My Interview with Richard French, on Richard French Live
From August 16
Sep 1
Aug 30
Return to Cairo
More from Today.com…..
Mom in Cairo: Back in our home, we’re adjusting to new normal
Monique El-Faizy
TODAY contributor
Author Monique El-Faizy moved, with her two young sons, referenced as X and T for privacy, and husband, Oliver, to Cairo on August 14, just as tensions reached a fever pitch. She’s there for a two-year stint while working on a book about Egypt. The delay of the kids’ school year rattled her nerves enough to take the boys and head to Rome but now, they’ve returned to their new home. Read the latest on her family’s progress.
We’re back in Cairo.
Arriving this time was different from any other I can remember. I didn’t feel any of the anxiety I usually do. We were coming home.
That’s not to say I hadn’t worried we might not be able to return to Egypt. While we were in Italy, having fled with the kids when the kids’ American school announced it was delaying the start of classes, Mubarak was released from prison and the self-described anti-coup alliance announced a “Day of Martyrs,” calling for multiple demonstrations. The stage was set for some serious bloodshed.
Monique El-Faizy
X and T, walking to school in Cairo on their first week.
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The Back Story
So clearly we left Cairo. I had been jittery. Then again, I’ve been jittery pretty much every time I’ve come to Egypt since 2007, when a guy harassed me in a street for, I think, not being covered enough. So that’s nothing to go by.
The truth is, we were fine and our neighborhood felt completely safe. I think it was a combination of the gruesome images on TV, feeling unsettled in the hotel and hearing about all the families who were leaving. And the jet-lag and worry-induced insomnia. I hadn’t slept for more than 4 hours at a stretch since we’d arrived, and on the day I decided to leave I didn’t fall asleep until 7 or 8 in the morning—I’d been up all night watching the siege of the mosque that the MB protestors had barricaded themselves in. So not at my most stalwart.
I realized that, but I figured we’d had a stressful summer trying to get ready for the move and, since the start of school had been postponed, I didn’t see much point in sticking around. We could barely feed the kids, between the curfew and our lack of a working stove, and it was only a matter of time before they got tired of being pent up in the house. We might as well take a relaxing little break on the beach, I reasoned. A close friend has an apartment in an Italian seaside town that is nearly always empty.
Nearly being the operative word. When I asked her if we could use it, her concern was that it was too rundown, or that there might not be mattresses there. But that wasn’t the issue, it turned out. No, as the email I received while buckling into the EgyptAir flight to Cairo told me, the issue was that it was rented.
Uh-oh.
Fortunately we’d planned to spend the first night in Rome, so we were okay for the time being. We were in one of my favorite cities in the world and had a bed to sleep in that night, so I couldn’t bring myself to worry. On the train ride from the airport to the city we met a lovely couple from NY who had just come back from doing volunteer work and going on safari in Africa. The boys had a blast telling them what superheroes they looked like.
And then the glitches started popping up. Both my US and Egyptian cell phones decided, for various reasons, to go on strike in Italy, so we’ve been without any reliable way to communicate with anyone unless we have access to Wi-Fi. Next, the hotel—which was fantastic (Hotel Artemide) and where I was hoping we could stay until we figured ourselves out, told me they were all booked for the following nights. The evening reception staff was terrific, though, and assured me they’d help me find somewhere in the morning.
The morning guy was decidedly less friendly (although I later found out he was holiday fill-in and normally worked in the back office). But he booked us into a sister hotel at a reasonable rate and told me everything was taken care of, which was a relief, given my telecommunication challenges. Thus assured, the boys and I set out for a day of sightseeing. We had a delicious lunch and a great time at the Coliseum. We returned to the hotel in the evening expecting to pick up our bags and go over to the sister hotel around the corner.
If only.
Unhelpful morning man had failed to tell the next shift about our little arrangement, nor had he given the sister hotel my name, so when they called later and asked who they were holding a triple room for, no one knew. Understandably, they gave it away. It is, after all, Rome in August.
Fabulous evening people, though, rode to our rescue, booking us in to a hotel next to the Forum, where we went after a nice meal on the rooftop of our first hotel. Hotel #2 was okay but not great and had only sporadic Internet access.
The kids though, were troopers, despite being exhausted and kept up way too late every night by their jet-lagged, insomniac mother. They have both fallen in love with Rome, although I suspect it has much to do with the daily pizza, pasta and gelato as it does with ruins. Although they’re quite good at indulging my talk of ancient civilization and architecture.
It’s day #3 and I’m writing this from our third hotel and our second city: Santa Marinella. After a slow morning in Rome and a line at the train station ticket office that took longer than the trip itself, we found ourselves in Santa Marinella, a seaside town on the coast less than an hour outside of Rome where, after a prolonged search for a beach escape for us, Oliver managed to book us into a basic but lovely hotel right across the street from the water. We plan to stay for another day, or two, or until we can find a room in Rome.
Aug 21
Out of Egypt
More of our saga from Today.com….
Flight from Egypt: As tensions rise, American mom and kids depart Cairo
Monique El-Faizy
TODAY contributor
Courtesy of Monique El-Faizy
The author and her two boys in Rome, where they flew to after leaving their new home in Cairo.
Author Monique El-Faizy moved, with her sons and husband, to Cairo on August 14. She’s there for a two-year stint while working on a book aboutEgypt, but tensions in the country rattled her nerves enough to take the boys and head to Rome while her husband stayed behind to continue setting up their new home. Read the latest on her family’s progress.
Well…we fled. Temporarily.
I’m still not sure it was the right call, although our friends and family seem terribly relieved. The truth is, our little Cairo bubble was as quiet and safe as ever. I’ll admit — I felt edgy every time I turned on the news or heard about another company evacuating employees, but had I not known about those things, nothing in our neighborhood would have indicated to me that we should get out.
http://www.today.com/news/flight-egypt-tensions-rise-american-mom-kids-depart-cairo-6C10967778
Related articles
Aug 16
An expansion of yesterday’s post on Today.com….
News
Mom on move to Egypt: ‘We picked one hell of a day to arrive in Cairo’
Monique El-Faizy
TODAY contributor
Monique El-Faizy
The author, with her sons and husband, on vacation in Montego Bay, Jamaica.
A few months ago, I decided to relocate to Cairo with my two young sons, 8 and 12, for two years. I had hit the mid-life skids and was questioning my marriage and my career choices. The book about Egypt I had been working on was almost impossible to write from my home in New York, even with regular trips to Cairo, because the situation on the ground changed too frequently and too completely. My husband — a Brit and former journalist who believes strongly in the value of living abroad — agreed that the experience would be great for the kids and would be manageable with frequent visits. When we made the decision, Mohammed Morsi was president and Egypt seemed to be in the midst of a messy and bumpy transition to democracy. When we got there, things were entirely different.
We picked one hell of a day to arrive in Cairo.
http://www.today.com/news/mom-move-egypt-we-picked-one-hell-day-arrive-cairo-6C10931500
Aug 14
Ominous Arrival?
Well, we picked one hell of a day to arrive in Cairo.
The last 24 hours have been a roller coaster ride. We scrambled to get packed and out of our apartment on time for our flight, and would never have made it without the help of a few amazing friends who went way beyond the call. I felt relaxed for the first time in weeks as I sipped prosecco and watched the clouds outside the plane window.
Alas, that bliss was short-lived. After a layover in Zurich, we arrived in Cairo with two tired boys and two traumatized cats and heard even before we had disembarked that angry mobs had set fires throughout the city in retaliation for the violent dispersal of the Muslim Brotherhood protests. The man sitting behind me on the plane said a friend of his had booked him into an airport hotel because it was pointless to even try to get out of the airport—the unrest was just too widespread.
I called Marco, our driver, who would turn out to be more of a savior, and he said that downtown was a mess but the roads between Maadi and the airport were fine and he was there and waiting for us. We sailed through immigration and customs—our cats could have been foaming-at-the-mouth rabid for all anyone cared—and found Marco. A lifelong resident of Maadi, it quickly became clear that he is going to be my go-to guy on everything from where to buy a mattress to how to get my garbage removed every day.
Safely in the van and on our way to meet the owner of the villa, O started reading the news reports of the dispersal of the demonstrations—I was still without any kind of internet access—when I heard him gasp. A British journalist had been shot and killed. Mick Deane. Mick had been O’s cameraman at ITN when we lived in Hong Kong. They, along with correspondent Mark Austin, had traveled all over Southeast Asia together. Mick was a lovely, sweet man. We hadn’t even realized he was in Cairo. Needless to say, the blissful haze of the plane ride out of New York had fully dissipated by now.
There is more to the evening—I am writing this from a random hotel while Cairo is under curfew because we couldn’t get to our intended destination—but my battery is dying and I am fading. More tomorrow.
Related articles
- Sky News cameraman Mick Deane killed in Cairo clashes (itv.com)
- Almost 280 dead after Egypt police storm protests (dailynewsegypt.com)
Facebook Fractures
Needless to say, the situation in Cairo has grown all the more heated after the latest round of massacres of pro-Muslim Brotherhood protestors. With the army taking charge in such a heavy handed way, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for people to stick to the black-and-white positions many of them had taken in the run-up to the June 30th ouster of former president Mohammed Morsi.
Not that they’re not trying. As an employee of the Egyptian Consulate in New York told me when I was there getting my boys’ birth certificates notarized, Egyptians are not good at accepting that others can hold differing opinions, or agreeing to disagree, so to speak. They’re also not particularly comfortable with acknowledging gray areas, preferring to paint things in absolute terms. But given what’s gone on in Egypt over the past few days, it’s hard for anyone except the most polarized to acknowledge at least some level of murkiness in the situation there. There are plenty of people who were happy to see Morsi go who are now deeply disturbed at the sight of protestors being shot with live ammunition and the obvious ascendance of the Army. People don’t know what side to come down on anymore.
In a country where political discourse had been effectively shut down for the better part of 60 years, learning to disagree amicably isn’t coming easy. My contact in the Egyptian consulate told me his school friends are hardly capable of having civil conversations with him these days because of their divergent views on Morsi’s removal, and my Arabic tutor said that members of his extended family won’t even eat meals at the same table together—during Ramadan, of all times.
My own family seems to be staging a war of their own, with cousin openly bashing cousin on Facebook. I got dragged into it a couple of weeks ago—which got me thinking about the dark side of social media. Much is made about the power of social media to shrink the world, and that’s true, but it can expose previously invisible fault lines in relationships as well.
In the days before social media, I had no idea what my relatives in Egypt thought about politics, as it was rarely a topic of discussion during our visits there—at least in my presence. Now, not only are Egyptians freer in expressing their political opinions than they were under Mubarak, but social media allows the world to see what they think.
Facebook has transformed my interactions with my family, and not always for the better. Our differences have been laid bare and exchanges often get heated. I was on the receiving end of a barrage venomous enough that a friend messaged me offline to comment on it, then tried futilely to defend me by posting a comment elaborating on the point I was trying to make. (Interestingly, my family was much more polite when disagreeing with him; Egyptian hospitality toward strangers reigns supreme even during political discourse). There was even an insult hurled—granted, it was a generalization about Americans, but it was directed squarely at me, and it stung.
Sure, all families have fights, particularly about issues as sensitive as politics. But a disagreement around the Thanksgiving table is likely to be punctuated with moments of fondness and levity, reminders that one is among people whom, ultimately, one loves. Facebook encounters don’t provide these palliative moments. The very technology that has allowed me to maintain closer ties with my relatives in Egypt has revealed just how far apart we are on sensitive issues—all without the comfort of a slice of warm apple pie.
Our move to Cairo is now less than two weeks away, and by the time we get there it’s likely that some attempt will have been made to clear the pro-Morsi sit ins. There’s no way to know how that will turn out—although past performance doesn’t bode well—or what repercussions will be lingering when we arrive. In all likelihood the atmosphere will be tense. That goes, too, for the first Friday night dinner we will spend with my extended family. I just have to hope that being there in person and being reminded of mutual affection will make all the difference.
Revolution 2.0
Things have been busy here and obviously a lot has happened since my last blog posting—both in my life and in Egypt. First up, there is a new government in Egypt now and what that means for the country is still uncertain. One thing is clear: the Muslim Brotherhood ain’t happy about it.
A lot of my friends have been in touch asking if I am still planning to go. The short answer: for the moment, yes. What I mean by that is, I haven’t decided not to go, but I also realize that things could further destabilize there. At this point I’m working under the assumption that I’ll be moving next month but am watching closely and am ready to pull the plug on our plans if need be. I guess I should start formulating a Plan B…
The truth is, much of what is happening is what should have taken place the first time around. There should have been a caretaker coalition government and a constitution should have been written before elections were held, which is hopefully what will happen now, although even that isn’t a foregone conclusion. Yes, Morsi was democratically elected but he was well on his way to becoming a dictator and was running a regime that was far from democratic.
It’s important to keep in mind that, with the Egyptian Army controlling about a third of the economy, very little happens there that they don’t want. Their hand just shows more obviously at some times than at others. How they integrate the Brotherhood will be the key to future stability. Sending them underground will have perilous results; the factions that are willing to be part of the political process need to be cultivated and included.
A lot has happened on the personal front as well. For starters, my grandmother died a couple of weeks ago. Needless to say, I am heartbroken. I really wanted the boys to have a chance to get to know her, and I can’t imagine what it will feel like for me to be there without her; she was my anchor. But she was 95 years old and was ready to go and didn’t suffer too much in the end, so there’s that to be thankful for.
Despite the unrest, school is currently scheduled to start on time. We signed and sent the money for the villa, so we’re committed there. I was relieved to have a place to move into right away; now it’s feeling like a bit of a burden to be tied to a place—not to mention, I’m wondering if we could have gotten a better deal if we’d waited. But what can you do? It’s done. I haven’t booked our tickets yet, and I’ve noticed that airfares are dropping, so at least we’ll save money there.
The boys seem to be feeling pretty good about the move, although we’ve shielded them from news of the latest round of violence. T has been emailing with a couple of boys who are going to be in his grade, which has him raring to get over there and has even eased some of X’s anxiety. Now that school is over and he’s not being reminded daily of what he’s leaving behind, even X starting to look ahead with more optimism.
Great News
We found out last weekend that the boys got into the school we wanted them to go to in Cairo. Rationally, I knew they would, but until the acceptance notice came there was always a lingering fear. I think T was most relieved. He’s so excited to be going. He loves UNIS but I think that after seven years there he’s ready for a change. He’s really looking forward to perusing the elective offerings and choosing his courses. He’d leave tomorrow if he could.
X is also getting excited about the new school. I came home from Egypt with a bunch of photos, and when I was putting him to bed after I showed them to him, he told me, “Mommy, I might be feeling better about moving to Cairo.” It’s no surprise. The school looks like a summer camp. It’s huge—I read 11 acres somewhere—with soccer fields and playgrounds and basketball courts and volleyball courts and ping pong tables and foosball tables and an outdoor Olympic-sized swimming pool. I think it was the photos of the swim class that got X over the hump. The teacher was in the pool and he was squirting a bunch of kids who were lined up at the side—all wearing goggles, which is X’s prerequisite for going in the water. The kids looked like they were having fun.
I think it also helped that the school looked so much like UNIS. I’d taken a photo of a wall mural detailing the UN Rights of the Child. “We study that here!” X exclaimed when he saw it. The classrooms had a similar set up, too, with cushions in the book area and math and reading prompts taped to the walls. It was helpful for him to see that the new school wouldn’t be the alien experience he’d feared it would.
The boys also enjoyed seeing the pictures of the houses I’d looked at. Of course, it would be too much to ask for them both to like the same place. T preferred the villa and X preferred the penthouse. I’m on the fence. The villa is sweet. I love that it’s on a quiet street and feels like a house, which we’re unlikely to ever live in otherwise. It’s great space without being ostentatious or over the top. High-end places in Cairo tend to have gilded furniture and shiny marble floors and feel more like bank lobbies than homes. While this place has marble floors on the ground level, they’re white and worn and don’t feel overly fancy. The kitchen is huge and filled with light. The stairs are rose-colored marble and a little cracked, and while it’s four bedrooms there are only two bathrooms upstairs, so it still feels fairly modest. Overall it’s got all the space we need—including an office and a guest room—but it has a warm and homey feeling. And the huge garden is fantastic. On the downside, though, the street is quiet and I wonder how safe I will feel there.
The penthouse, on the other hand, has a doorman and is far more secure. It’s also great space, five bedrooms in total, so we could have a guest room and an office there, too, and it’s on multiple levels. The roof deck is amazing, with a built-in barbecue and lounge chairs. It would be a great place to throw parties. On the downside, it isn’t as light, the kitchen is smaller and darker—though still large by NYC standards—and the floor of the entire, enormous, living/dining area is a highly glossed marble. The space is fantastic but it’s hard to imagine it ever feeling like a home.
I haven’t done anything on the housing front since I got back. I will soon, but I don’t feel too worried about it. I could take either, and others will come on the market once school lets out in June. I’ll get back in touch with both agents in the next week or so. In the meantime I have to wire the deposit for the school, and now my father tells me my grandmother is unwell again, so there’s that to worry about.
Wrapping Up
Concerns of my grandmother’s demise were unfounded; she recovered, or attained a state that passes for recovery in a somewhat ailing 95-year-old woman, yesterday. Today she was still not feeling great, but my father had arranged a surprise birthday party for her and she rallied. In the end, she really enjoyed herself.
My father and grandmother at her 95th birthday party
My father has started negotiations on the villa. I’m glad he’s doing it. Not only did he offer far less than I would have had the guts to, but he’s not budging. And I know he’s right. A lot of people are leaving when school lets out at the end of June and a ton of new places will come onto the market. I’m not worried about losing it—while I would love to end up there, if it fall through there will be plenty of other places. And still, I know I would have caved on a million points by now.
I managed to get out yesterday to see my friend R. We met at a Nile-side restaurant in Zamalek called Sequoia that’s frequented by expats and wealthy Egyptians. It’s a different world from the one I inhabit when I’m in Heliopolis: cocktails, shisha, plush furniture, wi-fi and good food. It was great to see R and meet her boyfriend and 6-year-old son. She’s been living here for nearly a year now and is enjoying herself. Her son told me that Cairo isn’t quite as good as California, where R’s family lives, but he likes it here a lot.
All in all it’s been a productive trip, and I’m feeling much less apprehensive about our move here. I think we’re going to have a great time. Okay. It’s getting late and the car is coming at 4 am to take us to the airport. I can’t wait to get home and see the boys.
Children of the Pharaohs 