hoof here and the sign of diseased gums here, pointing out their attributes. I thought it was just amazing - the Egyptian camels looked like what one might see in a zoo, but the Sudanese camels were several feet taller, just gorgeous and amazingly fast. The more I live, the more I realize I’m a girl who is equally happy in at a formal ball or at a malodorous camel market, drinking tea with the traders.

SG started to catch on to the things that I just found wierd. "Ria, I know you are American, you don’t have a class system, in fact, you probably think its just awful, and I don’t think its normal either - I grew up in France- where there is so much more egalitie and fraternite. However, in Cairo and in Beirut, that's just the way it is here, and being a Copt I’m a minority, and I cant really do anything but try to succeed within it."

My interest in SG quickly simmered down to just plain curiosity. I could certainly write volumes about what a piece of work he was. It was late, and I was bidden to the magazine the following morning, and so excused myself to go and call a taxi home. His cousins looked at me, agog, and called the limousine. When I pulled up in Imbaba in front of a group of niqabbed women and the ancient, toothless man who roasts corn on the sidewalk in front of my gate in this limo, with a fantastic bottle of champagne iced inside, my neighbors, well, I think they think I’m a high-end prostitute or something. So I went to the neighborhood sandwich shop yesterday just to let them know that I’m still a fuul and tammiya girl.

When I tell a taxi to take me to Imbaba, drivers seem very confused. Why would a foreigner EVER live in Imbaba (even though the houseboats are rented almost entirelyto foreigners). If you ask many Egyptian what is wrong with the place, they express a look of horror. I walk through the back alleys alot though, and I’m now convinced that its one of my favorite places in Cairo. There are no embassies and nary a foreigner in Imbaba, and for this reason, there are no police and there is no tourist industry. And instead of the common "Oh, I love you, please come here, what is your name, welcome to Egypt, I want to kiss you, are you married, you are beautiful," that I receive in most every other part of the city, the comments from Imbaba are restricted to "Good morning" and "Good evening.” I travel much of the time by water now. It's so great. I can wave my hand from my balcony and a felucca will pick me up in front of my bedroom door and take me right downtown. To travel from Zamalek to Imbaba late at night, I can either take a boat or a horse-drawn carriage.

My classes are going well. The second summer session began today. Of the 8 kids in my new class, 4 are doing their 3rd year of Arabic at Oxford, 1 had recently converted to Islam, and they came in chests all puffed out, ready to dazzle us all with their Arabic- and for all of the dour expressions on their pasty, ghostlike faces, the seeming great consternation apparent, I expected every one of them to be an Arabic whiz, but they are in fact lower than everyone in our class because we’ve been studying here intensively and that makes all of the difference. And the group slowly realized this and were not pleased to discover that this was the case. There is a boy who comes in to take our coffee orders during class, and when the first new boy went to say hello and place his order, the guy could not understand his high high Fusha at all. If you translated what he said, it could sound something like “Mightest thou, fair gentleman, goeth and fetch me a draught of water to slacken my thirst.”

Also in my class is a dapper old Scottish man who is the manager of the casino in the grand Cairo Marriott, which was originally a castle built for French Princess Eugenie when she came to watch the opening of the Suez canal. I love to sit at break on the balcony and have Turkish coffee with him. Oh the stories! Of the intrigue, the Saudi prostitutes, all of the rest of the stuff I haven’t seen.

When I first moved here, I was annoyed by so many things, and I couldn’t shake the continual thought in my head, that when one day, when I decided to return to America, I would breathe more easily, and delight in the freedom with which we are afforded as citizens and visitors and refugees in the United States. The longer I am here though, the more that I talk to people, the more I begin to realize that as thankful as I will be someday to regain all of the freedom which I have lost, I will almost definitely suffer from occasional and probably significant boredom. I was talking with an Upper Egyptian girl just this morning. She asked where I was from, and when I told her, Washington, DC, she gave a strange face. "Washington is nice - I mean, I liked Washington and LA and New York and everything, but aren’t you just bored there? All of the people go to sleep so early! The streets are so empty and quiet and clean- so many trees. How do you have any fun at all?" I understood her point. Here, we often go to dinner after midnight. Streets are never ever empty and no matter where one walks, you are greeted enthusiastically by children who ask you how you are doing and old men who stand up from their glasses of coffee to say hello. Because of this, not even the most decrepit alley is ever truly scary, because you can’t walk more than a foot without a little kid running out at any point even the very middle of the night. Parties - great parties, with families and children and dancers and singers, often on boats, last until almost sunrise every night of the week. There is a great club on the tip of the island across from my houseboat - every night, there is a mere 30 minutes between the point when the band stops playing and the sun comes up - and these are not club-kids. They are Saudi women in their black niqab with black gloves, multiple generations of families and couples on dates. As awful as this place is, as crowded and polluted and scary and repressed – it’s equally as wonderful – I’ve never been to a place anywhere with energy like Cairo. It’s just unbelievable.

Undoubtely, one of my favorite places to be right now is at AMERA[1], the refugee legal aid organization where I do some volunteer work. There's a great Egyptian receptionist there. She used to work in high-end luxury goods, but she just woke up and changed her mind one day and began to work with refugees. "And now, I wake up every morning THANKFUL. And I know I am helping people to LIVE! And what else would I ever NEED? That's just the kind of girl you need at the front desk of a place where 99% of the news coming in is absolutely miserable.

This afternoon, I met a beautiful 19 year old girl refugee named Kidi from Somalia, whose parents and sisters and direct relatives had all been killed. She had lived in Egypt for 2 years, studying English with singular devotion. In fact, her English was at such a high level after a year and a half that she was now translating for other refugees in preparation for their UNHCR[2] interviews. She intends to become a doctor. This very morning, she recieved a very rare clearance from the UN to be given permanent refugee status in the United States. I was the only American in the front of the office at the time and she sat down quietly in front of me and asked with her huge, bright eyes "What is it like in America?" And how could I answer this question? And could anyone, really? "Of course, all of the boys will fall in love with you, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be picky. But most of all, it will be difficult, it might take time, but in America, you really can become a doctor, or a teacher or anything, anything you want. And over and over, people will tell you that you CANT do things - that you aren’t smart enough or whatever, but no matter what, just don’t ever listen to them."

And, to you Americans, I hope when you come into contact with refugee communities in the United States, you can remember that there are people like Kidi out there. She's somewhere in Chicago beginning this fall.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

[1] Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance - http://www.amera-uk.org/egypt/index.html
[2] United Nations High Commission for Refugees - http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/home

Cairo Dispatch 7.3.05 Rowboat Adventures, Exotic Animal Market

2006-05-09T00:44:00.000+03:00

(The Imbaba Bridge, a short row from my houseboat. photo - www.planete-powershot.net)

I sit on my balcony and look at the Imbaba bridge (many say designed by Monsieur Eiffel) and at the gardens all around on the banks of the Nile. And at the end of my balcony our Egyptian fishing boat sits tied to the end of the awema. The vessel is certainly not pristine, but if it posesses anything, it's character - bright turquoise, with all manner of Allah-related invocations, evil eyes, painted flowers covering the hull.

Last weekend, a few friends and I took a picnic row around the island of Zamalek- an exercise which should take about 2 hours or so, however, the addition of cocktails and a lot of giggling lengthened the time of the trip considerably to around 5 hours. The sun was glorious, and the breeze just divine - I hitched up my skirt, until, gasp, my knees saw the sun for maybe their first time in Cairo. My friend Ania stripped down to a tank top. Oh, it was scandalous, but it felt so good. I was exultant for all of the quiet on the almost-empty Nile, and exclaimed rather prematurely that our humble boat might be the only place in Cairo where we wouldn't be sexually harassed. Not a moment later, a gaggle of Saudi's on jet skis began to make figure 8's around our boat- this lasted for nearly 30 minutes and they would not stop. After much screaming and cursing, in English and in Arabic, they finally relented. We floated past a restaurant where the waiters ran down to the shore, proffering towering plates of beautiful fish, vegetables and gravity-defying pastry. Ania could not resist - she rowed over - where we were told by the owner that we could have anything we wanted, for the small price of just one kiss. We rowed away fast and thought the madness had ended, but as we rounded the tip of the island, and slid under the busiest bridge in Cairo, we turned around and saw that at least 50 people were leaning over the railing above, yelling "You are beautiful!" "Welcome to Egypt!" A few sailboat owners spotted us and pulled up their anchors and soon a whole group were following us. So much for the quiet that day anyway. My friend Luke from the magazine surmised that Cairo might be fairly considered the Sexual Harassment Capital of the World. Even so, I love the place.

If there has been any point at which I have fallen in love with this city, though, it would have to have happened last week. I returned from classes before sunset and headed out in the boat with the London Symphony playing Scheherzade on my radio - I rowed down the other side of Zamalek, close to the shore, where among throngs of palm and jacaranda trees, whole floatillas of famlies lived in their boats, laundry hung out among the tree branches in the steamy air, the sun peaking out from in between the leaves, naked little children squealing as they waved at me before jumping into to the Nile. The water was empty as the sun slipped lower, the call to prayer echoed from every corner of the city. I rowed past incredible gardens of old villas, past the painters who waved from their perches at the top of the Iraqi embassy, past a sky the color of ripening peaches. And truly, the whole city felt as if it belonged to me then.

Sure, there are low points on the houseboat. For instance, the few days not long ago when a long, jangly rat decided he wanted to share my room with me. But overall, to sleep in my room is unbelievable. I leave all of the windows and doors completely open, and under my big white mosquito net, I read and watch the waves lap up very close to my bed. The fishermen sometimes row right past my window, look in, and bid me good morning or good night. And amazingly, the other night as I came in around 4am, I lay in bed to hear a felucca filled with young children, on a school night (!) having the time of their lives well, well past what I would consider to be bedtime.

My new neighborhood, Imbaba, has helped to improve my Arabic greatly. I’m not sure if any tourist has ever gone to Imbaba on purpose. No one speaks English. There is not much of interest, at least that I have found, and many people have told me that there is an unusually large contingent of the Gamiyat al-Islamiya in the middle of the place, though I’ve yet to see anything but poverty and a decent vegetable market. The one thing happening this week in Imbaba is a protest against the government, and with it being my neighborhood and all, I certainly intend on going just to watch.

There is a place called the Friday Market. I had not been, but I will surely return after this last weekends foray. I saw no tourists in the market and after a while I understood why. I was pinched repeatedly. And that was not fun. At one point, fed up, an offending pincher met up with the wrong end of my fist. I had been wanting to hit someone in the face that hard since the first time I learned to throw a real punch in boxing class. I admired my work as a bit of blood dripped from the offenders lip. His friends laughed at him and walked away. I hope it left a bruise.

I found a quite honorable old stall owner, Ahmed Hariri, to show my roommate Matt and I around. I did not see this, but Matt did. A teenage boy walked by and only saw me as he had almost passed by. He turned around and began to follow me. According to Matt, Ahmed ran around and grabbed the boy by the collar and threw him swiftly into a pile of discarded chicken parts. I don’t like to be harassed, but more awful than that is the idea that I would ever be scared off from seeing interesting things because of other people's strange ideas about sex and women. Woe unto you, the person who decides to cross my path in an unacceptable way. Prepare to be humbled.

I should have checked my dictionary before I left the house, as my misuse of several words confounded the friendly Cairenes who gathered to help me. Meaning to ask that I be shown the strange animals "hewayanat," I accidentally used the wrong word, "helwayat," which came out "I would like to see your strangest desserts." Why, the men asked me, would I come to the animal market if I wanted desserts? "You know, the dogs, the snakes, the lions, the BIG desserts, the DANGEROUS desserts!" I described excitedly. It took a lot of discussion to finally get my point across, and I was ushered to the more interesting corners of the massive souq. First, the dog room, a darkened pit under a bridge-high cement walls hung with massive chains, connected to them, pit bulls and emaciated great Danes, a feeling that at any moment, the men in the crowded place would throw down their Guinea (the Egyptian Pound, Egypt's currency) and start the Islamically haram (forbidden), but very practiced art of gambling. A row of black Labrador puppies were perched along the edge of a high cage and their owner gently passed a stick under their chins so that they all stood at attention as I passed by. It was interesting to watch – a few of the dog traders hit their dogs mercilessly, but the pigeon hawkers kissed their birds as gently as if they were their own newborn children. Its really random, you know, because if Egyptians saw the way Americans threw things at pigeons, they might gasp in the same way that an American would if they saw someone doing the same thing to a dog or a cat.

Behemoth older women, with missing teeth and clad in long black dresses and multiple headscarves, had black crows tied together by the claws, a dozen on each side of a rope, still flapping their wings, thrown over their shoulders as if they were a pair of ice skates. The women's voices, deep voices and high ones, all vying to be heard over the others, the prices of the crows going up and down, not much different from the floor of the NY Stock Exchange.

I was brought to the hidden stall of a venerable snake trader. "No pictures," he implored me, but I snapped a few anyway. He began to pull snakes out of bags, and I struggled for the Arabic, not knowing the word for "poisionous." Instead, I tried "If this snake eats my arm, will I become sick or die?" The man, with his long pomaded rings of hair and gold teeth, put the head of each of the snakes into his mouth before handing them to me to prove that they weren't a threat. As he unveiled various cages, amazing animals emerged – giant lizards and foxes and a baby hyena. I asked about a lion – how much to buy one? It could be done, later the next week, his cousin kept one in his villa near the Pyramids. I was tempted, I will admit. I felt a thump under me and jumped up a little. An apprentice reached under the chair for a large white canvas bag, and untied it to reveal an almost 3-foot long crocodile.

Oh Cairo is cool, and you could never become bored here.

Tomorrow, the Fourth of July in this crazy city, and hopefully a return to an America of sorts - or at least a bar-b-que where I will wear a sundress and drink Bud out of the can, as every Fourth of July should be.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Cairo Dispatch 6.19.2005- The Islamic Republic of Imbaba

2006-05-09T00:37:00.001+03:00

To the right is a picture of a houseboat in Cairo near mine. Mine is way cooler.

Officially, the level of my formal Arabic is now "intermediate." But this means very little in practical terms. Im missing great swaths of necessary vocabulary, which leads to interesting- at least for me - conversations. If one were to wear flip flops daily, as I do, Cairo tends to turn ones feet a definite shade of black, a black which does not come off in the shower. I went to the pharmacy seeking a pumice stone, not, however, having the faintest idea of the word for pumice stone in Arabic. The conversation went something like this. "Right now, my feet are not soft, but in the future, I want to have soft feet, and I think that there is a rock thing from the mountains, it makes feet soft." What kind of rock, they wanted to know. "There is a mountain, - there is a big one in Italy, there is a place in the middle of the mountain - there is an explosion from this place in the middle of the mountain. Stuff comes out of the top. This stuff (volcanic ash- who would ever know how to say that?) makes the thing that I want." They actually understood - thank god for the Egyptians- they will listen to anything I spit out, as malformed and ridiculous as it always is. And most of the time, I can spend about 5 minutes giving the explanation for something that the word would have conveyed in a syllable or two.

This past week I took a part-time job editing copy for Cairo Magazine. It was strange - as I sat in on the first editorial meeting, a cute, vaguely familiar-looking girl, a culture writer, walked in and introduced herself. I told her my name. I am often thankful for being the only person in the world I know with my name (save for Ria Temwanani Sibale, my goddaughter in Malawi). "Oh my God, Marian told me you were coming to Cairo!" Marian, of course, being my parent's next door neighbor's daughter. Although she had grown up in Rome, Ursula had even spent, I think, her sophomore year of high school in the same class as my sister in Arlington, Virginia.

I volunteered at World Refugee Day at AUC (Actually, side note, Condi Rice comes here to speak on campus tomorrow). Cairo has a lot of refugees, mostly Sudanese. I was assigned to the children's tent, and they demanded that they be read a story. I looked around and suppose that I should not have been surprised. In developing countries, I’ve noticed, at events that serve very poor children, resources are scarce, food is scant, but it seems that no matter what, there is always, always a big old box of children's Bible books donated by some- I’m sure, well-meaning missionary group. A girl named Islam picked one up and asked me in Amaya to read. I had a hunch, given all of the headscarves, what the answer would be, but I asked what religion the girls were. All Muslim. This would certainly be interesting. Jesus is recognized as an important prophet in the Islamic religion. He is, however, not the son of God and he is certainly not God. Mohammed is not God in Islam. He's the messenger of God, and it's an important job, but it’s not quite at the level of the son of God. So reading a story about Jesus isn't strange. But reading a story about how Jesus was the son of god, and about how that was the ONLY truth, would be. I skipped over a few words and when I got to the pages about Jesus being, at the same time, the son of God and God himself, I decided not to read them. The kids looked confused when a chunk of story seemed to be missing. I smiled and put the book down. "Who wants to paint?" I asked. I'm sure I could have just read it, but I’m the last person who wants to think that I might have inadvertantly converted a little kid and I have very little desire to have an angry refugee mother after me.

Perseverence or, heck, why not be honest, laziness paid off just in time. 48 hours before I was meant to leave my Zamalek apartment, my not incredibly nice Sudanese landlord cut all of the electricity off. A friend called, heard what had happened, rushed over to help me pack in the dark, and took me to her parents house in Maadi for a few days. After being only minutes away from taking a rather dingy apartment with a couple of Eastern European girls who spoke almost no English but perfect Arabic- by dint of their studying at Al-Azhar for the last few years (I would never have spoken English at home and that actually would have been wonderful), luck struck in the form of a perfect houseboat on the Nile. There is a large private garden in the back, with palm trees and several hidden spots with benches tucked around the perimeter. A deck wraps all the way around. My corner room has its own entrance to the balcony and two of its walls are composed almost entirely of floor to ceiling windows. The best part- the residents of my awema (houseboat) managed to get a rowboat for the summer and it’s tied to the end of our little dock and I can row to the grocery store and what's cooler than that?

Who do I live with? Just guess. Two boys from, where else, Arlington, Virginia who I just found out, also write sometimes for Cairo Magazine. This seems to be a theme this week.

I hope you all are well. Please write back. No, really and truly. No one ever writes back.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Cairo Dispatch 6.5.05 - Notes from the Sinai

2006-05-09T00:31:00.001+03:00

(To the right, a Bedouin boy from the Sinai, www.photosbymartin.com)

Regarding last weeks' protests. As you might have read, Egyptians went to the polls to vote in a referendum on Article 76 of the constitution which would allow for multi-party elections in the fall. Well, most of the Egyptians went. Well, hardly any went, if you want to know the truth. On the day of the vote, not surprisingly, opposition protests sprang up all over Cairo- followed by truckloads of cheerful "Mubarak, YES!" supporters who were dispatched to points all over the city. From Shariah Shagaret al-Dor - Matt's dry cleaner Nabil's analysis: the opposition protests, organized by, who else? the Jews. Ahmed the police captain: the American government is paying protesters to show up. Momon, the juice store manager in Midan Tahrir: the Israelis again. Very rare is there ever an alternate possibility suggested by a regular Egyptian.

The other morning as I headed to my final final exam, in the middle of one of the busiest intersections of Cairo, what else should greet my approach to school than a perhaps 15 foot tall stand-up cut-out of this nation's president - trimmed in hot pink flashing lights, his arm raised in victory. If this kind of thing doesn’t inspire confidence, what will, I ask you?

At the Arabic Language Institute’s farewell dinner held atop Persian rugs placed over some of the only grass present just off perhaps the busiest intersection of Cairo, the Dean’s speech included a quite interesting bit – that as we left the AUC, with so few Westerners actually understanding the Middle East, she thought that we were “The only hope left for the world.” She was American, but I sensed that her outlook on life had been inundated by the Egyptian proclivity toward drama.

Bear in mind, as interesting or uninteresting as these notes home may be, most of my time is not spent walking through protests, talking politics with my neighbors, or taking fun trips around this country, but rather, I enjoy a rather close relationship with my textbooks and my dictionary, who see me more than anyone else.

I went to Dahab, a beach town on the Gulf of Aqaba reachable after a 10 hour bus ride through the desert. I traveled with a pair of Norwegian girls who speak better Arabic than I, and I could not have had much more fun. My pansiyon boasted all of the juice you could drink and a stunning view of the mountains of Saudi Arabia for around $7 a night. In Dahab, there’s not much going on - spectacular diving, but mostly just Pink Floyd wafting from the speakers of oceanside bars, hordes of Australian vagabonds with braided hair and patchouli oil pretending to be deodorant, Italians with their funny shoes and capagallo bicycle hats, the Japanese with their expensive purses and endless cigarettes.

I laid next to the beach for days - with my snorkel next to me, and every time I became too hot, I slipped it on and dove into the water - hundreds of kinds of fish, flouresent coral formations, perfectly clear water - at one point, I was smack in the middle of a school of thousands of tiny blue fish who very strangely let me swim with them for a while. Okay, so I followed them, but they didn't shy away. Tiny Bedouin girls with bleached out hair came and offered jewelry, and on the second day I was there, a little 8 year old wearing black higab came up and started talking to me.

In the great Egyptian tradition, we shared my breakfast. She asked me if I could watch her things, did a quick scan of the boardwalk for her mother or sisters, and proceeded to unveil and then strip down to a threadbare and thusly almost translucent panties. I couldn’t help but be awed by the spectacle - higabbed on the street, practically naked on the beach. I took a walk to the real town behind Dahab - the place where the people who work in Dahab actually live. That's always the most interesting part of any resort like place to me - to see where the town behind the town is. In Dahab, I walked past the end of the boardwalk, through groves of palm trees, no more hotels, just beach and then came upon what was really a village, nestled in a valley between mountain peaks, a few hundred houses, a new mosque, goats roaming, naked children diving into the water, something that looked perhaps even middle class, nice little houses with fresh paint, bicycles, none of the intense overcrowding and incredible dirt of Cairo.

We took a trip to St. Catherine's Monastery, supposedly the oldest continuously operating monastery in the world, perched at the base of the mountain where Moses ascended, spent 40 days, and then revealed the 10 Commandments. We left the pansiyon around 11pm and drove through the desert where we were meant to be met by guides. Instead, we were unceremoniously dropped at around 1am in the middle of a caravan saray, where camels and their owners bedded down for the night. I and four others started off up the trail, ducking camels as they appeared out of the blackness and quickly becoming lost. Hiking in the desert in the middle of the night without a local, I found, was not something that I'd term advisable. A man started laughing at us, you will be lost, you will not find your way, he yelled from his perch inside the mouth of a cave high above us. I marched on determined - and he followed. Later on, I would be glad that he did, because I have no idea where we would have wound up if he hadn't.

I am probably more impressed with the Bedouin than I have ever been with any group of people before. And maybe that is ridiculous to say, because the Bedouin are people, not one describable set of characteristics, so okay, more appropriately, I was very impressed with our guide. Eid, was probably 6'5 with hands the size of a pair of rib eye steaks, and eyelashes whose length must have approached that of the camels that surrounded us. He wore a long green robe and several scarves wrapped around his head, and although illiterate, spoke, according to the Italian girl who was with us, almost completely unaccented Italian. He also studied with the Greek Orthodox priests in order to learn Greek, only modern Greek, he said, for tourism purposes. I haggled and haggled, attained the correct price, and we started off. Two of our group practically ran up the hill, and as we ascended, I wound up on the trail with Eid and no one else.

He spent the first hour trying to figure out how much Arabic I knew and explained the differences between Fusha and Bedu. After an hour, he said, okay, you will understand Bedouin. From then on, he spoke in Bedu, which was in many ways quite close to Fusha (Modern Standard Arabic)- and I answered in what I pretend is Fusha, but what in actuality is a sad mesh composed at least mostly of real words - however, with their order completely wrong and with connectors which have been absolutely massacred- the sum of which I have to assume is mostly completely unintelligible blabbering.

Walking up the side of a mountain at night any person, really, you get to know a lot about them. Eid would not walk by any tiny piece of trash without picking it up- "Do you see this piece of glass, Ria? Do you know what this could do to a camel's foot?" While I must have drunk 3 bottles of water during the whole climb, he refrained from anything until he drank a small cup of tea the next day at around 10am. He had never owned a toothbrush and rarely ate vegetables. At one point, I very nearly fell off of a ledge, and he scooped me up under his arm and I have no idea how this happens, but the Bedouin don’t bathe very often and when I did an informal sniffing survey when being rescued from certain death by Eid, he smelled like a million acres of sand bleached by the sun with just a tiny bit of orange peel thrown in. We hiked and hiked, reached the top of the mountain at around 3:30am. In the middle of the night, a group of tiny currogated tin shack stores were perched on the top of the mountain lit up with gas lamps, offering blankets and hot tea and water. We rented a pile of heavy woolen blankets, and headed off to the side of the mountain to sleep for the few hours until sunrise. Eid knew a place- a little flat spot hanging over the side of the mountain, no people around, just perfect quiet and very, very cold.

We knelt down to arrange our blankets, and Eid grabbed my arms, put them at my side, and proceeded to wrap me sardine-like in the heavy wool. He asked me if I wanted "laab," (I think) sunflower seeds and I said yes. He fished them out of his pocket. "Eid," I said in Fusha, "I need to use my hands to eat" and he laughed, looked out at the unbelievable stars, and began to crack the seeds between his teeth and feed me the seeds inside. I asked him all of the questions I could manage in Fusha - when you live in the desert, when do you take a bath? "There is no water in the desert, I don’t bathe very often, its okay." What do you drink? "There is no water in the desert, I drink when the camels do, etc etc." He talked and talked, and he told me a story, about his family's long journey on camels from Saudi Arabia, where he was born, to the Sinai. I understood about optimistically 70% of this story, but the rest is a mystery. "Oh, Ria, I wish that you could meet my camel. She's sooo beautiful, and I think about her all the time" his face looked off dreamlike into the night sky as he thought about the desert and his beloved "Fadha." And I knew from his face that the subject of camels not only filled his waking life, but also probably his dreams as well. Where is your camel now, I asked. "You think I would bring her to the mountains, to hurt her feet, she's stays only in the desert, of course." I was sleepy, but still awake because of the wind and cold. Eid sat up and sang me the songs he said he sang to the camels when they couldn’t sleep, and I drifted off.

Just before dawn, Eid tapped my arm, I awoke and the sky pinked up as the first tiny edge of the sun rose over the horizon. Perhaps 35 Korean priests began to chant their prayers, and so high up as we were, the huge fuscia disk came up in the middle of stacks of rolling, boiling clouds, and I will remember how it looked forever and I wish I could wake up that way every day.

We met up with the rest of our group and began to descend- I could not believe that we had climbed what we climbed in the darkness, and it was very strange to think that Moses might have walked down the same path that I was taking. Strange in the same way that it’s strange to ride a horse around the pyramids, to look at them and know that they were already thousands of years old when Jesus was born. Incidentally, if I had been a boy my father would have gotten to name me and my name would have been, yes, Moses.

I took a camel through some of the mountain passes- Eid took one of his scarves and niqabbed me, so that only my eyes were showing. I mounted the camel when Eid thumped my foot with his huge hands and looked at me with something like contempt or disgust. He turned away and pretended he didn't know me and waited for his friends to pass by. "You are sitting on that camel," he said "like a Japanese tourist." He grabbed my feet and arranged them like the Bedouin, and we started down the mountain to the monastery, filled with Greek Orthodox priests and their long black robes, long braided hair, and their attendant heavy religious jewelry. Inside the complex was the burning bush, thought to be of the same stock as THE burning bush, and a library whose collections of religious texts, it is said, come second only to that of the Vatican. Eid took my friend Warda and I into the village, both niqabbed.

The women covered completely in black, with their black gloves assuring that not even an inch of their skin would show save for their eyes, a type of woman who usually just gives me dirty looks for all of my uncovered hair and occasional bare ankles, now invited us for tea, retied our scarves for us, showed us how they smoked their homemade cigarettes under their veils. And in the desert, I realized, it actually was a lot more comfortable to cover completely - especially when you felt the crazy sun of the desert, the complete absence of shade.

Warda and I agreed that we would both entertain the thought of living in a Bedouin village for a while. Eid was the first boy we had met in Egypt who didn’t seem to care if we were girls or boys, I think he had the same talks with me that he would have had with any of his friends, and I was so amazed by that, and I don’t think its just him, I think its the Bedouin. Eid took us into the village to have tea with his friends and his brothers, and it wasn’t strange at all.

I cannot stress enough how incredible it is to have these experiences in places of such historical significance, but to be able to understand the people who live in these communities, to actually be able to interact with them linguistically, is just beyond anything that I thought I would ever be able to do.

We went back to Dahab to a nice restaurant where Warda and I haggled down the price of dinner - which is very Egyptian and fun to do. We sat by the ocean and had perfectly beautiful and fresh red snapper with roasted eggplant and zuchinni, baba ghanouj, tahini, salad, rice and desert and lemon juice and everything for about $2.50 each. There were 4 of us, and Warda said "You know, I can see why you wouldn’t ever want to settle down or get married or anything, but watching you with the Bedouin today made me think that I could see you as the wife of a Bedouin camel trader. I mean, they're nomadic and I think you would quite like that." Another friend said "Yes, and think of how amazing your kids would be - they'd all be really tall, they would smell good even if they never showered, they'd be able to live for days without water!" She then thought further - "But actually, a Bedouin wouldn’t be that much fun or very happy if you took him away from his camels and his desert. And he’d wind up spitting in really inappropriate places, and that might not be well received by too many ‘civilized’ people.”

It was strange to come back to Cairo now that Matt had left. He was such a part of our neighborhood, and as I walked to all of our regular places, the policemen, and the vegetable seller and the baker and the newspaper guy all stopped to talk with me about how sad they were that he was gone, and I surely miss him too. The deaf/mute old man down the street mimicked tears, and another actually cried, but again, I think it’s just the old Egyptian melodrama. A truck pulled in with the first of the season's new cherries, I ate a few as I talked with the fruit stall owner, from down the street, one of the guys from Matt and my ahwa walked up and told me to come to the ahwa anytime, that even as a girl alone, I was always welcome. And really, in Egypt, you can’t ask for more than that – and I take the high points where I can get them.

I hope that you all are well - come visit anytime. Really.

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria

Cairo Dispatch 5.21.05- School Elections, Catastrophic Haircuts

2006-05-09T00:27:00.000+03:00

(Right, from pictures.traveladventures.org, Islamic Cairo, view from Bab Zuela to the Muqattam Cliffs.)

Cairo, my home, the most crowded city in the world. And although the most challenging place I’ve ever lived, a place which in my mind remains magical in many senses, and at the same time, the constant sight of massive pollution, the lack of trees or of mountains makes me antsy for my move to Beirut at the end of the summer. I would also say that I don’t mean “magical” in an Orientalist sense – as if it’s a place that doesn’t make sense, which has no system of operation, because it does, though almost everything remains a mystery to me only because it’s new.

The student elections were held at the American University of Cairo last week - something far beyond what I have ever seen before in terms of university elections. There were three candidates for class president. All funding for the campaign came from private sources so essentially, the students with the most wealthy parents ran - one, whose father owns most of the construction companies in Egypt, had red t-shirts, sweatshirts, mongrammed pens and more handed out to anyone who promised to vote for him. On the last day of voting, fistfights broke out and one girl had a seizure in line after being harassed simultaneously by three groups of campaigners.

In presidential elections, Egyptians vote by referendum, and thus, no one ACTUALLY gets to vote for president - yet. I go to undoubtedly the most Westernized and most elite university in the country. And who won the election? The Islamist candidate who had no paraphenialia run up, a boy who ran on the campaign promise that he would stop the university from allowing female singers to come to the school - it should be, he said "forbidden according to the laws of Islam." And knowing this makes it all the more interesting to think about truly (which I, and most Egyptians, doubt will actually happen) free elections in this country. For all of the pressure from the US government that Egypt democratize, I and many others feel that very likely, the outcome of a truly truly democratic election here would have the Muslim Brotherhood figuring prominently – they have been long suppressed by the Egyptian government and no one else enjoys as much popular support as them.

My friend Becks and I went to get her a haircut. Horrible mistake and I could only leave the place saying a silent and heartfelt prayer of thanks that it wasn’t my own hair that had been massacred. I explained what we wanted in my limited Arabic, and the coiffure did an absolute hack job, lopping off random chunks of hair while staring at and attempting to have a conversation with me. Several other foreign students relayed the same sort of anecdotes about their own haircutting experiences in Cairo- especially the boys who have gone to "Ali of the Lazy Eye." We then came to understand the significance of "Lebanese Hairdresser" signs around the city - it probably makes sense to go to a stylist from a country where 90% of the female population does not wear the higab.

To me, the problem in the world is not that there are too many or not enough higabs being worn, but rather that some countries and some societies are imposing the wearing of higab or niqab (Iran, Saudi Arabia), and other countries, in some ways are banning the wearing of higab (Turkey, France), when the only real judgement that should be called into account with regard to wearing a higab, is a woman’s own choice as to whether she wants to wear it or not- and sadly, this is not the part of this argument that people seem to pay any attention to.

I’m riding more regularly now and I’m addicted. The pyramids are so close - and when I’ve had enough of this crazy city, there's nothing like hopping into a taxi to Giza - 15 minutes away if there’s no traffic - jumping on my horse and riding through the desert. I’ve gone a few times with a gaggle of Norwegian boys. They ride Western and I ride English– you don’t have to hold on with your legs at all when you ride Western, it just seems lazy to me. The western saddle is like a big old couch - you can lay back and practically nap, it's so comfortable. The English saddle is smaller and scarier - when my horse is running at full speed down the dunes next to Abu Hol (the father of horror (the Sphinx to ya’ll), I’m barely even touching the thing and its only by luck or unintended kindness on the part of the horse that I think that he hasn't thrown me wholesale into the dunes.

The other day, riding back to the stable, I became separated from my group and wound up behind a caravan of camels coming out on the path toward all of the stables. My group had gone left, but my horse refused to do the same, and started off in a canter following the camels to the right. I pulled and pulled and he would not turn around. Suddenly I seemed somehow to be in the middle of the massive shanty town that surrounds the pyramids. I jumped off and began to lead him- became completely lost, and was very glad to be able to speak at least some Amaya. I was lost for about an hour. People invited me in for tea, handed me their babies, I sat and talked with them the whole time holding the reins of this massive thing - it began to feel normal – I would like a horse, I thought while also realizing that I'll probably never be able to ride anywhere with such an amazing backdrop as the only surviving of the 7 wonders of the world, with the skyline of Cairo in the distance.

If everything works out with the landlord, I’m moving to a different part of Cairo for the summer. To a houseboat, called an awema in Arabic. Awema’s used to be dens of inequity and prostitution not so long ago, but to me they just have a nice breeze and the best view in Cairo. My friend Patrick and I went to check it out last night. He said I was certainly "adventurous," but seemed less enthused than me at the prospect of no AC in Cairo in the unbelievably hot summer. I know that Ill be okay -after Malawi, heat doest bother me. A houseboat- hmm, but when else would a girl have the chance to live in a place floating on the Nile, I thought. Behind the houseboat, a quite steep and lush garden climbs up the banks of the Nile, with palm trees and magenta flowers higher than my head. This particular houseboat was built in the 1930’s in Alexandria and towed up the Nile, and on it, you are slowly rocked to sleep by the water below. There are windows all the way around every side, and a 50 foot long balcony that overlooks the Nile, and a big white mosquito net over what I hope will be my bed. At least for now, this seems like a great idea.

Yesterday as I sat and drank tea with my Arabic Media professor, Mona - she asked about my plans for the summer - where would I be living, she asked. I described the place I had looked at, how wonderful the view was, the beautiful fenestration. Where was it, she wondered. I responded "Near "Midan KitKat" - her mouth dropped, it was a safe neighborhood surely, but not a respectable one for a girl like me, she said. "When people don’t have a place to go, that's where they go." Egyptian for "prostitutes," I think. Mona is Muslim, so it wasn’t the right time to bring out the "but Jesus hung out with prostitutes" line. So I just laughed and laughed.

People don’t harass me on the street that much anymore - even strangers seem to know that I’m not a tourist. My friend Patrick and I thought about why this must be happening and decided that when you live in Cairo for a while, as an expat, your clothes start to look a little shabby, you look at the ground when you walk - proceeding much more slowly than you ever have in your life, and your skin takes on a shade closer to that of the Arabs, certainly much more tan than the downright ghostly looking tourists who swarm around the city, always, somehow ridiculously wearing shorts, though any travel book you would ever read about Egypt would warn anyone against doing such a thing. Only a tourist would wear a saudi or jordanian headdress, argue their taxi fares in English, or ask their taxi to drop them off right in front of the luxury hotels and not expect to pay 10 times the normal rate. I’m quite pleased that most everyone can immediately understand that I at least sort of belong here.

A friend and I went to see "Kingdom of Heaven" this weekend. We were almost the only Westerners in the theatre and it was hilarious to hear the Egyptians snicker when they heard Arabic being spoken in a Western-produced movie - the pronounciation was a little off, according to them and now I too tend to snicker when people pronounce the "Gim" letter as a french "J" instead of an English sounding "G." Egypt is the only place where this happens and I know that when I leave Egypt, I will have a hard time letting go of my "G's," but in Lebanon, they're just not said.

I hope you all are well. Please write! I would love to hear from all of you!

Until the next Dispatch,

Ria