Cruising Down the Nile

                      Pictured: The Temple of Kom Ombo.

Part of my trip through Egypt included a three day Nile Cruise. A friend of mine from college, Katie Armstrong, found me on Facebook and mentioned that she always wanted to go Egypt so I told her to organize a trip and I would join her.  Another of my friends, Beth King, was going to be in Egypt during the same time so it would be a gang of three.  Katie planned a pretty comprehensive ten day plan to see Egypt with the Nile Cruise being the highlight. In the end, Katie had to back out of the trip at the last minute because of work obligations.  I wouldn't have signed up for the cruise if I was on my own. As the trip ends, I have had to become more budget conscious but since others were involved, I just put it on the credit card.  So far that is the only thing that I have had to put on credit but it was worth it. 

                                                        Pictured: Spartan pride in Luxor.

It was a good way to see the sights and treat myself as we come to the end of the journey.  The ship had about 100 passengers and we were by far the youngest of the group.  The trip made a number of stops including at Luxor, the Valley of the Kings and the Temple of Karnak.  The history and allure of ancient Egypt is fascinating but after the tour was over, I had Pyramid and Temple fatigue.  Too much of a good thing!

                    Pictured: Abu SiImbel.

Flat Mallory's Last Stand and Syria Round Up

Flat Mallory's Last Stand

As I was finishing up my tour of Syria, I had an e-mail discussion with Mallory's father, Steve, about getting Flat Mallory home.  Mallory's project was due on April 30 and Flat Mallory needed to be back in Owosso for the festivities.  I was initially thinking that I would send Flat Mallory home after my trip to Petra in Jordan.  Then I started thinking about it.  Sure, Flat Mallory had been to many cool places.  It is likely she has been to more countries than you have been to. But do third graders know where Palymra is?  Do they know what Petra looks like? Probably not but they all know the pyramids of Egypt.  I ran a plan by Steve that would get Flat Mallory to the Pyramids and back to Owosso in time for the event.  All I needed to do was change a few plans and hope everything worked out. 

Yes, a paper doll was dictating my itinerary.  We went to Petra and then worked our way south towards the Gulf of Aqaba.  We took the ferry over to Egypt and then a seven hour bus ride up to Cairo.  The next day I took Flat Mallory to the Pyramids of Giza.  Mission Accomplished.  Unlike our former President, I didn't put up the banner just yet.  I needed to get her to DHL so she could go home.  DHL is closed on Fridays in the Middle East so I would need to send it the next day.  I went to the DHL office on Saturday and it was closed.  I walked three miles to the Federal Express office.  It was closed.  Why? It was a national holiday in Egypt.  Whoops! 

The next day I was on a flight to Abu Simbel and I would be getting into Aswan in the late afternoon.  The city only had a DHL office and it closed at 5pm.  It was our only window.  If it went out the following day, Flat Mallory would miss the event.  Now gentle reader, I am pretty laid back but knowing that you could disappoint a third grader who was depending on you is pressure.  We got to Aswan after 3 pm and by the time I found the DHL it was well after 4pm.  I am quite sure the manager at DHL thought I was crazy to be using a courier service to send a paper doll back to the US.  I made him promise me three times that Flat Mallory would be back in time.

As Rule #1 of Singh Around the World states everything will work out in the end.  It did.  Flat Mallory survived a vicious attack by an ostrich where she lost her arm.  She had been folded a dozen different ways over the months.  She survived a kidnapping at the hands of some young backpackers in Tanzania.  She survived on her own when I left her at an internet cafe by accident.  In the end, she made it back home in time for the class activity.  I am quite sure she was the furthest traveled by thousands of miles then any of her counterparts.  Flat Mallory, I shall miss you.

Small World Experience in Syria
I was at an internet cafe in Damascus "skypeing" with a few of my colleagues at Public Policy Associates.  I have started to prepare myself for the working world during the past two months.  Near the end of our call the electricity went out.  I looked at the women at the computer terminal next to me in frustration and we started talking.  She told me that she over heard me talking about Battle Creek and the Kellogg Foundation and asked if I knew her old boss, Rick Little.  I started laughing. I didn't know him well but I had met Rick when he was the CEO of the International Youth Foundation. After the internet cafe, we had dinner that night and found out there were at least four or five other people we knew in common.  She had done some work with Rick on a project called the League and I had served on its founding board when it was just a small program in Michigan in the mid 1990's.  Another small world experience!

Don't Eat Here

I went to this restaurant for lunch one day in Damascus.  It was a decent meal of chicken, salad, hummus and bread.  I got the bill and was surprised at the cost.  It seemed very high but I went ahead and paid it.  While I was waiting for my change, I did the math in my head.  It was three times the amount I had thought it should be.  When the waiter came back, I told him that there was something wrong with amount.  He looked at me blankly claiming not to speak English.  I asked for the menu and made a gesture for it.  He went back to the front of the restaurant and was gone for five minutes.  He eventually came out with a menu.  I turned to the page where my meal was written and the price was crossed off with a pen and written over it was a new price.  It was comical.  I don't know if he thought it would work but I looked at him and just stared.  He put his head down realizing that he had been caught.  He went back and got me the right change.  It was the only negative experience that I had in Syria.

Don't Call it Swine Flu in Egypt!!!!!!!

A reader recently asked me about the coverage of the swine flu epidemic in Egypt.  I had begun to hear about the epidemic when I arrived to the country from Jordan.  There hadn't been much local perspective because there hadn't been any cases found in the Middle East at that point.  Most of the media reports I had seen were from CNN and BBC and the coverage in the Egyptian Daily News was from the wire service, Reuters.

That all changed last Wednesday.  I wasn't paying close attention to the media because I was on a tour of the Nile and Egyptian archaeological sites.  During one of our port stops, I caught CNN and saw on the ticker the decision by many organizations, including the World Health Organization, to stop calling it the Swine flu and refer to it by it's technical name, H1N1.  Not seeing any additional coverage on the topic, I immediately thought it was political correctness gone to far.  It wasn't until the next day, that I saw the headline in Egyptian Daily News, Cairo's English newspaper, that the government had decided to cull all of the nation's pigs.    At first, I thought that perhaps the headline was wrong or that the word "culled" had different meanings that I wasn't aware of.  I asked my friend if there were multiple definitions and she told me that she didn't think so.  I grabbed the paper and read the article.  To my amazement the Egyptian government had started a program to slaughter the nation's 350,000 pigs.  Local pig farmers were in an uproar.

The topic has been part of conversation and media intensity since that decision.  Initially, the government called the drastic measure, a protective step against swine flu in the country.  When they were pressed with the facts that there hadn't been any transmissions of the deadly flu strain from pigs but rather that it is transmitted human by human, the government began to make the case that there were other reasons for the decision.  They claimed the conditions that most pig farmers raised pigs were deplorable and that it was a public health risk for other diseases.

Many of the pig farmers are claiming that the decision is religiously motivated.  The Islamic faith forbids the consumption of pork and the animal is viewed as unhealthy and filthy creature.  Most of the pig farmers are Coptic Christians and they feel that this was aimed at them as part of continued religious discrimination by  the government.  The farmers are currently protesting the decision and there have been violent clashes between the government and farmers.  Initial reports suggested that the government was not going to compensate the farmers for their slaughtered pigs.  After intense media scrutiny and international attention, the government yesterday announced that they would compensate the farmers but the amount was unclear.

A recent story in the Egyptian Daily News covered some of the dialog that was occurring in the blogosphere.  It is interesting that every country has its wackos camped out on the internet.  A few sites were claiming that all Muslims were safe from the Swine Flu because they don't eat pork.  Another suggested that it was God sending a message to the West since most of the cases were located there.  Of course with every crazy blogger, there are a number of rational ones.  Some are calling on the government to establish true measures to protect the public from the flu strain instead of claiming that they are doing something through the culling of the pigs. One blogger made the comparison between the government measured response to the Bird Flu epidemic and their recent actions. The Egyptian Daily News had the head editorial in yesterday's paper condemning the governments plan and asking that they immediately stop the slaughter of the pigs.

With the first suspected cases hitting Egypt this weekend, this will be a story that keeps on growing.  I would have never thought the simple naming of a flu strain could cause the needless destruction of an entire population of animal. Then again, I should never be surprised that government officials don't always use fact and rational thinking skills when making a decision.  As a friend said on my Facebook page,      "At least they didn't call it testicle flu."